An interesting discussion of the physics of space battles brings up a lot of good points — those science-fantasy movies with spaceships flitting about ignore a lot of basic physics. Star Wars was basically WWI biplanes whirling around at speeds under 60kph, which is kind of ridiculous. But fun.
This article points out that that’s not how things would play out if ever there were a real space battle. The ships would have to obey physics and orbital mechanics, and there would be a priority on speed and acceleration and rapid maneuvers; also, explosions are kind of useless in a vacuum. So he talks about using big gyroscopes to whip mostly spherical ships around, and they’d be zooming about in complex spirals to take advantage of gravity wells.
But then he talks about crews.
I’m assuming that we’d have some intrepid members of the United Earth Space Force crewing these combat vessels. Or, at least, crewing some of them – robotic drone fighters would be a tremendous boon to space soldiers, but the communication lag between planets and vessels in orbit would make the split-second judgments of humans necessary at times.
Nah, I don’t believe it. In space battles, you’re talking about tremendous velocities, where maneuvers would slam the pilots with huge g forces. Even our atmosphere-bound fighter aircraft have problems with the limitations of the human body. How can you equip your Star Destroyer with massive gyroscopes that can flip it end over end in seconds, and not realize that using it would snap necks and turn your crew into bloody slime splattered over their cockpits?
I also don’t buy the stuff about needing the “split-second judgments of humans”. Human brains are slow. It takes us milliseconds to seconds to just absorb simple sensory output — we’re operating with a built-in lag that we don’t notice because your consciousness can’t notice that something already happened until your consciousness notices. So if the outcome of your battle depends on things only happening fast enough for human brains to process them, you’ll be dead when the ruthless cybernetic death machine swivels 10 times faster than a gooey animal body can handle, and decides to fire in microseconds, long before you perceive the new situation.
If our technology ever gets to the point where space battles can become a reality, it will also have reached a point where humans are no longer able to compete on the battle field.
“If our technology ever gets to the point where space battles can become a reality, it will also have reached a point where humans are no longer able to compete on the battle field.”
Assuming civilization endures for a couple more decades, humans will no longer be able to compete on the battle field long before that. DARPA is working on autonomous killer robots as we type.
They will all have gravity generators.
I suppose it depends on how good our programming is. The problem isn’t that humans are faster than AI, it’s that we’re faster than a drone getting confused at changing circumstances and radioing back to base for help. I also imagine a human-crewed ship would be harder than a drone to predict, based on what I remember from Google’s self-driving car projects, precisely because humans have fuzzy judgement and measuring skills. Basically drones will have to anticipate that piloted ships might occasionally do something bloody stupid.
requiring human brains to make snap decisions for flight maneuverability is currently refuted in our fighter planes currently deployed. Most are inherently unstable and require constant computer intervention to maintain stability. (and then there’s UAV’s …).
The pilot doesn’t fly (technically), he is just telling the plane where to go and deciding which targets to fire upon. Better for the pilot to make considered judgement calls rather than snap decisions. (IMO)
Hm that might be a plot device for some BSG-esque SF story: the autonomous interceptor drones rebel, and it turns out that the military which made them basically copypasted human brains, because they believed in their superiority.
Also, if I remember correctly, in BSG (the newer series) they actually said that the g-forces while maneuvering a viper absolutely can kill the pilot. They, of course, had some different reasons against the usage of drones…
Joe Haldeman did a pretty fun job with space naval combat in The Forever War: you get stuffed in a can and when you are in the battle your ship jiggles a bit and you’ve either won a great victory or you’re an expanding cloud of dust.
Alternatively I’d simply position my ship 10,000km away and snipe at my enemy with a massive rail gun. A few refrigerator sized slugs traveling at a few kilometres a second should be enough.
Re the g forces, sci-fi universes usually have some sort of (unexplained) inertial dampener; not just for fighter manouvers but also for acceleration of the big ships. I don’t ever recall this mentioned in Star Wars but Trek & Stargate talk about it.
Re reaction times, robots would absolutely kick our asses. The Star Wars droid army drives me up the wall for their inability to shoot anything. Our current AI’s would outperform them.
The main purpose of humans in a “space war” is to have a war, cause a war, and start the next war.
Chris Hall @7,
Yes but always remember,
(via http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1540125/quotes)
@7:
If that is an optimal strategy, that is what your opponent is doing as well. So now you are both dead.
Or perhaps, they fired at you when they were 100,000 km away, and you are dead, and they are not.
That was indeed interesting. For realistic space battles I recommend the first few books by Alastair Reynolds (the ‘Revelation Space universe’), which pretty much covers most of the points made by the article.
Energy/radiation weapons do exist but obey the inverse square law so are worth zip in an engagement unless it is really close quarters. Frying delicate electronics is one thing, but mostly the intent is to pick off hull-mounted equipment or simply vaporise part of the armour until it becomes vulnerable to other attacks.
Large starships are usually lightminutes to -hours apart, so any intelligence they have is by definition outdated, since they can’t cheat the lightspeed barrier. So instead they mainly rely on guided weapons or just toss hundreds of giants slugs in their target’s general direction at relativistic speeds. They’re hard to spot if just one hits you’re finished.
The cliché of fast-paced combat is reserved for small ships where the crew spends most of its time strapped down and protected so as not to be killed by evasive action – which doesn’t always work.
And ship shapes do indeed vary quite a bit depending on purpose. You get some sluggish spheres or blocky things for civilian use in space or aerodynamic ships where atmospheres might be a problem etc. The only deviation are starships which are rather sleek to reduce their cross-section. During interstellar cruises these ships eventually do get close to c, where collisions with even small particles tend to hurt.
Since humans really are too slow ships are studded with all sorts of machine intelligences that make most of the ‘routine’ decisions for their crew. Hence there is also a good deal of electronic warfare going on in the background as everyone tries to hack into enemy systems. Again there are no humans involved; too slow.
All in all it’s good stuff and pretty realistic, with some artistic license for new tech, but that’s sci-fi for you. Unfortunately these battles tend to take hours (or, in one case, years) so they’re not really suited for the cinema. There’s a limit to how long you can live on popcorn and soft drinks.
Re: Gorogh (#10):
Damn you! For a fleeting moment I thought there was a realistic sci-fi movie I hadn’t seen yet, waiting for me just one link away. Who put Mass Effect into the imdb? Until there’s a movie to go with that quote that’s cruel and unusual!
P.S.: Thank you, mystic forces, for de-moderating my textwall…
Indeed. I think the active fighting would be done by drones, perhaps controlled by a ship with less dramatic movement. Something like an aircraft carrier launching planes at the enemy. The key will be how to quickly disable the enemy, while keeping your control ship safe.
When it comes to manned craft, given the velocities involved, even quite small damage can be crippling. Any conflict would involve a large degree of risk. One stray fragment can blow a hole in a sensitive area and potentially kill everyone. Energy shields aren’t likely to come anytime soon. As such, there will be a premium on early detection and long-range weapons, allowing you to destroy an enemy before they can launch an attack of their own.
It’s interesting to think about how we’d get there, though. Why build the first star destroyer? It’s not as simple as “let’s build an armed space ship”. Doing that would be insanely expensive, so you’d need either a very credible threat or a promise of a healthy return on your investment. Perhaps if small-scale space craft become common enough that piracy is an issue? Or the discovery of some extremely valuable resource somewhere out there? Maybe some game-changer technology we can’t imagine yet will be invented, making space travel cheaper.
Either way, there has to be some driver to make it happen. I just don’t see space battles being a very likely outcome of our current circumstances.
Stanislaw Lem got it right in “Peace on Earth”: The future of interplanetary warfare is robotics. Autonomous robotics.
Re g-forces:
Remember that it’s not gravity/acceleration that kills you, it’s the normal force. (Same thing for falling from a height). If you can design the ship such that the humans are accelerated by force besides a normal force, you don’t need to worry about them splattering.
Such technology already exists, in a sense: We can already suspend small animals (mice, frogs) in magnetic fields. Given a huge enough magnetic field, you could suspend a human pilot and he/she could be accelerated to large g-values without splattering.
Of course, given that artificial gravity already exists in sci-fi, they can equivalently just use that technology with the same effect. (since gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable)
Charles Stross is currently discussing Space Opera cliches on his web site here
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/towards-a-taxonomy-of-cliches-.html
if any one is interested in the subject.
Prae @5
The mechanics of the space battles (thrusters all over the viper in order to change directions) were about the only thing I liked when my roommate was making me watch BSG reboot.
Here’s a few clips from Babylon 5. The Starfury fighters had the ability to use thrusters for turning around on the spot, which was pretty nifty. For some reason, the pilots never went splat, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx7L5woa3Rk
As for the reason for the first space battle, Bug Martini has you covered.
Nowadays ship weaponry and accuracy is all done with computers. Especially the long-range weapons. And in space, it’s all long-range weaponry. If anything you probably can’t even see what you’re shooting at.
Space combat has been a favourite of us wargamer types for a long time.
One of my favourite SF wargames was StarForce: Alpha Centauri, designed by the late great Redmond Simonsen in the mid-‘70s. One of its claims to fame was that it gave a name to a popular ‘80s synth band (The Human League, if you wanted to know).
However, it’s a fabulous game. One of its strengths was that unlike many space wargames, it had a model of space combat that was nothing like any kind of known warfare. Too many wargames turn into ‘Pacific Carrier Battles in Space’ which is fine if that floats your boat, but is lazy SF and lazy design. Redmond’s model was nothing like that, incorporating a healthy dose of fog of war and the need to adopt englobing tactics in three dimensions.
Of course his game was not based on physics but on handwaving magical means—namely psychic power. His starships were teleported about space by crews of psychics (so avoiding all that messy Einstein stuff) and combat was fought over vast distances by faster-than-light psychic projection that would render enemies unconscious.
Before anyone pooh-poohs the notion of what was essentially magical space combat, there were some narrative benefits from this approach. One was that, as mentioned above, it made for a very different form of combat from anything on Earth. Another was that it posited bloodless wars. The third was a little wrinkle that Redmond craftily worked into his background: that the crews of these starships were all women. Only women had the requisite psychic ability.
Simonsen later admitted that the notion of short bloodless wars fought by women was done to troll a very male hobby. Bless.
Great game, though. A true classic.
Which is why South Korea will be a major Super Power by the 25th centuries, when all these starcraft pro gamers become the vanguard elite of the Korea Space Forces, remotely controlling their armies of drones and zerg-rushing the opposition.
***
And then Shepard ordered the assembled fleets to fire with reckless abandon while they were right above Earth, because Fuck the Homeworld, there’s Space Squids to slaughter.
Space wars 101: Fill the orbital space above your planet with so much orbiting debris so that no-one can get either in or out without smashing into some fast heavy object.
We’re nearly there.
#22: I have a copy of Star Force down in my basement! Haven’t played it in years, and even way back when it was hard to find players — that business of having to calculate and track positions in 3 dimensions, writing everything down on pieces of paper, was a tough sell.
I wonder if anyone has done a computer version of it?
Ok what has been said already but there is the simple bit of matter. You are fighting your battle in space and fire a devastating shot on your target which then explodes sending millions of pieces of shrapnel some of which are sizable in all directions? you fly right through it perfectly safe with out even a sound of small collisions?
Another question you are in close in fire fight with an enemy and shoot with your “ray gun” and they “vaporize” how is that even remotely possible without some sort of reaction ??
that artificial gravity must be really tricky to be so directional compared to natural gravity.
uncle frogy
Can’t find a computer version of Starforce.
I’ve added it into my list of interesting things though, so if I ever get the time/motivation to build a computer version of it I’ll let you all know :P
Also, I’m glad you posted this because I read it on the original blog (thankfully credited by the OP article) and then lost his webpage. Now I can go through and read his stuff and see if there is anything else interesting on there.
I don’t think anyone has computerised it, PZ.
I know the plotted movement is a turn-off for some. (The Human League founders thought it impossible to play.) But it’s a rollocking good gaming experience for those who can wrap their head around the three-dimensionality of it.
One of the cool features of the game was the 3D map of the stellar volume 20 light years around the Sol system. Still a marvellous piece of design, that.
CavoriteIntertial Dampeners™Lee Brimmicombe-Wood: “‘Pacific Carrier Battles in Space’ which is fine if that floats your boat,”.
I see what you did there. (Also, hi!)
Who’s side will god be on in these battles?
Hi, Daz.
The ‘carrier battles in space’ thing is something of a bugbear of mine. I’ve seen it crop up in games and novels and it’s all rather dull. I’ve been thinking on the problem of designing a game on the space war subject employing some real science for some time now. Some of my thoughts made it into the Aliens book I wrote years ago, but I’ve got a mass of notes now and one day I’ll get to make that game, as soon as I’ve cleared my current design projects.
It’s well not to get too sniffy of sci-fi in general, when you’re really talking about big and small screen sci-fi rather than the ink-on-dried-leaves stuff. TV and movie sci-fi has a lot in common, tropes-wise, with printed sf of the fifties, and seems to resist anything too difficult for Hollywood execs to understand. Getting J. Michael Straczynski to convince his FX department to make the fighters on Babylon 5 move less like WW2 fighters and able to spin around in place was a big achievement for the fans back then, but doesn’t seem to have had much effect since then.
Not that printed SF is all super-realistic (from the point of view of engineering students and physics wonks), but the writers get more leeway (nautical trope ahoy!) in playing with the consequences of the physics of the universe, and are even expected to a certain extent to go beyond the tropes of World War 2. Larry Niven’s space battle that played at STL speeds over several years and light-years in his novel Protector between a handful of ships is one that sticks out in my memory.
Another is Charlie Stross’ space battle (no, not the one that replayed the Dogger Bank Incident) in Singularity Sky that at least played out like a modern naval battle as far as the combatants were concerned, all heads down over their consoles as the gigawatt lasers blazed and the nuclear salt-water rocket-propelled missiles roared (silently) towards their targets, light-seconds away. Too bad that the fleet is facing what Banks called an Outside Context Problem with regards to their opponent, and even their attempts to anticipate advances are somewhat akin to bronze-age sailors looking out for bigger sailing ships with longer-range arrows, not even able to consider submarines and aircraft carriers.
Talking of Banks, there’s the engagement of the Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time in Banks’ Excession with the Light Offensive Unit Attitude Adjuster and its accompanying flotilla, that takes several pages in the book and is revealed at the end to have taken mere milliseconds, and is fought with weapons with unusual effects (small pun there for the Banks fans).
Leebrimmicombe-wood @33, I love your Aliens book, and look forward to the game, if/when you can get around to it. Computer or board game?
There’s also Jack Campbell’s “Lost Fleet” series. There are several valid criticisms of his writing, but he does have a good take on space battle. Basically each opposing fleet lines up their fleet in whatever formation their commander decides upon and charge towards eachother. It is then up to the fleet commander to ascertain when, where and how to adjust the fleet course during the charge. Timing of this is important because there’s no FTL sensors. So, if you change course 2 lightminutes away from the enemy fleet, they won’t see it. Etc.
Speed also plays an important part, because relativistic speeds will fuzz up the automated targeting systems because they’ll be unable to adjust to the combined speed of the two fleets. And then of course there’s the relativistic speed of the railguns. You move at 0.1 the speed of light and fire a a canister of grapeshot you’ll of course add the speed of the ship to the speed of the fired projectile.
A pretty interesting take on space combat, if somewhat less than great writing style.
NelC, my day job is still working in the software games industry (I’m currently working on RIGS Mechanised Combat League, a Virtual Reality title for Sony’s PlayStation VR platform) but I don’t do much space stuff any more. The last software space game I worked on was Fractured Space, for which I did some very early design notes. You can check it our here: https://www.fracturedspace.com/
No, if I do a space game it will likely be a board game title. However, I’ve been mostly focussed on designing historical board games these past 15 years or so for GMT Games. I have a lot of work on my current Wing Leader title that I want to clear before I do anything else.
Saganite #19
I always loved the design of the Babylon 5 fighters. G-forces aside, they were the first ships I saw that actually seemed designed for real space. Just the fact that they had thrusters going in all directions was a huge thing.
Star Wars fiction invokes an application of artificial gravity called inertial compensators, which react to counter G-forces as they occur. Apparently there is some capacity for tuning, because they can be turned up to 100% effectiveness, making the ship feel stationary at all times even as the battlefield spins around you, or turned to lesser settings such as 95%, allowing for some tactile feedback that some pilots appreciate.
In the videogame Mass Effect the main science fiction element introduced is the mass effect technology which can increase or decrease the effective mass of anything within the field of effect, which can be used to enhance the effectiveness of thrusters in space or even impel a ship along all by themselves. This can also generate gravity on board and counter G-forces. The setting also invokes the automated systems and virtual intelligences that find firing solutions for the ships across massive distances, and the inevitable electronic warfare that occurs invisibly in every battle, as enemy ships attempt to hack each other’s systems while repelling such attacks against themselves, which the intent of sabotaging the very automated systems that makes high-end space combat possible. The setting also emphasises the importance of mass effect fields for shielding, partly to repel incoming attacks but even more importantly to deflect high-speed shrapnel and particulate that will be thick in the regions of both current and historical orbital battlefields. The entry for Earth on the Galaxy Map (and a few other worlds) specifically includes travel advisories to visitors and returning expats to keep their shields up at particular altitudes due to the remnants of pre-FTL space development that remains in orbit around the planet. An interesting point that modern planetary colonies have safer and cleaner orbital altitudes than the galaxy’s species’ homeworlds do.
Re: unclefrogy (#26):
It all depends. A small fighter-type ship, which is the most likely candidate for this, probably wouldn’t bother with a pressurised cockpit. So any sound would have to be transmitted through the hull, internal systems, seat, suit and finally through the pilot’s body. Not likely they’ll notice much. As for safe, that would depend on whether our fighter was chasing the target or if they were coming towards each other. In the latter case, the debris would be a lot faster.
On the other hand, if we were looking at something similar to an X-wing with a pressurised cockpit, no pressure suit for the pilot and a large glass canopy,* the pilot might hear a noise, followed by a crack, a whoosh and an early grave.
Bigger ships would probably be too far away to get hit and have too thick a hull to hear anything inside.
*All hallmarks of good design if you want nice pictures for the sales brochure. Noone ever comes back to complain.
Pump enough energy into a material and it should just ionise / atomise directly without the need for anything to react with.
That’s what the up/down switch on the captain’s chair is for. That’s also why there’s no seatbelt: to discourage fiddling through negative reinforcement.
LykeX @38, The interesting thing about the Babylon 5 Star Furies is that the design places the cockpit fairly close to the centre of mass, so centrifugal forces on the pilot from rolling, pitching and yawing would be minimised.
Leebrimmicombe-wood @37, thanks for the info and link! A board game would be fine by me; I cut my sci-fi boardgaming teeth on StarForce and Battlefleet Mars. Well, not so much on BFM: while I got several games out of Starforce, the combination of 3D and Newtonian mechanics in BFM were too much for most potential players, I found.
If we’re talking about a setting with Humans As We Know Them (not uploads or cyborgs), then I think you’d still have a crewed command ship at the center of a flotilla of drone ships with varying degrees of autonomy. The command ship would stay well out of the theater of battle, while sending out commands and conducting electronic warfare/defense. The actual combat itself would be handled by drone ships, unless we’re talking about a blockade/seizure scenario where you’re retaking a human-occupied outpost or ship.
@LykeK
Full-blown ship-to-ship battles (as in Star Wars) seems very unlikely to me. More realistic would be scenarios like
1. Utilizing asteroids en masse has become more common, and companies/people/governments have started illegally “seeding” them with defense systems designed to block their use by others in violation of the Outer Space Treaty. Your drone ships are responsible for disabling those systems.
2. The colony on Mars is refusing to give up a fugitive wanted for crimes against humanity back on Earth, and negotiations have broken down. Whatever government is involved on Earth gets a sanction on any goods sent out, and sends out some ships that stop Mars from either sending out or receiving any goods and services (also setting up a story where you’re a blockade runner doing a dangerous direct Mars atmospheric entry mission at high velocity).
3. A space habitat colony is experiencing unrest and violence, and the government back home sends out police forces to take over. They have to disable the defenses and board the colony.
So he’s not talking about realistic space battles then. Assuming no big surprises in the physics of potential drives, space battles are probably going to be more like the ones in the comic Albedo:
(Attacking fleet enters system.)
“Check our course and plot correction and deceleration burns.”
(Two days later.)
“Defense squadron is burning to intercept Commodore, it matches our intel for size.”
“Then we stick with the plan, launch 30 ACVs[1] and hold 10 in reserve.”
“Aye sir… ACVs away, intercept in 10 days.”
(A day leter.)
“Defense squadron has launched a counter-spread of 24 ACVs, that should be all they have. Intersection with ours is in 5 days.”
(and so on.)
The only fast paced part is when those ACVs that got past the enemy’s enter their final approach and both the drives and point-defense guns are handed off to the computer for the final attempt to not get hit at 30km/s.
[1] Autonomous Combat Vehicles, generally little more than an extremely long range kinetic kill missile.
Possibly relevant to the discussion: Charlie Stross’ Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera.
NelC
see comment #17
Not only are humans (or anything biological, really) too slow to be of any use in a real fight between competent interstellar civilizations, but all of the frippery needed to keep them alive is downright wasteful. Not only do you need large open spaces (which are better used for power generation, propulsion, weapons, and sensors,) but you also must have life support systems, food supplies, waste disposal and recycling, and a whole host of systems that are completely unnecessary on a fully automated vessel. On top of that, as has been pointed out in this thread, you’re then limited in amount of delta-v per second you’re able to attain, unless you have some form of technology that allows you to just throw physics out the window and ignore inertia. Even then, however, the power necessary for whatever that may be could be better used on propulsion, weapons, and other combat-relevant systems. So, really, humans onboard any sort of interstellar warship would be an anachronism.
chigau (違う) #32:
‘ello!
Komorav
why sure you pump enough energy into an object and you can turn it instantly into vapor which would very rapidly want to expand into a much larger volume. Isn’t that what happens with a chemical explosive?
if you instead pump enough energy into it to turn into energy wouldn’t that have even more of a dramatic result.
or you could just stage it like in most samurai fights and just have them fall without the buckets of blood erupting all over the place as would occur when someone is almost sliced through or the neat cowboy gun fights with nary a bit of gore.
uncle frogy
Also, I think lasers will be very important in space warfare. There’s the “collimation” issue, but lasers have several huge advantages over missiles and kinetic weapons:
1. They don’t impart momentum to the ship, or at least not a significant amount of it when fired
2. They move at the speed of light, so you can’t detect and evade them – your ship just has to fire its engines to maneuver constantly to minimize getting hit
3. They’re good at disabling ships by heating them up to the point where they have to deactivate and surrender
Even worse would be putting defensive lasers embedded on airless moons and minor planets (or even on the surface of regular planets). You could fire them over and over again, dumping the waste heat into the bedrock. I think they’d be so formidable as to make direct on-planetary assaults nearly impossible unless you’re genocidal.
brett #49:
Nor does a missile if detached from the host-vessel before the missile’s rocket is fired.
Granted.
Either that’s one helluva powerful laser, or the target vessel is sitting obligingly still and has godawful passive defenses.
Just drop stuff on the buggers from a great height. (See: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or any Niven-Pournelle wankfest. Or consult Ronald Reagan, for that matter.)
wouldn’t highly reflective surfaces be effective against lasers?
uncle frogy
the thing is for the life of me I can not see any motivation for a space war to be other than cultural any way. It looks more and more like there are plenty of recourses out side of this planet in space to satisfy anyone’s needs. If you can get from here to there or vise a versa you would have to solve so many difficult problems as to make conquest and subjugation pointless unless it be for religious reasons and I do not see how religion as we have seen it here (especially in the three middle eastern varieties) will survive the implications of solving all the problems of deep space exploration any way.
uncle frogy
I’d suggest a reflective outer hull with a vacuum-gap between it and the hull-proper.
The new SyFy series “The Expanse” has done the best job of portraying realistic (or as close as has been done so far) space combat, in my opinion — it also does a good job of realistic treatment of acceleration-as-artificial-gravity. And it’s a fun show!
I always loved the Iain (M) Banks novels in this regard – combat was generally executed out of necessity, by AIs developed far beyond organic beings; yet still in general concord with the organics who composed the rest of their society. Some of the combat situations were fantastic to read, convincingly using effectively instant AI response time, close to light speed (and hyperspace) travel and plain dirty tricks to great effect. I’d recommend the books to anyone who hasn’t read them.
What I dislike about the battles in space are the encounters where the hero (usually, although sometimes the villain) blows up a vessel that is immediately on the path forward, and moves through the debris field unscathed.
All the matter that is just brushed aside would really have to hurt to hero’s ship. (Shields be damned.)
Re: unclefrogy (#48):
Energy weapons would certainly be able to poke some (rather neat) holes into a target. A laser with a small enough spotsize and high enough yield would do very nicely.* This wouldn’t get you much of an explosion, I don’t think, because it’s unlikely you can put in enough energy quickly enough.
Chemical explosives have an advantage here, because in a way all the energy you want to release is already there. Good explosives are just stable enough to handle but, when set off, react almost instantly while releasing lots of energy. The downside is that you have limited control over where the energy goes.
Lasers take longer to deliver the same amount of energy but given the control it really is more like slicing through the target. I have no idea how much energy you’d need to convert matter directly into more energy, if that’s even possible. Assuming it was, you’d need a really, really fast pulsed laser with an enormous yield. Too slow and matter would start to boil off before you reach the critical point.
But fear not, there are always alternatives. Anti-matter pellets are another space opera favourite. The amount of matter directly annihilated by the anti-matter would be miniscule, but the amounts of energy released and the resulting destruction would not and should make for a more spectacular display. The downsides are the same as with chemical explosives: control and delivering the pellet to the target.
*A while back scientists used a very fast pulsed laser – pulsed to avoid pumping lots of energy into the surrounding material – to engrave the head of a matchstick without igniting it. Unfortunately I can’t find a suitable link; my search terms come up with matchstick models rather than useful references.
Re #51:
They reflective surfaces would still heat up and fail. You could cool them but that would probably play right into the hands of someone trying to overheat your ship. If you have a really good thermal system you can pump the heat to the far side of your ship and radiate it back into space. If you don’t, or if you’re being attacked from all sides, you’ll probably make things a lot worse as your thermal systems might actually make it easier for heat to move into your ship. Thermal radiators would be problematic in any case, as they’d be a prime target for the enemy in order to cook your ship even faster.
But your suggestion made me wonder if you could structure your reflective armour as an array of retroreflectors. It wouldn’t last any longer but any incoming light, regardless of the incident angle, would be reflected straight back in the direction it came from (with losses). Mirror damage…
A possible alternative might be a variation of ablative armour with low thermal conductivity. Eject armour plates that get too hot. If you can, do so at speed, turning them into somebody else’s problem. Of course you ought to have another layer of armour underneath. And there is no reason why this armour couldn’t be reflective as well.
Re: unclefrogy (#52):
Allow me to paraphrase any powerhungry cretin / pragmatic businessman throughout history: “That’s a very nice asteroid miner you have there. And how fortunate for you to have found such a rich and rare type of asteroid. It must have taken a lot of effort to find it and set all this up. Anyhow, I think it would be best if I took over now, before I accidentally blow your little operation out of the sky. Cheers, thank you.”
Remember, it’s not piracy when there are legitimate business interests and / or national security at stake. It’s a moral obligation for the greater good. (Feel free to insert any other boiler-plate justification here, including cultural and religious ones.)
Humans barely matter on the battlefield today. We still take the big decisions, but the bombs guide themselves, the planes fly themselves, the tanks and ships defend themselves.
Where humans matter is in the occupation, establishing themselves as the occupier by virtue of being present and in charge. That’s not the battlefield.
RE: Daz: Uffish #50
Depends on how heavy the power source and array is for the laser by comparison. The missiles can detach before launching, but you still have to accelerate with them on board before launching – and they will impart significant mass if you’re carrying a lot of them. A Minuteman III, for example, masses around 35 tons fueled, and that’s just for an ICBM.
It doesn’t need to be a single hit. If you’re firing a laser at it over and over again, it’s going to be expending fuel just trying to maneuver to avoid getting it – even glancing hits will heat up the enemy spacecraft further.
If you’ve got the “ground”-based lasers I mentioned as well, then that would probably be a tactic in of itself against a crewed vessel. Fire lasers at it over and over again, forcing it to maneuver until it’s low on fuel and has to make a decision as to whether it wants to risk ending up in a trajectory to nowhere (which will kill the crew), or surrender and push itself into a trajectory to be boarded with its last fuel.
That’s why I specified “unless you’re genocidal”. If you’re willing to drop a significant piece of rock at high speed on the target, then your odds are better (unless the laser heats part of it and deflects it off course).
@unclefrogy
Nothing’s 100% reflective, which means it will be damaging your mirrors with successive hits. Still, it would improve your ship’s survivability. You could also probably spray out diffuse gas and reflective materials to try and diffuse the beams a bit.
@Komarov
And there’s your space fleet scenario. Have them run around dealing with claim-stealers, or destroying the automated weapons systems unscrupulous folks sent out to “discourage” others from trying to mine particular asteroids.
Everyone who wants to talk about space warfare, I suggest a read of Atomic Rockets’ well-researched and interesting pages on the subject, starting here. Nearby pages on other topics of spaceship design may also be of interest.
I just realized the whole “stealth in space” debate is kind of weird, unless we’re talking about a scenario where somebody is doing a totally out-of-nowhere assault. If there are political entities in space with space militaries, one of the top Rules of Warfare will almost certainly be that all warships have to have radio transponders identifying them as military vessels, separate from civilian traffic.
If you’re talking about tossing stuff around at near relativistic speeds: sand.
No need for big projectiles – just a bucket of really fast-moving sand, spread on whatever vector you want. It’d be a good anti-missile defense, too, if the sandcasting ship had higher V. But mostly, if a hostile ship ran into a cloud of sand that’d pretty much do for them. And a sand-cloud could be very large indeed, unlike a rock or a chunk of pig iron.
To the point that someone made above: space battlefields would be so messy you wouldn’t want to go near them for a very very long time.
I was not thinking about actual weapons of some kind of focused energy poking holes in people and things but of the weapons used in things like star trek which just make people vanish without any huge splattery mess over all the surrounding surfaces that really bugs me but I realize it is just a theatrical convention so they can move the story along. War and killing is very seldom depicted in any way close to the absolute horror that they are any way .
As some general from long ago said war is all hell.
uncle frogy
the expense danger and difficulty involved in pirating were possible only in isolated times.
For the effort no as much return as in banking and debt leverage were the risk is small in comparison and the pay off is much better.
the indication seem to be that unless we find some new atomic structured material there is not any serious elemental shortages out there.
not much petroleum maybe but looks like methane is not in short supply.
uncle frogy
A few thoughts from a non-expert…
Human space travel to other stars is a fantasy, and travel to Mars is nationalism, not science. Some won’t agree, but if you don’t have to built life support, space missions cost a lot less. Space wars would be fought by robots. We are not going anywhere.
In auto racing, safety equipment is (reportedly) designed to withstand 70G of force, not any more because such crashes are usually not survivable. On the other hand, there have been race car drivers who survived crashes of over 100G and continued to race after recovering. David Purley survived an estimated 180G in a 1977 crash at Silverstone, and Kenny Brack survived a 214G crash, the number confirmed by telemetry (video below). Other drivers have survived massive crashes over 70G and continued their careers (e.g. Mark Blundell in Rio, Giancarlo Fisichella in France, Robert Kubica in Montreal).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVpux5JxqEk
Living in Taiwan, my first thought is Taipei 101 and its massive counterweight which shifts inside the building to minimize the effects of earthquakes. My second thought is the monocycle, a one-wheeled motorcycle where the wheel moves but the rider doesn’t. A ship could be built with an isolated crew compartment that doesn’t rotate, even if the ship spins wildly.
This reminded me of my pet-peeve about Sci-Fi (mostly movies). Deceleration/acceleration is really just ignored.
I really like the first Iron Man movie, but the scene where he gets shot mid-air by a tank, stopps, falls to the ground and stands up as if nothing happened is too much for my willful suspension of disbelief. If he got decelerated that quickly (either first time by being hit by the projectile, or second time by hitiing ground after falling from a few hunderd meters) he would be dead even if the armour was undamaged. At the very least his heart would be torn off and all his innards would be squeesed in the direction of the deceleration.
And the design of space battleships is bizzare in all movies I have seen. The movies might be entertaining, but since I got some decent understanding of physics this nags me on the back of my mind whenever I see one.
One particularly sticks to mind – the ridiculous interstellar battle in Star Wars III, where it is possible to destroy the cockpit glass of the ship with ridiculous ease – with the use of a handheld spear. Yeah, great design. And the cockipt sticks out of the ship like a periscope. Anonter nonsenical idea.
Real ships would rely on cameras and the crew would get the view projected on screens, or maybe with 3D glasses or virtual reality. Real ships would not have vindows you could break if you sneeze and thus kill everyone aboard.
ObRecommendation:
This sort of thing has been quite a favourite topic among SciFi fans. I really recommend Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets.
Human containing command ships will be single person vessels launched from a home ship and stealthed to the max, minimal loss to the fleet for each one taken out. Their comms with 2nd tear bot command ships will be short burst and designed for narrow cast. Those ships will then comm to the fighting front line drones. A lot will go into stealth and detection. Faint and confuse.
Autonomous bots will be deployed like mines with detect and pounce orders. However they will need to be set with limit duration effect or they become a threat to friendlies and civilian vehicles later.
left0ver1under @66:
By the combination of bloody good luck (what percentage of drivers survive 100G crashes?), and prompt attention by medics and doctors who haven’t been experiencing much more than 1G.
The only solution which seems remotely possible is via the diamagnetic properties of water (which we are, mostly) alluded to by ealloc @16.
I liked CJ Cherryh’s take on space battles, including probabilities and psychology into the mix, too, along with the usual near-lightspeeds and time differentials. I think it was Hellburner that went into the most detail on this, though I can’t ever say she ever published a particularly technical manual on her version of space battles. Still, definitely a lot more realistic than a lot of other stuff out there.
Rq @72, Cherryh is good at obfuscating a lack of the kind of technical background that would satisfy engineering students and other ‘hard’ science enthusiasts. By which I mean that she’s a good writer.
On the subject of survival of high g forces, it should be noted that in those 100s of g crashes, the rapid deceleration was momentary in the extreme, fractions of a second. Sustained g limits for the human frame tend to be much smaller; I think NASA tests put a limit of a few seconds of 20g, and we know that even fit, young adult humans with training and GPS techno-trousers can’t sustain high g turns in fighter jets for very long without blacking out.
If one argues that automated systems can take care of things while the crew of a space-fighter is passed out, one is back to the question of why we should put such g-sensitive components as humans in a space-fighter anyway, if the computer can do the job for less mass and zero life-support.
I do like the idea of robot drones destroying other robot drones in”battles” lasting milliseconds. The ultimate extension of WWI fighter pilots shooting each other down to no good end. Glory to the winners and losers!
I’m unsure lasers can be useful at all. You want to deliver a giant amount of energy into a small spot to cause damage there. But it’s leaving from a small spot, so you’re causing yourself an equal amount of damage even if your beam is perfectly collimated.
Worse, it’s not perfectly collimated; over the huge distances of space, that’s going to be significant.
Quick calculation, assuming this page is accurate: if you’ve got an X-ray laser (0.01 nm, quite high energy) firing a 1cm radius beam (that’s pretty big), and you’re orbiting Earth, firing at something on the Moon, you’re losing 99.94% of your beam strength. To heat your target as much as you heat your own laser, you’d need 1560 beams to focus on the same spot.
Huh. Eve Online doesn’t try to do fancy stuff where you run around dodging things. You warp in, you take up general positions, hope the server lag isn’t too bad, so it won’t take a million years to fight, then.. big ships sit in place and use shield and nano-tech repair to constantly rebuild their defenses, while once in a while firing some massive burst of weapons fire, while everything from smaller ships, to drone fighters, to much smaller sets of drones, orbit the big ones, trying to a) take each other out, b) help repair things, or boost shields, and c) pummel the big ships, whose systems are designed to do a damn lot of damage to other big targets, but not do so good of a job tracking the buzzing mosquitoes.
Of course, the first complaint for some game players isn’t, “Man, these battles lag a lot, when they have some 500+ players trying to kill each other.”, but, “Why can’t I swoop around the enemy, like I was playing a flight sim type game?!”
The irony is, perhaps, that, in this case, the “real” physics of what a space battle would end up being like is easier to run in simulation, to a certain extent. lol
But.. Man, stuff on there can get insane: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/the-bloodbath-of-b-r5rb/
The summary is at the end, but.. on average, there was more than 2,000 players in the main system in the conflict at any time, out of more than 7,500 total players who got involved, and the total losses, in terms of cash you would have to spend to “buy”, straight up, with real money, instead of build via mining, construction, etc., the ships lost, was something like $300,000 to $330,000 (or, more than 11 trillion isk, the in game currency).
Huh… As long as we don’t go the whole suicide booth route.. this would be the way to fight future battles. lol
Re: unclefrogy (#64):
Oh, I see what you mean. Sticking with lasers, I’d speculate there would be two kinds of damage:
a) Neat hole with lots of bodily fluids coming out depending on where the hole is and how big it is
b) Not quite as neat a hole with lots of charring / burns and, if the victim is lucky, very little bodily fluids leaking out
The first scenario would be a very fast pulsed laser, the kind used to structure the matchstick head I mentioned. Each pulse delivers just enough energy to remove a little bit of material where the target is struck. But the energy is low enough so that the surrounding material doesn’t heat up and remains undamaged.
In the second case, a slow or continous laser, the surrounding tissues would heat up as well, hence the burns. With luck, the weapon cauterises the wound as it inflicts it. Admittedly this is another sci-fi trope and hardly original.
Re: Brett (#60) and unclefrogy (#65):
Actually, given ‘easy access’ to space, piracy should be fairly straight-forward and low risk, at least for the proverbial captain. Asteroid miners should make easy targets and there’s no need to actually board a ship or station to steal cargo, as was the case with age of sail piracy.
The low risk option is simply to extort your target. Give us money or regrettable things might happen. An asteroid miner can’t hide, being stuck to a large-ish rock on a very predictable orbit. At most your mark can abandon their claim, forfeiting all profits they were hoping to make. So already there is an incentive to pay up, even if the profit margins suffer. A single asteroid can be worth billions of dollars, so who cares?
Defence would be near-impossible, since the facility could be hit from any direction at any time. You can’t be on alert all the time, so any pirate you deny just has to bide theirs. At some point they sneak in something small and explosive* and bang. Now there’s an incentive for everyone else to pay up when it’s their turn.
All of this could be done from the pirate cove, i.e. a cushy office building hosting all the other (legal) business ventures our rugged captain runs. Personal risk: low to none. You might still get caught but your life isn’t in danger.**
The higher risk-strategy would be to intercept cargo drones or packages before they reach their destination. Packages – basically boxes of materials that are ‘thrown’ by the miner and caught at the destination should be easy to harvest if you can find them. But this assumes cheap fuel since you’d spend a lot of it matching velocity with individual packages so you can reel them in. And then you’re stuck with stolen goods and have to haul them yourself. Frankly, we should take a hint from the banks. The type of piracy is simply behind the times.
*Cubesat of doom: A small amount of anti-matter in a small satellite with a tiny ion thruster. Good luck spotting that one. (Patent and Pentagon funding pending.)
**Headline: “Company CEO caught threatening spaceminers on Facebook. Facebook responds: No community guidelines have been violated.” Our dread pirate continues.
Re: numerobis (#76):
Energy weapons would definitely be restricted to short ranges. It’s infuriating really: here you have a weapon that could hit your lunar target in seconds, but if you really want to inflict damage you’re stuck with kinetic weapons that might take hours or even days to get there.
Anyway, shorter range means lower yields can do more damage, so cooling might become viable again. And if I’m not mistaken, current laser efficiencies are rubbish, so there are more improvements to be made, no doubt. Shoot for the Moon!
if getting to space is cheap I would also suspect that all the rest of the infrastructure to mine said resources would also be reduces in cost and danger so why would piracy be other then the occasional cargo high-jacking by small gangs of thieves as happens regularly today nothing that would cause anything like a war. even so it would still be easy to track any cargo and money . no one is doing that today except as extortion and still vary small level all things considered. the major taking is more easily done in banking and trading floors as it is today. The actual workers, the miners themselves, can easily be cheated out of all the profits and wages just as they are today no need for romantic pirate raiders at all. who would be even more expensive and harder to control then the miners.
uncle frogy
As mentioned above, a sandbag with a small explosive charge inside is the perfect interplanetary shotgun. It’s just slow.
But yes, you send a tweet saying “dear @asteroidminer, it’d be a pity if I accidentally put a piece of mail on this twitchy button to pop this sandbag and splatter a cloud of dust all over your operations… for just a few quid I could afford some tupperware to cover the button with and it would pass by harmlessly.”
You don’t even need to actually send a sandbag of course.
But actually, twitter, Facebook, and the FBI would probably be all over these threats. They aren’t aimed at the life of a woman — they’re threats to damage an industrial operation, which is much more important!
NelC (#74) –
That’s what I was getting at. Don’t know why people thought I inferred they were sustained G forces.
There is a case where sustained G forces did cause the cancellation of a race, when CART tried to race at Texas Motor Speedway in 2001. Normally in both CART/IRL and Formula 1, drivers are subjected to lateral or forward G forces between 4 and 5 for several seconds each lap (one or more times each lap) in corners or during hard braking.
TMS, with its 24 degree banking, was tested in the pre-season and deemed safe. But during practice for the race, drivers were subjected to lateral force as high as 6G for 10-15 seconds per lap at 225-228mph. Many reported blackouts at speed, though thankfully only one crashed. The race organizers recognized the track was undrivable and cancelled the race for reasons of safety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_Firehawk_600
Left0ver1under @82:
Context. A 100g acceleration for 0.01 of a second would probably not accomplish much for a spacecraft that couldn’t be achieved with 10g for 0.1 sec, or 1g for 1 sec, with far less stress and danger. A sustained acceleration of say 10g for 10 seconds might actually have some use, though what will depend on the exact technical details of the weapons used.
E.E. “Doc” Smith had this covered back in the 20s or 30s. Inertia-less drive. Your ship instantly reaches a speed where thrust forward is in equilibrium with resistance against interstellar hydrogen. Even a tiny amount of thrust can make a ship roar through space. And… turn your ship while your engine is running, and you’re immediately moving in line with your thrust axis. WW2 fighters in space!
left0ver1under @82:
Which people? ‘crash’ clearly implies ‘very short duration’.
Rick Pikul@43:
Of course, the author of Albedo was ex-USAF (admittedly, mostly as a technical illustrator) so actually had some experience with combat to draw on. Aside from the jump drives which were pretty much ‘flip the switch on at the edge of one solar system, get propelled out in a straight line until you re-emerge into real space at the edge of the next solar system with no personal time delay’, it was relatively hard SF.