Can we talk about naval tactics and how they would evolve in

>>29833704
>Can we talk about naval tactics and how they would evolve in space? I'm interested in the subject but I can't begin to grasp how to transition naval theory into 3D.

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

Not everything on this site is 100% correct, esp. a few technical science thingies, but by and large it'll give you the right idea.

Why would it be navel tactics? 3 dimensional maneuvering while firing projectiles sound like dogfighting to me.

>>29833715
Thanks anon

>>29833723

No problem.

>>29833716
Pretty much this. I always hated how in movies that ships all move on a single plain

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>>29833704
>>29833716
Space warfare won't be like naval warfare or air to air combat, instead it will be an entirely new and unprecedented form of battle. Tactics and technology will be completely different from everything that has come before, much like the development of air combat in the early part of the 20th century will require a great deal of experimentation. At this point we can only make the basest guesses as to what forms they will take.

>>29833704
It'd probably resemble a vomit inducing mix of airborne and naval combat tactics.

But like anon >>29833840 says, it'd be something new.

Any fighting in space would completely fuck up the regions around a planet with all the debris.

>>29833704
The book Forever War does a good job of dealing with just how alien the entire concept essentially is. Long ranges will be the norm along with high G maneuvers.

Really, the closest analog would be submarine warfare but fought at extreme ranges and a large amount of missiles.

>>29833840

I think this anon is right.
It will require experimentation before we figure out how to not be retarded with our super expensive toys.

>>29833716
What about subs?
>large vessel with a lot of personal
>long range weapons
>3d enviroment

>>29833704
Space Kaiju don't follow naval theory anyway anon. They're after humanity

>>29833704
>Electronic warfare

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>>29834233
gonna be a lot of pew pew pew and kabooooms. except without the sounds since yaknow...vacuum of space

>>29834584
died?

>>29834614
i dont know

THE ENEMY GATE IS DOWN

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>>29834614
I just saw an excuse to post annie mays. Im sorry

>>29834221
But still subject to gravity.

The first naval battles in space will literally be Chaos with MASSIVE loss of life on both sides

The introduction of additional vertical flanks will change everything

No longer would you have to keep an eye out to your sides and rear, now you have to look beneath and above

Getting flanked from both sides in early naval battles just meant that you could broadside in both directions, Now you'll have to have a full compliment of weapons facing your +Y and -Y in order to avoid being rekt from above and below without being able to return fire.

Ships will be massive fortresses with 180 degree bearing guns on every fucking side.

Surrounded? Good. Now you can fire in every direction.

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>B-17s in Space

Dick status: MUH

>>29834670
the suns?

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>>29834614
They didn't died, source is Gunbuster btw

>>29834706
That sounds extremely comfy

>>29834706
how the propellers gonna work?

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>>29834706
>>29834823
Welp.

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How effective would lasers be in space? Because doesn't dense atmosphere like clouds and fog severely reduce their effectiveness, so laser should be more potent in space?

It's gonna be all missiles, all long range, whoever lands the first shot wins. No rail guns, no lasers, no boarding enemy ships with magnetic boots. The future is bleak.

>>29834893
Finally, an MOS besides space shuttle door gunner I can get behind.

>>29834909
Pretty effective. They hit almost instantly and travel in a straight line. Unfortunately debris and lack of focus at a distance will limit its range.

Capcha: Mars exit

>>29834909
They will work, but they lack the main advantage of kinetic weapons, namely the range, and they will overheat like fuck in the power ranges necessary to damage metal, and what with space being space and all, this can and will kill a hypothetical spacecraft.

>>29834909
You won't have to deal with that, no.

On the other hand, space combat might be fought largely over distances so great that even laser have a hard time focusing properly. Targets might also employ mist/dust "shields" against them. And heat isn't terribly good at damaging stuff either, a laser is probably one of the easier things to armour a ship against. Even with a missile, I wonder how far a laser-based CIWS would get if you just put on a thick-ish alumina nose-cone and then had the missile spin.

>>29834909
Technically yes, but they still run into the issue of being less mass efficient than chemically powered weapons. Though by the time large scale space combat is common place, that might not be a thing.

>>29834893
I can live with it

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>>29834909
super effective as long as theyre pink

>>29834979
>bent by the planet's gravity

holy fuck yes

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>>29834958
So basically space laser will end up as a point defense system like we see in mass effect?

It's honestly amazing how quickly laser technology has been advancing in the last few years alone, now it seems every country is making their own lasers.

Honestly I think starship troopers, what little they discuss it in the book, does a really good job, long range, firing around planets, high g maneuvers, and being used not as combat system for other ships, but as a drop mechanism and for orbital bombardment.

>>29835000
at the end of every episode they had a lil science corner where they explained concepts in the episode and how science could support them like warp travel and bending light ect ect

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>>29833704
Just build yourself a fuckhuge cathedral in speehs, fly in between your enemys and unleash the wrath of the Imperial Navy upon this heretics.

>>29835131
>what is fuel expenditure
>what is delta v
>what is inertia
Fuckhuge is not the way to go my guy

>>29835155
40k says fuck delta v

>>29835155
stopping the thing is the issue, not getting it to move

I wonder what cold war space battles would be like if the US and USSR had gone ahead with their crazy 60s ideas like moon bases and nuclear armed spacecraft

I guess it would be like ABM/ASAT warfare but with two spacecraft shooting at each other rather than ground to air

>ywn defend a USAF moonbase against soviet space marines by blasting those godless commies with a davy crockett

:^(

This is how I picture it going down:
Small unmanned drones that try to overwhelm a ship's automated defense systems via sheer numbers
Combat starting and ending in seconds at god knows how many fractions of light seconds of distance depending on how efficient the laser output is
Not really much use for actual personnel involved in the conflict aside from repairing the ship from the inside to prevent hull rupture

Kinda like that

>>29835197
USSR would have better success of killing their own space soldiers than the US

>>29835215
you wouldnt even need drones for that though, just fire a volley. we still lack the key thing for space travel which is a good defense

>>29835188
In space you'll quickly come to realize that those two things are the same.

>>29835216
Has the US gotten 3.5 times as many people into space as the USSR? The casualties so far during space flights are 14 to 4.

>>29835290
its quality anon. ours survived and we beat their ass to the moon even though they got to the starting line first

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>>29835348
>ours survived

>>29834979
show?

>>29835372
okay now show me how many they lost

>>29835348
Actually they didn't really get there first, we had all the tech in place thanks to Wernher Von Braun and the German scientists who defected after WWII, however, due to fears of Russian retaliation, we didn't launch anything until they had, so there could be a precedent that space was open territory and borders didn't extend upwards infinitely.

I think The Expanse have a pretty acurate idea of how space combat will be

>Missles/Torpedoes for very very long range combat
>Rail guns
>Point defense cannons to destroy said torpedoes before they impact you
>Huge focus on jamming enemy guidance signals

I think they lack defense missles to shot down incoming torpedoes at mid-range. Also despite several times in the books acknowledging the posibility of weaponizing lasers and the existance of some kind of military grade lasers they never mention them in action (so far).

>>29833704
It's pretty similar op except you have to think in 3 dimensions. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you think in two dimensions some Volcan will show up and ruin all your carefully laid out plans for revenge.

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>>29834120

There's so much space around a given planet you might see an increase in shooting stars and that's pretty much it, they would likely be engaging each other at orbital speeds which just means space-junk.

>>29833840
I think this anon is the closest to getting it. It would be like the navy in the sense that you'd have different classes of ships, captains, admirals, etc. Large ships fighting each other would not be making wild maneuvers unless it was absolutely necessary just like you don't slam a heavy naval vessel to reverse throttle unless the ship was about to be annihilated.

On a smaller level though, there would be individual fighter and torpedo or missile heavy ships and there would also be plenty of corvette and frigate-class ships which would take advantage of 3 dimensions but this might not even be so much the case as most space-weapons would likely be simple missiles with the larger ships having rail-guns and maybe some kind of radiation-based weapons.

I don't think humanity would ever build such magnificent weapons because its not feasible. If you want to have a war in space, you lose one of the biggest advantages of a war in space by putting human beings in the ships. You could have an entire battalion of war drones from the US fighting the same number of ships without losing any human personnel or having very many security risks because very few people need to know.

Perhaps if we ever colonized anything to an industrial level you might see the development of epic star-ships and possibly some warfare, but the theaters would be places like the moon, phobos, mars. That's how I see it possibly playing out in the next 200 years or so.

But I do think if we're sticking with the big versus little ships model we're looking at drones. All it will take is the first time someone has their big fancy trillion-dollar star-ship utterly wrecked by drones which can fly magnitudes faster and do 90' maneuvers which would turn a human pilot into jelly.

>>29835348
>even though they got to the starting line first

Operation Plumbbob

>>29835290
ours just die before getting to space

>>29833840
I'm honestly surprised it even took this many posts for somebody to not be retarded.

Space combat will be unlike any current forms of combat. It will also more likely be undertaken at great distances, probably while the enemy is not even in sight.

My guess for weapons? Maybe high powered energy weapons like lasers, or powerful electromagnetic weapons firing smaller projectiles at incredibly speeds. Also maybe missiles, but they won't be the small ones like Sidewinders and the like, more likely being larger missiles made to travel longer ranges at great speeds.

I'll admit, I know little of space and about as much about warfare as your average /k/ommando, but it is almost certain that space warfare will be very different from what we think it will be.

>>29835384
they were in space first anon. thats the starting line for the infinite

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>>29835376
its actually a show about space robots vs space monsters anon. the ships are just for show. Dont wanna mislead you. GunBuster. Its also produced in japan, so girls in skimpy outfits in the space robots

UCP BEST SPACE CAMO

>>29833704
We've actually had this kind of thread before but it was fun the first time.

The way I see it, you've got two types of ships. Brawlers that are all lasers and railguns, heatsinks and armor. And Missile ships that are mostly missiles by volume. Now a brawler can shoot down missiles from a missile ship or two but enough missile ships can simply overwhelm a brawler. Furthermore, once the missile ships have launched their payload their mass is maybe half of what it was so they're really fast on the acceleration.

So what you do is you assign the brawlers to cover the missile ships, intercepting missiles so the missile carriers don't have to. However. this puts you at something of a stalemate. So what do you do?

You can play the angles and try to surround an enemy so the brawlers can't cover the missile ships effectively. Countering this you could focus your firepower on a small part of the enemy fleet and try to destroy it piecemeal. Countering that you could bunch all your brawlers together and try smashing through the enemy's brawlers and force the missile carriers to scatter, wasting their missiles to shed weight.

Regardless, you've got options to play with.

>>29835514
The ships would probably just use nukes for missiles since space n all

>>29834584
>>29834662
>>29834979
>>29835487
what anime is this?

Space combat sounds like the most pointless thing ever. congratulations, you won the space war and control earth's orbit. Now what? Bomb their country from above? We could've done that with ICBM's long before spending years and trillions of dollars to build and launch some space ships.

>>29833704
Let's not forget how effective a Glider Corps would be in space.

>>29833704
Is that Homeworld art I see.excellent taste anon.

>>29835588
gunbuster

>>29835584
A nuke is not gonna be super effective in space with no medium to transfer the shockwave. They would be essentially radiation weapons only, which is not as difficult to armor against. Hit-to-kill and fragmenting weapons will be king (which may also be nukes).

>>29835711
Yeah any sort of explosive will have to score a direct hit or rely on fragmentation obviously, with no atmosphere to carry a shock wave.

Lasers are going to be overall the best weapons available (at least until we come up with something completely new) just because they travel the fastest. I suspect space combat will tend to happen at distances great enough that even a laser will take a noticeable amount of time to reach the target. Guns have advantages in space - no gravity, no atmosphere, so every gun shoots perfectly flat and your projectile could theoretically go forever, but it's just going to be so slow to get there it will be easy to dodge and virtually impossible to hit with them.

I'm thinking there would be room for a hybrid though - a gun that fires a guided projectile. It can rely on the gun for initial acceleration, and conserve its own fuel for maneuver.

Still going to be very slow compared to a laser though, which means you could fire a volley of these and then get your own ship melted before they make it to target. Double-kill?

>>29835487
bout to start watching it

>>29835584
Still runs into issues with nukes being intercepted outside of their kill radius. More than that, the kill radius would be greatly reduced since vacuum doesn't transfer shock.

>>29835487
Wouldn't have expected otherwise

>>29835777
Lasers run into issues that they aren't very efficient or that powerful. Even cursory armor and angling is going to make them mostly useless. Railguns are going to be the real ship killer but that means getting really close in. Most captains will be content to just chip at each other at long range without good cause.

Missiles are also going to be a major ship killer but you're going to need a fuckton of them to overwhelm the lasers and railguns shooting them down. on the other hand, they've got arguably the best engagement envelop since they don't suffer from dispersion like lasers and can correct for enemy maneuvers.

Nukes are useful as space weapons if they are used in Casaba howitzer shaped charge or bomb pumped x-ray laser. Basically, launch a fuckload of missiles and detonate them into beams as they approach the enemy's effective intercept range.

>>29833704
There is always the case that anything fired in a vaccume will continue at amazingly destructive speeds until it is stopped by a stellar body.

Targeting systems would have to be perfect as a battle in orbit above Earth, for example, would end in destruction if a battery of torpedos missed the target and barrelled past in to orbit and land anywhere. If not torpedos then ballistic rounds.

I imagine manouvering would be a hydrid between Submarine combat and Ship and Sail broadside combat. I like that idea.

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Everyone who is interested in space combat needs to go watch The Expanse, they do a fairly good job of portraying what it will potentially be like.

>Huge emphasis on autonomous "torpedo" style weapons for long-range
>Railguns for mid/close range work, but require lots of power
>Massive amounts of electronic warfare & intelligence work
MCR STRONK, UN are a bunch of basic-dependent faggots, Belters are irrelevant morons.

>>29838122
There's no real stealth in space. If your engine is firing you can be seen. More than that, if they can see your exhaust plume they have a grasp on how much thrust you're putting out and, based on your acceleration, how much mass you've got.

Of course, now that they "know" this, you can fuck with them. Throw a mylar skirt over your engine. Burn retros to waste thrust. Launch some mirrors to create decoys. Have the enemy chase some nothing frigates around while the battleships sneak in with the cargo fleet.

>>29840321
So space subs are just going to be ships that can temporarily trap their heat/exhaust, like the Normandy in mass effect?

>>29838122
The expanse is pretty good. The G manuvers are also nice to see.

>>29835711
Fusion happens all the time in space senpai.

>>29840357
thermodynamics are a bitch
you'd need an impractically massive heatsink and The general rule for for building space ships is "keep the mass as low as possible"

>>29840573
we could just teach our space ship AIs body positivity and HAES. The laws of thermodynamics don't seem to apply to the fat asses who preach that stuff.

>>29833704
Think Submarine Carriers, in space.

>>29840357
The ONLY reason ME gets away with that BS is that the Normandy has a completely reactionless tantalus drive core. Otherwise they'd never cover the entire exhaust plume.

>>29840357
More like they're all subs, sort of.
While it's true you can't stealth it's also true that there's a huge number of observational angles and stars filling each one. A stationary observatory might pick up a burn from a ship in the outer solar system but they have to wait for the computers to filter out all the stuff that's supposed to be there before they'd even notice it.

But the closer you get the harder it is to avoid being seen, and yeah, you can't really stealth any likely propulsion device - what you *can* do is plan your trajectory well ahead of time and come in quiet though.

Once you get up to speed on the right course you don't need to burn until you are there.

>>29840760
Yeah, that's not too far off.

>>29834958
Mist/dust shields have at best the exact same efficacity as the equivalent thickness of an ablative plate of the same material, so they're actualy worthless as i can't see a reason i'd choose it over the actual armor.

>>29833704
unless you were near a planet or other gravity well it would be a complete clusterfuck

what bugs me is the way its allays likened to naval warfare
this is stupid as water gives two if not three frames of reference that simply do not exist in space

>>29836057
A 20kg slug moving a relativistic speeds will probably destroy any ship without being detected or evaded. All aspect missiles would only be useful for fighter sized ships that somehow get too close to target with the railguns.The fighter ships in turn would have some decently powerful pea shooter railguns.

In space, an object keeps going until it hits something. Projectile guns become much more efficient than in an atmosphere. There is no such thing as Star Trek type shields and there never will be, so these slugs will out range and out damage any missiles when direct lines of sight are involved.

>>29836260
>detonate missiles into beams

You have an unacceptable misunderstanding of how explosions work in space.

>>29838122
>Huge emphasis on autonomous "torpedo" style weapons for long-range
>Railguns for mid/close range work, but require lots of power

This is wrong. Railguns send projectiles at much faster speeds than missiles. Missiles are for moving targets. When it comes to the speed of railgun slugs, everything else is standing still, relatively speaking.

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>>29833808
In Star Trek II, Spock mentioned that very weakness in Khan's maneuvering, "two-dimensional thinking."

Kirk then proceeded to have Sulu maneuver the Enterprise along the Z axis. They elevated up and around the stern and blew up Khan's engine and torpedo launcher.

>>29835131
>space choo choo trains

Don't forget magnetic weaponry. My bro said it would most likely be like submarine warfare, which makes sense, but on a colossal scale. with Macgnetic weaponry, you wont need to waste fuel, and with debris, you can have a pretty large amount of ammo at any time.
>Launching a giant death spear at 40k mph to an unknowing target hundereds or thousands of miles away
>Muh dick

>Navies in space
>Not Airforce

I'll never get why this is the dominant meme.

I'm really interested in how the debris problem is to be dealt with. There's already a fair bit of junk wizzing around up there. When China test fired their anti satellite missile in 2007, they added to the total amount of orbital space debris by 30%. That was just from blowing up one satellite.

>>29841194
Space ships anon, not space planes

>>29840814
>While it's true you can't stealth it's also true that there's a huge number of observational angles and stars filling each one. A stationary observatory might pick up a burn from a ship in the outer solar system but they have to wait for the computers to filter out all the stuff that's supposed to be there before they'd even notice it.

Current computers are capable of filtering out the differences between two images, comparing the results to the expected images of known objects, and highlighting the resulting objects of interest in a matter of milliseconds. This isn't science fiction, SPACEGUARD does it everyday. The main bottleneck is your telescope's exposure time, but that can be easily mitigated with multiple cameras.

Here's some math. The sky is 41253 square degrees in total. A modern wide angle lens can cover 100 square degrees. So we divide 41253 by 100 and get 413.00 total photographs needed for 1 sky sweep. Lets round it to 420 to give us some overlap. Now you'll need about 30 seconds to get a nice clear pic of such a distant object. So we divide 420 exposures by 2 exposures a minute for each exposure and get 210 minutes for a single camera to do a full sky sweep. With just 6 cameras you'd be able to do it in 35 min, an hour and 10 for a double set to detect movement. This is for a full sky sweep, if you had any idea at all where the enemy might be coming from you could cut this time down substantially.

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>>29841194
aircraft cant into cargo
buoyancy allows sick gains for consolidation

>>29841194
>airforce in space
>no air
gee I wonder

>>29841210
Orbital space warfare is a zero sum game and always will be. Warfare is waged to defend one's interests or seize someone else's. In orbit, you cause too much destruction (not much, blow up a few satellites or a large craft/station) and you've created a debris field that will wipe out the enemy's satellites and craft, but yours as well. Any gain is negated immediately. The only way you could conduct orbital space warfare without ruining the utility of the orbit for yourself would be with kill craft that attach to the enemy's satellite or craft and drive it into re-entry.

>>29834909
Plasma weaponry would be superior assuming technology allows us to overcome its shortcomings.

>>29834909
Mirrors, you fool. You'd get the laser turned back on you.

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>>29834909
in atmosphere a weaker trace laser is sent to find the path of least resistance
it also has the job of priming that path for more energy

I would say the problem in space is that the distances covered would mess with projectile kinetic or otherwise just by chance alone independent of any debris or plasma drifts

>>29834909
>space laser
Jesus christ, this is worse than most /sci/ shitposts.

The major issues to adapt to are lack of oxygen/atmosphere pressure, the extreme low temperatures and accounting for gravity's variation over space.

Explosives will not burn without their own oxidizer, the temperature may vastly change the energetic favorability and rate of the reactions, the absence of air as a medium will effect the propagation of that mechanical energy and change heat transfer, aiming any sort of projectile has to account for the current velocity of the ship, its target, and the actual gravitational forces.

>muh lasers
>muh plasma
>muh railgun
Do you idiots ever stop and consider heat dissipation? It's not easy to do in a vacuum, as you can only radiate heat or vent coolant.

>>29833704
naval tactics have nothing to do with space. study missile defense/strategic defense if you want to understand space war.

>>29841405
no, because then you have to think about what's practical, and that's not fun.
just imagine we're building 100% efficient electronics or something

>>29834909
ablation on hardened targets would limit their effectiveness, even for nuke-pumped x-ray shit.

>>29841453
then shoot important things that aren't designed to ablate
like sensors and fuel

>>29841388
>in atmosphere a weaker trace laser is sent to find the path of least resistance

Stop making shit up.

>>29841398
You talked about lasers and then immediately listed projectile only problems while still refering to lasers.

>>29841486
>just shoot the unprotected bits
Uh, what is armor?
If your enemy starts using space lasers you're going to develop armor to protect the things they're shooting at.

>>29841534
Yeah, but it's like building a ship, where too much weight is bad as it adds to expense and reduces speed and maneuverability, so compromises are made on things like armor

except it's even more expensive cuz it has to go on a damn spaceship

Offensive capabilities of lasers will probably outpace ship armor for a long time, given that the ship is within a reasonable range

>>29841614
>Offensive capabilities of lasers will probably outpace ship armor for a long time
No because defending against lasers is as easy as increasing reflectivity to the wavelengths they operate on or creating low mass ablative material.

>>29840458
Yes, and?

>>29841405
Plasma is dumb, but lasers and railguns are fine.

>>29841633
At the very least, lasers are effective against their sensors and any other parts where it is impractical or impossible to change their reflectivity, such as solar panels.

>>29833704
Can we talk about how spergfully triggered I get when people use naval terminology for astral travel/warfare?

>>29841495
www.physics.iitm.ac.in/~cvijayan/opc-review.pdf

>>29841746
>such as solar panels.
>implying things that are known targets of laser weapons will be solar powered
You're just getting dumber and dumber.

>>29841768
A laser beam travels in a straight line. Therefore the only path to a target a laser can take is a straight line to it. There is no scouting around for a path of least resistance.

>>29841785
It's an example and that was my first post in the thread.

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>>29833704
It would basically be like in the expanse

>>29834823

Gravity.

>>29833704
By the time spaceship combat is a thing, weapons tech will be so advanced that the mobilization of a nation's fleet would similar to nuclear deterrents in todays world.

If above is true, fighters deployed from orbit to ground combat, or other manner of orbital-to-ground weapons would be a massive application. Nukes would need to evolve to deter this threat. Ship vs ship combat would be nonexistant even in a world where earths nations are in open commerce with colonies on other planets.

Scifi hypothetical world: the one who gets detected first loses. None of this flashy dogfighting starwars shit. Highly perfected stealth nukes with no signatures sent into the enemy fleet from half across the solar system. Nukes with warp drives and detonations not limited by planetary factors.

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Pew Pew

>>29841633
>No because defending against lasers is as easy as increasing reflectivity to the wavelengths they operate on or creating low mass ablative material.
no just no, at weapons grade laser wattage a 1% imperfection in a mirror is enough to make it an ineffective armor let alone maintaining a 99% reflective mirror on the entire surface of a ship.

ablative armor is a meme, it doesn't work.

Carbon is the best material for armor against lasers but it really depends on how powerful the laser is.

>>29841796
you don't know much do you

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>>29841796
>A laser beam travels in a straight line.

>>29833704
Orbital mechanics and heat management will dominate. It will be nothing like naval tactics.

>>29841911
>perfected stealth nukes
>detect heat from nuke
>computerized projectiles shoot it down
Whoops.
Now looks like the enemy fleet has maneuvered closer for a counter-attack, what will you do? Oh but you can't get within close range, that would be too much like Star Wars. Guess you better just surrender.

>>29842072
I don't think you realize how vast space is. "Close Range" would be measured in hundreds of kms, if not thousands.

>>29842114
Hundreds of km is short range yes
You would probably get detected within the light years
The point is, if you were to shoot torpedoes from that kind of range, they would most likely get shot down by computerized countermeasures. I mean, even within the hundreds of kilometers to make torpedoes viable from a weight and cost standpoint, the propulsion would have to be fairly rudimentary, even if guidance is automated.
To do any real damage you would have to get within close range, or do battle in some sort of environment which cripples automation or provides cover

>>29842182
Why are we shooting 'dumb' torpedos when we'd have rail guns?

>>29841486
>not shielding fuel


this would be a number one target for a laser.

>>29841746
>At the very least, lasers are effective against their sensors and any other parts where it is impractical or impossible to change their reflectivity, such as solar panels.

laser ablation was a problem for SDI, which was dealing with current-gen "tinfoil" space ships.

ablation will occur on any part of a ship that becomes damaged. so, you either have to compromise by

a) using a better laser
b) using a particle beam, since these have mass.

>>29842194
Torpedoes aren't dumb, like I said their guidance is automated, pretty much everything would be in order to have viable space combat.
The point is torpedo propulsion would be too slow at pretty much any range except close, because heat detection, motion detection etc. and you can't put a warp device on a torpedo because that would most likely be too costly, weigh too much or both.

Heat would be one of the largest problems. Space fights seem like they would last a few moments and be glorified pissing contests till someone runs away and comes back with friends. Then the other side comes back with more friends and etc etc till you get fleets like in >>29841930 but mostly just shows of force.

>>29842114
not hundreds on Km...

if I were to plot a tactical operation in space as I would an infantry or tank engagement on land, the unit standing in for Km would be the mega-meter. 1000km.

go dick around with orbiter to get a feel for distances and times in even LEO. shits big...

>>29842182
>detected within the light years

doubtful, at the size of a single vessel.

however, if we're projecting so far into the future that light years matter for waging war, then the societies invovled are so far advanced that speculating in them is pointless.

about like a Roman trying to consider how 21st century warfare would be...

>>29842255
So, again, why are we using torpedoes over rail guns? Rail guns can fire solid projectiles at incredible velocities against large targets. Large targets would have a next to impossible time of shooting them down, so they'd have to move. A large ship changing course isn't an easy feat in and of itself, let alone in a hurry (hurry being measured in minutes, granted, but its still a lot of ship to abruptly move) along with firing back, causing the other ship to have to adjust course, move, and potentially fire back.

All of this happening 1000s of kms apart, all at painfully slow speeds, till someone gets lucky and scores a hit, or someone runs out of energy/builds up too much heat and has to retreat. I hate to break it to you but space fights are going to be horribly boring.

>>29834129
I 2nd that opinion, it's an excellent and well thought out novel.

>>29842286
>starts to sink

forgot how bad this was

I mean, it is cool too, but there is just so many strange little things that add up against this movie

>>29842308
It sinking makes sense in such a low orbit at potentially slower than orbit speeds. Whatever space magic is holding those ships in orbit broke and the gravity of the planet started doing its job.

>>29842289
at space-faring distances, a rail gun would be too inaccurate to use.

a "torpedo" (or really, a rocket) would be able to make mid course corrections, which are a vital thing in space flight.

>>29842289
Rail guns would be more effective at close to medium range. You can't direct a projectile from a rail gun after its left, it's going too fast/going too far. Your computer has to aim your best and fire, and ships have more maneuverability in space than in water, they can most likely evade rather swiftly.

>>29842343
evasion's not even a consideration.

as firearms enthusiasts, can anyone tell me what the spread would look like for a device firing at 0.000001 MoA over, say, 5000km?

if that spread is larger than the kill zone of your target, then it doesn't even have to evade, as far as probability goes.

factoring evasion and counter measures...yeah. you don't even have to.

>>29835514
Sounds like chess, but on a 3D level.

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>>29841040
>A 20kg slug moving a relativistic speeds will probably destroy any ship without being detected or evaded.
Sure but how do you get it to those speeds? Not out of a conventional cannon, certainly, and while a missile with a powerful enough fuel and plenty of it could get there eventually, anything currently plausible would take so long to do so that wouldn't be usable in a battle, even a very slow one that takes days or weeks to complete.

>>29841057
Eh he phrased that awkwardly but it's basically the way that A2A warheads usually work today - a shaped charge that's already moving at very high speed producing a blast focused into a cone shape forward rather than a spherical blast. That would still work in space - but not as well.

>>29841082
Missiles in the atmosphere hit a maximum speed because of atmospheric resistance. This does not happen in space. A missile in space will continue accelerating at the same rate as long as it burns. Ranges would likely be greater as well. Terminal velocities on missiles would therefore be many times what a railgun can do.

>>29841185
Magnetic weaponry requires electricity, which requires fuel.

>>29841241
ok

Pic related, one of the more plausible fictional designs.

>>29834823
Space-time distortions

>>29833704
Hey a couple quick questions/thoughts for you guys.

1. Sensors. What would we be talking about here? Would there be any strong reasons to stick to radar? Would there be so much less clutter and such it would be even more effective than in atmospheric conditions? Would electro-optical sensors make sense given they are passive and there's no curvature of the earth and stupid stuff like clouds don't get in the way? Would advances in image processing make looking out and (as someone earlier suggested) compare an expected image to the actual one to check for eclipsed stars and shit easy? I'm guessing IR is a non starter given there's good method for propagation. Is there a way this could actually work?

1.5 Recon. I'm guessing relying on organic sensors for a spaceship would just be dumb af (though do feel free to disagree). As such do you think that it would generally make more sense to rely on orbital probes/telescopes/sensors or send out some random stuff into various solar orbits to do your dirty work. Would lags in data transmission make ships favor their organic sensors or would it make sense to try to distribute your high quality sensors?

2. Projectiles. People were talking about torpedoes vs rail guns and for the record already have highly maneuverable hit to kill weapons that have electronics that can survive some serious G forces. The SM-3s EKV is badass as hell and the new Hyper Velocity Projectiles are hardened for high G forces. Basically I don't think it would be impossible to create some crude maneuverable rail gun projectile for space combat today let alone a couple decades from now.

Missiles would also seem to make sense with no recoil to account for, guidance all the way to the target and high velocity built up over a long ass time.

2.5 Payloads. Back to questions what sort of payloads would make the most sense for any sort of projectile weapons? (1/2)

>>29842286
Fucking Star Wars with it's WW1 logic.

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>>29841194
I think it has to do with timescale. Ships, even today, go to sea for months at a time. Airplanes never stay aloft that long. Space travel is slow, it will take a long time to go anywhere for the forseeable future, even with the technology to get there, it's still going to be a long journey, months to mars, years at least to the next star system.
Sounds like a ship, not a plane.

>>29842649
Nuclear would certainly be incredibly energetic but heat and shock propagation would be issues. It also seems that if point defense was possible, regardless of the device, nuclear weapons would be more vulnerable to interception than say a straight kinetic projectile that doesn't need precise explosive geometry to function.
Speaking of which, kinetic payloads! Seem like potentially a fairly simple and effective payload option with something like tungsten or DU. Along this line would one want a single massive penetrator or numerous smaller penetrators? I don't know my physics terribly well but it seems like you'd get the same kinetic energy with a much more complex picture for the defender (if deflection/evasion were possible).
Final idea, HEAT rounds. Now before you laugh me out, take a second and think about it. With the right explosive geometry, couldn't one create a fairly stable stream that would have little ability to cool and suddenly have quite a bit more kinetic energy. I have no idea if the physics here make any sense but it seems like a good way to create a number of threats very quickly with significantly smaller energy and cooling requirements than a rail gun projectile of the same mass and kinetic energy.

Anyways yeah rip apart my thoughts, thanks (2/2)

>>29835000
>laser rays visible in vacuum

holy fuck no

>>29835380
Four. Soyuz-1 and 11

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>>29842795
>mechs
>floofy 80's hair
>sports movie homages
FUCK YES

>>29842759
Nuclear like any sort of explosive would need to be used with some sort of proximity fuse. You'd want it approaching the target as quickly as possible but explode just before it hits. With no atmosphere you have to impact with shrapnel or plasma - there is no larger shockwave effect, so even with a nuke a near miss would still be a near miss.

Otherwise you're basically talking big bullet versus small bullet, and it really all depends on what you are shooting. Anything we could build today and get in space? A swarm of fletchets at a significant fraction of lightspeed would wipe it all out. But doubtless some sort of countermeasure could be invented, and once you have something, perhaps a deflector of some sort? well fletchets wouldn't be great against a deflector, big slugs are what you want.

>>29842577
>one of the more plausible fictional designs.
>manned space fighter
Low mass manned fast movers is not plausible design. Huge spaceships will be moving much more faster then light space fighters because more reaction mass, and larger engines. And any Top Gun-like maneuvering at space speed will get pilot killed by g-forces for sure.

>>29842795
all proposed lasers for space warfare are x-ray. you wouldn't be able to see the beam, vacuum or not.

>>29841727
Super effective !

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>>29842867

we discover new types of lasers all the time, I honestly never get that triggered by visible lasers in space compared to other stuff.

>dude space is just ww2 naval battle look at these space fighters

kill me

>>29841796
> He doesn't know black holes can bend light let alone a prism

Light can be bent by many a things

>>29842795
Might as well not have them at all then if they aren't gonna look like my gundam beams

>>29834909
heat sinks are the most vital part of a space vessel. if a laser could be used to pinpoint and destroy the enemy's cooling components the battle would be over in a very short period of time.

>>29842867
So the tin foil from my space burrito will fuck with them like in the microwave ?

>>29842924
Can't we just make a super thick layer of that material that's blacker than black?

>>29833704
OK, so let's kill the thread already. here's what a space battle would look like:

so the space-soviets of the Moon, and the US get into a war over...well, God knows what, but they've initiated a nuclear exchange between one another.

so both sides are chucking out hundreds of MIRV equipped rockets towards the other side.

however, each side has an array of nuke-pumped x-ray laser stations in orbit around their homebody, and maybe some kkv deployment satellites, etc.

well, both sides account for this, and ahead of their missile barrage, they send a flock of their own x-ray laser stations to decommission the enemy's lasers and kkv devices.

now we have "combat". whoever has the most and farthest reaching laser platforms will have a chance at engaging the enemy's installations with their nukes. planetary stations will be gunning for vanguard lasers, and vice versa.

when the smoke clears, one side may still have a few lasers/kkv stations remaining. lasers will engage the missiles themselves before payload delivery, and the kkvs will mop up any MIRVs that manage to deploy.

then it's back to what we know about conventional war: warheads either fall or they don't, and things proceed as normal.

replace nukes with landing craft or other ordinance as your heart desires...the in-space elements are about the same.

>>29841314
Assuming you have an society capable of space war, its possible just not in the way its shown in media, where the ship creates a plasma jet and then shoots it across thousands of miles of space. It would be significantly more efficient to use a delivery system that can bring the matter to be generated into plasma close to the enemy and then activate it. I imagine using an ICBM sized missile that delivers a casaba mortar style warhead as a realistic plasma torpedo. This is arguably possible by todays tech. Just not a necessary use of resources, as the ayys are leaving alone for the time being.

>>29842955
when you melt through something with a laser, the slag will form a vapour cloud around the "entry wound" and lower the amount of energy being dumped by the beam into the actual vessel you're targeting.

as you bore deeper and deeper into a vessel, more of this slag-mist will develop, further decreasing laser efficiency, until you eventually just reach a point where your laser is burning nothing but slag-mist and not your target

this is ablation in a nut shell, and its why we started looking into particle beams, because since they have mass (albeit very little), the beam doesn't have the same issue with laser ablation (particle beams have their own issues with dissipation, especially in an atmosphere)

>>29842975
what would that do?

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>>29842859
The light fighters would actually be moving faster anon, at least if they launch forward. Physics.

That said there would obviously have to be some sort of technological advance to allow a human pilot to fly one through what we would recognize as fighter-like maneuverability at extremely high speed. That would be nice, sure, but it's not essential. The problems limiting maneuverability at high speed would affect larger ships the same as smaller ones so it's not a relative disadvantage. If we're talking about a deep space encounter at high speed then no one has much maneuverability.

Also space combat doesn't have to mean deep space. How about defending a solar system? Launched from battle stations, able to maneuver relatively nimble around moons, through asteroids, etc.

>>29843030
Yeah, my cartoons play into flooding the battlefield with powdered magic to kill most laser combat. I like your explanation Though

>>29833704
Guided missiles at long range and lasers closer in, 3-dimensional maneuvering will require significant improvements in navigational computers.

>>29834909
They'll be effective at relatively short ranges, however at long ranges they will have travel time and will be unreliable in terms of accuracy.

>>29833704
It wouldn't be naval tactics, it would be evolved air tactics.

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Post dank spaceships

>>29833704
>transition naval tactics into 3D

What are submarines, Alex?

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>>29843864

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>>29843864

>>29843875
Ships that can only fire forward or up. They're also not designed for space travel

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>>29843864

If you can't at will dump antimatter on someone a star system over I don't want you to talk to me.

Early space battles would probably be quick. No massive broadsides, mass is too expensive to get to space, so its unarmored ships that can be destroyed with a rapidly moving rock.
Energy weapons will have to deal with heat dissipation.

>>29835457

what's disconcerting is that in the future it will be very easy for a single ship to destroy entire planets

i'm not sure how anyone is supposed to be able to defend against that

>>29843031
Apply for EBT and food stamps.

>>29843855
Maybe if airplanes handled anything like giant space ships with huge guns.

They don't, though.

>>29844159
Unless habitable planets with mineral deposits enabling spacefaring civilization turn out to be incredibly common (say 2/3 of all star systems) I don't think anyone would want to melt a planet in the first place.

>>29844118
>Energy weapons will have to deal with heat dissipation.

You forget that space is -240C.

>>29844183
>

>>29844159

>not just basing your entire civilization on mega structures with built in defences

bet you don't even have self replicating robots

>>29844183
Must be why the sun has such a hard time staying hot

>>29844211
I doubt that's ever going to happen.
>Tardo McSpacedick NDs a capital ship's railgun that fires at 0.9c
>20,000 years later (standard time frame of reference) it cracks a Dyson Sphere's perimeter like an egg on the other side of the galaxy, completely undetected due to relativistic speeds

>>29844183
No, I don't forget the temperature of space. The issue is the ability to dissipate heat into a vacuum. THere's no mass in space to absorb the heat output, so it needs to radiate out, which is slow.

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>>29844016
That show had some sick spaceship designs.

Seems to me like any attempt to armor or anticipate fire when it likely moves at or around light speed would be pretty useless.
I'd guess things would end up like LotGH where everything mirrors line infantry tactics.
Mass fire and pray to god you don't get hit.

>>29844221


In those 20,000 years you could have made a shit load of dyson spheres though, one cracking isnt to big of a deal.

>>29844235
Isn't that why the universe is gonna die from a heat death?

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>>29844236

Doesn't macross heavily feature actual literal magic.

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>>29844257
Le Arthur C. Clarke cliche quote on technology.

>>29844247
It is if they're inhabited.

>>29844248
No.

>>29844257
>LRASM with impact resistant hi-fi speaker warheaad
There's magic and there's MAGIC.

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>>29844313

>>29833704
It would essentially be the same as submarine combat.

>>29844248
based on your reply, I think the universe is more likely to die from retardation.
Heat death refers to the final entropy, when all order has been reduced to a small increase in temperature of the universe. Like the giants fighting thor.

alright in space there will be jsut two weapons that matter, lazerz and guided missiles

to start with lazerz, these will be effective probably out to a few light seconds max (if you dont know what this means you shouldnt be in this thread). current lazers have serious energy efficiency issues but by the time we're arming space ships that should be sorted. generally speaking with lazers to give it bigger boom you want a larger lens and lower frequency, on a space ship with limited weight and given the difficulty of producing ultra low frequency lazers this will be a serious decision in spacecraft design. lazers will essentially be responsible for waxing anything that comes close to your ship. the other isse with lazers is heat. if you have an open cycle lazer, which vents the hot gas used to create the lazer after firing heat wont be an issue but you will be unable to fire once you're out of gas. on the other hand a closed cycle lazer cna keep shooting all day but will make a tonne of heat which will need to be radiated through massive fragile radiators which make your ship a big hot target against the freezing background of space. except when ships get really close to one another lazers will probably mostly be used for shooting down missiles.

cont in next post

>>29844372
missiles is where stuff gets interesting. first anyone who thinks that dogfighting will happen in space, no, it wont. missiles will probably be firly big, with a good old chemical rocket at teh back. inside will be a computer most probably with near artificial intelligence capabilities. surrounding it will be an ECM suite that would make conventional radar cry, decoys, submunitions and chaff and probably a bunch of reflective or heat absorbing armor so it isnt too easy for lazers to melt.

at the heart of it wall will eb a big ol casaba howitzer, look that shit up and prepare to have your mind blown. to behonest anyhting less than nuclear weapons is pointless in space, conventional bombs need to get wayy to close to be effective, and even normal nuclear weapons have very reduced kill raduis in space. kinetic kill is an option but requires ridiculous precision and would almost certianly get destroyed by point defense. one other option is a single use bomb or nuke pumped lazer on the end of the missile, though a casaba howitzer can do everything it can do in a simpler and better way, though would probably weigh more, which would be the only reason to choose a lazer over a howitzer.

these missliles will have some serious maneuvering capability to avoid point defense and will probably come in two types; big, fast super powerful missiles with high kill probability and smaller swarm missiles that overwhelm defenses with numbers.

cont in next post

>>29844399
finally space ships themselves will probably be very boring, an orion or fusion drive with a tonne of radiators and some lazers and missiles attached to a very small crew pod. until we can violate the laws of thermodynamics there will be no stealth and ships will be fairly easy to detect from huge distances with space based telescopes.

of course i have not been to teh future and know none of this for certain. these are just the conclusions i have drawn based no what i have read, if anyone disagrees or has something to add i would be very interested to hear.

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>>29844236
And it had space fights that were more than just lasers and missiles.

>>29842649
>1. Sensors. What would we be talking about here?
everything would be infa red, the background heat in space is a big fat 3 kelvin and let me tell you if you can move any meaningul amount of mass though space while maintaining anything near that temperature you're basically god, every ship in space will be visible for at least a few light seconds

1.5 Recon
pretty much just leave some small telescopes in random orbits around the place and when they detect new objects they'll relay the info to the fleet, meaning you'll be able to easily detect anyhtign in the solar system

2. Projectiles
missiles, torpedoes, autonomous kill vehicles whateveres you want to call them, railguns are useless until you can fire projectiles at relativistiv speeds at which point warfare itself will cease because of mutually assured destruction

2.5 Payloads
casab howitzers in most cases, though if you're missile is really fast a huge load of inert titanium ball bearings will be just fine, also bomb pumped lazers if you raelly want to save on mass

>>29844268
>>29844236


We put such a savage cultural buttfucking on Japan that they idolize our military technology even though we used it to totally flatten them.

How would we stop guns from overheating in space?
Kinda like a water-cooled machine gun, but with a super chilled liquid/gas in place of water?

>>29844482
Twice, even. American technology was used to slaughter the samurai during the Meiji period.

>>29844468
That first battle on the Odette was awesome. More shows should branch out from the typical beamspam/itano circus style of space combat.

>>29844486
by not using guns, ammunition weighs a lot at and you dont have a lot of mass to play with inspace, it will all be lazers cooled with massive passive radiators basically just big flat things sticking out of spaceships. on teh really big ships they'll probably carry a lot of liquid hydrogen to pour on anything that gets too hot

>>29844476

Not just infrared. But also diodes that receive light rather than emit it. And mass sensors, which already exist and would be extremely effective in micro gravity.

>>29844522

If we're talking chemical lasers, venting the gas used will be the easiest way to control heat from the weapons systems themselves, and the smartest.

Does /k/ not have realistic space warfare threads very often? It's been a /tg/ meme for years.

>>29844489
Well in the case of that battle, it was a decommissioned pirate ship turned space all-girls high school yacht and thus had no weapons vs. a small merchant vessel that moonlighted as pirates and had a gun.

Still awesome how they pulled it off though.

>>29844553
ah, but then you have a limited amount of shots which could leave you in a pretty sticky situation, though the radiators for non venting lazers would make you a big fragile target

>>29844594
Because we use Chinese cartoons and Vidya games as references

>>29834909
They will be usefull for one simple reason, they're the only thing that can.

>Go at the speed of light.
>Destroy enemy missiles.

With these two simple points lasers are just the way to go in space, but they have a shit load of problems.

>Efficiency.
>Heat
>Energy.

Your effiency determines how much heat you generate and the ammount of fuel you will have to waste to power your laser, and once the laser impacts it might need some seconds to completly destroy the target which in space is actually quite hard.

So, the real space weapon will be missiles, they will be always deadly, they can be launched beyond relativistic distances, and the only limit is how many you can carry.

>>29835155
What if that is the idea?

I strap like 5 o 6 engines to the thingie and accelerate from the outer part of the solar system to my target.

By the time it comes it will be a massive pain train too fast and too armored to be stopped and its impact might actually create another planet or affect its rotation fucking with the ecosystem.

>>29842286
I would die from a fucking big and eternal erection if a broadside space battle happened and we had HD camera footage of it

>>29835711

>A nuke is not gonna be super effective in space

Yes it would, a nuke its not only the shockwave its also the heat and the radiation and you have a shitload of X-rays going to everywhere without any atmosfere.

Anything under 1 km would be affected since radiation will also transfer destructive waves of energy.

>>29840357
>So space subs are just going to be ships that can temporarily trap their heat/exhaust

Yes you can, but trapping heat is something you can do for maybe a few hours and it would be an exponential effort(you need energy to also refrigerate the outer surface its not only about redirecting heat) and your space trip would need days or months.

Thats also why you just can't make a first burn and get close silently, the first burn can be detected and by the time you come your mission would be pointless since it took a year to come.

>>29844859
>shockwave
No shockwave in space.

>>29838122

I only saw small clips from swg but.

>Space combat on visual contact(AKA under 50 km which is completly bulshit)
>Railgunthingies(proyectiles would be easy as fuck to evade, throwing matter doesn't make sense in space combat unless it can correct its course like missiles)
>No radiators limiting what you can or you can't do.

My autism is just too much triggered by that bullshit.

>>29838122
>>29844897
Yuri Space Pirates was more accurate.

>>29840321

The only way to actually hide in space is anything out of the physics spectre.

Space is too huge and cold, any decoy will need an engine and fuel which are just the main and most expensive components of the ship.

No you can't hide your exhaust plume space is too huge and someone somewhere will see what are you doing.
No you can't use additional trusters to look more menacing, the exhaust of the main engine is too fucking huge to notice.
No you can't use mirrors, they're cold as fuck while you're not and the optical spectre is useless in space.
No you can't hide your ship between other ships, space is too big and so is the separation between ships.

You can lie to the enemy goverment, you might tell them that those guns on the ship are just weather ballons, you might falsify theiir space traffic data by assaulting their systems or corrupting their officials.

But you fucking can't hide anything in space under physicial measures, is just useless.

>>29844882

Yes, I wrote that wrong.

a nuke in space is just a radiation weapon and that radiation is not stopped by any atmosphere wich makes much more deadly.

no simple lead shield can stop it.

>>29844923
>No you can't hide your exhaust plume space is too huge and someone somewhere will see what are you doing.

Don't have to cover all of it, just enough that you reduce your emissions

>No you can't use additional trusters to look more menacing, the exhaust of the main engine is too fucking huge to notice.

It's a matter of degrees, really. The real benefit is reducing acceleration which means you look heavier than you actually are.

>No you can't use mirrors, they're cold as fuck while you're not and the optical spectre is useless in space.

It's a mirror. It reflects stuff. Angle it right and you'll reflect your exhaust.

>No you can't hide your ship between other ships, space is too big and so is the separation between ships.

I'm talking about disguising a battleship to look like a freighter and then hiding it in a fleet of freighters.

>>29833704
Everything boils down to sensor resolution.
Assume you and your opponent are in sperical ships 100m across, fighting at a range of 1 lightsecond. If you have a sensor resolution of 0.1 arcseconds, you have about a 47% chance of hitting with each shot. If he has a resolution of 0.08 arcseconds, he has about a 74% chance of hitting you.
Of course, more accurate sensors are more susceptible to noise, so I'd expect a massive amount of electronic warfare to reduce the enemy's accuracy by a few percent before the ships get within weapons range.

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>>29834909

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>no one posted best space opera yet

>>29845305
those explode too easy. Hand to hand combat is better

>>29833704
It would be math. Lots and lots of math while missiles flying super fast fly at distant targets that the human eye cannot see except on a computer screen. Defense against missiles will be something like a CIWS. boarding actions will either require a focus on melee weapons or some kind of gun will be designed that doesn't have any recoil. Because zero gravity and recoil would be a hilarious combination.

Read S.A. Corey's "the expanse", and glen cook's "starfishers" and/or "passage at arms". It's all pretty good stuff, but spoiler alert; passage at arms will cause feels you might not want.

>>29845354
how you gonna board another ship except through some built in emergency hatch designed for easy boarding of rescue crews?

>>29835487
anon... this is a blue board

>>29845342
>each ship has upwards of 10k men
>each individual battle resulted in millions of casualties on each side

The casualty numbers in lotgh were fucking rediculous. Made the eastern front look like a picnic

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>>29845305
>200+ posts to get LOGH mentioned
Faggots, the lot of you.

>>29845367
Use arc cutters to burn through the hull?

>>29835131
STEEL REHN

>>29845367
Through the air locks, a breach in the hull, whatever. if we're spending enough time in space to start fighting wars there, do you seriously think nobody will invest in portable emergency air locks or be interested in boarding other ships?

The technology already exists, btw. Developed for rescuing submarine crews.

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>>29845576
Actually the ship crews rarely exceeded 2000, with only the flagships having more than 1000.

>>29833704
Well let's see. Space warships would have to have:

Internally-cooled hulls.
Reactive plating.
Active camouflage (thermal and visual).
Small crews to limit cost, resource use, potential casualties, and need for qualified candidates.
Far more advanced thrust systems than what currently exists.
Power generation (nuclear/antimatter, and solar [power generation from solar decreases in efficiency the further you are from the sun])
And weapon systems, which would likely be a combination of missiles, lasers, and kinetic batteries

Add all that together, what do you get?

Ships that are small with 20 or fewer crew members, equipped to travel autonomously for weeks or months at a time. They'd be double-hulled, cramped, crowded, and likely rounded and curved (egg-shaped) so they can be spun to simulate gravity when not in combat. When in combat, the environment would be zero-g, and the ship would be depressurized to limit risk of fire. 90% of "combat" would a game of detect-the-enemy at extreme distances. Warheads and railgun rounds would then be fired (which may or may not explode at a certain distance, leaving a fast-traveling cloud of micro-diamond flak) at where the other ship MIGHT be, minutes, hours, or even weeks later. Orbital mechanics would determine how the battle would progress. Not targeting solutions. Lasers would also only be useful as point-defense weapons. Battles would also get increasingly lethal the closer the combatants are. At distance, it will be easy to avoid enemy fire by simply conducting retro burns or engine thrusts at random intervals, due to the delay (speed of light). In short, it would be a guessing game for both parties.

The biggest issue is actually debris. Flak and fragmented ships would leave the approach to most planets impassible in very short order. You could "blockade" a planet just by filling its skies with hull-piercing shards. You could likewise shred every enemy ship in its orbit in the same manner.

>>29845986
Might be the most plausible part of 40k.

What really sucks about thinking about real space combat is that if someone is looking for efficiency, ship design is very boring.

Simple shapes like squares, rectangles and spheres are ideal as thruster and armor placement are made simple

>>29846117
If you chop the bridge off the Star Destroyer is actually a good design.

>>29835155
Except fuckhuge is the way to go.
The larger a ship is, the more mass it can afford to devote to engines and fuel, which increases its potential delta v.

>>29846151
Fuckhueg also means that fuel is consumed in larger quantities when accelerating at a certain rate.

>>29842292
It's fucking amazing.

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The Sidonia have some great ideas as a colony ship. It has ice for the outer armor. You may think this is dumb, but this is actually ingenious for a colony ship. The armor serves as extra water storage, doesn't cost any metal to repair from micro meteorite or space debris impact, and is a natural coolant and heat sink. You can also build the ice armor as thick as you want as long as you have water.

>>29842577
>>29841057
Casaba howitzer styled warhead and bomb pumped lasers work off the idea of an (obviously) expendable lensing apparatus on the weapon that focuses a fair amount of the energy on release into a single "beam" of energy. In the case of Casaba warheads, it focuses a blast of plasma that's formed from material the warhead carries with it. The pumped lasers work by using the heat and radiation to generate a massive amount of photons that are focused through the lensing apparatus before it's consumed.

>>29844159
X-Wings.

>>29846117
This. A whole lot of curved shapes and cylinders. A sphere is probably the single most efficient shape for a space "drone", but the problem is that a sphere is somewhat irregular in terms of volume and storage capacity, making it not that ideal if you're a human and you need to put food, oxygen tanks, and weapons somewhere. For human-crewed ships, cylindrical hulls are the way to go. You can store things, you have maximum firepower in your forward firing arc, and simply spinning it would make laser weapons moot.

>>29846151
That's not how space operates m8
A Warhammer 40k ship would take months of burning just to break orbit in real life. Eventually ships get so big that it will require more fuel than can be stored on a vessel to actually propel it at any appreciable speed. It's the old question "Why can't a rocket go the speed of light?" Answer: Because the fuel requirement would exceed the mass of the universe.

Small is invariably more preferable in space. A ship the size of a school bus manned by a single person could still feasibly nuke dozens of cities and destroy whole space colonies. That's the uncomfortable reality of actual space combat. It doesn't take much to be incredibly lethal in the real, non-science fiction, universe.

WH40K uses whole fleets for 'Exterminatus' for example.
In the real world, a tungsten warhead the size of a telephone pole traveling at relativistic speeds would be enough to destroy most of Earth.

>>29846215
Ice also makes decent radiation shielding. Every 8cm or so cuts the radiation levels in half. Well...for neutrons anyway.

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I know people love the railguns and I've been thinking about them quite a bit. I think they would have a place - just not as y'all currently imagine it.

They wouldn't be throwing slugs. They'd actually be used as launchers for missiles or 'torpedoes' if you prefer. Let's think about this.

Assume your warship is approaching the enemy at 20% of light speed = roughly 37k miles per hour. The best railgun we have right now gets about 8k feet per second muzzle velocity, let's assume we can do quite a bit better and make it 20kfps instead, convert that to miles per hour, that's about 13,500 mph. So that increases the actual launch velocity of your missiles to almost 51k mph, well over 30% of light speed - and then they start their burn.

These torpedoes or missiles could actually be very simple and still be effective. Sure, nuclear warheads and smart proximity fuses would be idea, but even if this is nothing but a rocket and a guidance system, it would be moving so fast that a hit would probably be more destructive than a nuke anyway.

>>29845883
>dat multikill

Fucking ace alliance gunnery right there. You know they were fucking high fiving after that one

>>29846457
I thought the show made it explicitly clear that because of EW jamming, ships just fired blindly.

>>29834697
>Ships will be massive fortresses with 180 degree bearing guns on every fucking side.
I really doubt that, it is better to have smaller ships with weapons pointed in 1 direction and just use maneuver and formations to support each other, this gives more flexibility and fipower when you need it, it is very hard to sneak up on someone's flank in space so there will always be time to change formation as necessary.

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>>29846470
It was my understanding that they had some kind of targeting in the show, just that the jamming was generally enough to fuck with targeting and long-range communications to the point that you couldn't have battles until they were within about a light-second of eachother.

>>29833704
>Be in same star system as enemies
>Launch volley of nukes
>They do the same
>Several months later you both all die.

Space war is boring.

>>29846419
>These torpedoes or missiles could actually be very simple and still be effective. Sure, nuclear warheads and smart proximity fuses would be idea, but even if this is nothing but a rocket and a guidance system, it would be moving so fast that a hit would probably be more destructive than a nuke anyway.

Spaceships are fragile. Those nukes and proximity fuses aren't there to make shit hit hard enough, they're there to make you hit at all in the first place.

>proaching the enemy at 20% of light speed = roughly 37k miles per hour

Try 134100k mph. That'll be sufficient kinetic energy. Hell, it won't take much of a projectile for 37000mph to be quite enough either. 56000fps, about ten times the muzzle velocity of a 120mm APFSDS round, and with that a hundred times the kinetic energy per mass.

>20% of light speed
>well over 30% of light speed

So that railgun just managed a muzzle velocity of over 0.1c, and our current railguns would max out at slightly over a third of that. You never thought to ask yourself if that seemed plausible?

>it would be moving so fast that a hit would probably be more destructive than a nuke anyway.

Now you're starting to hit the right ballpark at least. At 0.3c, ignoring relativistic effects (so undershooting a bit) you get a kinetic energy per kilogram of mass of just over 10 megatons.

>>29846645
Only if you make it boring.

And forget to make anti-ICBM sats.

>>29833715
>by and large it'll give you the right idea.
lolno, you don't. The notion of gigantic armored space-dreadnoughts is simply absurd, yet they're desperately finding any justification they can to try and argue that it's a realistic take on space warfare.

>>29846286
Lol wot.

40k spaceships are built in orbital shipyards and have magical plasma handwavy fuel rather then rocket fuel like you are mentioning, so who knows how efficent they all are.

>>29846674
>Spaceships are fragile. Those nukes and proximity fuses aren't there to make shit hit hard enough, they're there to make you hit at all in the first place.

And in space, with no atmosphere to transmit a shock wave, that tactic will be less effective. Not unusable, but less effective.

>Try 134100k mph.
>So that railgun just managed a muzzle velocity of over 0.1c

Yeah that didn't sound right but I did the math quick on my calculator and must have been distracted. I see my error now. I mixed miles per second and miles per hour. HUGE difference lol. Thanks for catching it.

>At 0.3c, ignoring relativistic effects (so undershooting a bit) you get a kinetic energy per kilogram of mass of just over 10 megatons.

Right, and at the point against any target we can really imagine now at least your only worry is making impact, cause if that thing hits it's going to mess things up bad. A marble hitting at that speed will mess things up bad.

To increase the chance of hitting you can use a proximity fuse something like an A2A missile today would use, but you want a different sort of warhead. You don't need much of an explosive, maybe not any, something more like a fletchet shotshell would probably be ideal. A big cloud of fletchets at .3c would be hard to dodge and still deadly to, well, anything we can really imagine at this point, no?

>>29842072
The point is, systems would be in place to ensure this doesnt happen. Risking infinitely expensive ships in direct combat would be a hilarious mistake for both sides. Why ever risk this when superior detection capabilites and engagement range would prevent anything with less of either from even thinking about moving into your territory?

I know flashy scifi movies are fun to watch but unless a fleet of spacefaring warships and thousands of lives is cheap and easy to produce in this fantasy future, its not realistic.

Im talking from a purely "big military nation vs Big military nation in a military scenario" with massive motherships and destroyers.

Ofcourse the scifi stuff would still happen on small scale with small ships. Space piracy and straight up murder would be a constant threat if small craft were easily available. Boarding sabotaging or destroying a major military ship in one? Lolno

>>29835441

If your only requirement is "put a man-made thing in space", then Nazi Germany was the first nation to reach space with the V-2 test launch of June 20th 1944.

>>29842308
>>29842321
they are fighting in a gravity well.

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>>29846930
Yeah that doesn't explain it at all.
Conservation of angular momentum doesn't just quit working because the ship is breaking apart.

It's just a typical crappy hollywood movie, they can't get the physics right in a stone age setting let alone in space.

>>29833704
No, because naval tactics are about as applicable to space as they are to air combat.

>>29841314
Please never post again, ignoramus.

if I could throw my two cents in I assume we'll have a brief age of "dreadnought" type ships as we experiment with what works best. Probably seeing a bunch of silly shit like, cannons all fucking over to compensate for the change to 3D.

>>29834129
>Forever War

This is the correct answer.

Am I wrong in assuming that lasers would be the only weapon in use in space warfare?

They travel at the speed of light. By the time you can physically notice one being fired, it's reached you.

I'm picturing space warfare being literally nothing but lasers, and sensor arrays/computers designed to nail the other guy with lasers before he gets you

>>29846714
Have you ever been on projectrho? You sound like you never used the site. It is very realistic and even keeled. They specifically mention that armor is pointless in space

>>29847034
I always figured the damaged scrambled the nav systems and the entire thing turned semi-randomly.

Sure makes more sense than a space ship sinking.

Space warfare is going to consist of giant platforms with tons of missiles sniping other giant platforms with tons of missiles

>>29842399

>can anyone do basic science because i sure cant

no friend, no one can help you

>>29847264
Laser will probably be important but they are still relatively short range. Even in a vacuum, they disperse as they go downrange, lose focus, become spotlights.

High speed guided missiles (some like to call them torpedoes) are likely to be used from well beyond laser range.

>>29842649
The trouble with infrared telescopes is that they have to be kept very cold. Blinding the sensor takes much less energy than damaging the ship.

>>29842399
about a 1.45 cm spread @ 5000km

pretty accurate senpai

>>29833704
I'm not sure OP, but I hope to god Yang's leading the United States in our glorious wars for democracy if such a space war ever occurs.

>>29847264
Lasers are absolutely wimpy as weapons. Most can barely make 10% efficiency and max out at a hundred kilowatts before they threaten to melt down. There's an experimental one they're using for fusion experiments but that's about the size of an apartment complex even if it makes it into the megawatt range. There's also all sorts of issues with the reflectivity of the armor, the armor's angle, and how much debris are floating around.

Current gen railguns and particle beams run at 50+ percent efficiency and kinetics are notable for delivering all their energy in one single impact. The drawback, of course, is that you need to get close. No more than a thousand kilometers.

There are also missiles. Now, you can shoot down missiles but every one you destroy throws up chaff for the next batch. Granted, this trick will require a fuckton of missiles but missiles don't need power or generate significant heat for the launcher.

>>29847403
Just giving you a sense of scale, 1 MOA is considered the benchmark for accurate rifles.

If I were in a fight with another spacecraft, I would want missiles with nukes, bomb-pumped lasers, or a warhead that basically just disperses a large debris field in front of the enemy. Two are area weapons, and one is a directed energy weapon that can fire from within an effective range without placing the ship as a whole at risk.

Assuming that the enemy is aware there's a fight going on, they will likely be taking evasive maneuvers by randomly thrusting laterally along their course to diverge in a way that you can't accurately anticipate except at close range (assuming said thrusters isn't woefully anemic). An area weapon is most likely the only thing that will have a significant hit probability. The bomb-pumped laser might be a good compromise, being able to deliver a laser within a range where focus and evasion won't be issues.

Drones will rule space warfare, they are going to be the smallest size possible that still permits operation within a signicant range, armed with missiles, lasers and sensors, there is no sense in putting atronomically expensive (pun intended) capital spaceships, assuming these are even going to be a thing, in harms way.

>>29847956
Drones run into their own issue with AIs not handling ambiguity well and communications being jammable.

Smaller ships mean less range. It's not just a matter of fuel but also one of ammunition, power, and maintenance. You'd probably need a carrier.

Granted, larger ships and human crews have their own issues but I doubt drones will dominate unequivocally.

Combat in space would be much closer to aerial combat, even if the military traditions remained closer to Navy.

And even then, space combat would be different from aerial combat in that the rules of gravity are different (you can still get caught in the pull of large enough objects). You also have to deal with a complete lack of air, and dramatically different light sources.

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>>29847956
IF we have to stick to current tech and fairly direct extrapolations from it as I have been doing and most posters seem to have at least tried to do, then 'drones' or guided missiles or something else which has no human pilot inside of it will be the only thing able to really maneuver very well, because of inertia.

In that case I expect a large missile ship, probably using rail guns to launch the missiles, would be the pinnacle design.

But as soon as you posit an inertial dampener of some sort that can offset that, smaller independent ships become much more practical, even in deep space.

>>29848329

Meh. I'd opt for autonomous androids designed to withstand the vaccuum of space and wearing rocket boosters.

Get my ship close enough, and launch them all at my opponent's ships. The strong bastards rip holes in the enemy's ships and climb on in.

>>29845576
True but based on the time line of how humanity expanded in the series. you're talking about nation states spanning countless worlds, each having populations in the billions.

>>29834647
Fuck you ender you're autistic and Bean is smarter than you

>>29848504
You run the risk of smashing the droids against the enemy hulls. At enough velocity it doesn't matter how thin the enemy hull is, you're pulverizing anything you throw at it.

There's also the question of point defense and why you aren't just firing missiles but as a way of capturing an enemy ship it's not bad.

>>29846708
>space war
>ICBM
>C
You just went full retard.

>>29849689
Both go through space so anti-ICBM defenses will work on IPBM missiles.

Unless you've got a reason they shouldn't.

>>29847274
>Have you ever been on projectrho?
About as much as I could stand, yeah.
>You sound like you never used the site. It is very realistic and even keeled.
I could see how a normie might think that. I could also see how a normie might think that, much in the same way one might think Carlo Kopp or Pierre Sprey might be as well. They've got a serious agenda, though - dead set on proving their silly fantasy is actually the future of space warfare.
>They specifically mention that armor is pointless in space
Bullshit. They mention armor all the time and nowhere have I seen them say it's pointless.

>>29849727
I highlighted C only to see if you can think for yourself. Apparently you can't.

Here's the next hint.
>ICBM
>B

>>29849853
Now you're just wasting time.

>>29847433
>particle beams

I didn't think of this, but throwing neutrons and shit at people seems like an excellent idea as long as you can pack a particle accelerator.

Those things are big though.

>>29834945
range limitation is more of a concern in athmosphere not in space. and due to the insane distances kinetic weaponry that cannot adjust course is extremly likely to miss. meaning rockets or lasers.

>>29835600
now you have a monopoly on communication and navigation sattelites not to mention potential asteroid mining operations.

>>29835600
It's really more if you're fighting people on another planet.

>>29835600
No, now you intercept their ICBMs right as they launch. You can go ahead and nuke them and they can't nuke you back.

>>29841082
its not the speed thats really limiting the range. over long distances course adjustments are neccessary for a projectile. a rocket can do that even if its potentially slower but a simple piece of metal cant. there is also nothing that really prevents shooting rockets with railguns.

>>29850032
What else could one be doing on a mongolian visual arts forum?

>>29841405
railguns dont neccessarily create a lot of waste heat. though its is true for lasers and plasma. but then again you dont really have to fire constantly.

>>29844930
>>29844882
>>29844859
Nukes also produce quite a bit of heat as well.

>>29850350
The only way heat transfers in space is radiation.

>>29850443
Nukes are going to produce a lot of that too,

But seriously, a nuclear detonation is a BIG event and produces a lot of energy. Like, a couple hundred or couple thousand terajoules worth of energy. Now, just because it's not superheating the atmosphere to create a cataclysmic firestorm of DOOOOOOM doesn't mean that energy disappears. Most of it is going to turn into various forms of radiation, everything from infrared to alpha particles to possibly higgs bosons. That energy is going to hit nearby spacecraft and superheat their hulls and give their crews cancer. The outer hulls are going to sublimate explosively causing even more damage so the damage is going to be pretty severe.

Still, the power of the explosion is subject to the inverse square law so the farther you are from it the less damage it's going to do.

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>>29850065
With current tech they are HUGE, draw massive amounts of power, and only destroy a few particles when activated.

Posit they are miniaturized enough to make viable weapons.

Likely that the same advances would lead to some serious miniaturization of lasers too.

So how would they compare? Laser=light speed. Particle beam=slightly slower. Laser=relatively short range because of geometric attenuation. Particle beam = even shorter range, subject to attenuation like a laser but subject to an additional scattering pressure as well.

Both take a lot of power, generate a ton of heat. Particle beam should have an advantage in penetration for reasons another anon posted previously.

It's hard for me to imagine them actually getting good enough to displace lasers unless there was a situation where a lot of work had already gone into armor and other anti-laser countermeasures first. Maybe I missed something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLz7VxdZzGY

One of my favorite levels in a video game. If you held RB while flying the Saber it unlocked you from an up/down spatial orientation, made it so damn fun.

As far as what real space battle will look like, I imagine it will be more Air Force than Navy, if only because the Air Force's mission includes Space as well as Air and Cyberspace. Because of that, the strategists in charge will prefer fighter jet-style dogfighting combat to the Navy's combination of planes and missile ships. The missile ships might follow just because G-limits are much more restrictive in microgravity and without air resistance, missiles may be pulling upwards of 100G maneuvers while the ships will obviously be limited to <10G. I think it will largely depend on what the objectives will be in space, if we're fighting over a single resource-rich asteroid, it's not going to involve "ground" troops just because they'd likely be highly ineffective with less than 1 m/s^2 of gravitational acceleration when compared to a machine optimized for operating in microgravity, which would be similar to a fighter jet. Something like a Navy ship would, however, be the obvious choice for long range interplanetary operations, which require more resources for a longer time, you can't shove a complement of 1000 Marines into a fighter, but a carrier with escorts would do the trick nicely.

Weapons will be missiles and lasers, just like the next ten years will show us. Honestly there's not really anything in physics that can be to a laser what it is to a bullet. It will NOT be like battleships, however, simple inertia tells us that. Projectile weapons will be forward mounted so that they can be counteracted by thrust. Radiation missiles will be much more effective in space because there's no atmosphere to mask the heat emissions so they'll have a much much much longer effective range.

>>29845242
Also this.

eve online. not hard.