How would a realistic space battle look like? Would it

>>52724035
A realistic setting almost certianly has no FTL and therefore the odds of a space battle happening to begin with are almost nil.

>>52724065
ha ha ha ha ha ha

>>52724035
Most would probably take place in orbit.

It's easy to assume "realistic" space battles would work kind of like submarine warfare with ships millions of kilometers away from each other firing torpedos. A missile swinging wide of your ship by ten thousand km is an insanely close call.

Thing is this is a grossly inefficient way of waging a war. A missile or torpedo going that far a distance is going to be massively expensive, and it's almost a guaranteed miss anyway because at four million kilometers away that target has plenty of time to react.

Actual space battles would probably happen in orbit with ships and stations firing mass driver slugs and guided missiles at each other. Now it's only a few hundred kilometers instead of a few million. This also makes low orbit a strategically critical area because if you secure it you now have a staging ground for sending down troops, supplies, or just outright killing the planet if you feel like it.

>>52724035
Very long range weapons (modern dogfights happen at a range of miles so for ships hundreds, maybe thousands of miles?)

no sound, explosions, etc.

I would think of it as similar to submarine battles. You don't really know exactly what the other sub is doing, your torpedoes take 10 minutes or more to reach their target, and you don't know what damage they did on impact unless they are obviously disabled or attempt to flee.

probably pretty boring.

>>52724035
Distances would probably be extreme enough that it wouldn't even look like anything. You'd be looking at blips in your holofeed and running algorithms to fire at where the enemy might be in a split second after the shot fires.

>>52724035
the actual distance between enemy ships would probably be several kilometres.

>>52724035
Fundamentally, we don't know. As a species we've hardly moved past our planet's atmosphere, nor have we detected any evidence of other species moving about (in any recognisable way).

For us to try and predict what form a future space-conflict would take, is like a Pacific-islander tribe who only have canoes trying to invent from scratch the details of the Battle of Jutland, or the u-boat conflicts of WW2. Or modern carrier-group logistics. We simply have no hope of being accurate.

What we CAN do, is say "what would things look like, presuming X is true?" where X is a quantity you have no real evidence for one way or the other. Such as FTL travel being either possible or impossible. Or a new form of easy fusion power being developed. This type of theorising is commonly known as "science fiction".

>>52724035
> Railguns and particle beams engage as directed by computers as soon as they detect the enemy ships on radar.
> Enemy ships are preceded into orbit by a cloud of relativistic munitions and coherent light beams.
> Common, easily calculated orbits are full of debris and covered by weapon platforms, invaders have to enter into oblique orbits and adjust carefully
> Turning on the drive at all attracts beam spam to your vector

The problem with space is the distance and there is no where to hide. You can't hide because the other ship can simply see your heat signature. In order to hide you would need heat sinks that you then cast off from the ship itself.

Now assuming you can hide and you spot another ship. Chances are they are thousands of kilometers away so firing missiles is useless as they will have time to intercept them.ass drivers seem to be the answer but even with them if the target makes a minor adjustment the shot will miss.

It's like throwing a dart at moving dartboard from across an oval.

There would also be no manned fighter craft but just drones. Drones could take the sudden change in direction whereas a human would die. Even in space there is inertia.

That is a problem these days as well for fighter pilots. It's pretty damn hard pulling a 9 G turn.

So chances are battles will be fought at massive distances with either drones or mass drivers and missiles. Who ever can surprise attack or has more supplies wins.

>>52724035
Downbellow station has a pretty neat 'realistic' space battle. its all based on predicted vectors and mass drivers/railguns over long distances,

>>52724035
While the range of a space-based weapon can be enormous, accurate targeting is much harder. You're likely to get a distance of a few hundred to few thousand kilometers, not fighting from opposite sides of a solar system.

There is no such thing as stealth, at least for a ship. Engines are too bright, you can't accelerate without giving yourself away. And if you do one burn and then drift, your opponents can calculate where you are from your last known position and velocity.

Only missiles, with their bright engines, can be seen coming. Any other weapon is effectively invisible in space, at least to the naked eye. Sensors could spot them, and indeed you want that to be able to evade or shoot down incoming attacks. Looking out the window would make space combat look absolutely boring, which is good because windows are a structural weakness so you don't want them anyway.

>>52724035
https://childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/

>>52724035
Yeah, that would likely be boring for your average player.
Until their ship got hit. Things'd change pretty fast then.

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>>52724035
Oh look it's this thread again

Time to get the popcorn, /tg/'s about to go full retard

>>52724316
>several kilometers
>a lot
what

>>52724426
>In order to hide you would need heat sinks that you then cast off from the ship itself.
They'd have to be hella good heat sinks to keep your heat below 3 Kelvin and even then the enemy ship will detect all the heat sinks you're throwing off into the void, so again you can't hide

>>52724528
I think the point he's making is the sheer vastness of space means warfare is only efficient at close distances.

>>52724453
Oh shit, it finally came out. I saw this on Ad Astra and Project Rho.

>>52724035
in mid-space there would be no up or down of course. you always see pictures with all the spaceships facing the same way 'up'. In reality, spaceships would probably not even have an upside, which would make battlescenes more complex and confusing to describe and to deal with. There is no point of orientation in the void of intergalactic space. It is pretty interesting to think about.

Also, since you don't have to make ships have an upside or be aerodynamic you can go as crazy as you want with the shape of your ship.

Also no sound, which adds to the disorientation maybe.

Also the massive distances are a thing. Probably the only things fast enough to hit in a reasonably short time would be laserbeams.

Or, if we go really crazy, ships tearing each other apart using some sort of grav-beams.

These battles will probably take very long though as because of the distance the interaction speed is low.

>>52724035
Humans are pissing about with tiny "realistic" tin-cans of a spacefleet, trying to expand and resource grab, different factions shitting all over each other. Then a massive alien cruiser turns up, the kind of thing that can only be manufactured when you have factories the size of from entire moons, and just wrecks everything.

Remember kids, in war frugality and efficiency is a sign of poverty. An AK-47 is very frugal, but an A10 will wreck your shit.

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>>52724035
As mentioned upthread, Children of a Dead Earth is probably what nearish-future space combat will be like.
Everything that isn't a missile barrage is at knife-fight (though still beyond visual) ranges.

Magnetic weapons tend to be spray and pray, with high damage counteracted by low-accuracy due to lag(?)

Due to diffraction, lasers are only useful for pinpoint component disabling.
Though apparently CoaDE's lasers are underpowered, idk.

In terms of RPGs, space battles in general tend to be a bit dull for players, unless you go full Star Trek and have the players as departmental officers commanding a large vessel. See Stars Without Number's Skyward Steel supplement, which is pretty neat.

For a small Free Trader Beowulf, there aren't a lot of roles beyond Pilot, a Gunner per turret, and maybe an engineer to watch the drive and do any repairs. I guess a sensor operator as well, but that's essentially just painting targets for the gunners.

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>>52724035
The Expanse is a good example of what a "realistic" space battle might be like.

>>52725123
That looks like a modern naval battle just with everything blue and sci-fi

>>52724588
That is precisely the opposite lesson you should learn from that example.

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>>52725123
I prefer bodacious space pirates.

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>>52725200
I love Mouretsu Pirates's magic ECM because it makes space battles fun again.

>>52725143
???

Ships launching drones that move very quickly and toss torpedos armed with nuclear penetrator warheads against ships that are doing the same. Also point-defense systems to prevent that.

>>52724035
I imagine you'd have slower kinetic weapons can be shot down or dodged (but pretty much 1HKO they manage to hit), and radiation beams that are pretty much undodgeable, but deal slower damage by gradually burning away at the surface of the enemy ship.

Incredibly expensive to the point where no one wants to fight. Probably start off with some rogue private frigates and boarding parties. Slowly working it's way up to longer and linger engagements. Pick a spot in between the boarding parties and the 4 planets worth of space between ships for maximum fun.

>>52724249
>and it's almost a guaranteed miss anyway because at four million kilometers away that target has plenty of time to react.

Because as we all know missiles and torpedoes are unable to alter their course after launch.

>>52724426
Even if your heat sinks do the job, the moment you turn on your engine you have a huge flare shooting out of your ass telling everyone your position, velocity, and acceleration.

Then you shut it down and Newton's second kicks in, so even if no one can see you it'd be trivial to calculate where you are at any given time based on your last known position and velocity.

>>52725644
>Because as we all know missiles and torpedoes are unable to alter their course after launch.

And the objects they're chasing can do so as well, especially when we're talking about the distances you find in space.

If these ships are hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, then it could easily take days for those missiles to reach their target.

There will likely never be space battles in the way anyone in this thread is picturing them.

Even the ones involving missiles and things at extreme long ranges probably wont happen, because technological development by that point will render that sort of thing extremely primitive.

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>mfw you guys dont know what a relativistic projectile is
>mfw they can literarily see the universe as near flat and see your ship that is 10 lightyears away as if it was only a meter away and therefore can strike with pinpoint accuracy even with slowed time using quantum mechanical computers to make decisions in planck time
>mfw this is is the best possible scenario

There will never be anything other than that with the only "combat" being hiding yourself well enough to avoid solar system size shotgun-blasts coming from random directions.

>>52725821
The tread was about realistic space battles, not warm butter sci-fi.

>>52725821
It gets even more frightening than that.

At the level of tech where we have quantum computers calculating the firing solutions we can also be accelerating subatomic particles at relativistic speeds (or maybe even greater depending on how much quantum fuckery is involved) and then have them degrade into massive gamma radiation blooms from inside the targets armor after passing through anything in its path like it never even existed. Even if you had the same weapons it might be impossible to even intercept them. If you can be seen, you're dead, and considering we have no theoretical path to developing stealth in space....

>>52725821
Based on what tech level?

>they
Who?

>see your ship that is 10 lightyears
Then it'll be 10 years out of date.

Everything you've written is for Culture or Xeelee-level Clarke's Third Law bullshit

>>52725904
That's the post closest to discussing realism.

The ones discussing stupid shit like "torpedoes" as if space battles would have any resemblance to naval warfare are the ones ascribing to soft sci-fi.

Read up on current developments in particle physics and quantum mechanics. We're closer to doing these things than to figuring out FTL travel. Quantum computers might even already exist today in a top secret capacity.

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>>52725904
I know you are joking, but for the ones who lack any physics education my description is 100% scientifically accurate.
If anyone can tell me whats wrong or a more effective weapon utilizing proven physics go ahead.

>>52725923
>who
Anyone

>10 years out of date
Ah you didnt even read my post?

Man i cant wait for the autists to avoid explaining why the science is wrong.

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>>52725951
What. Quantum computers already exists ya doof. They are just horribly unwieldy right now.

>>52725923
Not him but the actual path technological development will take in reality is likely going to be very different from your perception of it based on what sci-fi has told you.

Case in point, 50 years ago everyone thought we would have flying cars by now. We don't, but we do have the internet and smart phones, something nobody back then even really conceived of.

When we are well into the space age, we may still have no conventional way of doing FTL travel for human beings - but there is reason to believe we may have quantum weapons that can destroy anything at any range we can detect in a split second.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle

>Mfw anons boring idea apparently is legit

>>52725951
>relativistic projectile
>closest to realisim

lel
Torpedoes are far more realistic.
The energy requirements for getting projectiles to travel at relativistic speeds would be so monstrous as to make them completely unworkable.
One could actually build a space torpedo, even if it didn't work well.

>>52726038
>humans defying gravity
>closest to realism

lel
Mechanical cavalry charges are far more realistic.
The energy requirements for getting a person to fly would be so monstrous as to make them completely unworkable.
One could actually build a steam-powered horse, even if it didn't work well.

>>52726038
>Anons race builds conventional torpedos and trek hundreds of ships at ultra slow speed for thousands of years toward alien base
>Alien race builds small kinetic impactors that are so small they accelerate to almost light speed, human ships are destroyed because autist thinks scifi trumps physics and cold tactics

Sometimes i forget there are alot of young uneducated people on here.

>>52725974
Explain to me how quantum computers can tell where a ship is at the current time while it is 10 light years away. If nothing else, it'll be educational then.

>>52726089
>>52726093
This is a thread for realism, not your bullshit scifi.

Torpedoes are doable, we know this. Your magic light speed accelerators may as well be wishes and pixie dust in the context of this thread.

>>52724317
*Tips fedora*

>>52724035
It would basically be as shit as submarine warfare, cranked to eleven.
Since there is no cover, no hiding or whatever, whoever detect the other first without his shot being detected win.
Weaponry would probably be nukes, as the battlefield is gigantic, empty, and the target can move a lot.

>>52726093
>Anons race builds shit that works
>Alien race bankrupt themselves after attempting to generate the energy required to accelerate projectiles to near light speed.

>>52726153
This is the most retarded self-defeating argument I've ever seen.

You're asserting that space battles will take place, for which the prerequisite is humans have access to FTL travel, and yet you believe the energy requirements for weapons accelerating projectiles that are significantly smaller by vast orders of magnitude to a mere fraction of the speed of light, let alone the kind of magnitudes of multiple speeds of light you'd need to get around between systems at any workable rate within human lifespans, is somehow unviable?

What kind of fucking retard do you have to be to think that makes any sense?

Please continue to argue why space battles would look like the way you want it to look because muh sci-fi and not like how the experts who have spent decades studying particle physics, quantum mechanics and astronomy speculate it will be.

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>>52726110
Moving at relativistic speeds make the universe "flatter" from the view of the projectile, at the cost of its internal clock running slower.

If given a quantum computer it could easily readjust course to follow you even with a slowed clock.

Deploy a couple of million of these all accelerating in direction around the ship and course correct.

>>52726153
>Guys this is a realism thread so talking about projectiles using newtons laws of motion aka newtons laws of scifi mumbo jumbo is just silly
>Remember only use things proven to work, like leeches and bloodletting for bubonic plague

You have to make your trolling less obvious.

>>52726196
>Anons race build some slow ships to shoot abit in orbit in 200 years when they arrive
>alien race sends kinetic projectiles the size of cities accelerating using smaller nukes(its a thing) to near relativistic speeds so they cant be interecepted
>Anons ships come and do indeed shoot m,aybe 100 enemy ships each
>But earth and all other planets are now gone

Sounds good anon! Reaaaaally scary to share a jobmarket with a guy as bright as you.

>>52726213
>You're asserting that space battles will take place,

Nope. I'm just pointing out that this thread is aiming for realism, not wild make believe.

>for which the prerequisite is humans have access to FTL travel,

How is that a prerequisite at all? FTl travel is not necessary to have two ships shooting at each other in space.

>>52726214
Absolutely use technologies that work, with only minor extrapolation.

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>>52726283
So you are saying current quantum computers will not improve and that nuke-drives also will break all known physics when tested?

>>52726214
Won't course-correction at those velocities be very energy intensive? Unless you're course correcting far from the target, but then you've got the problem of light-lag again.

>>52726308
Thats why you send millions of them.

If the thread said space battles around earth it would be a different story

>>52725951
You are fucking retarded. Quantum computers are a huge meme.

>>52726283
>How is that a prerequisite at all?

I think that anon is going by "If FTL-magic exists, then why not acceleration-magic"

Though it leaves out Expanse-style FTL-less sci-fi

>>52726269
What are you attempting to say here?
You've completely changed the scenario.
Now it's not about ships but people throwing big rocks.
Now we're nowhere near light speed.

>>52726214
How would you accelerate that projectile up to relativistic speeds? Where would you keep all the reaction mass?

>>52726301
I'm saying you shouldn't make wild assumptions.

>>52726344
>I think that anon is going by "If FTL-magic exists, then why not acceleration-magic"

Yes, but FTL was never specified by OP.
Realistically there is no FTL travel so it should be discounted.

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>>52724035
>How would a realistic space battle look like?
Interplanetary nuclear rockets and EMPs are fired at anything lacking the capabilities to intercept or destroy them. Space battles are slow wars of attrition between whole planets instead of individual fleets.

>>52726339
Anon they are literally in development. Look stuff up before you make yourself look like a retard.

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I freely admit to shifting the goalposts, but there comes a point (probably an actual point on the Kardashev scale) where you stop having space battles and just start throwing unavoidable relativistic rocks at each other in a MAD-scenario.

I feel that at that point "space battles" aren't really a thing.
Maybe it'd be more constructive to argue about what sort of space warfare would go on before civilisations reach that point? At least in an RPG-application sense

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>>52726339
>have one at my uni
>Easily measured that it works faster on certain problems
>Guy to stupid to understand it calls it a meme out of frustration

Ah yeah another one of these threads.

>>52726397
Dodging explaining why im wrong again, see below.
Its fine that you dont keep up with modern science but please be upfront with it and dont get mad when you dont understand things, its childish.

>>52726352
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion
If only i had mentioned it several times it would have been easier huh?
Why are you stalling?

But nah you are right guys, those nasa "scientists" dont know shit compared to you!
Same with all those fancy pants "scientists" who built em fancy quantum computers, i cant understand them so they are obviously a sham!
Those nasa people even believe the earth is round i mean how stupid could someone be?

>>52726411
That's a completely self-defeating method of warfare. You are wasting resources, time and energy sending packets of mass over to your opponents planet where he can intercept them at leisure and then cannibalize them for materials.

Rule adjustment: How would space warfare work between humans only, no aliums
Hard mode: A MAD-like atmosphere preventing you from say, blowing up entire planets/moons/asteroid bases/whatever on a whim (also applicable if it's a resource war, you want that stuff intact)

Aaaand I should do more reading because that's basically the same as >>52726433

>>52726437
>Dodging explaining why im wrong again

Nope, you've just yet to explain how you're going to accelerate projectiles to near light speed. And no, Nuclear pulse projection gets you nowhere close.
It might make for a better space torpedo though.

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>>52726458
>Intercepting a relativistic projectile

Man you guys actually never read about relativity huh?

Actually kinda spooked how many here never seem to have read anything relating to the sciences at all.

>>52726476
This guy gets it.

>>52726488
Nah you are right dude, those nasa fellas who wrote whole papers on the subject are wrong.

>>52726511
>Intercepting a relativistic projectile
I don't think the anon that that anon was replying to was talking about relativistic projectiles.

>Nah you are right dude, those nasa fellas who wrote whole papers on the subject are wrong.

Also, not that anon, but assuming you are using an Orion-drive-esque-thing, what's the ballpark mass of bombs you'd need to get to a sizeable portion of C?
Speaking of which, what fraction of C would be best for a relativistic projectile?

>>52726511
>Nah you are right dude, those nasa fellas who wrote whole papers on the subject are wrong.

I doubt they were writing about shooting small projectiles at near light speed for use in space battles.

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>>52726551
As high as possible, getting it to just 50% would still be almost impossible to intercept without sensors scattered around at huuuuuuuuge distances. Youd need alooooot, but just accelerating 4 kilos would for example burn the earths atmosphere at that speed.

>>52726570
Nope they are writing about accelerating other things to not even half a percent of the speed of life, but being scientists they realise the concept at math goes beyond that, and accelerating i.e a spaceshi using a method means it can, in the majority of cases be used to accelerate other things which they mention in the papers.

But man your argument is again so smart im in awe: how stupid am i for thinking that just because a horse can pull a wagon with 2 wheels that that means it should be able pull one with 4? The leap from accelerating soft squishhumans and assuming a dead solid projectil would also work is retarded.

>>52724035
Hold your enemy's star hostage by threatening to broadcast its location into the Dark Forest. Talk them down to peace by threatening total destruction.

Intercepting an RKV would be a hybrid of today's ballistic missile interceptors and the principle behind reactive armor. It would ultimately come down to being able to detect its approach in time to launch your interceptors and then a battle of course-correction algorithms between each interceptor and the RKV. You'd launch a wave of interceptors since the whole thing is a game of probability.

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>>52726678
But anon physics is too scifi for this thread. Keep it at "Lets call em torpedos because it sounds cool"

>>52726649
>Nope they are writing about accelerating other things to not even half a percent of the speed of life, but being scientists they realise the concept at math goes beyond that, and accelerating i.e a spaceshi using a method means it can, in the majority of cases be used to accelerate other things which they mention in the papers.

What's your point? I've never said it's mathematically impossible for things to accelerate to a significant percentage of light speed. But that requires a lot of energy and we're talking about realism here.
It's not at all realistic that a spaceship would be able to produce the energy required to fire off a projectile at near light speed.

>>52726723
Why in the world would you carry them on a ship?

>>52726678
Wouldn't even a successful interception turn the oncoming projectiles into near-C debris? If those projectiles are coming at your home, then it seems like your [insert celestial object here] would still be pretty fucked anyway

>>52726744
Because this thread is talking about space battles.

>>52724035
Play a game called Aurora. I feel like that's one of the more realistic depictions of 'space combat' I have seen in recent years.

>>52726759
Sorry my bad, forgot space only can contain ships while they earth and other planets in fact are not in any way in space.

Man i really am stupid, forgetting that planets, stars etc in fact dont exist in space.

>>52726782
Stop being such a pedant.

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>Wanting realistic space battles

You're a massive fucking pleb.

>>52726777
Aurora 4x is incredibly unrealistic. It treats spacetime as a fluid. That places it firmly in fiction territory. It's just boats in space. In fact it's even more restrictive than that because when you run out of fuel you stop in place, whereas boats could be carried along a tide. It's a fun game but don't mistake it for realism.

>>52724035
>How would a realistic space battle look like?

By "realistic" you mean "speculation based on existing science that may or may not be replaced by another cutting edge inovation"? Then it mostly consist of boarding actions on strategic space stations and colonies with bunch of Astromarines with space exos and shuttle transport instead of dreaming about fliying tubes with bunch of missiles and guns slapped in while ignoring any existance of cyber warfare and other method of countermeasure. Because it'll be extremely expensive without any meaningfull gain whatsoever, while creating bunch of unnecessary ruckus and much of kessler syndromes that'll end up with much of strategical loss.

The only time where spaceship battles were viable is when we're already throw most of our space manufacturing capabilities into space and when we're already master the way of interstellar travel. But by that time, our understanding on technologies, science, and culture will greatly differs from ours, so much that the matter of shapes aren't really much of problems to us.

tl,dr: we cannot predict on how spaceship battles in the future would actually work.

>>52725061
Properly deployed lasers actually dominate chode battlespaces, even with their laughable efficiency of a few percent and the tiny hardcoded engagement ranges of the game.

>>52724255

Alternatively, weapons would be more like railguns or possibly light or particle-based projectiles. So instead of waiting for stealthed torpedoes to reach their targets and swing by wide margins (assuming they themselves don't have guidance systems to take them to the target), it'd be a tense situation of just waiting for a firing solution on a hard target and then obliterating it in a fraction of a second, hoping you didn't just hit a decoy and gave away your position, in which case you'd probably be the ones being vaporized by a railgun shot in the next few seconds.

>>52727686
>getting close enough that an enemy could blast you in a fraction of a second
If that happened then people would stay far out of that range of each other so that they have time to maneuver away from incoming shots

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>>52724035

>>52726283
>How is that a prerequisite at all? FTl travel is not necessary to have two ships shooting at each other in space.
Without access to transportation energy/ efficiency that would allow for FTL, civilian infrastructure is probably never going beyond orbit. Which means there's not going to be anything in space worth fighting for further away from the moon. So there's basically never going to be big space battles, because nothing will be as expensive in the ship.

>>52724035
realistic space battles would involve little blips firing at eachother from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. No noise, little action, just intense ship sniper skirmishes.

>>52728141
That's like saying that "without infinite energy, we'll never sail to America"

>>52725123
The Expanse space battles are relatively unique in TV sci-fi (with ships being fragile as fuck and PDCs easily slaughtering the crew) but it ain't realistic. No ships use radiators, laser weapons don't exist, every battle has the ships be close enough to be in-camera, ships preferring to use turrets and guns instead of the asteroid-busting nukes they have, etc. It's neat that it's relatively harder than most series, but it ain't absolute realism by any measure.

Realistic space battles between two starcraft using current tech projections would occur at extreme distances (probably in light seconds) and would use DEWs. Orbital conflicts could use things like KE or missiles but the distances in interplanetary space are too large for that to be reliable without saturation fire into projected enemy vectors.

The anon talking about RKVs however, while useful on a planetary target, would require some form of super material to withstand the absurd stress from delta v at relativistic velocities not to mention an impressive internal propulsion system in order to course correct to hit a starcraft that may be actively manouvering. A pretty significant investment that may not even be feasible with material science.

>>52727800
Underrated post.

>>52728141
Interplanetary travel with concepts like the EM drive may indeed make it cost effective after easily accessed resources are all exploited within Earth's orbit. A month transit time to Mars for iron would be economical when it's the nearest resource you have.

>>52724035
Eggshells fighting with sniper rifles in an open area where stealth is literally impossible and your own body will cook you alive if you're not careful.

>>52724035
See the game "Children of a dead earth"
Basically launching long range nuclear missiles at each other across different points in orbit and using computer aimed machine guns and laser anti-missile defenses to defend yourself, and in the off chance two ships get close to each other it would just be them firing their machine guns and torpedoes into one another until one or bot are dead.
I can't even imagine how you would implement this into a tabletop game.
Maybe a game based around relativistic interstellar war were moves can be launched one after another but their effects take many turns to be felt since they are moving slower than light?

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>>52728674
>OP asks for realistic space battles
>Well all we can do is theory craft with assumptions from our knowledge base
>Faggot communists REEEE
What the hell are you on about?

>>52728531
The distance between Earth and the closest non-Lunar body is 79,000 times the distance between Europe and America. To establish anything worth fighting for in space, let alone the ability to fight over it, you're going to need either a fuckload of energy, or a discover of how to move shit around in space for much less energy per kilo than we currently do, by a factor of about 1000.

>>52726213
>You're asserting that space battles will take place, for which the prerequisite is humans have access to FTL travel,
HOW? Did the idea that the war could occur within the confines of our native solar system never cross your mind, are you really that fucking stupid?

>>52728689
>after easily accessed resources are all exploited within Earth's orbit
When space resources become more available than terrestrial resources, one of two things happens.
1. Resource depletion chokes off industrial society. Manufacturing grounds to a halt, as the products are not affordable in any reckoning of the term. When the last artificial satellite deorbits it is never replaced, the final entry in the Age of Space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnh8MNaTfyM
2. We go full scale Battlestar Galactica and abandon Earth like it's Firefly. Only we never get the tech to really leave this stellar system, and it plays out more like the first than the second, with people living on moon colonies and space stations.
In case two, most people don't even live on the fucking ground. You don't build a space battle ship when your entire civilization is the size of fucking Mir.

>>52727767

A projectile could be accelerated to a fraction of the speed of light. At these kinds of speeds, for a fight to take place at a distance which gives enough room for maneuvering, you'd need to be something like the distance between the Moon and the Earth away from each other, enough time for light to travel a second or two.

Of course, munitions could have their own propulsion and guidance systems to make hits more likely and counter maneuvering, like some smart munitions today.

>>52728953
>>52728141
There is no shit in this stellar system you would ever send a person to instead of a robot, because of how expensive keeping them alive without an independently functioning biosphere is. That would mean that without someone having FTL, space is entirely a game of robots. And you don't fight a robot with a missile, you fight it by hacking it's control process and bricking it.

>>52728828
I'm just mystified by why this board is so utterly infested with unbearable waste of jism like you, maybe it's got some connection with the weirdly high number of communists I've met on here (how often do you meet a fucking communist?) seeing as they are typically also utterly unbearable faggots like you. I guess it's just one of those mysteries, like why didn't your mother hug you enough as a child.

>>52729068
If robots are so easy to hack why in the hell would I entrust my entire off-earth infrastructure to them? You're sort of contradicting yourself in this post, also if everything is being remotely controlled from earth wouldn't the light-speed lag start to become an issue, especially as you get further out to the gas giants with all that juicy helium-3? Seems like sort of an advantage if you're capable of reacting up to several hours before your opponent can because you don't have to deal with the light-speed lag.

>>52728591
>Every battle has the ships be close enough to be in-camera

There's been 2 major battles in the show so far. The MCRN Donnager battle takes place partially at nonvisual range, and the raid on Spin Station is purposefully fought in CQB because the goal of the battle is to take the station personnel captive.

>>52729128
>why this board is so utterly infested with unbearable waste of jism like you, maybe it's got some connection with the weirdly high number of communists
Please, you can find more communists on /pol/, considering that's the board for arguing about that kind of shit

>>52729238
>communists
>on /pol/

If communists were capable of taking criticism they wouldn't have to start murdering all political opposition the moment they seize power.

>>52729252
>on /pol/
>taking criticism
m8.

>>52729271
You miss my point, why in the hell would communists ever go to a board that's so utterly anti-communist, they wouldn't be able to take it.

>>52728874

Without any actual technology that can do as much, the short "fantasy" answer is using much less energy to punch yourself into an alternate dimension and then punch your way out, having moved through that dimension and come out into your own dimension further away from where you started out and closer to where you wanted to go.

The longer answer is the book "Lockstep," where interplanetary society is active for a single month at a time and then everyone freezes themselves for 30 years. Spaceships carrying people and goods can move between systems at realistic speeds so people and stuff gets there on a reasonable timescale, and naturally the distance between planetary systems can now be measured casually by months of travel.

>>52728874
Columbus left Spain on the 3rd of August, and arrived in the Caribbean islands on October 12. A trip to Mars using a modern day, propellant-efficient VASIMR ion engine design takes 39 days. Roughly the same time, and no fuckloads of energy required.

You seem to also have some other misconceptions I'd like to correct:

- There's absolutely no need to have civilian infastructure in space to justify war. Military and government installations can certainly be worth fighting for, just like they have been on Earth. They need not even be manned by Humans to be legitimate military targets.
- It's much easier to move objects in space than to get them to orbit, so your claim that civilian infrastructure will get to orbit will inevitably lead to sending civilian infrastructure to locations in the solar system that are easier to reach. For example, a launch from Earth surface to LEO requires a delta-v of 9 km/s, but a journey from LEO to the surface of Mars only 4 km/s.
- That often repeated "factor of 1000" refers to surface-to-orbit launches only, the rough goal pursued by many agencies and companies using chemical rockets, and not deep space designs. Likewise, I'm not aware of any serious designs for FTL methods (like the alcubierre drive) or infinite energy generators that cannot reach FTL (like the EM drive) that would work in a surface-to-orbit configuration. The supposed requirement to invent such a fantastical thruster in order to establish a presence in the solar system is a red herring. Solar and magsails work just as well in vacuum if you really want a drive with practically infinite energy and no propellant.

There will be no space battles. Why? Because there's no reason to. We have wars because resources are limited on our planet. If we managed to get interstellar travel, then either it's too expensive (ala Dune) or there's literally billions of planets out there to settle on that you can just go to another one and call it Planet Ponyfucker XXX for anyone else to care. When we have stars made out of diamond, mountain sized rare metals asteroids, hydrogen nebula lightyears accross, why squabble?

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>>52724426
>ass drivers seem to be the answer

Never been to space but in my house they are.

>>52729563
Piggybacking onto this, look up some specifics of cold war space policy. Anti-satellite warfare and orbital bombardment have been discussed since the end of WWII. If that's not space warfare I don't know what is.

>>52729633
over pussy

>>52729633
>We have wars because resources are limited on our planet.
Not entirely, sometimes people just really want to kill each other. Also while all those planets might have relatively equal amounts of resources to draw on they wouldn't all be equally developed, much nicer to just steal all that lovely infrastructure then have to build it yourself.

>why squabble?
Because people are retarded, you really don't think they'd send out crusades to punish planets for liking things they don't like? Who cares if you've got everything you want if there's still fucking maniacs out there who teach their kids there's only two genders, that's child
abuse! What about the trans youth!

Just to use an example.

>>52729633
it will still be cheaper and easier to take shit than to establish your own shit
in some situations
thats fucking obvious

>>52729195
>If robots are so easy to hack why in the hell would I entrust my entire off-earth infrastructure to them?
Economics. It's basically one of those things where given the choice between better cyberwarfare and sending human beings to the asteroid belt, you don't really have a choice at all. So space warfare becomes a game of hacking, spoofing, false-flagging, trying to convince a semi-autonomous drone that you have root-user authorization over its source code, etc. And the advantage of the robot over a human crew is so large (take any mission outside luna, multiply its cost by 5^(the number of human crew members)) that it's far far more cost effective to just put more work into making your gear harder to hack, and being better at hacking the other guy's gear.

>>52729760
>And the advantage of the robot over a human crew is so large (take any mission outside luna, multiply its cost by 5^(the number of human crew members)) that it's far far more cost effective to just put more work into making your gear harder to hack, and being better at hacking the other guy's gear.
If my enemy's can react several hours faster to new information and have orders carried out several hours faster I think that would more then make up for it. Who cares about cost effectiveness if the ships going to get blasted before you even know the enemy was there, oh and there's the fact that your signal could get blocked by an intervening object, like say if you robot tanks on one side of a moon and the earth's on the other.

>>52729794
*enemies

>>52729563
A Spanish galleon has a mass of ~600,000 kg and moves about 2.6 m/s, for a total energy output of 1.9849e+6 J.
Seeing as how the VASIMR hasn't flown a single mission, I'm going to ignore any theoretical numbers in favor of a vehicle that's actually gone to space.
The Indians probe to Mars took 43 days and weighed 1,300 kg, using 2.4525e+12 J.
I am pretty sure that literally 1 million times more energy counts as a fuckload.
> no need to have civilian infastructure
>government installations
This may amaze you friend, but if it isn't in the military it's civilian, even if that civilian is employed by the government.
> It's much easier to move objects in space than to get them to orbit
This is true. The hard part about space isn't the dv so much as the life support. That's why I originally said that without FTL we will send robots, but not people.
>surface-to-orbit launches only
Unless it is your intent to teleport the factories off planet, the entire deal has to go out of a gravity well at least once post-construction.

>>52729794
It is possible to win a war to death.

>>52729961
>Unless it is your intent to teleport the factories off planet, the entire deal has to go out of a gravity well at least once post-construction.
What about space elevators? What about mining the asteroids for the resources to build that factory with so you don't have to bring them up through that gravity well?

>>52729633
>We have wars because resources are limited on our planet
Or because two countries have vast ideological differences like religion and political system, or someone desires a strategically located empty parcel of land they don't have, or they want revenge for a war they lost a generation ago, or they wish to tip the balance of power in their direction, or they wish to liberate a certain ethnic population, or a single assassin causes a succession crisis in the powder keg of a continent, which triggers a network of defensive alliances causing three powerful monarchs, who are each others' cousins, to go to war along with pretty much everyone.

War between two rational actors happens when at least one side thinks that the gains from a war - such as resources, advancement of technology, international prestige, or nationalist pride - will outweigh the costs of war (not always money - loss of face by dishonouring an alliance could work just as well). In order for the war to begin, all bargaining to reach a mutually beneficial agreement between the entities also has to fail.

>>52730048
With what factory will you turn raw iron into a factory? With what workshops will you make tools?

>>52730115
1. Send a smaller factory ship up
2. Use said factory ship to mine asteroids to turn them into parts for the larger factory
3. Assemble parts for the larger factory in orbit
4. Have massive factory in orbit without having to bring it up all at once
What did I miss?

They're already talking about asteroid mining right now, some asteroids are actually easier to reach then the moon.

>>52730133
There is one km of asteroid in our system for every volume of Rhode Island.

>>52730171
>for every volume
In english doc?

>>52724035
>How would a realistic space battle look like?
No one knows, just go with what looks fun.

>>52725920
>considering we have no theoretical path to developing stealth in space....
You'd think someone would have asked some of those quantum computers to work it out in their spare time when not plotting the takeover and putting all the humans in cozy holocaust saunas.

Seriously if you're going to pull out radical scifi offense there is very likely going to be equally radical scifi defense.

>>52726026
>This article has multiple issues.
>This article relies largely or entirely upon a single source. (August 2015)
>This article possibly contains original research. (August 2015)
>This article needs additional citations for verification. (August 2015)
>Some of this article's listed sources may not be reliable. (August 2015)

Yeah I wouldn't hold my breath. But what would you expect doing research on wikipedia?

>>52725701
>days


AHAHAHAHAHA

>>52724451
> windows are a structural weakness so you don't want them anyway.
Nonsense. Assuming space battles are anything like this thread claims, all weapons would need to be one-hit-kill weapons, meaning that it wouldn't matter if you made your whole ship out of glass or titanium, a single hit would take you out anyway. And windows are good for some things so why not have them.

>>52731719
micro meteorites, that's why.

>>52725604
Once you get your production into space and use off world aviable materials for construction, prices are gonna plumet down rapidly.

>>52731719
>all weapons would need to be one-hit-kill weapons
How?

>>52725920
>military that uses such advanced weaponry and equipment can't develop simple dummy countermeasures.
Disregarding spacetime warping/phase shifting shields.

>>52725974
>utilizing proven physics.
>postin' dison spheres in thread about hard sci-fi space battles.
Opinion discarted.

>>52731866
KIC 8462852 is real tho.
Also
>dison
Its dyson come on now.

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>>52731745
That's why you create tiny robotic lego figures to patch the windows. Duh.

>>52731745
Come on, anon, we're talking about science and real proven physics like the recent breakthrough in the greatest material of them all, transparent duct tape. Seriously, dude, nothing is getting through that.

>>52731789
Because the separation of ships is like millions off kilometers so hitting the other guy is difficult. So when you hit you want to be sure it counts.

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>>52726843
I'm with this guy.

Here's a better idea: How do we make the standard, sci-fi unrealistic space battle plausible?

>>52731895
It has been speculated that the changes in brightness could be signs of activity associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life constructing a Dyson swarm.[6][11][12][13] The SETI Institute's initial radio reconnaissance of KIC 8462852, however, found no evidence of technology-related radio signals from the star.[14][15][16]

KIC 8462852 is not the only star that has large irregular dimmings. However, all other such stars are young stellar objects called YSO dippers that have different dimming patterns. An example of such an object is EPIC 204278916.[17][18]

Rly now? We sank that low as posting speculations?

>dyson
My bad.

>>52732294
Oh I see someone's lost all of their sense of wonder. Keep living in a universe where everything is boring, dead, and so far out of our reach it might as well not exist faggot.

>>52732033
>Because the separation of ships is like millions off kilometers
Why?
>So when you hit you want to be sure it counts
Exactly, so how do you do that? It sounds like just battering the enemy until nothing remains is the best course of action.

>>52726751
And with a clever enough interception it's a cloud of near-C debris on an escape vector and thus somebody else's problem.

>>52724035
Jousting. See Frontier: Elite II.
Yes, kinda boring.

>>52724317
stop making sense

>>52732329
>KIC 8462852 is real tho.
and afer i pointed out that it is isn't
>sorry you lack imagination.
ITT we play "what if" not "pretend."
I believe that is reasonable for posters to respect diference between facts and speculations.

>>52732526
We're talking about space combat. What fucking facts? This entire thread is the imagination of people speculating about the future, or stealing ideas from the imagination of other significantly smarter people.

>>52732566
Fact is that there is no proof that some spacefaring civ is constructing dyson sphere around aforementioned star.
If you had suficient attention spam to not only read but also proces my previous post you wouldn't have to get assblasted as well as confused about them. We already had such Buttmad Brittney in this thread and it did not help/please anyone.

>>52732566
Where were you when people thought that stupid "hard" sci-fi game was real?

I know again why I prefer soft science fiction/science fantasy.

>>52724035
it depends
"modern" ship fights would boil down to watching the radar for tiny blips, then you order those blips to be shot down, while sending out your own blips

the enemy are BVR so you dont see explosions, and if your ship is hit, then you enjoy action for all of 5 seconds before you die

a space fight might just be people staring at their space-radar, mashing buttons, while spherical, short lived explosions happen in the distance

>>52732750
And this goes on for a month max before both sides run out of missiles and then dash to figure out how to fight a war.

>>52724065
>no ftl

whoa what if like
hold on
what if instead of having shit happen over a bigger area
IT HAPPENED OVER A SMALLER AREA?

like you could totally tell a storyline similar to Star Wars or Star Craft that was interplanetary instead of interstellar

>>52732630
I told you a star was real. My first mention of dyson was the correction of your spelling.

Also if nasa can't outright say nuhuh no it isn't, that's about the same level of proof of concept as a lot of other shit round here. Just saying.

>>52732959
1. That picture has artificial celestial body with some strong light inside.
2. Wiki page about
star mentioned above has that citation i used.
3. >nu-uh.
Are you trying to push burden of proof on me? Coz that is not how it works.

>>52725644
>Because as we all know missiles and torpedoes are unable to alter their course after launch.
A missile that can significantly alter its course will need a lot of fuel. Which means it'll have a lower payload.

>>52724035
In any situation where humanity is advanced enough to be called a spacefaring civilization, it would resemble submarine warfare with no human input, so yeah, probably not real exciting.

Now, it's possible there is some role to play if PCs aren't humans, but instead are transhumans, AIs, or posthumans. Even then though, probably not real exciting.

>>52732777
full-scale mobilization that would use up missiles faster than you can make them in the span of a month is not very realistic, it would end relatively quickly as they broker a truce before they are forced to make life absolutely miserable for their potential voters

>>52733336
turn to star trek, where fights are fought on monitors (slightly boring)and resolved with diplomacy

>>52733223
I'm not asking you to disprove anything. Why would you need burden of proof? You've already established how much of a faggot you are. I've got nothing else.

>>52733347
>full-scale mobilization that would use up missiles faster than you can make them in the span of a month is not very realistic
Then you must not be living in reality. The US navy has a stockpile of roughly 3,000 cruise missiles.
>it would end relatively quickly as they broker a truce before they are forced to make life absolutely miserable for their potential voters
if there is a war in this day and age, it has gone beyond "truce because I need votes next year".

>>52733358
Whatever floats your boat.
Definitely don't neck yourself.

>>52733356
Star Trek does it better than most, but it's coming from an era before we understood the vital and ubiquitous role that "smart" devices play in advanced technological society. The spacefaring future will feature universal, layered networks of data, the so called "internet of things", alongside exponentially more powerful and efficient computing systems. Add in all the advantages that a spaceship/hab has over terrestrial engineering and nearly everything can be fully automated and self-sustaining, with abundant free energy as easy to collect as fabricating some extra solars. Nanomachines, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, cybernetics, genetic engineering, post-scarcity economics, and this all in the /infancy/ of a stellar civilization. Transhuman and posthuman society will inevitably follow shortly in that wake.

>>52733454
Wan't planning on it ya miserable cunt.

>>52733489
You should, just saying.

>>52724035
A piece of advice, never use the word realistic in a sci-fi context, especially if it involves stuff like space battles.

>>52733744
I am literally in the process of not necking myself. I can't do it any harder, believe me I've tried.

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>>52725200
There's also Starship Operators for a obscure sci-fi animu everyone forgot about. Spacetits unrelated.

>>52733824
Provide me with pics. You can do it i believe in you.

>>52724035
Unmanned relativistic kill vehicles.

So yeah, really boring.

>>52732719
You and me both, /tg/ made me loathe realism in my fiction.

>>52733922
when it comes to scifi the harder you try the less fun everyone has and its likely you got enough of it wrong to trigger some spergs rocketry autism anyway
far either to go for dramatic seriousness then actual realism, makes for a better story anyway

or fuck it lets just all go back to buck rogers
>inb4 Twiki a shit

If you want a decent Example, read The Black Fleet Trilogy, it has some amazing space combat that while realistic, feels intense.

>>52732143
That guy was a faggot but I'll answer his dumbass question. You need superscience and a lot of it. Force fields, reactionless drives, artificial gravity, gravitic compensators, etc. You basically need to put your fingers in your ears and scream "SPACE IS A OCEAN" until everyone including the laws of physics leaves the room. It also helps if you hum the intro from a New Hope loudly and incessantly.
>>52734198
>or fuck it lets just all go back to buck rogers

The fact you mentioned buck rogers and not the Foundation series shows me just how much of a pleb you are. All scifi is realistic in some way. Some focus on technical realism while handwaving social problems. Others focus on social realism while handwaving technical problems. A few try to do both but more often than not fail at either (those that do succeed are some of the best scifi authors out there). The worst give up on both, essentially shitting out fantasy with a space fetish (which will inspire no one to anything useful). Everyone should pity those fools and the scabrous wretches that enable them.

Short of discovering miracle cloaking or ECM technology, a space battle will consist of firing swarms of nuclear weapons at the enemy from millions of kilometers away to overload their automated defenses. Fighter-type vessels are also a silly idea.

>>52724065
>no ftl
>ergo no space combat

What are planets and what is orbital infrastructure?

>>52724249
What this guy said basically.

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>>52734737

Literally no point in war at the point in time most anons are describing
>Resources
You're in fucking space, there's nothing on planets that you couldn't get in space and make yourself but
>People
But people are useless, because you can always just make machines to do all that work for you, and that's already implying
>Machines
Haven't already replaced biological humans entirely, with what's left of "humans" living in virtual reality. Which brings you back to the first point, why wage war when all the crap you care about is digital or common in realspace?

The most frightening thing about this thread is that everyone here is assuming humans will still be similar and have the same instincts and motivations as they are today.
Genetic engineering says nope. So my argument about 'humans' living in virtual reality might be moot, because at that point there might not even be humans left as humans engineered themselves to extinction because there is no intrinsic benefit of self-reproduction. And humanity can't stay modern humans because modern humans will be out-competed to death by genetically engineered humans
tl;dr the future sucks if you like being human

>>52726301
Double king's being out for like 3 years, why it became a meme this week?

>>52736544
>You're in fucking space, there's nothing on planets that you couldn't get in space and make yourself but
Accept other planets.
>But people are useless, because you can always just make machines to do all that work for you, and that's already implying
Then why have citizens to begin with? Why have a civilization? You technocrats are such short sighted folk.
>Haven't already replaced biological humans entirely, with what's left of "humans" living in virtual reality.
Clearly these things are a threat to civilization, so why should they be allowed?

>assuming humans will still be similar and have the same instincts and motivations as they are today
Trust me, they will, people never change.
>Genetic engineering says nope.
And the judges say no genetic engineering.

And then you have some drivel about modern humans dying out.
tl:dr the future looks great if you're authoritarian.

>>52736669
>And the judges say no genetic engineering.
>implying the rich won't jump at the chance to genetically engineer their kids
Your naivety is astounding.

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>>52736762
>Your naivety is astounding.
My brutality even more so.

>>52736669
>Accept other planets.
There's nothing on planets you can't get elsewhere, tard.
>Then why have citizens to begin with? Why have a civilization? You technocrats are such short sighted folk.
You probably don't. You probably have a (relatively) few people on Virtual Reality servers with an AI that is in charge of sustaining the VR indefinitely.
>Clearly these things are a threat to civilization, so why should they be allowed?
Because your idea of civilization is embarrassingly narrow. And far enough into the future there IS NO "why is it allowed", it goes back to evolution and the question becomes "does this out-compete the ones who don't, letting them survive longer?"
>Trust me, they will, people never change.
You're an idiot. People have changed, unless you still think we're still the non-tool using apes we were millions of years ago.
>And the judges say no genetic engineering.
Judges say no to genetic engineering? Who, why and where? What is their jurisdiction? What happens if a child is already genetic engineered? Do you execute the child who was engineeredt? ( lol, we have ANIMAL ABUSE laws, no fucking way). What about the parents, do we execute them? Do we sterilize them ( whoops, that probably involves genetic engineering too )? Execute them? Then what about the child?
>And then you have some drivel about modern humans dying out.
Modern humans WILL die out, without question. It's only a matter of WHEN. And I'm saying it will happen shortly after genetic engineering reaches a certain level.
Humans aren't special. Modern humans will not be able to compete with Humanity 2.0, much less the Humanity 3.0 and so on that Humanity 2.0 will lead to.

>>52726437
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion
So your missiles are going to each hold possibly thousands if not millions of nuclear warheads?
Exactly how heavy is your ship going to be with all of these projectiles?
Where did the ship take off from?
How much difficulty does it have decelerating?

>>52736544
Ah yes, genetic engineering, the newest scifi buzzword to add to the list after quantum mechanics, nanotech, and atomic cars. Because why be content with just misrepresenting physics, when you can also make up bullshit about biology?

tl;dr: No, traditional humanity won't go extinct.

>>52726696
>Keep it at "Lets call em torpedos because it sounds cool"
Whats wrong with that you autist?
>take rocket
>stick warhead on it
>Fire it from ship
what would you call it?

>>52736897
It's not a buzzword, dummy
>Intelligence is a physical process
>That process can be made more efficient or even qualitatively improved, or an entirely new method of intelligence can be created
Even if there is a hard limit on intelligence, the average human right now is clearly not at that level.
A human at the hard limit of intelligence would no longer be human. It would have different motivations, actions, and abilities than any modern human that exists.

Basically, you're a fucking retard no better than muslims who think humanity is special and can't be replaced.

>>52729068
>There is no shit in this stellar system you would ever send a person to instead of a robot
What about speed of light lag?
If you have a $billion+ mission that' success rides on the craft not accidentally crashing into it's destination in a few milliseconds you may not want to have to deal with a signal delay of seconds to hours depending on the distance, so having a person nearby may be a good idea.

>>52737023
It's actually you who has been bamboozled by the Silicon Valley prophets of pseudoscience technofaith, you filthy singularitarian.

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>>52733833
If you want realistic chinese cartoons in space at least go for pic related ya git

>>52732892
>>52736225

The odds of 2 planets being viable settlement centers and thus needing to fight in space as opposed to just having things out on the ground are virtually zero. And if you have space to surface weapons, you also almost certianly have surface to space weapons; and unlike those poor bastards in the tin cans up in space, on a terrestrial environment, you can actually take cover.

>>52736897
>genetic engineering is bullshit
Anon, there's a good chance the food you're eating and the clothing you wear comes from genetically engineered products.
>nanotech is a buzzword
Yes because all the billions of dollars going into nanomaterial research is because some shitty author wrote Accelerando.

You need to learn to disassociate real science from fanboys anon. It makes you look like an imbecile.

>>52737095
Oh, you're just trolling.
Because all that research into cures for genetic illness doesn't involve genetic engineering at all.

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>>52724035
Assuming Children of a Dead Earth meta is close-ish to how shit would go (which I admit is a big "if" but we don't have anything better to form a rough idea currently):

Hours of boring for a few seconds of sheer panic when things go south. Missile volleys at very long range, more to force the other guy to burn delta-V than really expecting a successful hit in the off chance the other guy makes a mistake, our maybe your missile reserves are so disproportionate you can overwhelm his defenses, then long range large aperture lasers trying to burn sensitive stuff and achieving a soft kill (quickly followed by a hard kill if you feel like it) and engaging ennemy missile volleys from thousands of kilometers away, then you get into the effective range of kinetic weapons, railguns and coilguns, shorter ranged but packing a mean punch with tremendous rate of fire, meta tends to point that small caliber, very high rante of fire and velocity have the best results and could perform the role of CIWS as well, and then short-ish ranged defense lasers.

>>52724035
>How would a realistic space battle look like?
>Would it be boring for players?
>Realistic
>Would it be boring for players?
>Realistic

You answered your own question.

>>52725444
I once saw a calc. that put the penetration value of shaped nuclear warhead a something like 1,000 meters (of RHA) per kiloton

>>52736544
>Literally no point in war at the point in time most anons are describing
This thread is probably a good example of how people will fight over completely pointless shit. Resources? I hate to say it but it makes you sound naive. Religion, factionalism, or just the usual shit over the sins of our father's father's father's father's - and so on back through millennia. It's a nice dream to think that should humanity ever spread from this blue marble that we'd leave behind all the shit here but I sincerely doubt it. Even if we did we'd create new shit.

There will always be reasons for humans to fight. Nobody said they were good reasons. Space is infinite, why don't we all spread out in different directions? But you'd still have the thread of civil wars and besides some people cannot stand the idea that their neighbor has bigger and better territory. Sure you could expend your time and efforts into expanding yourself but some asshole will take to his soap box shouting that the other guys are going to be doing the same if only as a reaction to your expansionism and they, larger and with more resources, will still expand faster than you can - so why not cut them down to size? If enough idiots listen, well, we've seen that happen on Earth too. Or maybe the smaller group makes a huge find of rare resources and some bigger kid decides to kick over their metaphorical sand castle and steal it.

MAD? Mutually Assured Destruction didn't end conflict on Earth even if it largely kept the nuclear powers from living out the Fallout series in real life. It can be argued that it instead kicked off a series of smaller conflicts as kinds of proxy wars. STOP THE SPREAD OF VILE COMMUNISM! / RESIST DECADENT WESTERN VALUES!

Humans are immensely creative at causing so many of our own problems.

A realistic space battle would look like not seeing the enemy for days, then suddenly seeing enemy ships and the computers deciding the outcome of the battle in milliseconds. Then you either die instantly, painfully die after some time, or win the battle.

>>52737191
I never said genetic engineering is bullshit, so that's a giant strawman. I said it was a buzzword in a long line of buzzwords, used to justify a fantasy championed by technofuturists.

I am well aware of the real science, that's exactly why I'm arguing against someone who repeats fanboy talking points. These are the kinds of people who imagine themselves to become enhanced supermen, and masturbate to Vernor Vinge's writings about biological enhancements. "Rapture for nerds" is the best phrase to describe it; immortality will happen just before the fanboys die.

Genetic engineering will lead (and already has lead) to wonderful advances in the study of medicine, will cure many diseases and raise the average life expectancy. But just like the spread of nuclear power didn't lead to the prophesied personal flying cars (but lead to relatively clean, plentiful energy), and quantum mechanics won't lead to brain uploading like Ray Kurzweil claims (but fast quantum computers will work just fine), and an increasing number of machine implants won't lead to a robot rebellion (instead improving the quality of life of many people), and all those cryonics fanatics froze their heads certain that they would be resurrected (but will instead stay dead), it would be silly to claim with smug certainty that genetically engineered Humans will out-compete us to death with what we know of biology.

>>52737251
Strawmen, strawmen everywhere.

>>52737541
>even if it largely kept the nuclear powers from living out the Fallout series in real life
Well performed a lot of "tests" that probably amounted to waving our new nuclear dicks at each other as each side tried to make newer and more frightening weapons of mass destruction. Also we still managed to come to the brink of war more than once.

>>52724035
>How would a realistic space battle look like?

http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-nuclear-spear-casaba-howitzer.html

It's a long read. TL;DR?

Quiet, lots of missles, focused nuclear charges

>>52737541
>MAD
point of order, leaving earth defangs MAD because extinction from a single nuclear exchange is no longer a possibility

So space colonization could be the impetus for thermonuclear war. YAY!

>>52737660
>These are the kinds of people who imagine themselves to become enhanced supermen
But I'm not imagining myself as enhanced supermen.
I'm acknowledging the limitations of modern humans, WHICH IS WHY I'M SAYING THEY WILL GO EXTINCT.
Because modern humans simply won't be able to keep up with out own creations.
>it would be silly to claim with smug certainty that genetically engineered Humans will out-compete us to death with what we know of biology.
It's silly to claim that evolution stops working for humans, which is precisely what you are claiming.

>>52737696
>Hard science fiction with a military focus usually boil down to where the author has placed their marker on the sliding scale between missile and laser dominance. Make lasers too powerful, and they make mass missile attacks uneconomical. Make missiles cheap and fast enough, and you can overwhelm any laser defense.

>Missiles are hindered by the requirement to track the target and follow until impact. Lasers are increasingly effective as missiles close the distance to their target. Past a certain point, any missile touched by a laser is quickly destroyed. So quickly, that a laser defense's primary limitation is the time it takes to switch targets. In other words, a laser defense sets up a 'death zone' around itself, within which any wave of missiles will quickly be annihilated.

>A combination of efficient lasers, multiple turrets and competent target handling can cut through hundreds of missiles.

>The counter to this, on the missile side, is to perform randomized high-acceleration maneuvers called 'jinks'. This tactic is already used today by sea-skimming missiles once they enter the range of CIWS defenses. The problem is, in space this requires the missile to have powerful thrusters, lots of propellant and active, autonomous sensors that survive to the terminal stage of its attack. This means that missiles will end up being heavy, hard to bring up to speed, large (easy to track and hit) and expensive due to on-board electronics. These are all characteristics you want to avoid when trying to make massive waves of missiles economical, or if jinking through the death zone.

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>>52737730
>Using a Casaba Howitzer warhead solves this conundrum.

>It allows missiles to deal damage from outside the death zone. It also removes the requirement of saving propellant for the terminal stage, or even the necessity of accelerating up to a high velocity intercept. At allows missiles to be lighter and smaller. Depending on the price of the nuclear technology, a few Casaba-Howitzer missiles may be cheaper than multitudes of kinetic impactors.

>Point defense

>The usefulness of a nuclear shaped charge extends further than just being a warhead. As calculated in the Effectiveness section of this post, the particle cones spread quickly, but remain effective at short ranges.


>In a defensive role, a Casaba Howitzer will have to be lightweight and efficient in its use of fissile material. This is because it must be deployed in numbers comparable to the incoming projectiles. Optimizing for efficiency has the consequence of producing a wideR cone.

>This cone can be used to sweep away missiles in the terminal phase. Close enough, it will outright vaporize kinetics. Further away, it can still damage sensors and shatter propellant tanks through impulse shock. The large angle of the cone is advantageous, as it would reduce prevision requirements against jinking missiles, and might even catch several missiles at once.

>Other advantages of using Casaba Howitzers as a point defense is that it can easily be aimed, does not consume power and has infinite firing rate. If you detect missiles coming in, dump your entire payload of defensive drones and have them point at targets. Once they come within range, all can detonate simultaneously.

>This might actually be the preferred tactic, to prevent previous nuclear detonations from interfering with the detonation of subsequent charges. This is a concern if the Casaba Howitzers use fusion fuels that are sensitive to external sources of neutron radiation.

>>52737340
COaDE meta needs high quality beamforming, high efficiency lasers (seriously nothing tops 3% efficiency ingame while we have 40%+ lasers available for combat duties right now), high thrust Orion-like engines, casaba-howitzers and nuclear pumped X-Ray lasers.

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>>52737747
>Example defensive Casaba Howitzer:
100kg, 10kt yield
85% efficiency: 35.56TJ beam
Beam velocity 1000km/s
Beam angle: 10 degrees
Effective range (penetrates 5mm of aluminium): 16km

>This warhead can destroy anything within a 6.15km^2 circle up to 16km away. It reaches targets in less than 16 milliseconds, and unlike a pin-point laser, it affects the entire surface of the target at once.

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>>52737711
Non-sequitor. Your facts are uncoordinated.

MAD was never about either side prizing the survival of the species, it was the fear of personal annihilation. The destruction of everyone else on the Earth was a tertiary concern at best. This would still be a factor during an age of space colonization which would merely expand both the scale of the conflict. As long as that conflict could still have fair odds of destroying all civilizations engaged in warfare MAD applies.

>>52737770
>The ionized particles produced by a Casaba Howitzer can be used to feed a particle accelerator. Unlike a traditional accelerator, its main role is not to accelerate particles closer to the speed of light, but to use magnetic lens to focus the ions into a tightly collimated beam. At the muzzle, the ions are neutralized to reduce bloom using a co-axial electron beam.

>The greatest point of concern is pushing the particles into the accelerator without reducing their velocity. A magnetic 'funnel', much like that of a mass spectrometer, can perform this role.

>The second point of concern is preventing the particles from damaging the particle accelerator. This can be remedied by building the accelerator as a series of widely spaced loops of wire acting as electromagnets. The particle beam is focused in stages, narrowing after each loop.

>The optimal Casaba Howitzer configuration for this weapon is a fusion device that is built to maximize particle velocity. 10000km/s (3% of the speed of light) may be achieved. This is much slower than an electromagnetically-accelerated particle beam weapon, but it has the advantage of requiring little to no external power (the electromagnets can be fed by the heat they receive from the nuclear detonation), massing much less than a regular particle accelerator and able to extend the range of small nuclear pulse weapons to useful distances (in the thousands of kilometers).

>>52737816
>the fear of personal annihilation.

Is existant in any war, thats not particular to nuclear weapons. The fact we could annihilate entire continents and irradiate the soil for a couple years is a much more existential terror.

I could see space colonization giving rise to "proxy wars" between terrestrial powers.

Until a man named Char is born...

>>52737861
>Is existant in any war, thats not particular to nuclear weapons.
That's the point. As a military doctrine MAD isn't necessarily reliant on nuclear war even if the threat of nuclear war is what drove the policy. You could replace nuclear war with genetically engineered biowarfare if that became a very real threat (outside the fear of terrorists). Even then people still talked about smaller scale nuclear conflicts on the Earth. Douglas MacArthur got his ass fired over the suggestion.

So even if space colonies free up the use of nuclear warfare that wouldn't defeat the possibility of MAD.

>>52738068
The entire point of MAD is in the name. MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION. That is, the other side won't attack you with their doomsday weapon because if they do you send your doomsday weapon and you both die. Conventional Warfare has nothing to do with MAD.

Without the risk of complete annihilation in a single strike, MAD loses it's deterrence. You can't assure the destruction of a people spread out across space. At least not with any weapon we can currently conceive of, if you had some kind of, black hole cannon, sure.

>>52738068
That reminds me there was supposedly an idea from the Russians to expose, say, black plague to radiation and propagate lines that manage to survive high exposure. The idea was to follow a nuclear bombardment with bio bombs that would seed an area with radiation resistant plague so when any survivors crawled out of their hidey holes would find their problems only beginning.

>>52727800

This, unironically. The only way space battles will ever be fought IRL. The number of countries that can even afford to have a space program can be counted on one hand, and the ones willing to risk billions of dollars in equipment and manpower (when going into space is dangerous enough as it is) is exactly zero.

Maybe when the Martian Republic declares its independence from the Terran Federation, we might see space battles. Or maybe they'll just tell us Earthlings to fuck off while we sit with our dicks in our hands because they're a million miles away.

>>52737727
Evolution doesn't work that way. Beneficial mutations might not spread across the entire population, the vast majority of all mutations are neutral, genetic drift is an important part of evolution, and harmful mutations might not be deleted. Mutations that don't lead to death or infertility don't almost ever affect the fitness of an individual to any meaningful degree. Evolution has no single goal, instead trending towards local maxima in a fitness landscape (where a supposedly harmful mutation might suddenly beneficial when the environment changes).

Evolution works just fine in modern Human populations. For example, the ApoA-1 Milano protein emerged in Italy in the year 1780 when a male with a beneficial mutation was born, and eventually spread to dozens of his modern day descendants. It efficiently prevents cardiovascular disease and LDL cholesterol related problems, so it's a hugely beneficial mutation in a world with overweight people who eat lots of fatty foods. It's doubtful it's ever going to spread accross all of Humanity. Here's the story of a decade long failed struggle by biomed companies to turn it into a gene therapy treatment, if you're interested. Will they ever get it to work? Possibly some day in the future, perhaps only in engineered babies. Most likely it'll never provide a noticeable fitness advantange, but could be a fun thing to have.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/11/16/the-long-saga-of-apo-a1-milano

>>52738146
>The entire point of MAD is in the name. MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION.
Anon, that's what we've been talking about since the first post that brought it up.

>Without the risk of complete annihilation in a single strike, MAD loses it's deterrence.
I think you mean single conflict. Nuclear warfare would still last through several exchanges. You don't put your nuke launchers in the your major population centers not to protect the people because they'd be targeted anyway, you put them in the sticks and launch them from subs. It isn't about a single flash and everyone is dead, our weapons simply are not that powerful and the radioactive fallout will take time to really put the hurt on. It's that the conflict, however brief, still will not stop until neither side is capable of waging war. A space based conflict would engage in the same. Hell, if the conflict was slow to boil they'd probably have their fleets already poised to destroy the key worlds of the rival empire.

Yes you could have smaller conflicts that wipe out individual worlds, but then we've had the threat of smaller conflicts on Earth too that could destroy entire nations. India vs Pakistan was really scary for awhile and frankly still is, then we have North Korea. Mostly people have resisted small scale nuclear wars after the end of WWII because you never know where the fallout would end up but sure colonies would limit the threat of radiation spreading.

>>52738210
Never underestimate the threat of space warfare. Even taking out an enemy's satellites would risk leaving frightening amounts of debris in orbit that could eventually create a barrier of high velocity shrapnel around the planet. It could turn reaching for the stars into even more of a fever dream for generations without expensive and extremely difficult attempts to clean it up.

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>>52737829
>Missiles carrying nuclear-bomb triggered lasers and particle beams
They use these lots in Peter F Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy (and associated short stories). The main weapon carried by military starships is the Combat Wasp, a drone missile carrying multiple Casaba Howitzers warheads, as well as decoys and other types of warhead. They operate semi-autonomously after launch, since light-speed-delays and human-speed thinking don't make for good bedfellows in space combat, with captains/admirals selecting from preprogramed attack patterns (though they can be updated in flight when necessary).

In combat a ship/fleet will launch waves of Wasps towards the enemy, along with slower accelerating ones for defence. They typically stagger them so that the second wave can make it through the split-second defensive hole created by the fiery destruction of the first wave. A major tactical consideration is how many of each ships limited number of Wasps get put on offence, how many for defence, and how many are kept back in reserve in case something goes wrong (or if you need to fight more than battle).

>>52724035
Watch the Expanse. They have some space battles in season 2.

Essentially, space battles really really suck to be in as a human, and you're probably going to die.

>>52724249
>Most would probably take place in orbit.
>It's easy to assume "realistic" space battles would work kind of like submarine warfare with ships millions of kilometers away from each other firing torpedos. A missile swinging wide of your ship by ten thousand km is an insanely close call.

Ignore this moron.

Missiles can survive higher G forces than humans, which gives them far more mobility. A missile missing by a foot would be a miracle.

>>52738888
But if they have acceleration on their side, missiles lack delta-V, so you can outmaneuver them.

>>52738888
Lucky that there are no methods of missile defense that could disable the missiles' sensors that they need to home in, which would the salvo to miss the target by a large distance.

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This seems like a good enough place to ask, but:

Sci-Fi Fighter planes and mech suits make sense when fighting around space stations and asteroid cities, right?

I want to run a campaign with a single Colony ship and have the attacks happen when resupplying or similar situations. Enemies are looking more for loot or to hijack the ship instead of just blowing them up because they belong to some other group.

>>52739196
>Sci-Fi Fighter planes and mech suits make sense when fighting around space stations and asteroid cities, right?
Not if you're going for muh realism. If you want to use the damned things then use them, it's that simple.

>>52739196
Ignore >>52739238.

Small, fighter-like spacecraft can make sense if that's all the people fighting can afford. However, in this case your fighter would be more like a Coast Guard patrol boat than a F-22 fighter jet. Similarly, a mech could be used as improvised weapons, especially if it's used in a mainly combat engineering role. Just keep in mind that if these people run up against a real military fighting force, they're probably going to be obliterated in short order.

>>52739196
>>52739238
I don't think a small jury-rigged shuttle with an autocannon attached to it is any more unrealistic than a .50 cal mounted on a Toyota Hilux. Of course the Liberation Front of Space Chad could not beat any advanced military in a realistic setting, but could fight a backwater military or terrorize any civilians that didn't have proper military protection.
Heavy construction exoskeletons or mechs could also be repurposed to serve in combat if you're desperate or poor enough.

>>52724035
spamming as many mass driver rounds at the enemy, from as far away as possible, and dumping fake heat signatures (like flare countermeasures). Fighters wouldnt exist because they would get chewed up by an automated defense grid of close range lasers, and rail guns. If they did exist they would be cheap cubes or spheres of the drone variety with propulsion and weapons on all sides. The fight would be decided by which side could fill the void with most on target mass driver rounds. Relatively boring affair. Gets a little more exciting if you bring in shielding though i guess.

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>>52739238
>>52739385
>>52739393
The Human Colony ship is headed through the backwaters of bigger empires and will mostly be dealing with the Shadowrun equivalents of Raiders and Smugglers, so they aren't allowed to have future space/jets either. Plus, one of my players already described his mech as a giant tractor.

>Liberation Front of Space Chad
I found a new enemy for them, thanks.

>>52739196
In a hard science setting, which seems to be the basis of this thread? Short answer is no in 99% of the cases related to high intensity war. As big ships as you can logistically and technologically manage, with a lot of Delta-V, large ammunition store and energy reserves to power large apperture lasers and powerful railguns and coilguns, are the way to go to go someplace and attack it, bringing with them a small officer crew for decision making and on site responsability on the go.

If it can defend from a distance from a given amount of missiles, it will be able to defend against drones who have to trade a part of their efficiency for reusability, fighter spaceships who have to trade efficiency for a pilot, and mech suits who, well, mechs don't make much sense anyway. And with its bigger guns it will be able to reduce your asteroid station from a greater effective distance that your own engagement range.

Which means that you will want to defend yourself with at least equally large apparture lasers, powerful railguns, and stores of missiles. Keep in mind even the densest asteroid belt is mostly empty space, there is no way of hiding behind astertoids and slalom wildly to your target.

Now, why would your colony ship let anything get close to it without slagging it? Is it not single, in hostile space? IF you find a reason far that, then yes, to some extend maybe you could get close with a "pirate ship" looking like a civilian, with camouflaged jury-rigged weapons and carrying assault teams and boarding ships or some thing like that. But then again CIWS and missiles are the way to defend against that, for the same reason modern destroyers don't carry they own catapult launched fighters like WWII battleships.

>>52724035
>Would it be boring for players?
Anything realistic in space would be boring.

>>52739196
Keep in mind, realistic-ish space warfare big ships vs space fighters is not equivalent to modern frigates vs fighter jets, it's modern frigates vs coastal defense boats, on open sea. Won't end well for the boats.

>>52739459
>anything realistic in space in boring
Why would you say something so easily refuted? Did realism rape your mother or something?

>>52739452
The 'Colony' ship, and all the other equipment, is military surplus or civilian equivalent. Would it still make sense for them to have all that equipment you just mentioned? I had ruled that they had a few but very advanced point defense weapons but the big guns were removed since the ship was going to a civilian organization of another species.

Plus, they are headed out by themselves. I did give them some manufacturing abilities, but would those be possible to be built inside the ship itself? They won't have material support from Earth besides some credit transfers to buy supplies at said stations and cities.

>>52739524
I did forget to think about some boat stuff. I have some time, so I'll look up some of their defenses and technology to add to spruce up the setting.


Actually, how well defended are modern ship ports? I could use those as examples.

>>52739452
What if they're civilians or refugees without access to any of that high-tech shit?
What if the best they have is space Technicals and Ripley MkII Exosuits?
Given that >>52739440 says their gonna be fighting enemies with similar tech, it probably works.

That does raise an interesting idea though.
Sure, "realistic" space combat between the major powers might be throwing relativistic rocks at each other, but what about the podunk powers who don't have access to that shit?
Add in a little cold-war-esque manipulation from the larger powers and you've got a fun setting

tl;dr African Bush War IN SPACE!!

>>52738888
>all these 15 year olds who think missiles are an invincible weapon.

bitch become an airforce techie. shit messes up all the time

>>52739545
>Actually, how well defended are modern ship ports? I could use those as examples.


Practically not. Modern doctrine is defense in depth. You don't have to defend your ports when you have a distributed network of sensors patrolling the sea for hundreds of miles around. It's the job of coast guards to control the suspicious ships at sea, maybe a shore based boarding party with a fast boat for intervention at sea. But the time of artillery directly protecting harbors is mostly over in the western world as far as I can tell. Now, in Asia around the South china sea or other highly contested waters, that may still be a thing in some way or another, batteries of shore based missiles at some strategic points, maybe, but i can't be affirmative.

>>52739745
China has anti-ship missiles near their ports.

>>52739586
Above posters here. Definitely, high intensity war is mostly a matter of cold calculations, probabilities, and logistics.

I used to run a hard-SF-ish game, one of my players favorite campaign has been when they crew ended up working a densely poplated area around a superjovian in the goldilock zone of a sun, with dozens of moons colonized, hundreds of space stations and asteroid habitats, and the fights went from multi-kilometers long spaceships throwing superweapons at eachother in the cold of an Oort Cloud, to operating a much smaller patrol ship and having to deal with difficult decision making in a highly evolving orbit with dozens upon dozens of innocent civilian spaceships, smugglers, hidden pirates, custom officials, mercenaries paid by other employers, all operating elbows to elbows without knowing who was who.

>>52739905
>I used to run a hard-SF-ish game, one of my players favorite campaign has been when they crew ended up working a densely poplated area around a superjovian in the goldilock zone of a sun, with dozens of moons colonized, hundreds of space stations and asteroid habitats, and the fights went from multi-kilometers long spaceships throwing superweapons at eachother in the cold of an Oort Cloud, to operating a much smaller patrol ship and having to deal with difficult decision making in a highly evolving orbit with dozens upon dozens of innocent civilian spaceships, smugglers, hidden pirates, custom officials, mercenaries paid by other employers, all operating elbows to elbows without knowing who was who.

dat run-on sentence...

>>52739955
Just take a deep breath before reading.

>>52739955
Now that you point it to me...

>>52739005
>but if they have acceleration on their side, missiles lack acceleration, so you can outmaneuver them
>jackiechanwut.jpeg

>>52740204
Delta-V doesn't measure your instantaneous acceleration, it measures you capacity to change orbit. You mileage rather than your horsepower, if you prefer.

>>52740278
Then your statement makes no sense at all. Missiles operate on the same principles as People Ships, they just don't have to have people slowing them down in every possible way.

>>52740367
And missiles generally need smaller engines and less fuel to do their thing, because they aren't weight down by people, life support systems, etc, etc.

>>52740304
>>52740367
Edited for clarity:

For a given engine technology, making it bigger will trade thrust for delta-V, your propellant reserves grows by the cube with the volume of your tanks, your thrust only grows by the square with surface of the section your thruster.

>>52740395
True. All our rocketry experience up to that point still consider it a good trade: big rockets go further.

>>52740395
Don't confuse power with efficiency.

>>52740446
I'm not. None of what you're saying changes the fundamental truth: missiles are more maneuverable by far than anything that has to carry people in it.

>>52740439
And extremely high delta-V/low isp rockets will beat the inverse as long as they have enough time to maneuver. While low isp missile are just begging to be shot down. So you will want high isp rockets on your missiles, ence an interception capability not too fantastic at longer range.

>>52729741
if you have the massive infrastructure required to wage interstellar or even interplanetary war you wouldn't be wanting for much.

>>52740475
but instantaneous maneuverability is not a valuable metric in anything but the very last second of an engagement. The ability to repeatedely correct course over a long time is, which is not the same thing. Big rockets do that better than small ones. Ence big ship will be able to move out of the way of small missile which will run out of reaction mass.

>>52740535
>instantaneous movement

Whatever level of movement the people ship is doing, the missile will be far more able to correct for it. Again, you have no point.

>>52740535
I should add to this. There is indeed a garanteed kill range were your missile will always beat the evasive capability of a big ship. But the point for the captain of the big ship is not to act like an idiot if he can avoid it and never enter that no escape zone if he can avoid it. If that was the point you were making, though, then yes, there is a limit under it missiles beat big ships.

>>52740568
you simply don't seem to grasp the difference between isp and delta-V.

>>52740535
>>52740568
Think about it this way. Ship A is traveling. Missile B is designed exactly like Ship A in every way, except it doesn't have extra mass from life support systems or people. By the laws of motion, every movement that Ship A makes can be mimicked by Missile B, in a more fuel efficient method,. because there isn't as much mass in Missile B, or Missile B can afford to have more reaction mass than Ship A while still having the same amount of mass.

In either case, the Missile is guaranteed to eventually get the ship. Now scale everything down to an appropriate size for a missile and things get even more efficient and faster.

>>52740621
I'm pretty sure you don't.

Stupid question: why so much talk about missiles or other kinetic weapons over lasers? Sniping ships from millions of kilometers?

>>52740697
It is a very heated debate which boils downs to each individual's feelings about of good lasers will be compared with propulsion systems and have no right answer until we get there.

>>52740639
If your missile has the same mass as ship A, then yes.

>Now scale everything down to an appropriate size for a missile and things get even more efficient and faster.

Not necessarily for the reason cited above about reaction mass stores and thrust who don't evolve linearly. your thrust to mass ratio will rise but burn time will go down faster (square cube against square root) which means your dV will go down. There will be a point were the tradeoff is not worth it.

>>52740851
Your Thrust to Mass ratio will never get worse compared to the ship. How you haven't gotten this, I have no idea.

>>52740884
I agree. I did say your thrust to mass ratio will rise when you scale down. Rise. Do you even take the time to read?

>>52740851
>square cube
dear god... i meant cube root. against square root. Sorry for the typo.

>>52740935
Literally no metric will not favor the missile.

>>52740757
Yeah, I think the most annoying parts of the thread were people raising a stink about what they know about theories as if those theories were gospel. Not to say theories should be discarded, science is fundamentally all about theories, but we're hell and gone from practical applications especially on the scales people are talking about. Who knows if it would work scaled up or if it would even be the most practical option.

It's still a great place to start like the wikipedia entry someone posted >>52726026 which lists a lot of scifi stories. Sure it's applicable, but is it the only solution or even the most interesting? That could be debated. Not sure why people got so emotionally involved in it. There's other choices. Hell, you could do space broadsides, why not? Ships are too fast to accurately target at long range or able to somehow obscure their position (I suppose you could use "buoys" surrounding a ship to send false heat signatures or EM emissions. Or you sensor issues. These kinetic kill vehicles people are talking over light years is fine for long term conflicts if your target is a planet with calculable stellar drift, but a ship is going to be parked in the same location several light years away waiting for your projectile moving 30% of c to reach it. How would you even detect it at that distance? I suppose you could have small spotters in a local enemy system sending target location by ansible (something else people might find too questionable for realistic space even if theoretically it's possible) but they'd still move. If you're close enough to detect it a kinetic kill vehicle is probably ridiculous overkill for a ship. Or you could do ships as command bases for drone swarms which you can use engage a ship at close range while you sit at a safe distance directing the attacks. There's some interesting tactical options there, especially if you want to pick apart a ship's key systems to capture it.

>>52740697
Because near-future lasers at near-future power levels have ranges measured in the tens of thousands of km, not millions.

I like the idea of warfare becoming too horrific that major space powers are too scared to get into a major dustup where even if a planet survives it might have so much debris in orbit as to be virtually cutoff until expensive and dangerous cleanup efforts. At the same time drones have rendered warfare largely sanitary, at least you aren't committing lives as combat troops and the only casualties are whatever civilian centers are being targeted.

So instead governments wage proxy wars, machine on machine violence, until it enters the public psyche and becomes a sort of Olympics. People gleefully watch metallic carnage as governments compete in various scales of warfare designed for bragging rights and proof of who has the superior tactics and technology. And hanging over all of it the veiled threat that these same armies could be unleashed on populated worlds. Maybe Olympics is the wrong notion, it would be more the Colosseum of Rome meet Battle Bots.

>>52724035
The Expanse.

And probably.

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>missiles vs ships

Ships have high ISP, missiles have high thrust. How is this even a thing?

Missiles aren't one stage either. In an interplanetary setting with MW range lasers, they'll inevitably be a bus [possibly dual-stage] carrying a semi-maneuverable swarm of KKVs, of which about 10 per 1 thousand are expected to hit the target.

Hence, constellations of units do the fighting, akin to interlocking, expendable fortresses; while buses shuttle them between planets, similar to railway tracks.

Keep in mind this model assumes nuclear-level buses, with high-MW to low GW lasers and GW to low TW range nuclear rockets. The submunitions are cheap chemical rockets.

>>52742132
I don't think the webm shared earlier sold it very well >>52725123

Maybe it's the lack of context if you haven't watched the series but it's just a mess of effects.

>>52729633
>Fuck you space communists, this is a space Nazi planet
>Come take it over our dead bodies

Is why we would fight over anything in space because based on what we know so far habitable worlds are rare as fuck.

>>52724035
The thing about realistic space combat is that you're looking at huge differences depending on how far in the future you're talking. People mention The Expanse but that's a future where humanity has colonized the Solar System. If you're doing full space opera, however, you're probably looking at higher tech, at least something approaching practical FTL travel which to some people already asks for allowances to reality.

If you're doing just within a solar system you'll probably end up with closer ship-on-ship violence due to limited sensor tech and probably also try to stay away from inhabited planets or stations as much as possible since as others pointed out space debris in orbit can be a nightmare so unless you want a colony dead and don't care about seizing the territory you'll probably fight in the void between planets as much as possible or just fight near a gas giant.

For real world applications, I recall that there was some talk over a decade ago a sort of revival for the Star Wars initiative where instead of laser based they'd have tungsten spikes. The whole "rods from god" approach of dropping these things from satellites and letting gravity pull them in. No guidance systems after release and they'd hit with incredible force. Come to think of it, didn't the GI Joe movie use something like this? I think I caught a few minutes on TV that had something like that. Really, though, it can be pretty scary. Kinetic planet killers are one thing but if you could get an effective long range particle beam weapon in orbit you could basically snipe targets from space. Screw NSA satellites, we're talking full interdiction. People would be scared as shit to commit over crimes out in the open and you could use other assets to provide tracking data within buildings.

Forget planet killers or duplicating the blast that killed the dinosaurs, whoever controls the orbit controls the planet without need of leveling anything. One shot and someone's head is vapor.

>>52724035

Have a look at the game Children of a Dead Earth to get a good grasp on realistic space combat

>>52742653
The moon is the hardest mistress of them all. The only reason we haven't weaponized space beyond intelligence gathering is fear that countries destroying each other's satellites would do the whole debris death field thing. As is there's been efforts to use lasers to blind spy satellites. The Chinese supposedly did that to a US sat awhile back. They also tested an anti-satellite missile in 2007 that received heavy condemnation for the debris risk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test

>>52742653
If you grab a rod, exit the ISS and let go of the rod, it's just going to float along for a while, until the ISS fires its thrusters again to correct its altitude.
You need to push hard for the rod to fall straight.

>>52742801
The satellite doesn't just open up and the rod falls, anon. The satellite provides the initial thrust and vector. It is STILL an aimed weapon but by the satellite pre-release. After that it relies on gravity to pull it in. It doesn't need thrusters or onboard navigation. And you don't need to push all that hard unless you're planning on some kind of space crosswind. Here's a hint, you shouldn't and I'd hope for obvious reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

>>52724249
As a submariner, you have no idea what submarine warfare is like.

>>52742894
You would need a good bit of initial thrust though, wouldn't you? Unless you're planning to have the rod make a bunch of orbits before hitting the target.
You wouldn't need a full suicide burn, but you'd still need to kill most of the horizontal velocity or the rod is just going to continue in its orbit.
Said orbit will degrade of course, but that'd probably take a while.

I guess it all depends on the mass of the rod, and the mass of the thing firing it, and you'd need to account for Newton's third law.

>>52742940
I always found it interesting, and fitting, that a lot of the old scifi stories of space relied on submarines and navy ships for inspiration. Even the old Star Trek had flavors of this you don't really get much of in modern scifi. Of course even then the series Enterprise came closest to this but it was still pretty roomy and the only episode I can recall where hot bunking was an issue was when the crew had to live in the warp nacelles due to, I don't know, a radiative nebula or weird space storm or some shit.

I guess Hollywood can't be blamed too much for leaning away from this, it would be a bit awkward filming everything as if it were realistically in a cramped metal sausage.

>>52743054
Not as much as you might think and more to move the sheer weight of the thing. You'd just need to be VERY careful with the math and making sure you launch it at the right time and the right velocity to ensure that reaches the reentry you want and hits the intended target. After the initial push gravity provides acceleration for you and it's only as the rod enters thicker atmosphere that it decelerates to terminal velocity.

The process is described simply enough in the wikipedia link without a lot of pesky math, however since it's a weapons system that's been considered since the Cold War it's gotten some rigorous study and you can find more detailed write-ups via google if you're inclined. One of the reasons it's gotten interest is because there are treaties against WMDs in space but this is a kinetic delivery system, basically a gravity bullet. The reason I don't think we've ever seen it is countries have been wise enough not to want to weaponize space too much and honestly terrestrial weapons systems up to ICBMs are more practical and cost effective. Getting anything up into space is risky and costly and those rods wouldn't be light by any stretch of the imagination.

>>52743184
>countries have been wise enough not to want to weaponize space

Weaponizing space escalates exponentially, as Brilliant Pebbles + crowded orbitals = a total shitshow for everyone, including the aggressor.

>>52743184
It's amusing in a sardonic way that even though these rods are considered hard to defend against, and you could do something similar with an atomic warhead with a very thick heat shield to make certain it survives entry, the prevailing military attitude was basically, "Fuck it, if the Cold War goes hot we'll be throwing enough missiles at each other nobody could stop them all." Even modern missile defense struggles against conventional weapons so they made the right call.

And Star Wars was supposedly a phantom project to trick the Soviets into beggaring themselves trying to keep up with fictional aspects of the arms race, but who knows how much of that is just history told by the victors. Contentions and prone to starting arguments.

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>>52742894
Those kinds of rods can't just be gently released, they have to drop pretty much straight down to have accuracy comparable to guided missiles. If they deorbit at a low angle and spend hours or days orbiting in the atmosphere before falling to the ground, they won't land anywhere near the target due to effects like differences in atmospheric density. Here's a picture of the Mir reentry: it took a couple of hours, and its debris impacted a wide area.

Your own link says that the strike would happen within minutes. This requires a vector in the direction opposite to the satellite's, which at LEO has a velocity of about 8 km/s, which will make the rods fall pretty much straight down after the boost. Either that change in velocity comes from thrusters the rods have, or your satellite has guns that can accelerate tungsten to 8 km/s (far from a gently release), or the satellite itself performs the acceleration with the rods still aboard, releases them and falls down along with them (making the expensive satellite not reusable).

>>52743253
One could argue it is an inevitability, I mean if we survive that long of course! At the very least you'd do so defensively, weapons aimed outward, to ensure nobody else in your star system can. You don't want anyone setting up to your doorstep, right? Though that would, I guess, depend on how effective you could do land based weapons systems like, what?, giant particle cannons?

I don't know, it's hard to think about this kind of thing seriously because while it IS freaky to think about it's actually more depressing know that we're taking such ridiculous babysteps we'll all probably be dead long before this becomes an issue. But you never can tell about the future, right? Things could change and change fast.

>>52724035
It depends how fast ships are and how easy it is to stop them from just leaving.

Take EvE Online for example. In game, ships have a limited targeting range. It used to max out at 250km, but now it ranges from ~30km to a few thousand km.

Guns are turret-mounted and computer-controlled. Missiles and drones are also used.

"Tackle" modules can stop ships from warping off, or slow them down. They range from 8km to 50km depending on the ship and module. There's also warp disruption bubbles that vary in radius.

Frigates can move about 3km/s to 15km/s. Battleships go 100 m/s to 1km/s. Pretty slow, but all ships have infinite fuel.

So what does this create? Fights tend to center around chokepoints and strategically critical areas; mostly star gates and space stations.

Individual pilots need to manage their modules and fly the ship to either decrease relative transverse velocity (helping guns target) or increase (hurt enemy targeting). Positioning is especially critical. Don't get caught, but keep the hostile tackled.

Fleets tend to use bubbles or massed fast-tackle frigates (or a few long range heavy tacklers) to hold down opponents.

Shields and armor can both be repaired remotely by logi ships. 30-80km range. Range from frigate to capital ship size.

Really, it's all about positioning. Be in range to maximize damage. Keep your logi safe. Accomplish your objective.

>>52743433
Why do you keep assuming it's gentle? What about any of this suggested gentleness was even remotely implied?

It feels like you latched onto the idea that they don't have their own guidance systems and for some reason assumed there was never any attempt to direct or initially push them.

>>52743433
Deorbiting such as with MIR are very different from what we're talking about. It was deorbited with the intent to burn up as much of it as possible by extending a reentry that kept it burning in atmosphere as long as possible, though even then we knew beforehand some of it would survive. You're looking at a VERY different process to what the weapon system is using, albeit with the same basic intent to be able to project where any surviving pieces will land to minimize collateral damage.

This weapon system isn't doing that. It's going in steep and it's meant to survive the heat friction and still retain enough mass to provide a punch where it hits. That's one if not the primary reason they don't bother with onboard systems and it's just a solid tungsten mass. Systems probably wouldn't survive. Hell, a warhead might not survive and detonate early. So you don't bother with either and just rely on pure force.

>>52743433
Something you have to remember about space is we have to fight to keep things from falling back to the Earth. If you want stable orbit you're talking the Lagrange point. Everything closer needs thrusters to maintain orbit. If you shove a mass directly at the planet as opposed to an angled reentry path gravity is going to be tugging on that sonnovabitch like a whole who needs this payday for her next fix.

>>52743460
I assumed it was a gentle release because you, or someone on your side of the argument, said "
>And you don't need to push all that hard unless you're planning on some kind of space crosswind".
You do need to push very hard to fall in a steep angle. The atmospheric effects do include crosswind as part of a multitude of reasons it's best to fall down within a few minutes if you want to land accurately. Modern designs for railguns only have muzzle velocities of 3 km/s, and you need a release the rods two or three times faster.

>>52743561
A steep descent requires a quick deceleration in the opposite direction. You either need thrusters on the rods or a big fucking space gun, that's my only gripe with you guys. Kinetic impactors without guidance systems work just fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
>In order for a rod to fall straight toward the center of Earth it would need to be launched away from the station with a tangential velocity equal in magnitude and opposite in direction from the orbiting station. This velocity would be in the range of approximately 7–8 km/s for satellites in low earth orbit.

>>52743762
>I assumed it was a gentle release because you, or someone on your side of the argument, said
Then you clearly misunderstood. You don't need to push all that hard because gravity will be doing all the work. See? It doesn't need boosters because the acceleration is gravity. It accelerates to the point that any crosswinds are going to be minimized by its speed. This will give only relatively slight deviations from the target zone. The far bigger atmospheric effect is from deceleration due to air friction.

This sucker is going to come in hot and it's going to hurt.

You're also a tad late with that wikipedia link which was already posted for you up above.

>>52743933
>You don't need to push all that hard because gravity will be doing all the work
Well, not all the work but certainly the lion's share.

>>52743762
>A steep descent requires a quick deceleration in the opposite direction.
What the fuck. You do realize the other end is the ground, right? The only deceleration it will get is air friction, same as the chunk of rock that killed the dinos.

This is NOT hard, anon, it's barely rocket science. It's the ultimate fire and forget weapon because once you launch it it's coming down. The trick is in timing and making sure you get the proper initial trust which will, as you've managed to surmise, the key to how long it takes to hit.

The thread basically began arguing about the physics of kinetic kill vehicles traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, now we're arguing about the extremely basic physics of kinetic kill vehicles moving by the acceleration of gravity, i.e. falling. The thread feels like it's gone full retard circle before autosage claims it.

>>52744112
>rods fall, everybody dies
Realistic space combat at its finest.

>>52743933
>>52744052
You need to cancel the rod's orbital velocity first, otherise they will just keep orbiting! Soyuz capsules, for example, perform a deorbit burn that lasts over 4 minutes to reduce their orbital velocity. I'll try to again explain this extremely simple concent of orbital mechanics.

Let's take the extreme, optimal trajectory, falling pretty much straight down towards the target. The rods are moving at 8 km/s along with the station in orbit. Their velocity needs to be perfectly cancelled so that they'll momentary be still in space for the steepest possible angle, which requires a 8 km/s boost in the direction opposite to where the station and the rods are moving. Gravity will accelerate the rod straight downwards after that.

The other extreme would be something like a Canadarm on the ISS gently releasing a tungsten rod, which will have the same orbit as the station, save a few m/s difference in velocity. It will take years for the rod to deorbit, so this doesn't work as a weapon.

If the tungsten rod is fired at 1 km/s, it'll still have a 7 km/s orbital velocity, get a slightly elliptical orbit that won't cross the surface of the Earth, and will slowly deorbit over weeks as friction with the upper atmosphere slowly lowers the perigee, untl the rod eventually hits the ground.

If you use to railgun to fire the rod at 3 km/s, it'll still have 5 km/s of its initial velocity left. The orbit will be highly elliptical, and will probably result in the rod's reentry within a few orbits as it'll hit the denser parts of the atmosphere, but that takes hours. This will result in a still very inaccurate strike.

So either the rods need thrusters capable of a close to 8 km/s delta-v manouver, or the station needs to be able to fire them at a similar muzzle velocity.

Does that make it any clearer? If you're still having trouble, I suggest playing either Orbiter or Kerbal Space Program as they both illustrate that you need a deorbit burn.

>>52744450
>You need to cancel the rod's orbital velocity first
You don't have to cancel it, anon, you just have to ACCOUNT for it in your drop to achieve better accuracy. If you absolutely need to fire it from a "still" point you can have the satellite's thrusters achieve geostationary orbit relative to the target.

If you're still having trouble I suggest looking up "falling" in the dictionary. When you think you have the basic concept try wikipedia for some more advanced yet probably suspect reading. Your homework tonight is to jump ten times and write your observations on what happens.

>>52744665
That still doesn't work. Not only do you need even more propellant to move a satellite to a height of 36,000 km above the equator, the satellite won't be still in one location: it'll have a orbital velocity of 3 km/s that needs to be nullified, and have a round orbit around the Earth.

Once the rods get that final 3 km/s push in the direction opposite of the station's orbit (eg by firing the railgun, or a 3km/s delta-v burn), they'll stop moving, and begin immediatelly accelerating towards the Earth as gravity pulls them straight downwards.

If any geostationary satellite releases an object without cancelling that 3km/s of velocity, it won't fall down, but will keep orbiting along with the satellite.

>>52744450
It's a tungsten rod. They aren't trying to get it down safely, they're ramming it. You aren't worried about it surviving because it's a weapon system.

This is really basic shit that's been fairly well covered by military studies. Don't take some random anon's word for it on 4chummer, look it up for yourself.

>>52724035

It would be long range projectile lobbing that would have to abuse gravitational pull of local space bodies.

It would depend heavily on accuracy and avoiding to get hit since at those velocities armor would be incapable.

>>52744665
Let's try this out and see if your overtaxed brain doesn't explode. They probably wouldn't bother with geostationary because, get this, it's not necessary. You don't drop the weapon directly over your target, you LEAD the target same way a pilot would, only from much higher up. You drop the weapon so that by the time it's calculated to reach the surface the rotation of the planet will have brought the target to you. Still this is going to happen fast, it's not going to take years to drop as you for some reason now surmise despite supposedly reading the wikipedia article. You account for the relative momentum of the satellite, the weapon, the target, the effect of gravity, air friction, but when all is said and done this is a fancy way of just dropping something and make sure it hits what you want it to hit.

>>52744837
If you provided an initial force downwards on the rod without cancelling it's orbital motion it absolutely would still fall down. Once you have gone past the Lagrange point, even if it still has orbital momentum, it will have whatever force you applied to it directly towards the earth plus it's orbital velocity plus acceleration due to gravity. All it means instead of a straight down path, you get a parabola which is easy enough to calculate. Once you are in atmosphere all you need is a few fucking tiny little fins to compensate for wind and other factors to keep it on target. It's just a matter of maths. Once the price per kilo of transporting shit into space drops due to reusable vehicles or orbital loops or space elevators or whatever, there's will be fuckloads of these things in orbit faster than you can blink.

The only limiting factor at the moment is the cost of shipping a fuckload of heavy ass tungsten into orbit.

>>52744943
>The only limiting factor at the moment is the cost of shipping a fuckload of heavy ass tungsten into orbit.

They'd probably have done it if it weren't still cheaper to just fire a shitload of missiles to overwhelm local efforts to shoot them down. Hell I bet the military still looked into funding.

>>52744943
I think I read somewhere that instead of a more cylindrical body like a rocket or missile they would more likely use spikes.

>>52744978
I think orbital weapons are against the geneva accords

>>52737139
surface to space weapons are just not going to work. A power in orbit is going to have more or less absolute dominion over the ground. Any attempted surface to space launches would be very easy to detect, and avoid/intercept, not to mention the launches being highly impractical in the first place. meanwhile you can just rod the surface from high orbit. if a forgen power seiges your planet, the only way your taking it back is by sending a force at them to to battle in space.

>>52745037
WMDs are, which is frankly a shame since that's the major roadblock to nuclear propulsion. Nuclear, bio, chemical are prohibited. Whether or not de-orbiting masses with intent to strike an object in a military fashion is covered, well, probably not? Sub-orbital at least is allowable for military purposes and while I realize there's a significant difference I don't think any treaty has prohibited it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely glad we've never done it! It's expensive, unnecessary, and weaponizing space would be a new kind of arms race that would lead to problems. You don't want a payload of rods designed to withstand reentry heat exploding on takeoff and coming down over god knows what, or the satellite getting's thrusters malfunctioning. Or someone just shooting the damn thing down!

>>52745037
Not directly afaik, but there is a part of the Convention (which is not the same thing as the Geneva Accords, by the way, that was a 1954 peace agreements about the Indochina war iirc) about unecessary destruction of property with no justification by military necessity, and unhumane killing of person protected by the Convention. So depending how they are used, they may or may not fall under it, assuming anyone will give the slightest fuck of the Convention in a scenario that justifies the uses of Rods of God.

There is however indeed a point in USA-Russia nuclear non proliferation treaties about the interdiction of nukes based in space, which might be what you're thinking of.

>>52737340
I just love how the ships' designs evolved in a few months.

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>>52744843
Again, what part of the following description of a deorbit burn do you find hard to understand?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
>In order for a rod to fall straight toward the center of Earth it would need to be launched away from the station with a tangential velocity equal in magnitude and opposite in direction from the orbiting station. This velocity would be in the range of approximately 7–8 km/s for satellites in low earth orbit.

And what method would you use to cause such a large change in velocity, if not a thruster or a gun? Magic? Keep in mind that for a steep angle to be possible, the change in velocity needs to happen within minutes. Here's Project Thor's description as a reminder:
>The time between deorbit and impact would only be a few minutes

>>52744943
>If you provided an initial force downwards on the rod without cancelling it's orbital motion it absolutely would still fall down
How do you provide this large "initial force", if you want to get a steep angled trajectory that crosses the surface of the Earth within minutes (instead of just getting an elliptical orbit with a small angle of descent, that requires a long time to impact)? With some kind of a thruster attached to the rod that accelerates it? Or maybe a gun that fires the tungsten rod at multiple km/s?

>>52745486
You keep reposting a link given to you to read which you still clearly don't understand, especially since you're referencing an unsourced part talking about a goddamn GI Joe movie. Even then you don't seem to understand the part about "low earth orbit" which, btw, would NOT be the ISS.

>A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with an altitude between 160 kilometers (99 mi) (orbital period of about 88 minutes), and 2,000 kilometers (1,200 mi) (about 127 minutes). Objects below approximately 160 kilometers (99 mi) will experience very rapid orbital decay and altitude loss.

Note the rapid orbital decay and loss once you push an object below LEO. Even by your own words of "a gun" you clearly can perceive hat the rod wouldn't need a personal thruster but could otherwise be launched by the satellite itself.

>>52745632
Whoops,

>NOT need be the ISS

No sense weaponizing the goddamn International Space Station.

>>52736873
>There's nothing on planets you can't get elsewhere, tard.
Other than living space, or real estate as some call it.
>You probably have a (relatively) few people on Virtual Reality servers with an AI that is in charge of sustaining the VR indefinitely.
That sounds horrible. VR Verboten.
>Because your idea of civilization is embarrassingly narrow.
I prefer precise.
>And far enough into the future there IS NO "why is it allowed"
There is when people like me are in charge.
> it goes back to evolution and the question becomes "does this out-compete the ones who don't, letting them survive longer?"
It doesn't, and who would want to live such a rank imitation of Brave New World?
>People have changed
No they haven't, we still doing the same things and arguing over the same things since Sumer laid down the first stones.
>unless you still think we're still the non-tool using apes we were millions of years ago.
Well those aren't people now are they?
>Judges say no to genetic engineering? Who, why and where?
My judges, because man should not meddle with what they don't understand, and in my hypothetical future.
>What is their jurisdiction?
The law.
>What happens if a child is already genetic engineered?
Those who did the engineering and those who ordered it are punished. The child is taken into government care to be studied.
>What about the parents, do we execute them?
Maybe.
>Do we sterilize them ( whoops, that probably involves genetic engineering too )?
Perhaps to a degree but at least we know what scalpels and forceps do to human flesh.
>Execute them?
Twice? Now there's an idea.
>Modern humans WILL die out
One day maybe, but certainly not the date you think.
>And I'm saying it will happen shortly after genetic engineering reaches a certain level.
At the rate it's going, such things will not be allowed.
>Humans aren't special.
The only intelligent being this planet has ever produced and in the known universe, sounds pretty special to me.

>>52745701
>Modern humans will not be able to compete with Humanity 2.0, much less the Humanity 3.0 and so on that Humanity 2.0 will lead to.
If you say so, I'm declaring a preemptive strike, no GE, No 2.0. Accept for the natural pattern which won't matter. Problem solved.

>>52745701
>The child is taken into government care to be studied.
And here you bitch about him supporting some Brave New World kind of shit. And don't get me started on sterilizing people.

>There is when people like me are in charge.
Thankfully you're not.

>>52737660
>Genetic engineering will lead (and already has lead) to wonderful advances in the study of medicine
While I agree I would also like to point out it's also causing new problems, the curious rise in soy allergies wherever Monsanto puts down roots comes to mind.

>>52737711
>leaving earth defangs MAD
Implying it wasn't pointless to begin with, they were just cowards.

>>52745753
>the curious rise in soy allergies wherever Monsanto puts down roots comes to mind.
Uh? Genuinely curious. Any link? And please, something peer-reviewed, not from wearegainstmonsatan.org or some other bullshit website.

>>52739196
>Yeah sure.

>>52740697
Turns out lasers suck.
The most powerful made was just used as a glorified laser pointer (blinding the cameras on a spy satellite) and the ship borne ones we have now are probably going to be the next gen CIWS (in fact I thing the convoy Trump sent to NK had an experimental one on board and we zappd those missiles).

>>52737093
Designing an automated navigation system, as bullshit as that would be, is still less bullshit than a space ship that's 4/5 life support.

>>52745897
Using lasers as CIWS is exactly the opposite of "suck" in my mind.