Space Ship Weapons

>>55147254

Project Rho is a good first stop for these questions.

>>55147279
>Project Rho
>Metal tubes in space

Hate this, Like feathers on a T-Rex.

>>55147279
Thanks for that, I guess it more or less supports my thinking. Although my scifi isn't nearly as hard (c'mon, those ships are lame).

smaller and/or civilian ships can not have access to advanced point defense systems so escort carriers and missiles can still be used to both protect them and by pirates or smaller factions. This can also let us use carriers as command vessels or flagships.

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Thanks for all the useful feedback!

Now on to ranks. I was thinkings something like this except without the weird red and white stripes, vice commander senior grade being changed to just commander, vice commander being called sub-commander, and having an additional rank of captain.

>>55147628
Also, instead of the enlisted titled there I have my own ranking structure

Apprentice
Junior Rating
Rating
Senior Rating

Junior Petty Officer
Petty Officer
Senior Petty Officer
Chief Petty Officer

Warrant Officer
Senior Warrant Officer
Chief/Master Warrant Officer (can't decide)

>>55147254
Ranks are fine. As to ship weapons: consider that even a very small object can be given the energy of a very large bomb if you can accelerate it to relativistic speed. One other aspect to this that many do not consider however, is that it is foolish to fire just one projectile.
Railgun shotguns, firing inert but dense materials could be reasonably sure of hitting a ship in a specific region of space, whereas a laser or single projectile could be easily dodged simply by randomizing acceleration. With only single target weapons, the optimum ship is as small, fast and stealthy as possible, with a weapon just large enough to get the job done: spot the target first, and the first shot will always kill. If you are detected, just start dodging and they'll never hit you. With wider range weapons, the balance swings more toward static defenses; large slow ships that can carry a lot of mass for the railguns. These ships will blanket the space they suspect the enemy to be in, without necessarily needing a concrete target lock. Two capital ships like this would result in a long brutal punching match.
One note about missiles: really good future missiles will be more like AI driven mines (I suspect) and will be constantly balancing acceleration and stealth. If they can push themselves up near C, then all the victim would see is an image dopplered far above the visual spectrum; sensors would have to be adjusted to look for a missile at anything from visual emissions all the way up past ultraviolet. Also, the defenses would have to look for missiles that absorb radar, have photoreactive shells, may be on ballistic trajectories etc.
Bottom line with missiles is that it is impractical to rule out ALL missiles; really fast or really sneaky ones can be a threat to any defense system.


TLDR at long range, you can even dodge a laser. Relativistic shotguns turns ship warfare into a numbers game rather than a sniper dual.

>>55147254

Grape shot. Grape shot should be a thing for space ship combat. Pump the area they are going to be going through full of tons of ball bearings and watch as they plow into them at x percent of the speed of light. See how much punishment their shields can take before they fail and those ball bearings tear through their ship and make it into swiss cheese.

>>55147254

I'd point out at the speeds that space craft would be traveling it would be unreasonable for there to be human pilots. Human commanders certainly, human officers and human crew members to keep things running, but human reflexes wouldn't be good enough to react in time when ships went at each other at even .2 of C.

Speaking of mass driver ships, i got a cool (probably not very practical but fuck it) idea.
Let's say you are battling aliens and have to make a devastating first strike against an alien fleet.
You know what point they are going to warp out of (due to techno magic) and you cant lay mines there or pre-set any obstacles either (due to technobabble, plasmabubble that disintegrates matter at warp out point).
So you do the next best thing, you calculate how long it will take for them to warp out and during this time you move your fleet to another position in the solar system.
From this point you fire your mass drivers at the location where the enemies will be in X amount of time, timing your shot so that they are outside the warp bubble when the aliens dewarp but will soon after that impact with them.
After this, you perform several micro jumps within the system, positioning yourself near the area where the mass rounds will fly by you, then as they fly by you, you fire a second salvo and now there are twice as many mass rounds flying in close proximity towards same goal.
Repeat this as many times as you have time/want.
Watch as enemy fleet dewarps and gets hammered from all sides by a literal wall of mass rounds that hit simultaneously.

>>55147254
Honestly, space weaponry is an oxymoron. Not to go on forever about how space wars would never happen but ultimately in space where there is no cover, range is king (assuming FTL weaponry). Say the railguns are used as long range hull busters. Railguns cannot be scaled down due to absurd recoil and huge portions of your ship are used as a recoil sink or whatever. The 'slug' is fired with such speed and density that onboard weapon defense systems cannot stop the projectile. They know for a fact it's coming but by the time you know, how the fuck do you stop that in time?

Only the biggest ships have railguns. Big ships counter big ships due to the inherent problems with maneuvering large bodies. There is no real way for large ships to quickly maneuver themselves out of the path of fire from any weapon thus, armor up to invulnerable status. This means large ships are actually EVEN LARGER due to the insane amount of defense is necessary. This means they are practically only vulnerable to railgun systems and internal sabotage or micro-ships/drones finding cracks in the hull to exploit.

Since these large ships are only breakable by obscene weapons like railguns, they also started carrying railguns (a technology that is typically overkill and inefficient).

Smaller ships still have a purpose. They are agile and can simply avoid the shot of a railgun that takes a relatively long time to charge, aim and fire. Smaller ships can also be used to raid, dump drones, etc. Large scale fleet battles typically see large ships firing railguns at each other trying to puncture their massive hulls while smaller ships run sabotage missions, attempt a boarding missions into 'cracked' ships or usually do the killing blow. A railgun will crack the outer layer but smaller ships can get into the crack and blow it up from the inside (Usually by spinning which is a cool trick or having a one-in-a-million shot).

Sound ok?

>>55147628

Kill all the overwrought bullshit. If you can't read it handing upside down in a utility closet, the insignia are too complicated.

The loops and red bars are fine, the diagonal bullshit and all the fucking swords are garbage.

Bars and Stars gentlemen.

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>>55147254
>Is that a good enough justification?
Yes.

>How can I stick to it and still justify the use of strikecraft and missiles?
Strikecraft are suited for an unique mission: go within the target's ECM field which prevents unmanned systems and electronic targeting and fire a nuclear blaster as crudely as WW2 fighters used rockets. Said cannon is actually a kind of one-shot shaped charge which narrows the explosion forward enough that it becomes a nuclear-powered energy shotgun. It usually isn't enough to breach the hull or cripple a capital ship, but it strips vulnerable systems off the enemy hull, like the laser point defense, cameras etc.

Then the missiles become effective against big targets. But they usually work against strike craft which can't pack all the countermeasures and respective power plant.

>>55147254
>(c'mon, those ships are lame)
When did blowing up nuclear bombs to go up became lame? And nuclear-pumped x-ray lasers? I based the above on reading the site.

>>55149989
>i don't understand the difference between velocity and acceleration, the post

>>55147254
Rail gun rounds are cheap, they're just forged/cnc designed metal chunks

Missiles are expensive and require possibly volitile fuel and guidence chips

Missiles can still be used but could be more secilized payloads like em countermeasures, self replicating WiFi viruses, attachable tracking rounds, or sensor rounds for quicker shot recalculation

Strike craft could be more for interdiction, ground support and work in orbits or around asteroids or other orbital installations. Also laying mines and sensor nets

>>55150565
I was going to replace the swords with simple lines for each rank. Ratings get white lines, petty officers get red lines and warrant officers get gold lines.

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>>55147254

I'm working with the same concept, and I must say, there isn't much TO explain. A fuckhuge mass driver is a good idea in space warfare, but there is no way in hell you can make it turret mounted unless you have magical super-small and super-effective conductors for power and heat. And even if you do, you must remember that recoil is a thing, and is generally bad news bears for a spacecraft if it happens off-thrust-axis.

>How can I stick to it and still justify the use of strikecraft and missiles?

Strike craft should be like gunships: multi-crew, short-ranged fire support used for tasks that are too much even for a corvette (like running anti-smuggler patrols around a space colony) or zerg rush the enemy and overwhelm their offensive and/or defensive capabilities.

Missiles should be more like automated mines. They are launched into an area where they then become dormant (pretty much undetectable), only activating when an enemy ship passes in close vicinity. They are used to deny advantageous positions and lock down certain movement vectors. They can be used for direct attack normally, but it is considered a rather desperate act (for example when you have too much waste heat to fire the mass drivers).

>>55150642
>When did blowing up nuclear bombs to go up became lame?

When you realize that the Orion drive only looks good on paper, but is utterly retarded otherwise.

>>55147628

One thing I'm thinking about is a Space Navy that has an organic composition instead of a hierarchic one. There are no ranks or similar distinctions, the whole thing runs kinda like a huge family. You have a commander at each level (ship/squadron/task force/fleet) whose orders are absolute, but otherwise, you are on your own. Stick to your business, try to be productive and not disruptive, the rest is largely meaningless. There is only so much you can do on a spaceship, after all.

>>55147254
I think the ranges of space combat more or less require spinal mounted weapons.

If a battleship is just a mobile armored gun emplacement, and space is really big, then you want the biggest gun possible to engage targets at the longest range possible, which means building the ship around the gun. If you want more guns, bring more ships. A ship with turrets firing in a broadside doesn't make as much sense when you don't have to worry about stabilizing the guns against the waves anymore, and at the most likely ranges in space, it will always be easier to just point the whole ship at the target.

As for missiles, even a missile will benefit from being launched by a large spinal mass driver. The only weapons that don't make sense to spinal mount are lasers (which have to be wide rather than long) and point defenses (which will engage at closer range)

So the ideal space battleship is a long pointy thing with a single spinal mounted gun that may or may not launch missiles, and a secondary battery of some sort of turret mounted point defenses.

A space destroyer would be a smaller ship with a point defense weapon in a smaller spinal mount (it can rotate much faster effectively making it a mobile turret) There may or may not also be cruisers with a greater focus on turret based weapons, but they will be kept away from the front lines of any serious engagement. Their job is to lead squadrons of destroyers, escort battleships, and patrol places where battleships are not expected to be a problem.

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Specialized missiles
sensor disruption, FTL drive inhibitors, Micro warp missiles that are long range and make tiny FTL jumps to avoid countermeasures.

>>55147254
>spinal mounted

sounds painful

>>55153632
That would be an interesting system for a clan based faction or for space nomads but I don't see how it would work in a professional volunteer navy.

Also, I am boring and stick to the Space Navy tropes as close as possible for my main faction.

>>55153809
Didn't even know they bothered with flagships seeing as how expandable ships seem to be in LoGH.

>>55153701
>Spinal mounted point defense

wat?

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>>55154546
And in Alliance side most of their flagships are made from same pattern.
In the empire on the other hand they got enough money to build a specialized personal flagship for the admiral in question.

>>55154672
Why do they all employ 19th century Napoleonic infantry tactics in space? There doesn't seem to be any maneuvering at all, they just all get in a clump and shoot at each-other.

>>55150410
> They know for a fact it's coming but by the time you know, how the fuck do you stop that in time?

Dont stop, evade. Space is big, and near misses offer no rewards. If they are aiming across your flight path, almost any deviation will result in a miss.

This effectively shortens the nigh-infinite actual range of your weapons to the effective kill range of where an enemy ship realistically has trouble evading the shot in time. Your slug can be moving at 99% lightspeed, but if your target is 3 light days away they have plenty of time to move the few dozen meters in any direction required to save themselves. They might even do it incidently before they know you fired.

>>55154546
It's been a while since I watched the series, but in the books they do go on about how Yang's flagship is a cruiser (the Hyperion) instead of a battleship like the rest of the fleet flagships.

>>55155081
You mean the "wall of battle"? Since they've concentrated all weapons in the bow, it's the only formation needed.

If you mean fleet manoeuvres, they don't always use the "thrust forward and bang away" one. Good admirals do stuff like encircle the enemy, and the great admirals remember that space is 3D and form their fleets into doughnuts or spheres on occasion.

>>55152507
>Rail gun rounds are cheap, they're just forged/cnc designed metal chunks
Actually not metal chunks. They are probably plastic or some other radar transparent material in a metal casing. After acceleration projectile sheds the casing and becomes really hard to find in any reasonable timeframe.

>>55153473
>They are launched into an area where they then become dormant (pretty much undetectable)

Unless there are some other space objects in this area they will be very much detectable. They may be detected only as space rocks but military vessels would definitely hit them with a laser just to be sure.

You need some big asteroids to hide them properly.

>>55155081
>Why do they all employ 19th century Napoleonic infantry tactics in space?

They lose communication if they stray to far from one another or don't have ships relaying commands due to the powerful ECM both sides use. The ships also have their armament in the bow of the ship so you need to keep that end pointed at the enemy.

>>55154400
>
for you

>>55154597
The destroyer is much smaller than the battleship, and can rotate much faster. It turns to face any incoming threats and shoots them down before they arrive.

This counts as point defense because it can only defend against attacks that are approaching the destroyer, or a ship the destroyer is in formation with. Essentially the entire ship is just one giant mobile CIWS to protect the giant mobile gun.

Some people might prefer to call this thing a "fighter" but fighters imply that it will be going on longer ranged missions away from the mothership. Fighters don't normally hold tight formation with the ships they are escorting. The destroyer has a much higher rotation speed than the battleship, but has roughly the same acceleration and endurance. Perhaps even less if it relies on the battleship as a mothership. In an emergency the Battleship might leave it's escorts behind as a screen as it escapes from danger. It's much more valuable.

>>55154672
The empire flagships were all prototypes for the next generation of mass produced battleship that was determined to be too expensive for mass production.

The Empire makes lots of prototypes like this because they have a much higher RnD budget than the Alliance. The fact that there are a bunch of Foppish admirals who all want fancy ships is just a bonus.

Realistically, missiles are better than guns in space. You get more velocity from a minute of pushing with a rocket than you can possibly hope to with a fraction of a second of magnetic acceleration. If you can make the railgun projectile impossible to destroy, you can do the same to the final stage of the missile.

Best design is probably a tube of frozen propellant (probably good old water) feeding into a fission engine (usually nuclear engines are problematic due to the difficulty of maintenance and refuelling, but for a missile you don't care), so you don't need to bother with jettisoning fuel tanks (the fuel is it's own tank; no need to worry about it subliming into space since it isn't going to exist for long enough) or armouring the thing (it's also effectively ablative armour). The propellant is melted then turned into steam by the engine and jetted out the back. When the propellant is used up, the engine blows up, the fragments forming an effective warhead of tiny, incredibly fast projectiles (much of them made of very dense, radioactive, molten metal which will punch through any armour, be almost impossible to deflect with energy weapons and fuck up basically anything they hit).

>>55155708
Well that too.
I just love it how in the show they managed to show with this sorta little things the difference between the two nations monetary situation.
Alliance would mass produce, standardize and spartanize things like hell while Imperials would be running in corridors with long red carpets, wood and bronze paneling and sit on fancy leather seats on a bridge that has corinthian pillars for no reason other than aesthetics.

>>55147339
They don't HAVE to be tubes. They just need to have the engines on the 'bottom' and everything built 'on top' of the engines. Tubes are just easy and cheap. Children of a Dead Earth demonstrates pretty handily why tubes and cylinder armor are actually the worst despite it being the default due more to programming limits than any real science.

>>55147254
Right now, the most devastating weapon in Children of a Dead Earth is a KKV missile launched by a kind of ok railgun. It has an insane range and accuracy and uses the insane range of a green laser as a range finder so the game's system doesn't default to the railgun range and put engagements too close.

At more than 100km out this thing launches missiles at a pretty good speed making them decent projectiles as they are, then they keep getting faster and can course adjust on the way in. Most laser point defense only manage to heat a few of them up before the rest in a salvo catch up and obliterate the intended target. After anywhere from 5 - 20 hits the target is obliterated, and there are still about a hundred shots in the sky that due to being missiles can re-target somewhat.

>>55150410
>Big armored railgun-blasters and small nimble missile frigates
I like this, but then it seems like you've got two classes of ships that aren't designed to fight each other. What happens if a commander decides not to use big ships, for example?
Also, what stops railguns from getting smaller?

>>55156519
>what stops railguns from getting smaller

The longer the barrel, the higher the velocity of the shot. The higher the velocity (and the heavier the shot), the more kinetic energy it has, thus more boom.

>>55153701
Range is both spinal weapons' biggest asset and biggest weakness.

On one side, yes, you can accelerate a tin can to make it punch like a nuke. On the other, spinal weapons are a an absolute BITCH to aim. You have to physically move millions or billions of tons of steel in order to line up with a target so far away it's barely a pixel on your radar, while both you and the target are presumably doing evasive maneuvers. That's pretty much in the realm of impossible.

Any projectile traveling at those ranges will need some sort of course correction capability if it's going to hit anything, and at that point you might as well chuck the giant gun and just go full missile bus route.

>>55156360
Well the imperial ships have alliance like corridors, its just that the characters that the show follows are officers that usually keep to the nicer furnished decks of the ship.

>>55150410
>assuming FTL weaponry
And assuming there isn't, everything you just said is bullshit.

>>55156642
Well true.
The decks we got to see in gaiden serials were downright ghetto tier when compared to average alliance corridors.
Then again, we never did see enlisted mens corridors on alliance ships if i remember right.

Not a single correct answer in this thread. All ranged weapons are usless considering any ship that travels close to or faster than the speed of light will encounter radiation, heat, and kinetic forces stronger than any possible weapon and be built to withstand them so the only means of combat is to directly board and take an enemy vessel.

>>55157498
>Any shop that travels close to or faster than the speed of light...
So, none of them. We good, boys, weapons are still relevant.

>>55147254
Spinal mount is foolish. Too few firing options. If the anti-missile weaponry is too good, as lasers will be with missile speed so low, then far better to get an old style broadside firing volleys. Solid-slug railguns at a medium to short distance would be the premier in such an environment. As any point defense laser could be used on shells at longer ranges to melt and/or deflect, as light does have some actual mass; ala light sails theory.

Armor should be thick and good at radiating heat buildup to allow for attempted offensive laser use. It would also explain the lack of turrets, as armor on them becomes a problem in a low gravity environment as the torque from turning large amounts of mass would shift the entire ship small amounts. Also drones would still be used as a point defense system against lasers. Small heavily armored drones on close formation and/or tethers to deflect/absorb laser fire.

Spinal mounts would be better used for the few heavily armored nuclear torpedoes that also could be used at closer ranges. While closing keep the armored nose pointed at the enemy, and launch a few torpedoes before turning to deliver a broadside of railgun. First one to twitch and fire would get the chance for first damage, but also would be likely to take more damage from the return volley. What with Newtonian physics carrying the enemies constantly towards one another.

>>55158732
>far better to get an old style broadside firing volleys

I suppose you are aware that in space, you can have a full broadside worthy arsenal of weapons in the front of your ship because you can give zero fucks about hull shape.

Firing to the side will also have hilarious consequences, so I think it is not advisable.

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>>55156495
Yep. Coilgun boosted semi-maneuverable missiles are where it's at for non-nuclear weapons. Next to lasers ofc - CoaDE lasers are rather underpowered due to design choices based on on extant tech over scientific limits.

>>55158946
I dunno, so long as you had the batteries in line with the center of mass, you'd be alright, surely?

>>55156413
> than any real science.

What?

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>>55154520

Realistically, warships would have very small crews, around a dozen for every size and class. What can be automated should be automated.

Also, a family-like crew setup could potentially decrease the chance (and/or the success rates) of mutiny and higher-level rebellion.

>>55149907
Railguns will never achieve relavistic speeds. Friction. It would burn the round to dust as it travelled down the barrel. Gravimetrics will be the only to launch such things.

If you have gravity control of any kinds, firing any weapon at ranges longer then point fucking blank is pointless. Perfect turning and complete control of inertia means all shots miss. Not even mentioning any projection of gravity.

>>55153473
This guy is right >>55155247
Also, there's the fact that space is all orbits, so mines aren't that amazing unless you're willing to go full Kessler on a planet

You'd want to use missiles in situations where the light lag makes mass drivers inaccurate.
Missiles are able to self-correct, thereby increasing their ability to hit their targets at long range.

>>55147254

Misiles are not something you can't simply take out, they can be armored too like a ship(and if they are armored even better; more mass for the impact, don't worry for the deltaV they only need to make an interception course) and don't have to worry about taking care about disgusting organical humans demanding a special 9G acceleration limit or a living space.

So if you were to say that your giant 1TW laser can destroy missiles on a proportion of 100 to 1 I could simply use the resources of an entire planet to build 1000 missiles, in terms of scaling up the number of missiles I don't think there is really a limit and you don't even need special equipment to operate them; a few transistor and a IR receptor of any kind would probably do the job since we have been using them since the Vietnam era.

>>55158946
A broadside also means that if your armor is thick, you have to cover more of yourself with it.

Long and pointy is still better even for missile ships, because they can point armor at the enemy, and then just drop missiles out the sides like a fighter jet, and let them accelerate once clear of the bay doors. Another option if your missiles are smart enough, is to just drop all your missiles at once, but program them to not attack right away. They'll just sit there in whatever orbit you left them, and now the enemy has no reason to attack you. He'll be too worried about the missiles, which are now fully autonomous and capable of avenging you if the enemy attacks, or being recovered if the enemy is suitably impressed by this show of force and backs down. One reason people might want to nerf missiles in space combat, is that they tend to reduce battles to missile counting contests. Do you have more missiles than my point defense can handle? Do I want to test that? Entire battles might as well be fully automated dick measuring contests between defense contractors.

Either way, the only time a space warship should ever be firing broadside, is if it's in close quarters battle, and can't chose the direction the enemy will be approaching from. Or if there is more than one enemy that will be threatening it at the same time. In both cases these are jobs for secondary batteries. Big guns should be facing forward, and missiles should soft launch.

>>55159128
You can however intercept a missile with another missile, and when it comes to kinetic energy missiles, an anti-missile requires less delta-v than the missile it will intercept. The attacking missile needs to be traveling as fast as possible, the defending missile just needs to get in the path of the attacking missile.

Now, there are ways around this, mainly give the attacking missile some sort of really hard to intercept sub-munition, but this reduces lethality. A missile that explodes into a bag of sand could be intercepted by missiles that release sheets of Whipple shield. Most of the sand will be destroyed along with the sheets, and what little remains will be much less of a threat than the missile would have been in a single impact.

Another solution is say fuck kinetic energy weapons, and focus on bomb pumped lasers or Casaba howitzers. These will be much more killy, and much harder to intercept, because they can go off at longer range, and might even be disguised as other kinds of missiles. These are likely to be much more expensive weapons however.

>>55159128
>if you were to say that your giant 1TW laser can destroy missiles on a proportion of 100 to 1

A regular 100-300 MW laser can do that. The Newtonian benefits of missiles are cancelled out under realistic accelerations by the distances of space. (You can shoot from a planet weeks away? Well, if it takes half an hour to kill a missile and the danger zone they have to cross is several days of nonstop laseing wide, few of them are crossing.)

To be fair, you hit an important point: missiles use existing drive tech, so if you can into space, your missile R&D costs are free. Lasers aren't really advanced or expensive, but they are on a separate part of the tech tree.

So missiles are theoretically long ranged but practically short-ranged, but that range (inside a single planetary orbit band) also covers 95% of practical combat. And they're an all-or-nothing shot that can only be expended a few times.

In toto: missiles are a fleet-in-being for poor people, pacifists, and mid-tier powers. Laser arrays are the tool of major military powers.

>>55150410
>They know for a fact it's coming but by the time you know, how the fuck do you stop that in time?
The answer is maneuver in any way whatsoever, which will cause the shot to miss by a massive margin. Which is why a large, low rate of fire weapon is horribly ineffective against a target that is actually able to maneuver at any range where the target has time to react to detecting a launch or where generalized evasion will cause an aimed shot to miss.

At long ranges you essentially need to either use missiles with significant maneuvering ability or weapons that can saturate the area where your target will probably be by the time the shots arrive there with enough shots to make a hit against an evading target statistically likely.

that may mean rapid fire guns, multiple rapid laser pulses, grapeshot, kinetic energy missiles with bursting charges, nuclear shaped charges, continuous-wave lasers being swept about in patterns etc.

The only time a massive spinal railgun shooting a single solid projectile would actually be effective is at attacking sitting duck targets like space stations.

>>55159252
>Another solution is say fuck kinetic energy weapons, and focus on bomb pumped lasers or Casaba howitzers

Get both! A casaba howitzer is a nuclear shaped charge *jet* - high power, short range, easily dispersed.
What's the other major kind of shaped charge? A projectile. Middling power and penetration but harder to stop with fancy armors, and doesn't disperse by itself.

Nuclear EFPs FTW. Going by the toughsf calcs, the minimum size (before risking the shot being evaporated by a nuke) is about 20 tons of tungsten. That's a big gun.

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>>55159333
>>55159308
>>55159252
Busters?

>>55159278

I was thinking more along the lines of missiles being carried in cargo freighters where at the very least they can get close enough for a crippling attack on a laser relay.

To define it under fundamental levels, we can say that any laser that has to travel beyond 10 seconds is completely ineffective. So you need frontiline relays that redirect the energy when the target is under 1 second light, destroying one critical point or several relays in the laser network means that you have extended your safe zone , either permanently or for a while(other relays can cover the loss of cover by simply advancing their orbits but this can take weeks or months in higher orbits)

In a more interesting way, this is also very dependent on space territory, the problem is that territory in space must be a completly weird subject, sure; you own up to the point of maximum altitude where you are still orbiting your celestial body; but what about horseshoe orbits, lagrange points and trojans? You can stick your missile bases or laser relays in such orbits and put your response times from months to days or hours.

>>55159308
Why are you just assuming the giant fucking mass driver is going to have a slow rate of fire? If it's a big enough coil gun with an efficient enough cooling system and power source, it could be spraying projectiles like a fire hose, and adjusting the dispersion of each one by making minor adjustments to the magnetic fields. At any moment there could be multiple projectiles inside the barrel of the gun at the same time, each being accelerated by different sets of magnets.

I think a big problem is that we instinctively reach for the word railgun when we talk about mass drivers, when they are seriously limited. Coilguns on the other hand have lots of room for advancement. Most kinetic energy weapons in sci-fi are coilguns, even if the author comes up with a fancy name, or calls them a raillgun by accident.

>>55159512
>Why are you just assuming the giant fucking mass driver is going to have a slow rate of fire?
Because of the specific terminology used in the post I quoted.

>Smaller ships still have a purpose. They are agile and can simply avoid the shot of a railgun that takes a relatively long time to charge, aim and fire.

>>55159278
>A regular 100-300 MW laser can do tha

yes, but they can do it at "close" distances like 100 km or such before refraction start fucking their energy delivery, and missiles can accelerate to insane speeds(missiles can easily become relativistic kill vehicles too) and close the gap in seconds by simply using low mass/high thrust relationships, as stated is not like the missiles has a limit on the number of Gs you can stick on it.

Casabas aren't exactly that complicated, sure its a shaped nuclear bomb, but if you have the expertise for the design and production of nuclear bombs you are at maybe a decade or so of getting a casaba-howitzer since you already know the concept and the whole idea has quite a theoretical foundation.

>>55159512
>If it's a big enough coil gun with an efficient enough cooling system and power source

That's a very-very big if.


For the missile discussion, I must add that information warfare should be a very big thing in space combat, and thus there must be range limitations (regarding time required to engage/fire/hit the enemy). You have to fire when you see the white of their eyes, so to speak, and not unload your firepower at shadows and illusions. And once you are there, it is wiser to fling two metric tons of superheated tungsten at your enemy rather than a missile that can be played.

>>55159641
>as stated is not like the missiles has a limit on the number of Gs you can stick on it

Delta-V OTOH is highly limited for missiles, and it scales geometrically as you armor the missile. So even with armored ICBM scale buses disgorging a couple hundred swarming KKVs apiece, you're still looking at a practical maximum range of several thousand km for missiles. Easy if you can hack, stealth, or diplomacy your way in. But if the enemy starts off the battle, or if they survive your alpha strike, their chances of victory get higher and higher as time goes on and yours fall like a rock.

>>55159626
But nobody's going to fucking use a raillgun, because anybody who can colonize space can also build much more efficient mass drivers. A coil-gun is built using the same kind of technology as a ship's engines, a bunch of fancy magnets that push things in one direction. The only difference is it pushes solid projectiles in a straight line.

Raillguns are weapons that planetary civilizations consider putting on their wet-naval vessels before they decided they don't provide much of an advantage over missiles or conventional guns. Coil-guns on the other hand are the space equivalent of a battleship's cannons.

>>55159732
Not really, if you are building interplanetary spacecraft that don't suck balls, you'll need those things for the engines.

The infowar part is a good point though. In the "No stealth in space" arguments, people forget that there is more to stealth than just hiding. It's true you can find out a lot about a ship by observing a drive plume, but if you load a bunch of missiles with different warheads, and make sure they all have the same mass, The enemy will have a hard time telling them apart from each other, esp if you program them to fly in sub-optimal patterns for the purposes of deception. And once the missiles are in the terminal phase, they can deploy decoys along with their warheads, and once they've gone ballistic, you might not even be able to tell a warhead from a balloon. And this is before you get into active jamming, or throwing up reflective Whipple shields so the enemy can't see what temperature your radiators are, which direction you are pointing, or which bay doors are open.

The enemy will always know where you are, and have a good idea what you are, but he won't be able to know what cards you have in your hand and what you've placed on the table. There is still plenty of room for poker in space combat, even without stealth.

>>55159052
In Children of a Dead Earth the ships are forced to use cylinder shape armor only mainly out of limits to the programming and game engine. Going off of real science you'd use different armor geometries and then turn your craft to the proper facing to begin any engagement.

>>55159931

As far as I read from the developer blog he actually designed the game around the idea of using cylinders instead of any other shape. Suposedly is not a coding limitation but an intentional limitation based around the idea of having as much sloped armor as possible while giving a very low cross section.

>>55159895
>But nobody's going to fucking use a raillgun, because anybody who can colonize space can also build much more efficient mass drivers. A coil-gun is built using the same kind of technology as a ship's engines, a bunch of fancy magnets that push things in one direction. The only difference is it pushes solid projectiles in a straight line.
I was responding to a post that talked very specifically about railguns and more specifically spinally mounted ones, even more specifically low rate of fire ones.

So the content of your post is totally irrelevant to me. It has no bearing on what I posted at all.

>>55160023
He said that in a blog post, but everything else in the game is optional so why limit that only?

The real reason is to fudge the calculations, which the system does. Angled armor is better, but cylinder armor is not the equivalent of being covered in angled armor, it is decidely the opposite of angled armor if you get hit directly. Cylinder armor is the equivlant of being covered in non angled armor and sometimes the enemy hits you at an angle if you're lucky. But being hit at an angle in CoaDE does the exact same thing to your armor tile as hitting it directly. Your armor, despite being touted as 'monolithic' is also very decidedly tiles in how the system handles it. Despite how realistic the game is it limits you and cuts you off from a lot of real world solutions.

>>55160063
Well, spinal mounted BFGs make more sense when they are rapid-fire coilguns with smart munitions. OP probably doesn't know enough about the different kinds of mass drivers and just meant some sort of electro-magnetic cannon.

>>55160197
You are correct, they make dramatically more sense with higher fire rates because they are much more likely to actually hit the target.

You want a really fun idea for spaceship weaponry that gives you lots of tools and options? Gravimetric Projection, ie Gravity Manipulation.

Ships use FTL drives that use that principle of distorting space in front of and behind the spaceship; those same drives can be weaponized and used for other purposes than travel. Artificial Gravity is a no-brainer. Creating a gravity well around the outside of the ship can drag missiles off-course, so that when point-defense blasts them, the debris misses the ship instead of continuing to come in at the same speed as when it was blown up. Smaller ship harrassing you? Just reach out and crush it like a can. Need them alive? Ramp the power back, and you've got a tractor beam to pull them in, while sending the message "no funny business, or we'll crumple you into dust."

The only real disadvantage would be range, but when a battleship is big enough and can generate enough gravity to rival that of a planet, not being able to reach out as far is less of an issue due to the fact your opponent's weapons can't touch you.

>>55160463
>FTL spaceships
Shadman.jpg

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>>55159252
but in order to intercept 50 missiles you need 50 missiles. how much of your ship can you dedicate to countermeasures?

>>55160710
>but in order to intercept 50 missiles you need 50 missiles
False. A single missile may be able to defeat multiple missiles at once depending on warhead.

>>55160710
But since anti-missiles don't need to travel as far or fast, they can be smaller. So you could have an equal number of anti-missiles, but for half the mass of that many attack missiles.

>>55160747
>depending on the warhead
what do you mean? like using a nuke to divert their path?

>>55160820
I'm not sure what the fuck you mean by "to divert their path".

I mean either destroying them outright with a nuclear warhead, or damaging their sensors and electronics with radiation. Alternatively I mean using fragmentation warheads to throw an expanding cloud of tiny fragments at them.

>>55160915
Im talking about missiles that are basically just chunks of metal moving at speeds that make payload redundant.

>>55160710
>but in order to intercept 50 missiles you need 50 missiles.

The missile needs to be able to damage or destroy an armored ship, while the anti-missile just needs to damage or destroy the thin-skinned missile.

>>55147628
Rank slides need to be distinguishable from a distance. Serving in the space navy would be an absolute nightmare, you'd never be able to make out the rank of the guy approaching you until he was right in front of you.

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>>55159931
Nah, today CoaDE gunships all about double tapered hulls and forward fire concentration, you don't need to turn broadside anymore.

>>55161199
what do you get if you blow up a solid chunk of metal travelling towards your ship at relativistic speeds?

>>55156330
I think 'missiles' would essentially just be suicide-drones. At the kind of ranges/speeds an interplanetary species' ships would fight and travel at, any missile you fired would need significant abilities to alter it's own course once fired. It'd have to have very advance onboard computing/AI.

I always imagined 'realistic' space combat as two massive motherships launching thousands of drone-missiles at each other from AU away, the drone-missiles simultaneously trying to neutralise the enemy drone-missiles and close with the enemy mothership, and whatever drones survive that melee between the two attempt to run a gauntlet of point defence to kill the enemy mothership.

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>>55147254
>Solidstate weapons in space

Reminder that something solid fired in space keeps going until it hits something else. Responsible military complexes have projected energy weapons that peter-out at designated ranges.

In the time frame you're looking at (Technologically speaking, I mean), you're probably going to have insane weapons like gravity mines and nano bot clouds which will just tear a target ship to pieces.
Also, beam weapons will be extremely powerful by that point.
I can see close up ship encounters only happening when one side wants to capture the others crew or cargo or ship without destroying the ship completely

>>55161397
>responsible
The only rule of war is that you do whatever it takes to win. Note how the majority of weapons banned by the Geneva Convention are actually very inefficient compared to conventional weaponry.

>>55161309
Firstly a missile is inherently not a solid chunk of metal. By their nature a missile is a small scale spacecraft and subsequently a large fraction of its mass is going to be comprised of its engine and fuel, another portion will be sensors and guidance systems.

You will not be blowing up a solid chunk of metal, you'll be blowing up a missile. And what you get is a cloud of debris or plasma that won't hit a target. If it was the case that the missile could hit the target by turning into a cloud of plasma or fragments at the range at which other missiles could intercept it then the missile would have been designed to do that.

Terminal guidance is a thing that exists for a reason (because it's necessary to achieve a hit against a moving target).

>>55161499
A lot of the "will a target be pelted with missile fragments" issue depends on the specific course of the ships involved in the fight.

Most of the time, unless the missile is directly chasing or flying head on toward the target the debris of an intercepted missile won't go anywhere near the target ship, sometimes it may, but in either case an intercept is always better than a hit, even if you do get hit by bits of a missile and a missile turned into plasma by a nuclear explosion isn't going to do jack shit. Also the further away the intercept occurs the less likely a hit from debris would be, and with missile on missile intercepts that's probably far enough that it's a non-consideration.

>>55161282
You mean forcing the system into a rough approximation of sloped armor that isn't quite accurate?

>>55161397
>until it hits something

Reminder that this isn't likely to happen to be anything other than motes of dust and stray hydrogen atoms prior to the heat-death of the universe.

>>55161457
Yes, good, wanting everyone to have solidstate weapons that all fire everywhere in a battle and potentially heavily damage near and far celestial bodies on a miss, because obliterating your own potential resources is excellent for a space faring people to do! Hay we're a mining conglomerate, why did one of your roaming RFG's from that war three years ago just vaporize the moon we're extracting from, costing us billions AND killing some labor? We're allied with you morons! Hay, we're a bunch of colonists, why is one of your stupid bullshit weapons screaming toward our colony on planet Don't Kill Us From Orbit Please, didn't that war you had end five years ago? Please help! Hay, we're part of your own military, you were given orders to collect your roaming ordnance from the Sescelon Attack Front a two days ago and now we've detected a mass of extra-terminal force ballistics on our scanners heading toward our forward asteroid base which are all registered from YOUR ship, enjoy your court marshal.

>>55161499
>And what you get is a cloud of debris or plasma that won't hit a target. If it was the case that the missile could hit the target by turning into a cloud of plasma or fragments at the range at which other missiles could intercept it then the missile would have been designed to do that.

That's a good idea actually.

>>55161605

even tiny pieces of debris travelling at these kinds of speeds is going to do much more than "jack shit".

>>55161682
Say that after the fifth large scale battle in which hundreds or potentially thousands of ballistic rods are screaming through space in your own territories because it was a retreating battle, in all directions, just from a single fight of which there will be much more.

>>55161837
>undreds or potentially thousands of ballistic rods

The odds of them hitting anything meaningful are still infinitesimal.

And because of the difference in scale between interstellar and interplanetary space, if your battle was in a star system, the (presumably c-fractional) projectiles would exit the system within days or weeks of being fired (making it fairly easy to have failsafes to stop your guns firing on a trajectory that will intercept the orbit of one of your inhabited planets) and then takes centuries or millennia to reach another star system.

Even if your star empire is ridiculously dense and you've colonised every planet in hundreds of star systems all neighbouring each other, and fire off thousands of c-fractional projectiles in battle, the chances of one striking your planets are next to nil.

Space is really big.

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>>55147339
Sorry to burst your bubble but T-Rex was a big ol bird with lips.

>>55161837
There have been some extremely stupid military incidents IRL before, that you'd think would have been accounted for, but the idea that you could get friendly fire from an errant solid projectile, from a ship that was destroyed in a fight potentially decades old, is pretty hilarious. Hilarious enough that it probably would happen, eventually without some sort of oversight for it. This is why Star Trek has that deflector dish shit on all their ships, to avoid moronic crap wholesale.

>>55147254
Not entirely sure I agree with the laser defence for space fighting. Trying to destroy incoming projectiles will just turn them into a shrapnel cloud.

>>55154672
where my nigga The Parsifal at?

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>>55147339
>Hate this, Like feathers on a T-Rex.
>>55162039
That is a fucking tepid feathered T-Rex.

This is much better.

>>55162122
Trex had lips.

https://www.livescience.com/54912-did-t-rex-have-lips.html

>>55162039
When you're that massive, the problem is actually getting heat out. Large dinosaur probably had very little feathers.

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>>55161971
And after millions of rods from thousands of battles because the odds are so small that you don't need to clean up? And then billions of rods and debris because of that mentality? Why create a potential problem like countless examples of space junk ordnance hurtling in every direction from countless battles and wars, when you just clean it the fuck up before people have to deal with it? The potential cost saving in resources alone should be enough incentive for any military to want to collect their mass projectiles after a war is over, because something like a solid spear fired from a rail can be reused so why the fuck not? And given human lazyness especially in the military, if you wanted, entire civilian industry of salvagers could be arranged in a potential setting that do exactly this to either sell back the collected ordnance and debris or work for the military themselves regarding it.

>>55162088
Given a people would need to be pretty advanced in defensive measures before a full fledged space battle occurred. What about a sort of system fired out from a ship that uses proximity detonated solid ordnance which once exploded in front of an incoming target, would foam in a cloud of adhesive spray which temperature solidifies deflecting its target's trajectory in the least, or containing warhead detonation in the most?

>>55161971
>The odds of them hitting anything meaningful are still infinitesimal.

Oh, they'll hit plenty. There's a reason we don't see lots of near-luminal objects skittering around through space puncturing holes in moons; they lose kinetic energy burning pretty trails through dust clouds, since every collision is molecule-shattering horror at that speed. Eventually they're just another blob orbiting the local star.

Fire off 500 tungsten rods in a battle? Well, unless you were retarded enough to do that in a planetary gravity well (in which case, seriously wtf is wrong with you?), then that's maybe a couple of dozen new short-lived "comets" decelerating in the dust and the solar wind; and a whole bunch of radio signals zooming off into interstellar. It's possible you could have a Mass Effect-style thing where one of 'em skeets into another system 3ly away and through sheer chance knocks a small moon out of orbit or reshapes a continent but it'll be as >>55162049
says; the kind of thing that's a rare ludicrous one in a gazillion chance that is notable mainly for how unlikely it is.

Of course, the real terror when you have 0.5c coilguns firing a few kilos of tungsten is that planets are a sitting duck. One such ship in Earth orbit right now could wipe out our entire species in a matter of minutes, and even that only because the orbit would take minutes. You can't do that with lasers or missiles.

>>55162167
Many other Tyrannosaur species are confirmed to have had feathers, what would've caused it to lose them? The fossil of its neck tissue found this year didn't have feathers but that isn't really conclusive. First thing you have to remember is that fossilizing soft tissue is incredibly rare, and second off it might not have had feathers on its neck. Just look at an ostrich, just thin fuzz, not large plumage.

And heat is less of an issue when you consider that it probably wasn't a sprinter.

>http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/tyrannosaur-trex-running-speed/

When you get a creature of such massive weight it's skeleton couldn't handle running at high speed, its feet would've shattered.

Given its slow speed and massive olfactory system it was probably a scavenger. So when youre leisurely strolling around picking at corpses you won't get as hot. And in that role having a bright plumage might have been beneficial, since its vibrant colors and massive size would scare off any other bone pickers.

>>55162276
>And given human lazyness especially in the military, if you wanted, entire civilian industry of salvagers could be arranged in a potential setting that do exactly this to either sell back the collected ordnance and debris or work for the military themselves regarding it.

Now there's a /tg/ concept. Space Janitors RPG, anyone?

>>55162088
You can just accelerate or decelerate slightly and the shrapnel cloud will miss completely unless you were flying directly toward or away from the missile.

The alternative is you let the missile hit you.

>>55162276
In vaguely realistic settings, the delta-V needed to do that is prohibitively expensive.

You're proposing the equivalent of using a VTOL fighter jet to pick up discarded trash lost on an empty plain.

If you have a setting where energy is so cheap, use some lidar to track anything that comes near important stuff, and vaporize it with a laser if it would hit. Or use Kirklin mine shields, if it's a no-lasers kind of setting.

>>55162580
You can also shoot down the debris with your point defense, and only have to aim at specific pieces that would hit you.

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>>55162520
Junkers work in nearly every science fiction setting and are fun to boot. And this will absolutely be an industry in the future given we have a whole host of them IRL that troll the ocean looking for wrecks and ordnance to monetize.

The Battle of Jutland is a good example, over the years the wrecks from the battle have all been found, and each had one thing in common, metal theft from salvors.

First generation spaceship weapons: hypersonic missiles & drones

Second generation spaceship weapons: railguns and lasers, but the latter likely only for point defense due to energy issues

Third generation spaceship weapons: Mass drivers, offensive lasers

Fourth generation spaceship weapons: Plasma weapons, sentient missiles

Fifth generation spaceship weapons:
Dimensional rift tearing, time manipulation, atomic restructuring.

>>55162671
Where does that thing keep its fighters once it's built them?

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>>55162767
Who knows?

Space fighters from carrier ship are a stupid concept anyhow. Space battles will be like battles between submarines at extremely long distance. If you're in a space war and your fighting up close in some sort of furball of ships, something went very wrong. Not saying it would never happen, but if it did, every admiral and captain of a ship involved would want to hang themselves for the fuck up.

>>55162867
>Space battles will be like battles between submarines

Except for the part where there's lots of stealth in water and practically none in space. Trench warfare might be a better analogy.

>ywn be a nonsentient AI piloting a million-ton "tank" wormhole breacher through incandescent laser fire and automated torpedo nests to pave the way for the manned cruiser fleet

>>55162867
Why, though?

Missiles in space have been continuously overrated since people started having these discussions. Lasers are shite at hitting anything further away than a couple of light-seconds at most, but they really rock as a missile defence in space; as soon as you cross that 1 light-second barrier all your missiles become expanding clouds of dust and your opponent just vectors slightly and avoids them. And you can't hide a missile because it's a giant torch. If it's going at a good percentage of c then maybe you have a chance - but if you have that kind of delta-v available, why can your ships not just accelerate away anyway?

I agree that fighters are a fairly dumb idea. The premise is supposed to be that smaller mass means the delta-v can be greatly improved, making it hypermaneuverable and able to dodge pretty much anything, but they couldn't get closer than maybe half a light second before being vapourised by lasers. Only thing you could do with fighter craft would be torpedo bombers that dash within a light-second, loose a missile at full acceleration, peel off and hope for the best.

Also human pilots would be worse than useless for actual space fighter combat, since the acceleration and vector levels would be waaaaay past human limits. Drones or go home.

Dammit this thread is making me want to drag my /v/ project ("Aurora with less stupid") out of mothballs.

>>55160710
This is why Destroyers exist. Small expendable ships filled with nothing but countermeasures that can react to threats more quickly than your battleship. They will be cheaper than the ship they protect, and the counter-missiles they carry will be cheaper than the missiles they intercept.

>>55161309
Place a similarly massed chunk of mass in the path of that missile and the two will more or less cancel each other out as the missile hits it. There will be a big cloud of plasma and maybe some tiny debris that can easily be countered with Whipple shields.

>>55163017
Hence why rapid firing spinal mounted coilguns, possibly firing self guided projectiles if you can make a guidance system capable of handling the G-forces. The incoming projectiles will be too fast to dodge, too small to intercept with other kinetic energy weapons, and too numerous to intercept with missiles. It brings dreadnought warfare back to space.

>>55163230
>Hence why rapid firing spinal mounted coilguns, possibly firing self guided projectiles if you can make a guidance system capable of handling the G-forces.

If it's going fast enough to be serious, no guidance system will be able to vector it enough to make a significant difference. The "shotgun" approach is probably the best one.

>>55163230
>Place a similarly massed chunk of mass in the path of that missile and the two will more or less cancel each other out as the missile hits it.

sounds bloody difficult. how would you go about doing this?

>>55163275
how about a directed nuclear charge? once the solid projectile is close to the target use a nuke to send fragments in the right direction.

>>55163017
>Why, though?
Given the history of naval combat, generally huge masses of ships coming into close suppressive combat with each other is something everyone with a navy has always tried to avoid. It's rather simple, big ships cost big money, as a resource you never want to lose them, so a swarm of big ships against another swarm of similar ships guarantees the loss of many ships and often signals the victor in a war altogether from just a few engagements. Consider the Yamato from WW2, the largest ship of the war, the Japanese used it very sparingly due to the potential loss involved and the only major engagement it was ever in of any note, it sunk. Look at the game EVE Online as a dumb but contemporary example out of necessity. Due to the nature of its economy, Titans are almost never used in real fights because of the potential loss, they're built as a status symbol and blown up only in major fuck-ups or for charity.

But regarding fighters in space. Every instance or example of the possibility is derived from aircraft mentality, dog fighters, interceptors, bombers, squadrons flying in formation and such. Applying this to space would require that ships would need to be in acceptable range for fighter engagement. So given that, look at aircraft carriers now. Launch aircraft, due to advances in fuel economy, engine efficiency and power, dogfights are not only a rarity now but actively meant to be avoided. The most advanced fighter craft in the world are now designed to be areal snipers, firing missiles from extreme long distance where the pilot trusts implicitly in his command and instruments telling him that there's a target and a lock. Bombers are similar, dropping ordnance from higher and higher altitudes. Active engagement from ground or air-to-air, is something you now NEVER want, so apply said mentality to a space conflict with bombers or fighters, the range spoken of taken exponentially. Drones would be the only thing feasible.

>>55163472
Believe it or not, it takes a lot less energy to place something directly in the path of something else, than it does to accelerate something up to speeds required to be a kinetic energy weapon. The only real problem is timing it right, but a sub-orbital rocket could conceivably be used as a defense against a planet killer RKV of similar mass if you could see the RKV coming. The rocket just needs to have it's launch timed just right so the RKV hits it while both are outside the earth's atmosphere. The result would be a very large explosion, but the planet would not be destroyed.

Of course, in that case the timing would be nearly impossible to pull off because you probably wouldn't even see the RKV coming. In the case of a military spaceship defending itself from another spaceship of comparable tech however. If you see the enemy launching missiles, you have plenty of time to launch your own counter missiles, And the counter missiles will always be cheaper than the attacking missiles.

Keep in mind, ballistic missile defense is completely different on earth. One ICMB can have multiple warheads, and even more decoys, and the warheads will actually be cheaper than the interceptors deployed to catch them. The problem here is the warheads only have to land somewhere near a city sized target and then detonate, while the interceptors have to accelerate fast enough for a kinetic kill against a small target in a ballistic flight along with a bunch of other small targets that might look identical to it. There is really no way to defend yourself against modern ICMBs with current technology. Star wars or brilliant pebbles might have worked, but they required technology nobody was willing to fund, and would have just escalated the cold war even further. The current designs are more or less wastes of taxpayer dollars.

>>55163472
You can hit ships, right?

A ship at long range is a harder target to hit than a bullet at close range. Space is big.

>>55163230
>>55163472
>>55163661
>>55163666
The name of the meme is Kirklin mines.

>>55163050
This thread makes me wish Dreadnought wasn't such a massive turd.

>>55163661
>>55163696
would this be more effective than using an explosive missile to push projectiles off course? either way it sounds like it could make for some interesting combat scenarios.

>>55163666
>You can hit ships, right?
probably not according to this thread.

>>55163531
>Due to the nature of its economy, Titans are almost never used in real fights because of the potential loss, they're built as a status symbol and blown up only in major fuck-ups or for charity.

They used to be a major feature of massive fleet engagements before CCP intentionally rebalanced the game to reduce the number of massive fleet engagements (a move which included severely limiting the ability to get Titans into position for big battles).

EVE is a bad place to get examples from because real life doesn't have CCP hovering over it.

>>55163902
It would be cheaper, and easier to justify to the politicians. A few extra grams of propellant, or a nuclear warhead that needs to be almost touching the target anyways to work. I think the Kinetic interception method is most effective.

The only way I see exploding anti-missiles being worth it, is if you want to use EMP or radiation to fry the electronics. And even then that only works until the enemy starts including shielding. You might as well just be using lasers to do the same thing.

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>>55162959
>Except for the part where there's lots of stealth in water and practically none in space

Pro Tip: Due to next to nothing interfering with it, radiation is instrumentally "loud" in space causing a fuck huge amount of noise jamming. A military would need to devise a system of targeting buoys otherwise anything resembling an active radar or sonar would look like it was constantly hit with chaff. We get telemetry data from space in fixed positions in a similar manner now.

Aside from that...
>Trench warfare might be a better analogy.
It would be a mix, the ranges would be at such extremes that ships would be like large artillery batteries but would be able to move out of the way of incoming solid fire given the amount of time a salvo would take to hit either side, unless using laser weapons. Which would entail their own problems as lasers have massive distance related power drop-offs akin to making ineffective glancing blows unless someone with balls and no sense got into hot range with them, but that would also mean certain doom for the moron and the crew who tried it because incoming fire would be near impossible to avoid.

>>55163985
to be fair, the servers were being slowed to a snails pace. it might not be realistic anymore, but it makes for more engaging gameplay then watching still frame combat for a few hours.

>>55164041
>massive distance related power drop-offs
No they don't. Lasers don't dissipate unless they hit a dust cloud or such. You get focusing issues past the first light minute or so but that's a sizeable chunk of the Solar System.

The problem with lasers is that they are a single point of incidence being projected at light speed at a target which is relativistic distances away. The slightest variance in vector and you become effectively impossible to hit past a light-second or so.

>>55164059
>to be fair, the servers were being slowed to a snails pace. it might not be realistic anymore, but it makes for more engaging gameplay then watching still frame combat for a few hours.

I don't disagree (supercaps were balls then and they're balls now) but it does illustrate that EVE doesn't really help a discussion on space combat. It's not really a space combat simulator in any meaningful way.

>>55163985
>EVE is a bad place to get examples from because real life doesn't have CCP hovering over it.
Instead it has things like actual economic systems which are far more complicated and much worse. If you have a massive space vessel, crewed by thousands of people that need to be trained expertly, using a fuckton of fuel and needing a huge amount of resources and time in literal years pre-war time to build, you will not ever want to to just throw at an engagement because if you loose that ship (or ships), that means you no longer have the fuel it stored, or the ordnance or the materials used to build it in a war where resource blockades are an ever-present and absolute certainty.

>>55164112
>The slightest variance in vector and you become effectively impossible to hit past a light-second or so.

Diffraction tho. Spread the beam out to multiple kilometers wide and it doesn't matter if it slow-roasts a ship instead of vaporizing it, because you've got all week and the nearest hard cover is a month's travel away for them.

>>55164041
A simple way to have a system of targeting buoys is to make missiles that can function as targeting buoys. Fire them off when you enter a system, have them spaced out and holding position throughout the system, and boom; you've got both an early-warning system and a first line of defence, with targeting data to boot.

>>55164221
Or just like, the enemy ship can just point it's radiators into it's own shadow, and cranks the cooling system to max while it laughs at you because now you're getting hotter than they are from the waste heat of your own lasers.

>>55164172
There are a few specific benefits to such a craft in space that don't happen on Earth, though. A lot of naval trade-offs don't occur in a vacuum. and one large ship could mount (and power) enough lasers screen an entire fleet from missiles, not to mention potentially include support and maintenance facilities for the rest of the fleet in a situation where such facilities are VASTLY further apart than on Earth.

And none of this supports why space combat would necessarily be submarines sniping at one another rather than fleet actions. Note that anti-missile systems are especially additive in a 3d situation - you can have screens shooting down missiles in immense numbers. Long range space warfare (above, say, 10 light seconds) is waaaay overstated as a concept barring crazy-ass scifi tech like dimensional warps or controlled wormholes.

>>55164313
Not very practical if my ship can support continuous laser fire but their ship's CNT armor is being eroded at a millimeter per second.

>>55164112
>Lasers don't dissipate unless they hit a dust cloud or such

Space is not empty or a complete vacuum, diffraction would happen near instantly due to dust, as you say, but also radiation and electromagnetic forces, among other things. Attenuation of beam strength would need to be calculated directly opposed to distance of target because the only mechanical movement involved would be the ship that's firing or that's potentially getting hit, making calculation of attenuation opposed to emitter wavelengths and everything in between the firing ship and the target a massive factor of effectiveness due to that calculation needing to be near constant for the beam to be effective. Firing lasers in an atmosphere is actually less complicated due to the gravitational and electromagnetic forces of Earth being a known commodity.

>>55164221
>multiple kilometers wide

Bear in mind that our craft are likely to be travelling at very very high speeds. At ~300,000km, you're firing at something with effectively a 2-second delay - one second for the signal to hit you, and one second for the laser to hit them. In those two seconds the other craft could be dozens or even hundreds of kilometers away from where you guessed they were; and if you diffract your beam over hundreds of kilometers, you might as well just hand them some toasty mittens for all the good it will do.

There's a midpoint here - a minimum beam width at a given distance that will give you a destructive impact. But this trade-off is going to make you want to use that laser on one of two things:

a) stuff that's right fragging next to you
b) stuff that's highly predictable

The joy of missiles is that they are always b), and usually very rapidly becoming a). So lasers will be the CIWS of choice for space warcraft; that's what they're best at.

>>55164292
>Missiles

Mines muchacho, targeting bouys would be on the shortlist of things to obliterate on your opponent's side anyway. Although you'd run into the station that targeting bouys help both sides... So destroying them, yours or theirs, impairs lethal engagements on either side.

>>55164445
>Space is not empty or a complete vacuum, diffraction would happen near instantly due to dust, as you say, but also radiation and electromagnetic forces, among other things. Attenuation of beam strength would need to be calculated directly opposed to distance of target because the only mechanical movement involved would be the ship that's firing or that's potentially getting hit, making calculation of attenuation opposed to emitter wavelengths and everything in between the firing ship and the target a massive factor of effectiveness due to that calculation needing to be near constant for the beam to be effective. Firing lasers in an atmosphere is actually less complicated due to the gravitational and electromagnetic forces of Earth being a known commodity.

True, but a focused beam will still not be able to target things beyond a few light-seconds at best, and the diffraction due to microgravity dust is not going to be particularly significant within that range.

>>55164548
Lasers are a meme anyway if you just load your ship's hull with a surrounding shield of ice. A huge ice shield will absorb much of the incoming energy, and the heat will dissipate in that mass of ice. The high energy of the beam will also likely vaporize and ionize the water, creating a plasma which will absorb even more energy and travel up the beam, blocking the laser's punch.

>>55164367
But your ship probably can't support continuous fire because that's stupid, and their armor probably isn't being eroded at millimeters per second because you've diffracted the beam too much.

>>55164548
You aren't going to be engaging with lasers at whole light seconds worth of range with anything less than a stationary defensive platform. The optics and heat syncs you need for this kind of thing would be impractically large compared to a missile buss. It would be a strictly defensive weapon, that is in itself a big juicy target for long range coilguns.

>all this talk of beam weapon effectiveness

BULLSHIT, if you're pussy ass space military is a loser enough to worry about such things then fuck you, just make a beam weapon so fuckhuge that range dissipation don't matter and laugh at all the bitches who whine about it.

>>55164673
>You aren't going to be engaging with lasers at whole light seconds worth of range with anything less than a stationary defensive platform. The optics and heat syncs you need for this kind of thing would be impractically large compared to a missile buss. It would be a strictly defensive weapon, that is in itself a big juicy target for long range coilguns.

Heat is definitely the main problem, it must be said. I'm generally working from the assumption that the primary issues with spacecraft in general have been figured out; (see also: coilgun recoil)

(Optics mass is pretty much irrelevant next to the scale of the power plant and/or storage needed for an effective, destructive laser at long ranges.)

>>55164733
The problem isn't range dissipation, it's targeting. Have you ever tried hitting a moving object with a water pistol? Easy close up, fucking impossible past about 30 paces. Same thing with lasers past about 300,000km.

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>>55164758
In outer space, temperature is a steady 455 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. That's about three degrees Kelvin regardless of varying electromagnetic or radiaological heat retention in a near vacuum. Fuck that noise I say, we can do better and achieve beam weapons that shit all over the concept of heat.

Heat negative lasers my man. A cooled potassium gas system that produces a outbound beam to one billionth of a degree below absolute zero. In the quantum world, that's actually hotter than the Sun. It's hotter, even, than infinity degrees Kelvin. Now, before you open your mouth, fuck you, with your "but it's impossible to go below absolute zero!" Cooled potassium gas has a negative temperature, Because if you introduce more energy to the gas into a system where there are more atoms that are moving at high velocities than at low velocities, this corresponds to a negative temperature rather then static atoms at zero degrees and negative temperatures are in a sense hotter than positive temperatures thus logically avoiding all that absolute zero cockery.

My space military will deploy our "Vanilla Ice Beam System" and proceed to teabag the universe.

>>55164783
>targeting

A pleb problem for beams THAT AREN'T BIG ENOUGH

>>55165012
Sorry, even if you had a citation (which you clearly don't) I'm just going to have to assume you're wrong because that sounds like a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Adding the word quantum to things is not an excuse to break the laws of physics.

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>>55165012
Can my frictionless, high-photonic photoselective lasers join in? You can use them for vectoring in space!

>>55165024
Beams which will waste most of their energy and thermal capacity, thus requiring hardware of limited tactical utility in everything except a fixed defensive position.

Don't get me wrong, a Type II civilization willing to turn their entire solar system into a dyson swarm can mount a pretty impressive laser defense, but that won't stop a type III civilization from just throwing more than one solar system's mass worth of missiles at them.

IDK how practical a galaxy scale laser would be. but inter-galactic conflict would probably be hilariously slow.

>>55165241
>Throwing more than one solar system's mass worth of missiles at them.

Needing mass in your weapon systems?
>Laughing type V civilizations.zip

>>55165272
Well even for a type II, there are probably weapons systems that we can't even imagine, that would make a Nicoll Dyson laser seem laughably crude.

Still, I like the idea of a suitably paranoid post-human civilization turning their entire solar system into effectively a giant disco ball. Immune to most relativistic attacks, because the individual shards are either replaceable, or capable of evading. And anything slower than relativistic is going to get lasered to pieces before it gets close.

The only real way to kill it would be focusing Nicoll Dyson lasers from more than one enemy solar system over the entire swarm until all the shards cook off, or use some super-science weapon to make the star go nova.

Another interesting thing a type II civilization could conceivably do is, (very carefully) remove mass from the star in order to build even more dyson swarm shards, and extend the life of the star (and thus the civilization using it), Do it right and you can even increase the solar energy output in the process. Probably Maximum comfy if you don't have any reason to worry about the neighbors.

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>>55165152
>Sorry, even if you had a citation (which you clearly don't) I'm just going to have to assume you're wrong

If you're going to be a positive heat laser bitchpleb, I have more than one, eat an icy space laser cock brochacho.

>http://www.rle.mit.edu/eap/
The research group under Vladan Vuletić, Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics Division Head, Atomic, Biological, Condensed Matter and Plasma Physics.
>https://phys.org/news/2013-01-atoms-negative-absolute-temperature-hottest.html
Example, article one
>https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130104143516.htm
Example, article two

See me after class.

>>55164112
>You get focusing issues past the first light minute or so but that's a sizeable chunk of the Solar System.

No, you get focusing issues at 500 - 10,000km's depending on the size of your laser. Getting more than 30,000km range from a laser requires gamma rays or fuckhuge optics.

This isn't anywhere even remotely close to 0.0001% of the size of the solar system. Your typical laser couldn't even focus and burn something across the diameter of the earth, let alone even just the distance between the earth and the moon.

Lasers are short-range weapons in space.

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>>55165024
No anon, you're going about this the wrong way. You don't need bigger beams, you just need an absolute shitton of them.

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>>55165544
This, any suitably large scale laser attack/defense is probably going to involve some sort of composite beam created by multiple emitters, the upper limit of which is going to be a Nicoll Dyson laser, or perhaps a galaxy full of Nicoll Dyson lasers if you can somehow bother to coordinate that.

>>55164733
Calm down Sheev

>>55161251
Welcome to the British navy...

>>55160197
To be fair railguns sound cooler than coilguns. Sounds like something from a 1950s toy cartoon.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvs_f5MwT04

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg8eJZ08_0Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtFnWh53z0

>>55166209

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg9BRaI_exo

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>His setting doesn't have Nuclear Shaped Charges
>It doesn't have Nuclear Bomb Pumped Lasers either.

There's no real reason for not to make all the ships the same size barring economics.

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What does interplanetary warfare looks like when neither planet is unified? Say, French colonies on Mars, and the French themselves, start a war against British ones.

>>55166849
They make an agreement not to blow each it from orbit and keep the fight on space, alternative they fight other in all fronts turning it into a race of who kills the enemy first. had a few variantsof this scenario.

>>55163531
>>55163985
When CCP first added Titans they THOUGHT that they'd be so expensive and time-consuming to make that even the biggets alliances would have maybe two or three. They completely underestimated how much effort players are willing to put into something if it's useful enough. Titans were simply so good (both for their utility in opening jump bridges to move fleets quickly across the galaxy and being a hard-counter to other supercapitals) that you'd be fool to not get one if you could afford one. And once your enemy has a Titan, you need one as well. And you know what's the easiest way to kill a Titan? Two Titans! Or even better, three or five or fifty Titans! No major coalition was willing to risk a "Titan gap" between them and their enemies, so despite the immense resource cost they started mass-producing them, eliminating the long-ass build time by ensuring you always have one coming off the assembly line somwhere. Thii ended up with every coaliting stockpiling hundreds of Titans and making it completely impossible for any new power to get a foot in the nullsec politics since even if every major coalition would stop building Titans and not blow up the one Titan you've managed to build with twenty of theirs, it'd still take years of nonstop building just to catch up with the numbers they already had.

Eventually CCP realised the supercapital proliferation was one of the big reasons nullsec politics had gone stagnant, and made them less practical (mostly by making it harder to move them around, so you can't just hot-drop a dozen on top of the enemy fleet whenever you feel like it). They're largely relegated to status symbols now, but that's not because they take a lot of resources to make, but because the game was literally rewritten so that they'd no longer be the most optimal way to spend those resources.

>>55147254
Space combat would be over the moment it starts. Dogfights in space wouldn't happen, as cool as they are in games and other media.

>>55149907
>at long range you can dodge a laser
by the time you can see that the laser was fired it has hit you, unless you have sensors that can somehow detect things faster than light

>>55168308
Well, if Star Trek can do it, we can do it too

>>55168308

Just randomly change position while you are light minutes/seconds away.

>>55168349
again this presupposes that you have some faster than light way of detecting threats, unless you just fly around drunk ALL the time

>>55168138
To get into more detail, the main reason for Titan proliferation was probably the introduction of the carrier.
The way large fleet battles in EVE typically work is that you want to concentrate the firepower of your fleet on few targets to overwhelm their defences. Ten battleships all shooting at different enemy battleships results in a long drawn-out firefight, but if those ten ships focuses their fire on one enemy ship at a time, they can quickly destroy them one by one.
Enter the carrier. While capable of launching fighters, the thing that really made carrier amazing was bonuses to repair modules. This meant that if the enemy had a fleet of carriers supporting their battleships, you absolutely had to concentrate enough firepower on your targets to kill them in a single volley, because otherwise the carriers would instantly repair them to full health. Which meant usually wasting a lot of firepower since your choise was overkill or risk doing effectively nothing. And carriers themselves were tough enough that only the most massive battleship fleet could hope to destroy one in a sinle volley, so multiple carriers repairing each other were nearly unbeatable.
Unless you had a Titan. Titans have the appropriately-named Doomsday Device, a massive spinal-mounted weapon that can kill even a capital ship in one shot. But because it has an extremely long cooldown, you need multiple Titans on field if you want to do more than kill one or two carriers. And the Titans of course can also be repaired by carriers, so to deal with Titans you need enough Titans of your own to oneshot enemy Titans with multiple Doomsday blasts or to take out all of their carrier escorts before they do the same to you.

So, the only real counter to carriers is Titans, and only real counter to Titans is more Titans, which leads to every coalition sitting on a pile of hundreds of Titans, that are actually kind of useless against anything smaller than capital ships.

>>55168360

Of course you can. You are at war. You better change position all the time taking into account the recycling cycles of the lasers. A near miss is enough to save your ass. Force the enemy to rely on volley fire or close combat.

>>55168372
>Titan pileup
Its like a nuclear arms race.

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Does anyone else just comply to the rule of cool with ship aesthetics and technology?
I feel, aslong as it's a space opera at its core that different factions using varying different technologies and styles across the board just makes for a good time.

>>55168387
>captain have you been drinking? we are swerving all over the place!
>we're at war laddie the enemy could be firing on us at any moment
>but how do we even know if they are there?
>they are ALWAYS there lad

humor aside conflicts in a setting with fater than light travel but not faster than light sensors would probably be more about intelligence than heroics, as the only way to effectively attack anything is to know when and where something will be long before it gets there.

>>55166849
I don't know, it'd probably depend on the weapons (or if you want to copy tropes from a particular conflict), but it'd be interesting - especially if there's neutral powers as well.

How well space ships could support a ground fight would be interesting - accuracy would be an issue, as would the fact that you can make much bigger weapons on the ground for defences (though of course they have to fire in a gravity well).

Maybe "fighters" would be used primarily for atmospheric battles ("carrier" vs "shore"), but seeing as you have them you might as well use them in space fights (carrier vs fleet) if they work in space as well

>>55168429
Prett literally yes. In both cases you've got immensely powerful weapons that are kind of useless in a conventional battle (Titans can barely even hit battleships with their normal guns, and doomsdaying a single battleship is a massive overkill, and while nukes would destroy any enemy army they'd also destroy everything else in the general vicinity and cause your opponent to start firing their nukes at you so it's just better to not use them except as the very last resort) but extremly powerful in specific cirumstances, and you must still build and maintain in huge amounts of them to avoid the enemy from building more than you because in that case you'd be at a massive disadvantage. I'm pretty sure every major coalition in EVE has at one point or other declared that they can't allow a Titan Gap.

The big diffrence is, of course, that Titans were frequently deployed en masse before the great capital ship rebalancing, and nukes can't be used to teleport your army hafway across the globe (jumb-bridging being the other main use of Titans, and the other reason any major alliance needed at least one: they're a massive force-projection multiplier)

>>55168521
>Titans can barely even hit battleships with their normal guns
Are battleships (or anything that size) any good against Titans then?

>>55168529
>that size
I mean, anything smaller than Titan size

>>55168529
If you'd pit a lone Titan against equivalent of its cost in battleships, the Titan would lose. It simply can't kill that many battleships fast enough to avoid being overwhelmed.
However, if the Titan is accompanied by a couple of carriers they can just repair it and each other to tank the battleship fleet all day, while using their fighters to kill your battleships, which is why you need your own Titan (or preferrably multiple ones) to oneshot the enemy carriers/Titan.

This is all from before the capital ship changes (I think they've finally wisened up and split the fighter-carrier and capital logistic ship into different classes), so I'm not really sure how much of it is relevant anymore.
I probably should start playing EVE again.

>>55165582

I think if you have converted your galaxy into Nicoll Dyson Lasers you are probably at the level where you can co-ordinate that.

Quite what that other galaxy next door did to piss you off I don't know, but I'm sure in the next 8000 years they're going to be very very sorry.

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>>55156495
>an "insane" range in a "super realistic" game
>engagement distances are measured in mere hundreds of km

This talk about Tians in EVE has reminded me of one old incident that should give you a good idea how capital ship escalation in battles used to happen before the nerf.

It was the battle of Asakai, which for a logn while was the single biggest fleet battle in EVE. And it all started because of one fuckup.
See, there was a relatively small skirmish going on in Asakai, and one side was using a Titan, located safely within their alliance's space, to bridge in some reinforcements to the battle. Except he accidentally hit the "jump to" rather than "bridge to" button, dropping his lone Titan right in the middle of the fight. Which of course led to the other side calling in every Titan they could to destroy the enemy supercapital, which led to the other side dropping as much capitals and supercapitals as they could do safe the Titan and kill the enemy Titans, until finally you had a massive clusterfuck with hundreds of supercapitals duking it out, all because one guy accidentally hit the wrong button (if I recall correctly, he also somehow managed to actually survive the battle as well).

>>55168628
Sounds both a bit mad and quite cool.
And for anyone actually manning the fleets, would probably be quite horrific.
Actually comes off as quite realistic in a way, so many things in history being the escalation of simple mistakes or acts of foolhardiness

>>55168782
>>55168628

There was a similar case in the current largest space battle in EVE history.
One team forgot to direct debit their sovereignty fees on a key staging post sytem which currently contain a fairly large armount of their factions stuff during a relatively tense faction war.
They forget one payment, lost sovereignty and everybody attempts to jump in on everybody else.

RPS has a pretty good write-up of it if you look up Eve Online in the tags.

>>55168434
Realism>"fun"

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>>55168798
Yeah, I heard about that one.
One missed direct debit leading to literally hundereds of thousands of dollars worth of digital carnage as a valuable system goes up for grabs.
Did anyone actually win that battle?

What you say in >>55168628 has me thinking, realistically warships can't repair each other infinitely, but how much capacity to repair on the go could be maintained in space, by use of a fleet train of tenders, supply ships and even portable shipyards - it's not something normally thought about, and it's often abstracted away in-game

>>55168925
>What you say in >>55168628 has me thinking, realistically warships can't repair each other infinitely, but how much capacity to repair on the go could be maintained in space, by use of a fleet train of tenders, supply ships and even portable shipyards - it's not something normally thought about, and it's often abstracted away in-game

Aurora, for all of its flaws, handles this better than pretty much any other space /v/. Supplies for (limited and slow) in-flight repairs, maintenance schedules, crew tours of duty/leave etc... It's the only game I've ever encountered apart from Supreme Ruler where supply units are actually important.

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>>55169182
Please, tell me more, I know nothing about the /v/ Aurora, I've never even heard of it

>>55169308
It's basically a 4X game, but driven by the same mentality as Dwarf Fortress. Currently in hiatus while the developer learns to code in a grown up language. http://aurora2.pentarch.org/

>>55147279
Project Rho makes assumptions about future technologies the same way old navy admirals used to deride the utter bullshit concept of using flying things in warfare.

While it's very useful for explaining what could be done in the near future and the overall issues/considerations that will need dealing with, it's also very quick to judge "silliness" and "impossibilities" while occasionally forgetting that no technology is an absolute.

>>55147254
Missiles would likely be replaced by bomb-pumped lasers and the like; sending out large numbers of disposable weaponry is still going to be a thing, but if they get blown up when they get close, people are gonna improvise.

Similarly, what would fuck up strike-craft would be a temporary (but exceptionally fatal for that period of time) lack of miniaturization: You're looking at that period of time in between these two points:
>The time when only capital vessels are capable of mounting railguns (or whatever weapon) with the power to punch through the defenses of other vessels
>The time when reactors and weapons have advanced enough from miniaturization that one can now deal damage to larger ships

Saving on costs, space, manpower and materials will always be advantageous. As soon as one can deal even mild damage from a strike-craft to a ship that could easily be a million times its cost once salaries,etc are factored in, 'fighters' are back in business. In fact, tiny strike craft were pretty much the death-knell of the old seagoing dreadnought; when aircraft gained the ability to mount weapons capable of damaging things that had cost tens of thousands of times as much, even if they were limited in doing so, they completely fucked the tactics of the time.

Likewise, if missiles become killer-drone platforms that nuke their front half into a relativistic slug, suddenly the effectiveness of the antimissile system drops radically.

Offense, Defense, Stealth (remember stealth is RELATIVE, not absolute: if you're .5 light seconds slower to be detected than the other guy, it's not much of an advantage but it IS one) and miniaturizations are an endless dance.

>>55168570
In the present day Titans have AOE Doomsdays again as well as things like warp disruption probes and High Angle capital ship guns exist. Titans with high angle guns and shotgun DDs are screaming, fiery death to subcapital fleets and titans with regular guns kill anything else. PL has frequently dropped nothing but titans and fleet auxiliaries (the replacement to triage carriers, which are just capital sized logistics ships).

Essentially nothing is good against titans and god save you if they happen to be Avatars.

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>All this talk about mounting the biggest/longest spinal railgun

>>55164292
They do this in Schlock Mercenary. "Very Dangerous Arrays" are just a large stock of missiles whose telemetry feeds double as synthetic-apperture.

>>55169626
So really the only point to subcapitals nowadays in EVE is "I'm new and can't afford anything actually useful yet"?

>>55169705
I mean everyone always needs interdictors.

>>55169680
Your a decade too late to be posting cringe worthy images of that meme plane.

>>55169705
Everything is useful in the right context. But if your alliance leader just spent 40 minutes telling PL what a bunch of dumb faggots they are and how he's going to remove them from the universe there's not a damned thing that you're going to be able to do in the resultant shitstorm in a battleship.

>>55164449
>In those two seconds the other craft could be dozens or even hundreds of kilometers away from where you guessed they were

A random evasive manouver that results in the spaceship being 100 km away from its predicted location within 2 seconds would have an acceleration equal to roughly 5000 g. Keep in mind that thousands of gees are in the realm of space magic like Star Wars, where an Imperial Star Destroyer with its fancy inertial dampeners and other magitech only has an acceleration of 3000 g, if that one autist who runs stardestroyer.net and jacks off to Star Trek ships blowing up in various ways is to be believed.

You need to learn to think in vectors: A constant velocity object is very easy to hit no matter if it orbits a planet at a few km/s, or is moving past the planet at 0.90c, as its future locations can be easily calculated. Acceleration in a random direction perpendicular to a attack's path is what makes it possible to dodge attacks the most efficiently. 2 s at 1 g is a distance of merely 20 meters, probably smaller than the ship's diameter, at 5 g it's 100 m. The ship's 'absolute' velocity does not matter in such manouvers.

That's likely the maximum plausible dodge vector as OP discusses Human-crewed warships. With larger g-forces, every crewman's chair would have to swivel so that their back is always 'downwards' if they don't want to get severy injured by the ship's movement. (Let's just ignore for the moment how difficult it would be for the ship with a spinal mount to have multiple engines capable of 5 g acceleration pointing in different directions, as it certainly couldn't pivot within seconds to use its main engines.) If we assume, on the other hand, that the fight is between a bunch of massive autonomous drone superscience ships moving close to the speed of light and not Humans with naval ranks slugging metal with big fucking railguns at each other, you're probably talking about a setting beyond the scope of this thread.

>>55169839
>Let's just ignore for the moment how difficult it would be for the ship with a spinal mount to have multiple engines capable of 5 g acceleration pointing in different directions, as it certainly couldn't pivot within seconds to use its main engines.

This is easy: pivot the engines. Just stick 'em to the sides of the ship, hook them up to a massive servo-rack, and do all kinds of silly shit with your "tiltrocket". Structural strain and maintenance will be interesting, but it is still better than getting blasted because you can't into complex evasions.

I highly recommend looking at C.J. Cherryh for high%c combat. The Chanur books have some good segments, as does Hellburner, and I believe there's a setting PDF that has a good deal of detail on ship combat. I'll try to find it when I'm home today.

>>55169614
But what if point defenses against strike craft also evolve to the point where it would be tantamount to suicide to approach a larger ship? What if you have energy shields to worry about.

>>55170178
>What if you have energy shields to worry about.

Then it is no longer hard sci-fi and thus irrelevant to this thread.

>>55170235
This thread is about weapons, not hard sci-fi.

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Would shitloads of drones, plus a few manned fighters make sense, if fleets used powerful ECM systems?
Pic related, a human fighter. It uses guns only when it runs out of micro-missiles.
>>55162742
>Dimensional rift tearing, time manipulation, atomic restructuring.
That's so terrifying it's ridiculous.
>>55168925
The Goons did, unfortunately. I'm not really on board with the news, what happened with the Imperium? Didn't the Moneybadgers kick their shit in? What the fuck is going on in the south?
>>55163050
The only thing stopping you is your lack of faith, come on and make us proud.

>>55170331
Small, singe pilot craft are not an answer to ECM, the instruments they use to navigate and target weapons are the same instruments that would be present on drones and missiles for the same purposes and which would be the target of ECM. And by adding a pilot you add maneuvering limitations and a requirement for life support and sufficient propellant and a return journey, as well as using manpower. For those reasons a manned fighter is unlikely to be directly competitive with a reasonably advanced autonomous drone of the same size and cost regardless of whether or not electronic warfare is occurring.

Fighters are useful in a specific situation:
- The total duration of the mission is very short
- The independent decision making ability of a human operator is of enormous importance to the mission
- Attrition rate of craft is expected to be low, or the mission is of sufficiently critical importance to justify loss of difficult to replace trained pilots

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>>55170331
>>55170784

why not long range drones? essentially a rail gun with thrusters? one or two human piloted ships to make decisions and several hundred small-ish drones scattered over miles.

pic unrelated.

>>55170923
I mean you can do that, sure, but even a small long range manned ship is unlikely to be recognizably something a person would typically call a fighter.

>>55170944
more like a tank I guess.

>>55170955
Tanks are also short range in that they require frequent resupply and aren't habitable enough to be occupied for long periods of time and interplanetary distance require days of travel with anything remotely resembling realistic drives.

>>55171100
you'd need a carrier.

>>55171347
The context is a drone command ship. The drones themselves can have long ranges independently of the command ship, or have shorter ranges and be carried to their destination by it. In the case of the former a carrier is not actually required, the command ship just needs fuel, supplies and habitation to facilitate long periods of travel. In the case of the later the command ship becomes the carrier.

>>55164059
That wasn't really the reason why the rebalanced it. I mean, it might have been part of it, but the main reason was that the big players were bringing titans to every engagement no matter what the opposition was packing, and any major fleet battles boiled down to whoever brought the most titans. This was fun for the guys with the huge titan fleets, but it made it impossible for smaller parties without titans to compete in any meaningful sense, which is why they eventually made it much harder for titans to move around.

So tossing FTL (or at least tactical use as opposed to strategic) out the window for a minute at least, how does anyone propose to actually fight beyond a few light seconds range?

From my understanding, limited as it is, unless you're blessed with some sort of magical FTL sensors (as in the sensors themselves get you information FTL), you have input delay on all available methods of detection that becomes rather noticeable at about 150,000km/0.5 light seconds. Said delay/lag is only going to get worse the further the distance, eventually resulting in an increasingly useless set of information.

Targeting info isn't exactly handy if it's half a minute behind where the enemy is.

>>55171522
Shoot things that affect a volume, use guided munitions, but generally speaking "With great difficulty" is how.

>>55171522
>how does anyone propose to actually fight beyond a few light seconds range

Generally, they don't. Most rocket/power source>radiator>laser efficiencies are under half a lightsecond, most missiles need to be fired from under 10k-km to survive the point defense from such lasers.

Planets are like castles on a plain, watching the enemy march all the way there until they are within bowshot.

If you want effective damage at multi-lightsecond (or lightminute) ranges, it's typically going to require a several km long size Xray laser, aimed by turning the fresnel plate.

>>55171522
Autonomous network of semi-smart weaponry that is scattered.

Or you simply don't. But at the same time, I think that we may be overstating maneuverability, in the sense that, unlike general scifi, maneuvering takes time/energy/mass. A ship won't be able to do evasive actions forever.

>>55170297
Hard scifi is implicit, or we would also be talking about Photon Torpedoes and FTL weaponry.

>>55169556
Slight difference is that Space has hard physical limits that we are taking into account, that aren't really trivially solvable by a decade of tech advancement. A lot of these theories come from how the hell we fight when we have hard fuel, heat management, and light speed limitations.

>>55169626
What the fuck happeend. Why did AOE doomsday come back. That was an amazing change.

>>55171416
To secure the territory, or at least have authority and an official voice, you'd probably want some sort of central command anyway - drones are good for a lot of things, but acting as a representative of your navy isn't one of them.

Besides, carriers as drone bases is starting to be a thing even now, it may be that by the time there's space combat the idea that a "carrier's" launched weapons platforms are manned would be seen as incredibly archaic

>>55171693
People were pretty fucking bored of titans being relegated to jump bridge machine with minimal combat usefulness so CCP decided to make them good at killing things.

So now there are multiple different types of doomsdays, which need to be aimed and apply damage in different patterns.

>>55147254
Just some things I noticed in the thread that seemed illogical to me and please note am not OP.
In space range would not be the defining factor.
1.Spaceships much like asteroids are extremely difficult to spot in the void of space. At the kind of ranges discussed in the thread above it would be almost impossible to sense your enemy let alone fire at them. And unless the species in question has god level technology most space battles would be at a much shorter range. For us probably in the range where radar would still be effective.
2. C-Missiles are not going to be practical for most engagements unless the battle is between two galactic superpowers. The amount of energy to go into them would be insane and more than likely they'd be massive and overkill to use on a starship. They'd definitely be planet busters of course but on a smaller scale it doesn't really make sense.
3. Most battles would not be fought in deep space and rather they'd be fought close to terrestrial bodies and locations of importance. What I mean by this is that the chances of finding your opponent in the deepness of space even with god sensors will be unimaginably difficult and deep space really has no strategic value to fight over anyways. Much like naval history here while there have been some battles in the heart of the oceans most were located close to ports or military installations of some kind.
4. With kinetics at the range of light days where you can't even hit even if you see your enemy and where a miss would just waste ammunition anyways most commanders would maneuver to much closer ranges in order to get more accurate shots.
My conclusions are that rather than range ships will be based around speed,maneuverability and weight of fire (in OP's case heading the massive railguns being made just to crack open enemy capital ships after any sensors and engines have been taken out). With most warfare occurring around mid range with cruiser sized ships being the combatants.

>>55172132
Actually spaceships would be extremely easy to spot in space. Asteroids are hard to spot because they're inert hunks of rock with temperature very close to the surrounding medium (even with space being a good insulator, they've had millions of years to reach temperature equilibrium with their surroundings), so you have to rely on visual sighting to spot them, which is hard because space is big and mostly dark. But a space ship would at the bare minimum radiate heat. You can hide elctronic signatures and make it invisible to radar, but that heat has to go somewhere. And since most of space is empty and doesn't have many source of heat within a reasonable distance (aside from the Sun, of course, but you're not really going to confuse anything else for the Sun), a spaceship will stick out like a sore thumb.

>>55172249
But that depends on having a very effective heat based sensor that can can be used at long ranges. And still at long ranges it would be almost impossible to land an effective hit.

>>55172249
This is true, to a point, but it's also not the be all and end all of spotting a spaceship - if space is busy then things get a fair bit more complicated, because orbits and systems are going to be full of things giving out craploads of heat and signals

Bump for interest

>>55172359
>But that depends on having a very effective heat based sensor that can can be used at long ranges.
This is one of the easiest types of sensor to construct and they exist already and already have the ability to detect relatively small engines, such as chemical rockets at interplanetary ranges.

>>55172359
IR telescopes. Cheaper and simpler than radar, to the point that outside a few narrow niches (you might want some radar for speed/ranging data for point defense and docking, or penetrating cloud cover for orbital support), they're the only sensor you need in space war.

>>55172359
So in other words it depends on technology that exists today and is available to civilians.

>>55172363
If space is busy, sensor networks will be just as busy to compensate. It's less complicated to build more sensors and more powerful computers to crunch the data, than it is to build more spaceships. Furthermore, the amount of energy consumed by said computers and sensors will always be less than the energy consumed by the ships. Unless you are being negligent in maintaining your system to meet demand, or suddenly visited by the entire galaxy at once, I doubt you are going to have problems tracking incoming vessels.

The way around this of course is doing a retro-tech setting where computers and sensors are nerfed, the technology that exists today is sufficient to detect ships that would be radiating as much heat as necessary to provide the capabilities being discussed in this thread. You'd also have to explain why people were able to learn how to control these levels of energy without modern computers. The amount of slide rules necessary to design an effective torch drive or combat laser, would be kind of absurd. Maybe they were invented by a mad genius, or it was a literal gift from the gods.

>>55165502
>https://phys.org/news/2013-01-atoms-negative-absolute-temperature-hottest.html

>This inversion of the population of energy states is not possible in water or any other natural system with moving particles, as the system would need to absorb an infinite amount of energy – an impossible feat!

So your weapon stops working if you use it on anything more than 0 energy. Which is, outside a lab, everything. Cool.

>>55173717
>>55173752
Would giant space flares be practical to combat this? Maybe detonating some kind of heat device to blind the sensor?
And still lining up long range shots with just thermals alone would still be very difficult. I still think it is better to rush to midrange instead where you'll have a much better chance of hitting the other vessel (in this case midrange would be more in the thousands or tens of thousands of miles).

>>55173938
>Would giant space flares be practical to combat this? Maybe detonating some kind of heat device to blind the sensor?

Maaaybe if you hit the point where you're no longer using chemical or nuclear plumes to push your ships about. Until then, the biggest flare is you.

>>55173938
>Would giant space flares be practical to combat this

Not really. Flares (and chaff for the same reasons) barely work in-atmosphere today, they're only used because they're cheap and semi-effective against old, shitty missiles. DIRCM is better (blinding the seeker with a laser pointer) and active defense missiles (guided explosives, fired from the same flare box in fact) are in the prototype stage.

In space, flares don't work because of the rocket equation. One good look at a ship thrusting and you can see it's mass, vector, engine spectrography, etc. So unless a decoy has the same drive and mass as a ship, it's basically useless.

>>55174126
So in this setting instead of having stealth ships you'd have"cold ships" that maybe use ion drives for propulsion and instead of going silent they'd go cold and turn off all power? Seems sweet but what would they be armed with ?

>>55174126
This, the only thing brighter than your engines will be some very large nuclear weapons, and the nearest star, and in both cases sensors will be calibrated to safely image both.

Really the only thing you can do to hide is place something between you and the enemy. Being on the other side of a planet helps, provided your enemy dosn't have friends on the other side relaying the data for him. And even then he'll have to deal with light lagged intel.

Another option if you aren't under thrust and are just coasting, is to throw up opaque/reflective screens between you and the enemy. If they are made out of some science nanotech material, they can only be a few molecules thick, and several kilometers wide. The enemy will be able to see the screens, but not what's behind them. This isn't always useful if the enemy already knows your fleet composition, but you can make him wonder what you are up to, or hide the fact that you are repairing damage and would be tottaly vulnerable if he attacked right now. Even better, you could design these screens to also be giant sensor antennas so you can observe the enemy without being (directly) observed yourself.

These screens might also provide some very limited protection against kinetic attacks, but will be destroyed in the process. They are obliviously very fragile and only really work in space. They also can't really be moved at all, so they will stay in the orbit you place them, and can't be used while the ship is under-thrust. As soon as you make any maneuver other than basic attitude control, you'll move out from behind them. And even if you are just adjusting your rotation, you have to be careful your jets don't blow them away. Very embarrassing when that happens while the enemy is watching.

>>55174173
Well what if you were to detonate a large enough explosive to blind the enemy's thermals?

>>55174289
There's no atmosphere in space, so the heated gas cloud will dissipate in milliseconds. A nuke is even briefer - just an instant flashbulb. And either way, thanks to the inverse-square law, you're not going to permanently damage any sensors. In a laser-heavy setting they're probably even behind redundant shutters etc.

>>55174199
For a long time, it was thought that such a ship would have to break the laws of physics. But more recently people have been discussing so called hydrogen steamers which boil hydrogen for thrust.

They are very slow and very cold. Space equivalent of submarines. Like a submarine, the only real weapon they could use would be torpedoes and mines. They would probably just drop them in a useful place, then activate them remotely after moving on. If properly cooled, the missiles would be hard to spot until they start moving, after which they would be very hot and very visible.

https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-hydrogen-steamer-stealth-spaceship.html

>>55174289
Why not just detonate a big enough explosive to destroy the enemy ship? Flares probably won't be worth the amount of energy being used just to blind the enemy.

>>55174199
Ion drives at the power levels where they are useful for spacecraft propulsion are not actually much less visible than chemical rockets.

>>55147254
Not having read the thread I'd say that'd do. It's kinda a fuck it whatever reason but it shows you've considered it.

The alternative is that laser point defence got good enough to invalidate missiles entirely, so they moved to lasers which are being outclassed by energistic barriers that absorb or refract light or whatever you have the beams made of, therefore the only decent way to hole a ship is now to ping godawful half-ton darts of tungsten at them at c-fractional speed.

But honestly whatever, both sound plausible and it gives you the answer tot he first 'why' you'll receive, which is good enough in a softer sci-fi setting.

>>55174352
Somebody writefag this. I want space submarines.
>>55174354
Well what would be the stealthiest method of space propulsion? For the sake of the question having the ship equipped with some kind of FTL so it isn't too damn slow.

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>>55174750
As stated earlier in this thread hydrogen steamers. They use sunlight to boil hydrogen and then direct it as thrust. They are less efficient even than chemical rockets, but almost completely invisible and if you are VERY patent, give you the ability to put missiles in unexpected places.

They also look really weird (assuming you can see them at all), are 2km long, and have to point at the sun at all times. No these design features are not negotiable.

>>55174834
Just read the article and honestly it would be a great story and a stealth warship would be a great equalizer against a superior force. Are there any good novels or short stories that explore the concept?

>>55169614
>Missiles would likely be replaced with [missile warheads]
You put the bomb pumped lasers on the missiles.

>Stealth in space but I get distance and time units mixed up
stealth in space isn't a thing without magitech

>>55171522
Defensively, Nicoll-Dyson laser arrays. You can just target every spot they could run to out to a really extreme range. (light-hours maybe?)

Otherwise you use missiles/drones to close to a more reasonable range and have them attack. Against enemies aren't evading a really large x-ray laser can damage them and once fired they can't see it coming (they'll see the thing and should be evading already though).

>>55175370
Read this post about stealth.
>>55174352

>>55175370
Also this post. Mid range combat is where it's at.
>>55172132

>>55174834
>not to scale
oh gee, thanks

>>55175515
the tube part is 3m wide, and the entire length of the ship is 2.4km long. It would be very hard to illustrate it at scale.

>>55175370
>stealth in space isn't a thing without magitech

It is, just not in the way one would normally image 'stealth' as stealth. You can't hide, but you can deceive your opponent. Or beam a Medusae into their passive sensors and make them think twice about looking for you.

InfoWar fuck yeah and all that.

>>55175406
22 K is not stealthy, just stealthier than the normal "screamingly obvious". The nonmilitarized WISE telescope can detect 70 K objects at light hour+ ranges, and it's using liquid hydrogen coolant. Hydrogen and helium are visible in space, so the exhaust is also (low visibility) visible. I also have some doubts that the outer hull will actually be 22 K after it gets out of the physics lab and to the engineers. It also uses a standard booster so you exactly where to start looking, making it much easier to spot quickly or just deploy a UV/X-ray laser to paint it.

Even if it works as planned a near-solar observatory could see the lens flickering open and closed, and you'd really, really, want a near solar observatory in that case.

Tough SF is written to make normal sci-fi tropes more plausible, which is does a good job of, but it's not the same thing as a proof of concept. It does require a fairly large IR sensor, or a long scan time to see though, but it's also really slow so I don't think that helps a lot.

>>55175446
>Mid Range
That doesn't mean anything. Long range for a Nicoll-Dyson laser is a million LY, so what actual distance is medium range? (That said a Nicoll-Dyson laser has no place in this kind of setting)

>>55176143
If that's possible in such a way that they can't sanitize their inputs (which is probably impossible) then it works great. Q-ships are also possible, but IMO, stealth and subterfuge are different.

>>55176198
Are you posting that "muh IR" bullshit on here now that it didn't fly on the CoaDE forums?

>>55166849
https://youtu.be/Mg8eJZ08_0Q
You may find this vid interesting as it goes through some of what you suggest. Althrough the answer seems to ultimately be they probably would not fight in the first place.

On a seperate note, wouldnt it be interesting if emp and anti electricity technology were to advance to such a point where nothing electrical could even be used, yet space combat and travel was already such a norm that there was no getting away from it. Ships having to be manualy operated by huge teams manuvering thrusters and forcefields having to be replaced with massivly thick hulls. Homing missiles become impossible and the use of large cannon forces ships to close range in the mannor of old line battles or ww2 battleships. Communications between ships has to either be done through long cables or by flag semaphore. Huge bellows run on diesel engines keep air circulated and ships have to spot eachother using telescopes and other manual equipment.
I k ow its probably a flawed idea fundimentaly but it would be really cool.

>>55178005
I'm not sure how you even build interplanetary drives without using electricity. Chemical rockets don't strictly need electrical power (except to guide them in a sane manner) but those won't be good enough for most purposes, and atomic engines will probably need some sort of electronic control system.

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>>55168841
>Realism>"fun"

Ok, a faction of motherfuckers on one side of a large solar system cluster declares war on another faction on the other side of the cluster and after ten years of calculation, uses a point to point gamma-ray burst to shit all over their enemy as an opening salvo, because the GRB is the only thing that could maintain its energy and travel fast enough to be relevant in such a long distance war. Since the distance is so far away, the gamma ray takes one hundred years to reach its target and neither faction can actually send ships because that would be pointless due to relativistic space travel (time dilation). So the war just becomes eventual gamma ray pot shots causing mass migrations in their interim, until one side says uncle due to resource expense.

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>>55179072
>I'm not sure how you even build interplanetary drives without using electricity

You're not thinking like an orc, convert the topography of an entire planet into one very large slingshot and fire your "ships" into the great unknown using pure kinetic force.

>>55169696
Yup. Schlock Mercenary's art is nothing special, but the science and technology in it is fascinating and very well-done.

>>55176198
>>55177234
Yeah but you can't see somebody at that range anyways regardless of actually hitting them. But in this context I meant the range would be in the thousands and not millions because it seems very infeasible.

>>55169839
That's why I like sublight warp engines for space opera. You can do many interesting things with them and don't run into a problem of each ship being an RKV.

>>55183022
Hmm, how do you work around that to make something FTL?

>>55184747
Memes

>>55161397
>projected energy weapons that peter-out at designated ranges
Like what?

>>55161067
If they're moving that fast, then any, and I do mean ANY projectile that they hit on the way in is gonna convert them into plasma.

The faster a missile goes, the harder it is to intercept, but the more certain destruction becomes when it is hit.

>>55184747
Warp.

It allows you to move the ship without getting all the kinetic energy of an object moving at 0.1c and above.

Same way as Alcubierre drive warps space to move the ship at FTL speeds you could warp the space "just a little" to move the ship at sublight speeds. It actually should, in theory, take much less energy and have less problems (like say navigation).

The main bonus for space opera is that a ship moving at 0.5c warp (or even 0.99c warp) that say collides with a planet would have kinetic energy in much more reasonable amounts that come out of its real speed (probably a couple dozen km/s). So instead of vaporising a good chunk of a planet you have just a big old nuclear blast. And in space opera settings they probably can even shield key locations from a direct hit of such calibre.

>>55187752
I see, my idea was for something like the 40k warp, but the ships travel the warp with their real legit speed, however the warp is a place time flows in a strange mannger, allowing people to FTL but not really.

>>55179072
You gotta go all project orion style and use atomic bombs exploded behind you. You wouldnt need a constant control system that way, so long as the warheads are stable your golden.or just use some kind of electrical drive until you get within emp range of the opposition. Then switch to chemical drives as you dont need the speed as much

>>55187781
40k warp doesn't allow for fast movement in normal space so it is more or less useless in direct combat.

Sublight warp drive allows to move at pretty insane speeds while still being in normal space and continuing to interact with the rest of the universe. Admittedly there should be some lensing around the ship making it harder to hit with weapons and any projectile that can't move at the same speeds won't be able to hit the ship (most of the time). So most kinetic weapons will need be some kind of close combat shrapnel launchers and missiles will be scaled up until they could accommodate their own sublight warp drive or else they will be more or less worthless.

It also, in theory, should allow for fighters armed with same close combat kinetic weapons. If you could move (and accelerate) at around 0.1-0.5c you will be really hard to hit.

>>55188056

To be fair, I don't really like how some of sci-fi series treats ships like angry bees mixed with DBZ, I prefer my ships to be rather slow and big, another minor thing I dislike is how small ships can go at fuckhueg speeds.

So, I tend to use something like LoGH but somewhat scaled down, as in not having tens of thousands of ships.

A question occurs to me, regarding large scale laser weaponry.

It was mentioned earlier that at the kinds of distances capital ships can engage one another, there's still plenty of time to dodge a laser

But, that assumes the ship knows the laser has been fired and where it's being aimed. Assuming a laser travels at the speed of light, is there any way to monitor the opposing ship and incoming fire that's actual capable of giving you forewarning? It would require a method to transfer data faster than light, wouldn't it? Since any method I can think of would tell you the laser has been fired at the same time the beam finishes hitting you.

>>55188260
Without any sort of sensor, which is basically magic, no. The best answer is engage in what I call, Bee warfare, where you constantly move and attack in 3d.

>>55188120
Crest of the Stars is better than LoGH. But they also don't have no tiny spaceships. Their smallest combat ship has a crew of around 20 people if I remember right.

>>55188289
A follow-up thought of course occurs in that you can't aim your laser at any speed faster than the projectile, which means laser targeting would be 100% prediction

So they'd be incredibly effective against an unaware opponent but you'd have to predict every single alteration to their acceleration and direction to ever get a second hit in at extreme range

At close range I'd imagine they'd eat capitol ships though, because there's a point where the target can't get all the way out of your general cone of potential threat

>>55188305
I just googled on google images, pls don't tell its a romance.

Casaba Howitzer

http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-nuclear-spear-casaba-howitzer.html?m=1

>>55188357
If you mea LoGH no

It is not a romance

>>55188353
>>55188289
>>55188260
Long range laser warfare is why armor exists!

Obviously, ships randomly dodge about in 2d, as they travel towards the enemy (delta-V costs means nobody is decelerating mid-fight on the third axis). And lasers naturally spread out at extreme range as well.

An unarmored ship is vulnerable to soft kills from the weaker, wider (potentially deliberately defocused) lasers at long range. An appropriately armored one is tough enough that it can survive dissipated, long-range fire; and at mid range, the enemy has to take focused shots to pierce it effectively, so random skittering around in 2d is useful because they can't just spread the beam out.

>>55188405
No I was talking about the other serie.

>>55188510
There is some romance but most of the anime is politics, war and characters trying to understand each other over a gap in culture a couple of hundreds years wide.

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>>55186429
Plasma weapons that lose cohesion at particular ranges due to their pre-programmed chemical bonds breaking down?

Lasers that suffer scattering and loss of lethality at ranges longer than intended due to diffusion?

Singularity missiles that pop using tiny proximity warheads which suck in their shrapnel and then explode into a small near-harmless ion cloud once their designated input of mass is caught and converted to ions?

Directed EMP waves that don't do dick to anything other then ships?

I don't know, have an unrelated Star Trek TNG gif.

>>55161067
A missile is a guided rocket, a rocket is a propelled mass explosive. A missile that's essentially just a massive guided chunk of metal like a tungsten rod that has enough mass and speed to do damage on its own is not a missile, the word you're looking at is "javelin". Which is cooler in any case.

>>55188260
It's pretty easy to devise a type of system that tracks heat or radiological build-up on enemy ships at range. Assuming the lasers in your setting require a charge up before firing. In terms of chemical lasers, that's easy to pinpoint too. A defensive arms race would also naturally occur as such in trying to defuse easily detected heat, radiation or chemical signatures in ships which would be marginally cool.

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>>55147254
>Space Ship Weapons
How about a mass carrying beam of light? not a laser, but a beam of light that has enough cohesion to carry mass ejected along its linear path, say nanite swarms injected into the beam, which upon contact with an enemy ships hull, begin to either detonate, themselves causing huge amounts of static or interference for the ships mechanical systems, or get to work burrowing to the hull to detonate into a vapor cloud causing mass oxidization of the ship's interior to erode armor, internal supports like bulkheads, or eat away at computer systems?

>>55190347
Ugh, don't remember who wrote similar space combat. There were micro machines used as projectiles that were fired at around 0.4c. They hit the ship, pierced through 3 or 5 walls and then started to chew it.

I didn't have enough hands to facepalm so I also used feet.

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>>55147339
You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

>>55190347
Like a solar sail?

Starwisps riding lasers as kinetic weapons or to carry more mirrors to the edge of a laser network make sense.

They were even in one of Stross's books featuring space combat, the same as >>55191318 IIRC.

>>55147254
How about defensive weapons against space ships?

Like a race of highly advanced yet simple living extremely passive aggressive people that just don't want to be bothered by the extra solar shit they know is out there. So they programmed their automated artificial sun to emit a huge system-wide set of EMP pulses, or mined their entire solar system with cloaked cascading E-bombs, so any time a space vessel without proper introduction invades their solar boarders? Boom, a system wide event on an EM scale too huge to protect against? Any invader, or invading force would either be obliterated or struck stranded permanently without aid to be collected on a later date by the system dwellers dusting off their ships to be towed or disposed of.

>>55191341
I don't get why the Orion Drive wasn't adopted by the scifi genre
There's not a single fictional concept engine more badass than the idea of riding the shockwave of nuclear bombs

>>55191872
They wouldn't even need retrieval ships, just focused light beams that can "push" stranded ships out of their system. Maybe right into the hands (or claws) of allied space pirates...

>>55192128
It has shown up in a few stories. Footfall has the Humans pulling an Orion out of their ass to fight off an alien invasion. But for the most part it's just too weird looking for a genre which is used to just putting boats or planes in space.

>>55191872
>>55192209
Really, if you have a Dyson swarm, it should be impossible for anybody to set foot in your solar system without your explicit permission.

Anything that gets within range will be "Greeted" by a beam of light that functions as a target painter and communications laser. If they aren't interested in talking, and don't understand what "target lock" means, then you just increase the power of the laser until parts of them start to ablate away, creating thrust that will push their debris out of your sphere of influence. If you do want to allow them in, you could probably force them to turn off their engines deploy a solar sail and then be pushed around by your lasers, completely at your mercy.

The only thing the Dyson swarm laser net won't be able to (reliably) spot and laser in time would be RKVs, and even then those are only a threat to planets. An RKV could pass through the swarm without hitting any of the shards, and even if it hits one, it would be a meaningless loss because the shards are massively redundant. The only real way to kill a Dyson swarm is to laser the entire solar system with multiple Dyson swarm lasers, or find a way to force the star to go supernova. The former would take lots of time to coordinate, and the latter would require crazy super science.

>>55192128

It wasn't adopted because it doesn't work. If you have the magic to make Orion drives then you also have literally zero reasons to not go for the much more efficient nuclear salt-water engines.

>>55194048
Nuclear salt-water engines may be more "Efficient" but they are also much more dangerous and even less likely to be approved by anybody with half a brain.

>>55194088

If you are thinking about Orion then "dangerous" is not something you worry about.

>>55194211
All memes, aside, an Orion would be very safe compared to a nuclear salt water engine. It is very possible that the economic benefits would outweigh the risks for an Orion, but not for an NSWE.

>>55194341
You would have to built its nuclear bits entirely from a space platform, no way in anyone's right mind would it be allowed to be transported from ground to space via shuttle or rocket. Same reason nuclear bombers were scrapped in the 60's, one mishap and things go badly.

>>55194768
Or just launch it on the ground from a suitably remote location. With that much thrust even the north pole is acceptable, and in that case the radiation wold get sucked into the Van Allan belts.

>>55190347
>How about a mass carrying beam of light? not a laser, but a beam of light that has enough cohesion to carry mass ejected along its linear path,
That's called a laser.