A Different type of space battle.

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Subject: A Different type of space battle.
Miles 3/7/2007 12:35:36 AM

What kind of space battle could you think of, which is different from Star Wars, Star Trek, and Halo. It can be an idea, fact, or something you made up. But it can not be from a novel that you read. It must be different and new.

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Treadgar 4/7/2007 8:42:32 AM

As for guided missiles I've wondered how they could be used. Maybe as intermediate defense against swarms of drones? Sometimes they seem like a waste of resources because you need lots of fuel for them to be effective. Lots of dumb missiles seems like a better bet because you could saturate the target ship's fustrum. In the future it might be easier to make guided missiles with smaller, faster, and smarter computer guidance systems, so maybe the big expense would be fuel. When you consider the velocities involved, the warhead or shot may not have to be all that large, so the greater mass of the weapon (perhaps as much as 90%) could be for fuel. The question is, would we call these torpedoes or missiles? Maybe you could have both...

Treadgar

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flamingknives 4/7/2007 9:26:25 AM

The fuel question is dependent on technology. If the missile can have the same propulsion tech as the target, then you might be able to guide it all the way in whilst performing evasive manoeuvres, but you've still got to survive DEWs on the final approach or passing the pickets. Guided projectiles could be like small ships in their own right, with counter-countermeasures and EW facilities.

Or, you could fire salvoes of missiles with only terminal guidance, on the basis that the defence facilities wouldn't get them all. Perhaps they could be heavily sensor-stealthed or include decoys. Multiple warheads rather like a MIRV, with each warhead a small missile capable of autonomous guidance once released. If you used a multiple stage booster, you could provide the initial velocity to a spread throughout the target frustum with a first stage or two which are then discarded, along with their heat, so that it will not be detectable with IR based sensors. It would be radar stealthed and black so it would be very hard to detect, especially in the outer reaches of a solar system when solar radiation would do little to heat it up. The real trick would be to put the warheads onto a different trajectory to the boosters, possibly by using a cold gas system or some ejector mechanism, otherwise the position of the warhead would be easy to predict.

The thing is, that the shape of a space battle is dictated by the technology available. For example, with todays tech level extrapolated into interplanetary conflict, it is very easy to predict, to a few tens of thousands of km, the path of any hostile vessel, as we have to follow the most ballistically efficient path. We don't have powerful or efficient enough engines to allow much manouevre, so you could just position a few nuclear warheads along orbits of concern and detonate them when they float by, looking like asteroids or other space flotsam. For a conventional approach, AHEAD-style rounds would be pretty nasty againt conteporary spacecraft.

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Treadgar 4/9/2007 8:08:00 AM

I think a .22 would be effective against the spacecraft we build today. I remember this book I read long ago by Martin Caidin (sp?). Where the Russians and the Americans start fighting over the moon. The Americans had .50 caliber machine guns modified to fire in space. It was all done with sixties and seventies technology. Caidin went a long way in describing how lethal such weapons would be if they could be used in space. The key ingrediant was the lack of atmospheric drag. Wish I could remember the name of that book, or even find it. It might be fun to revisit.

As for drones, simple off the shelf weapons like these would still be effective for the final layer of defense against those drones or guided missiles. One question I have, is what happens to the steely eyed missile men when all the stuff starts flying down range? In Star Wars you have people manning gun turrets, blisters, cupolas, etc. I don't think that's very realistic. I imagine something like people deep in the ship, a kind of armoured bunker. They are surrounded by screens, and these are plastered with data obtained from external sensors. They make descisions about what they see through their sensors, then you make your battle plan and activate it. Machines do most of the work. Once the plan is activated, you sit back, strap back, whatever, and hope to hell you come through the other side alive.

Treadgar

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Jeff_F_F 4/9/2007 9:32:17 AM

Definitely no way your people would be sitting under a glass canopy. For one thing almost nothing is going to happen within visual range, and when it does the speeds involved will be so huge that our nervous system's ability to react to them will be utterly inadequate to the task. I'd guess that the automation trend that is developing with modern warships will continue and the only humans onboard will be the command crew, possibly even just a pilot. And a bunker in the center of the ship makes perfect sense. At the very least you'd concentrate the shielding against gamma rays and such there, it would allow a lot less mass to be devoted to such sielding an a better level of protection, compared to protecting the entire ship.

I'd think you would have huge amounts of AI processing data from the entire EM spectrum. Advances in man-machine interface are occurring so rapidly that by the time space combat happens, screens might not even be needed to display the data. We'll eventually develop the ability to pipe visual data straight into the brain to allow blind people to see, so piping visual data on a space battle into a pilot's brain would be quite efficient. You could also use senses that normal computer interfaces can't. People build up a 3D map of their surroundings based on imput from many senses that allows them to keep track of what is going on around them. The computers could supply this data to allow continuous 3D awareness of the overall battle inside their head, while visual imput could be used for data that needed specificity of information.

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Yimmy 4/9/2007 1:39:46 PM

Well I have only skim read this thread - but it certainly looks like space wars are going to suck (get it?).

I have two stupid questions.

1) What would happen if you tried to fire a standard Earthling rifle in space? Would the powder detonate? Would the weapon explode with no external pressure? Would the projectile go on for-ever?

2) What would happen if you tried to fire an English Longbow in space?

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andyf physics 4/9/2007 2:15:53 PM

a longbow would function, as long as wood can withstand vacuum,- i dont know, same as a bullet really, but none too accurate, the flights wouldnt contribute anything to stability

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flamingknives 4/9/2007 2:19:31 PM

1) Yes, the propellant would detonate. All the oxygen required for the reaction is already contained within it. Pressure differential shouldn't be a problem, since chamber pressures are thousands of atmospheres and putting it in a vacuum only reduces the external pressure by one. The projectile would be stable and have an effectively flat trajectory. If it is in the vicinity of a planet it will most likely end up in orbit, since rifle velocities are only a small fraction of orbital velocities.

2) It would work, to a limited extent, although the vacuum would quickly do unpleasant things to the organic compounds used in it - some components would vapourise off in the low pressure. The arrow, however, would not be stable (no atmosphere for the flights). It would most likely 'fly' in the direction that it was shot in, but it will rotate end-over-end, so could well hit the target backwards or sideways

Back on subject, it seems likely that the fighting would be done from the very core of the vessel, although the level of data fusion is very technology dependent. Normal living quarters would be around the perimeter of the ship, providing an extra layer of armour against DEWs and broadband radiation attack. Probably only the core would be lined against really hard-core radiation attack. In combat, it would probably be a good idea to extensively compartmentalise the exterior sections and keep them at a lower pressure, to avoid catastropic outgassing adversely affecting the ships structure or course. Against hypervelocity fragments these decks would act like whipple shields - they will get holed, so you'd better have some suited (against vacuum and radiation) repair crews.

In combat, unless we can develop some kind of inertia damping, the crew would have to be strapped down very, very well. No standing up to shout "make it so, number 1". On a spacecraft carrying out evasive manoeuvres you are either strapped in or getting bounced off the bulkheads. Possibly the crew would be in some full-body chair that rotates on two or three axis to present the posture most resiliant to acceleration. I can't begin to imainge how that would mess with your senses. Military crews would have to be very highly trained. No farm boys.

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andyf crew stations 4/9/2007 6:31:03 PM

how about spherical ball units, chair inside, data fed to screens, whole thing would have 3 degrees of freedom

thinking of something like that afterburner arcade machine

if you had them independant of each other that would help in the case of depressurization.

and to avoid the startrek problem,, no voltages higher than 12v in the cic

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Ehran 4/9/2007 6:58:14 PM

the rifle would fire, might not do so again due to lubricnts freezing up.the bullet ould travel until it hit something, and it ould remain as lethal as it was at the muzzle, relative velocity notwithstanding

another annoying thing is that some of the metal parts might vacuum weld to each other, given the low temperature things like recoil springs could shatter and some plastics do not survive contact with vacuum with nylon i think it was being absolutely classic example of that.

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TrustButVerify What about defenses? 4/10/2007 10:28:48 AM

Has anyone considered the defensive implications of having to fight a space war? Orson Card's character Bean tumbles to it in Ender's Shadow- the forces required to defend against attacks which can come from any spatial direction are disproportionately greater what our essentially two-dimensional frame of mind is used to considering. The enemy has near complete freedom to attack from any direction (up and down as well as N/S/E/W) and this means many, many more forces are required to maintain a credible defense.
Bean then comes immediately to the logical conclusion- the best defense in such a situation is a strong offense against the adversary's power base.
It is interesting to note that similar conclusions can be drawn regarding current concepts of 4GW and the push to take the fight to the terrorists. Creating a "Fortress America" is prohibitively expensive, so attacking Al Quadea directly in Afghanistan was a logical response to September 11th... And likewise, your future space admiralty would concern itself with positioning its forces to destroy the enemy's hardware first, rather than pouring money and resources into homeworld defenses.

I concur with previous posters regarding the importance of a highly integrated data-delivery system (call it a user interface) for actual battle management. No doubt some of you have played true 3-D space combat cames such as homeworld; perhaps the nearly-true-3D interface those games use is a way ahead. The command systems in the FCS demo program
seem to suggest that this sort of thinking is already being done by the military, and I seem to recall seeing air battle management software of a similar nature.

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