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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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Jeff_F_F       4/23/2007 9:04:19 PM
Reaction mass by any other name is still just a thruster.
 
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TrustButVerify       4/24/2007 7:54:48 AM

As far as space propulsion, I know solar sails are a fuel free option, but what about ores?
 
Not ores like the ancient Greeks used on their longships exactly - but every action has an equal and opposite reaction right?  So if you had loads of people, say, pooping off the rear of the spaceship, the ship would go forwards right?
 

Their diet could be carefully adjusted for maximum density and mass. No steak and eggs (the traditional astronaut breakfast) for these weary travelers!
 
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Jeff_F_F       4/24/2007 9:19:04 AM
Burritos or other bean containing foods would be good to increase the thrust velocity.
 
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Jeff_F_F       4/24/2007 9:22:27 AM
And remember that "the effectiveness of any thruster as a propulsion system is directly proportional to its effectiveness as a weapon."
 
It would be a very different kind of space battle. Not at all like Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, etc.
 
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vorticity    Time on target bombardment   4/24/2007 4:31:24 PM
From the Oort cloud, to arrive all at once from every angle, 7000 years in the future.

--
VK

 
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Treadgar       4/27/2007 11:12:24 PM
Kinetic kill weapons could be a problem not just for warships, but pretty much anything else out there. The closest terrestrial analogy might be land mines, the kind thay lay around years after the fighting has ended. I even hear stories of WWI ordinance still going off when rediscovered by unfortunate farmers. I don't think the problem would be intractable, although victims of said debris would disagree. I imagine all those habitats out there would need to be equiped with lasers and other techniques to deal with space garbage. Not just from war, but from the building of space habitats and colonies. There is bound to be debris from that and from mining operations which will produce the materials for human expansion in space.

Treadgar
 
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BasinBictory       4/30/2007 2:02:27 AM
I have just been skimming over the responses in this thread and have been mostly intrigued. I always thought that the space combat we've seen as depicted in Star Wars and Star Trek was slightly ridiculous, mostly due to the artificial gravity thing. Star wars and Star Trek combat was basically the same as Bismarck vs. HMS Hood combat or Battle of Leyte Gulf combat.
 
I always imagined that future space combat would most resemble submarine combat of today, where one hull breach effectively kills a ship, and the name of the game is escaping detection.
 
As far as weaponry, I would think that any kind of high speed projectile would make a feasilble weapon. As mentioned earlier, standard HE weapons would be mostly ineffective and a waste of space and explosive due to the lack of atmospheric compression, but I would think that a weapon resembling a CIWS, capable of creating a stream of high-velocity projectiles, might be a feasible weapon system on a  spacecraft. The propulsion system for the projectiles might not be your standard smokeless powder, due to the recoil of the weapon, but perhaps some kind of magnetic system (isn't there something like this in the works right now?) in which recoil wouldn't throw off the spacecraft's flight. Spacecraft right now are, by necessity, lightly constructed and fragile, due to having to launch them from Earth, but I imagine that future spacefaring warships would be assembled in orbit in order to more heavily armor them.
 
However, I'm wondering why we would have manned space warships in the first place? I remember how, wathcing a program about Star wars and the unmanned Imperial Probe Droid, the concept inspired (or was inspired by) the unmanned drone system the USAF uses now. We're currently putting weapons on unmanned drones, and while they don't yet have anywhere near the capabilities of a manned airplane, that's just a R&D problem. I can't see why space warships wouldn't be unmanned weapons platforms, especially if, in space combat with one another, they would have to perform evasive manuevers which would result in accelerations that would kill human beings.
 
Just some rambling thoughts....
 
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TrustButVerify       5/1/2007 12:32:29 PM
BasinBictory-
UAV and UCAV development in the coming decades will be a good window into the manned vs. unmanned question. It may be practical from an engineering and military standpoint, but IMHO it will be some time before fully autonomous combat vehicles (space or otherwise) are politically feasible. If any when we have to worry about space combat, it may already be a moot point.
One other thing- I believe railgun recoil is a real, labratory-verified fact. If putting a hole in the adversary's hull is the main idea, HEAT warheads might be a better idea.
Would it, though? Submarines have to worry about hull integrity for reasons that don't apply to spacecraft, so I would that a hull breach which didn't disable essential systems would be contained in the traditional, compartmentalized fashion. It might provide a big chink in the EMP shielding, however.
 
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flamingknives       5/1/2007 6:14:16 PM
As TrustButVerify says, spaceships don't have to worry about things that submarines do. You can have a ship full to the brim with vacuum, but it won't sink, and under steady state condition there won't ever be more than one atmosphere acting on the hull.

Escaping detection in space is hard. We've become quite good at locating and cataloging all sorts of cold, ballistic space junk down to centimetre size, so I don't see how hiding a large spaceship with some sort of interplanetary (at least) drive system. would be in any way possible. Certainly your detection range would far exceed your weapons effective range. Submarines, on the other hand, swim around in a medium opaque to the vast majority of our detection systems and that blocks the effect of most of our weapons systems. Space ship combat will not be like submarine combat, or WW2 carrier or battleship combat, or even modern carrier combat. But it may have features that are familiar from those times.

As for drones, most of the concepts discussed here include drones, but take into account things like data-bandwidth, the delay in sending signals to the drones for control purposes, degrees of autonomy and the desirability of having a human in the loop.
 
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TrustButVerify    Speaking of nukes...   5/2/2007 12:10:14 PM
Click here for a Cold War-era NASA paper on nuclear weapons behavior in space. In brief: no blast effects (as we guessed), no thermal effects, intense radiation effects over a large radius. I leave the implications to the reader as an exercise.
 
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