Joseph Shoer isn't afraid to make predictions:
So, I think the small fighter craft would be nearly spherical, with a single main engine and a few guns or missiles facing generally forward. They would have gyroscopes and fuel tanks in their shielded centers. It would make sense to build their outer hulls in a faceted manner, to reduce their radar cross-section. Basically, picture a bigger, armored version of the lunar module. The larger warships would also probably be nearly spherical, with a small cluster of main engines facing generally backward and a few smaller engines facing forward or sideways for maneuvering. Cannons, lasers, and missile ports would face outward in many directions. On a large enough space cruiser, it would even be a good idea to put docking ports for the small fighters, so that the fighters don't have to carry as many consumables on board.
The article is interesting through and I hope it raises your appreciation of F.A. Hayek. For the pointer I thank Scott Cunningham.
“Realistically”, it will be much more likely that first space wars will be a single space superpower destroying helpless infrastructure of someone else – either bombardment from orbit, or destroying satellites and other space ships; pure counter-value action. Wars between more-or-less-equals which would require significant counter-force are much less common than that.
Also why not have a HEAT style rockets with shaped charges, which would reach the target and then cause a directional explosion? Purely kinetic weapons don’t even work with normal tanks, and spaceships can be far better armored than that.
Pete: Velocities relative to the nearest planet don’t matter – only relative velocities between ships do. If both ships travel at similar velocities in similar direction, let’s say both on geostationary orbit, cost of achieving very high relative velocities is almost as difficult as on Earth (except for no atmosphere). To make matters worse, if something is ridiculously fast, it is ridiculously easy to miss.
The only scenario I can think of in which kinetic weapons would make sense would be approaching an object in space from a completely different orbit, with very high relative velocity, and firing a space shotgun. Such encounter would last seconds before ships would get too far to engage each other. Even in such case I wonder what would be the chance of hitting anything.
The author needs to learn to think three dimensionally. In one of Brin’s (?) books he has a universe where dolphins become an advanced species and become excellent interstellar pilots because of their ability to think and act in 3 dimensions. The space fighter will, presumably, be launched from a mother ship so gravity will be a non-factor. This argues for more equal placement of engines around the craft. Same with weapons. Maneuverability and acceleration in a fighter trumps raw speed. Read John Boyd. You also need some way to shield pilots from the sudden G effects or not have human pilots on board.
Steve
Fighter-sized warships would be missles/drones. Having a Protoplasmic Intelligence System aboard adds a lot of mass for the life support and limits the acceleratin and operational endurance of the craft.
Larger warships would be cylindrical rather than spherical. You have a narrower cross section facing the enemy and thus less surface to armor; and you don’t need as much support structure to resist the acceleration frmo the main drive (“skyscrapers aren’t spherical”).
If you have high relative velocities and are passing fairly close by, the shotgun approach should work–which means his should work, which means this is a situation you want to avoid. At longer ranges, an unpowered KEW isn’t likely to intercept and a powered one can be detected and attacked with point defense lasers. A missile carrying a bomb-pumped laser doesn’t have to get into contact range so it’s more likely to score.
All of this is merest speculation, of course.
If you’re fairly bright and you’re interested in space war, you might take a look at Attack Vector:Tctical from adastragames.com. Wrapping your mind around the three-dimensional concepts can be a little challenging, but once you actually practice it a few times, you can get the hang of it.
Three series which deal quite well with space battles while paying attention to physics are David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, David Drake’s Daniel Leary/RCN books, and Peter Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy. The battles in the Weber books, especially, have devolved into little more than counts of ships, missiles, and plotting acceleration curves as the series has grown past a dozen books.
One dynamic that is always fun to look at is how authors adjust their physics to maintain the old dichotomy of small/fast ships and large/slow ones so that they can transpose ‘wet’ naval structures into space.
Also, at what point do orbital mechanics stop mattering? Certainly, at any thrust that a human could survive for any extended period, (Up to 3 G’s or so.) we must pay attention, but for how long? Assuming some sort of ‘inertial compensator’, do you really have to care how close you get to a planet if you have 50 G’s of thrust to play with?
If I learned anything from Homeworld, it’s that all space battles will be fought to the music of Yes.
The idea that fighters in space would be spherical because they are operating in 3-D space is pretty funny. On the 2-D battlefields on Earth, has anyone deployed a disk-shaped tank with cannons pointing out of it on all sides?
For all things space and space-combat related, check out Winchell Chung’s hard scifi site, Atomic Rockets: http://projectrho.com/rocket/
Also, his twitter feed (http://twitter.com/rocket) has similarly interesting information.
@Sean: Maneuverability and Acceleration do trump raw speed, but it’s not worthwhile to build a ship that’s small enough to take advantage of its low mass because a lack of mass also means a lack of *reaction mass* to propel yourself around. A space fighter needs enough reaction mass (or total delta-v) to get to the combat, maneuver around, and fly home. When you look at how much mass all that fuel adds to push around a pilot and a life support system, you’re looking at fighters the size of Saturn V rockets or small office buildings. With that in mind, why not add more systems, bigger engines, and bigger weapons. Now you have a “destroyer,” but what can the destroyer do that a “battleship” cannot? Just add more engines, more reaction mass, and bigger guns. You now have something as fast and maneuverable as a fighter that has long-range missiles, lasers, drones, nukes, heaver armor and point defenses and whatever else you’d need for an extended campaign.
In space, building big doesn’t just have no disadvantages, it has significant advantages over building small. The only time you’d want fighters is for “brownwater” missions where you need to provide air superiority inside a planet’s atmosphere. A deep space fighter would probably look a lot more like a big missile-carrying disposable drone: drones are awesome because you only need enough delta-v to get to the target and maneuver a little. If it finds itself on an impossible-to-recover trajectory, who cares? It’s just a robot. Even a self-aware drone could be downloaded back to the mothership via radio.
Kinetic weapons are useful when relative velocities are high and distances are short. Lasers are great at medium distance when the lightspeed delay is less than a few seconds. After that, you have to rely on high-acceleration smart missiles that can follow their target and get close enough to release its payload. This could be a shaped explosive that fires shrapnel, bomb-pumped laser, or particle beam.
Also, any spacecraft that has a power plant worth talking about is going to have serious problems with heat. The vacuum is a perfect insulator (space may be cold, but it doesn’t conduct that cold very well) and when you start using weapons that produce a lot of heat (lasers, particle beams, railguns, or chemical slugthrowers) you’re going to have to find ways to manage that heat without cooking your crew or melting parts of your ship. You can liquid cool everything, but then you’ve just moved the heat from your ship into the water and eventually you’ll have a tank of boiling-hot water with no quick way to cool it down. You can vent the water, but then you’re stuck with radiative cooling in a vacuum, which takes huge very-fragile radiator fins.
re: John Mansfield: the reason you’d go for a sphere isn’t so you can have guns facing every direction–the original quote even specified that the weapons will be generally facing forward. You go for a sphere because 1) it’s the maximum volume for a given surface area (ie you get the best ratio of payload per armor, if you want to have full coverage armor), and 2) it’s the most maneuverable–easiest to turn in any direction.
re: Steve C: there’s no stealth in space. Any object warm enough for a human crew will stand out like a flare. Detection is trivial, although identification (“is that a warship or just a barge?”) and targeting may be tricky.
I don’t know what models WILL work, but “carriers-and-fighters” and “submarines” will not.
I am reminded of Charles Stross’ novel “Singularity Sky,” in which a spacegoing civilization that had retained its naval-warfare mentality – big expensive capital ships armed with cannons, lasers, and missiles, to more-or-less quote Shoer – went up against a force that had really thought about space warfare and built appropriately. Lots and lots and lots of little, fast, cheap weapons, like Pete’s ball bearings or Laserlight’s shotguns. The latter won, although I must note that they had a technology advantage; the sand-grained-sized weapons were also nano-disassemblers, and ate any ship they hit. And they were pretty certain to hit, since you could produce and launch a few trillion with less effort than just one of those big ships.
Space is VERY VERY big, which means crossing it will take a lot of time and reaction mass, which will push the size of vessels up. But with modern weaponry, anything you can see, you can kill, and that goes double in space, where there’s no reasons not to chuck nukes at anything that looks dangerous. These facts combined mean that any ship capable of carrying humans any significant distance is going to be VERY vulnerable at anything less than relativistic speeds. Unless you can travel faster than light, I can’t imagine you could ever successfully attack a planet. All you have to do is kick a few hundred nuclear tipped missiles into orbit and keep an eye out for intruders.
As the only reason demand exists for fighters today is to appeal to politicians and top gun wanna bes, a space fighter will need to be designed to look like a fighter to members of legislatures or dictators. In the US, they will need to be stupidly complex in order to be expensive and involve several hundred contractors in at least 47 States.
If you want to know how to cripple the enemy in space cost effectively, think like a terrorist.
The most effective weapon in use today is the land mine which is incredibly cheap, and used by the millions. While the US military suffers most of its casualties, it refuses to agree to have them become a prohibited weapon because the US military deploys them by the millions even knowing land mines kill civilians and children in greater numbers than soldiers. Why? Land mines are cheap and effective as a means of war.
So, in space, the weapon of choice will be mines, mines by the millions.
And they can be simply one inch tungsten wire moving in an orbit that intersects the enemy’s likely or required path.
For places where land mines would make operations to difficult, remotely operated vehicles are the obvious choice. I’m sure a “terrorist” group is going to develop cheap COTS ROVs and everyone will be shocked, as if it hasn’t been a plot gimmick in hundreds of TV and movie stories.
Btw, the Russians were the first to orbit a space “fighter” – Almaz OPS-2 in 1974. It was probably the last.
Poor space-marines. I can imagine the exchange:
Soldier: “ok, we’ve conquered this hell-hole for you. Can we go home now?”
(orbiting) General: “sorry lads, not enough fuel, what? Congratulations, brave new colonists! Don’t rebel like the last batch, or you know what will happen…”
And I am afraid you would have to explain the Hayek reference.
Not really. Unless you have a really, really large telescope for picking up infrared emissions (i.e. “heat”), all you’ll see is basically a one-pixel dot at any significant range (meaning in the millions of kilometers). That dot could be anything from a single ship, a fleet of them, a decoy emitter drone, or something else, and that information would be almost useless for targeting purposes.
That’s assuming, of course, that you actually see the heat, which is only if your enemy craft is stupid enough to turn in such a manner that it exposes its engine and heat emissions. In the mean-time, that infrared radiation is subject to the same light-speed limitation, so except at “close” ranges (where the kilometers are measured in the tens and hundreds of thousands instead of the millions), actually finding and hitting a ship with anything other than guided weapons is a game of probability.
The “submarine warfare” comparison is actually quite apt in many ways. The only real exception to it that I can think of is that defending craft might be assisted by stationary weapons platforms (including stuff on airless moons and the like), where you can build far bigger telescopes and bigger weapons as well. Think of the Moon – since it’s airless, you can build a pretty damn big telescope on its surface, and since it’s big, you can also build large weapons systems (particularly lasers) that take advantage of the Moon’s crust being a gigantic heat sink.
Military aircraft of unusual configuration are of course a reasonable explanation for some sightings. I don’t think anyone is suggesting they are an explanation for all sightings.
Comments on this entry are closed.