On December 14 2016 21:19 Sent. wrote: What would be the most optimal weapon for space commandos of 2030? Railguns? Lasers?
It depends.
If you fight on board a spaceship, you don't want weapons with high penetration, because explosive decompression isn't fun. However, if you use a weapon with low penetration then a sufficiently advanced personal armor will probably resist it.
That means you need to use weapons that kill despite armor, e.g. high heat (laser?), strong radiation or essentially highly powered microwaves. You could also go for blunt trauma with a heavy but low velocity projectile.
For planetary combat you'd use weapons like today, just higher powered, because bullets are easier to manufacture than batteries and they have enough stopping power. It takes insane amounts of energy to create a laser with the stopping power of a pistol. At most you'd use gauss weapons that use energy to propel a metal slug.
Sorry. I now realize you mean for space combat and not raining terror down on planets. In which case, photon torpedoes, of course.
We are talking about 2030, so no ultra scifi tech imo. Probably just improvements from what we currently have. I'd guess swarms of missiles for offense, and lasers for defense against swarms of missiles. Or possibly shaped nukes to defend against swarms of missiles.
I am also not that convinced of using rocks to devastate planets.
Yes, hitting a planet with a large asteroid at high speeds is devastating. The problem with rocks is that they are usually not where you want them to, when you want them to be there. Of course you could slightly shift the orbit of a thing pretty far away, but in that case it could last hundreds of years until it actually hits the planet you were aiming at. I'd guess that you don't have that much time.
So you would need to invest shitloads of fuel to actually get a rock onto a timely intercept course, or be insanely lucky that there is a large enough rock just about to nearly miss your target, so a slight nudge is still enough. I don't think that counting on being insanely lucky is a good idea.
And if you are investing shitloads of fuel to get a rock onto a timely intercept (and "timely" will probably still mean "months" or "years"), why didn't you invest that fuel into carrying around lots of nukes instead, which are where you want them, when you want them to, and which don't leave the enemy months to react.
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
But if huge space-based particle accelerators are the weapon of choice, then presumably throwing large amounts of cheap projectiles will be an effective way of breaking those particle accelerators. Because while yes, they can be detected, throwing enough of them fast enough (aka swarm of missiles) would require some serious capability to stop one of them from reaching your large immobile cannon and blowing it up. This is the same reason why aircraft carriers are not very useful against a reasonably equal military force. You just throw enough small cheap missiles at it until one hits.
It is a thread about what the winning strategy of interstellar warfare is, especially considering the limitation of speed of light, and how that affects what alien contact we may have. A bit further into the future, but this thread seems to move into that direction a bit.
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
A big problem with lasers is that they need to be on target for a sustained period of time (usually not that long, depending on the power of your lasers it could be milliseconds), which is hard to do when everything moves really fast.
Light lag is also not only a problem for the defender, but for the attacker too. If we assume that there are no humans aboard the space combat things (probably reasonable due to the lack of tolerance for acceleration) and a light lag of a few seconds in both directions, random maneuvering leaves a large area in which your opponent could possibly be, even if you have an absolutely exact (lightlagged) knowledge of his velocity and position.
(Lightlag calculation with some random assumptions: acceleration of 20g, 3+3 seconds lightlag means your target can have moved unpredictably by
dmax=0.5*a*t² = 0.5*20*10m/s²*(3s)² =900m
into any direction. This can be orthogonal towards you, so you basically have to hit the right random spot in an area of Pi*900²m²=2.54km². Assuming that the target has an area of 100m² that you can hit it on, this means that you have a chance of 0.004% of hitting with any non-steering projectile at that distance. Obviously this greatly improves the closer you get to the target. This is assuming both absolute knowledge of the target position AND absolute accuracy of your weapon.)
So as you can see, any non-steering weapon becomes useless very quickly against a randomwalking opponent if you get into lightlagged distances.
This leads to my assumption that missiles are the main offensive weapon. You can of course launch them through a railgun or something. You need to get their relative speed compared to the target to be rather large, so the time they spend in a range where they can reasonably be intercepted by lasers is minimal.
So a combat would look like this: Both oppenents get into an interception trajectory on each other, and shoot large swarms of missiles from railguns. They then attempt to change their trajectory to avoid the opposing missiles by making the missiles spend fuel tracking the target. The missiles counter this by spending fuel tracking the target.
The next phase is when the missiles get into intercept range, and happens very swiftly, because the relative velocity they have compared to the target is very high due to both the ships original velocities, and the launch velocity of the missiles. The missiles start randomwalking, while the ships try to shoot down as many as possible using lasers. A lot of missiles will die in the last moments before interception, but if one hits the target dies.
One could improve the chances of this by using stuff like nuclear shaped charges in the missiles, which allow them to detonate earlier and still destroy the target.
You can of course make this cooler by launching drones with lasers to intercept the missiles, the missiles using laser countermeasures like spraying chaff forwards. But everything still happens within moments.
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
But if huge space-based particle accelerators are the weapon of choice, then presumably throwing large amounts of cheap projectiles will be an effective way of breaking those particle accelerators. Because while yes, they can be detected, throwing enough of them fast enough (aka swarm of missiles) would require some serious capability to stop one of them from reaching your large immobile cannon and blowing it up. This is the same reason why aircraft carriers are not very useful against a reasonably equal military force. You just throw enough small cheap missiles at it until one hits.
But I am gonna see your missiles potentially hours before they came even close to me. Because I just have so much time to shoot at them and they are many orders of magnitude slower than what I shoot with.
All I am saying is that I do not think that the experience of large ships being defeatable by small ones translates well into space, because of scale differences.
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
A big problem with lasers is that they need to be on target for a sustained period of time (usually not that long, depending on the power of your lasers it could be milliseconds), which is hard to do when everything moves really fast.
Light lag is also not only a problem for the defender, but for the attacker too. If we assume that there are no humans aboard the space combat things (probably reasonable due to the lack of tolerance for acceleration) and a light lag of a few seconds in both directions, random maneuvering leaves a large area in which your opponent could possibly be, even if you have an absolutely exact (lightlagged) knowledge of his velocity and position.
(Lightlag calculation with some random assumptions: acceleration of 20g, 3+3 seconds lightlag means your target can have moved unpredictably by
dmax=0.5*a*t² = 0.5*20*10m/s²*(3s)² =900m
into any direction. This can be orthogonal towards you, so you basically have to hit the right random spot in an area of Pi*900²m²=2.54km². Assuming that the target has an area of 100m² that you can hit it on, this means that you have a chance of 0.004% of hitting with any non-steering projectile at that distance. Obviously this greatly improves the closer you get to the target. This is assuming both absolute knowledge of the target position AND absolute accuracy of your weapon.)
So as you can see, any non-steering weapon becomes useless very quickly against a randomwalking opponent if you get into lightlagged distances.
This leads to my assumption that missiles are the main offensive weapon. You can of course launch them through a railgun or something. You need to get their relative speed compared to the target to be rather large, so the time they spend in a range where they can reasonably be intercepted by lasers is minimal.
So a combat would look like this: Both oppenents get into an interception trajectory on each other, and shoot large swarms of missiles from railguns. They then attempt to change their trajectory to avoid the opposing missiles by making the missiles spend fuel tracking the target. The missiles counter this by spending fuel tracking the target.
The next phase is when the missiles get into intercept range, and happens very swiftly, because the relative velocity they have compared to the target is very high due to both the ships original velocities, and the launch velocity of the missiles. The missiles start randomwalking, while the ships try to shoot down as many as possible using lasers. A lot of missiles will die in the last moments before interception, but if one hits the target dies.
One could improve the chances of this by using stuff like nuclear shaped charges in the missiles, which allow them to detonate earlier and still destroy the target.
You can of course make this cooler by launching drones with lasers to intercept the missiles, the missiles using laser countermeasures like spraying chaff forwards. But everything still happens within moments.
I think your assumptions of "moments" is wrong. Why do you think that the laser intercept range is so small? Why do you think the time to intercept is small? Acceleration takes a lot of energy and fuel - but if the missiles are small, they will be either harmless (deflected mechanically) or easily destroyed, because they will have limited amount of energy they can absorb before evaporating.
I think your lag issue can be solved by either a "spray and pray" strategy or just having enough power to cover the whole idea. Even if 3s distance is indeed enough to hide from my accelerator, any projectile you shoot from this distance, which is a million kilometers, will likely take hours to reach me, giving me enough times to shoot the hell out of them.
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
A big problem with lasers is that they need to be on target for a sustained period of time (usually not that long, depending on the power of your lasers it could be milliseconds), which is hard to do when everything moves really fast.
Light lag is also not only a problem for the defender, but for the attacker too. If we assume that there are no humans aboard the space combat things (probably reasonable due to the lack of tolerance for acceleration) and a light lag of a few seconds in both directions, random maneuvering leaves a large area in which your opponent could possibly be, even if you have an absolutely exact (lightlagged) knowledge of his velocity and position.
(Lightlag calculation with some random assumptions: acceleration of 20g, 3+3 seconds lightlag means your target can have moved unpredictably by
dmax=0.5*a*t² = 0.5*20*10m/s²*(3s)² =900m
into any direction. This can be orthogonal towards you, so you basically have to hit the right random spot in an area of Pi*900²m²=2.54km². Assuming that the target has an area of 100m² that you can hit it on, this means that you have a chance of 0.004% of hitting with any non-steering projectile at that distance. Obviously this greatly improves the closer you get to the target. This is assuming both absolute knowledge of the target position AND absolute accuracy of your weapon.)
So as you can see, any non-steering weapon becomes useless very quickly against a randomwalking opponent if you get into lightlagged distances.
This leads to my assumption that missiles are the main offensive weapon. You can of course launch them through a railgun or something. You need to get their relative speed compared to the target to be rather large, so the time they spend in a range where they can reasonably be intercepted by lasers is minimal.
So a combat would look like this: Both oppenents get into an interception trajectory on each other, and shoot large swarms of missiles from railguns. They then attempt to change their trajectory to avoid the opposing missiles by making the missiles spend fuel tracking the target. The missiles counter this by spending fuel tracking the target.
The next phase is when the missiles get into intercept range, and happens very swiftly, because the relative velocity they have compared to the target is very high due to both the ships original velocities, and the launch velocity of the missiles. The missiles start randomwalking, while the ships try to shoot down as many as possible using lasers. A lot of missiles will die in the last moments before interception, but if one hits the target dies.
One could improve the chances of this by using stuff like nuclear shaped charges in the missiles, which allow them to detonate earlier and still destroy the target.
You can of course make this cooler by launching drones with lasers to intercept the missiles, the missiles using laser countermeasures like spraying chaff forwards. But everything still happens within moments.
I think your assumptions of "moments" is wrong. Why do you think that the laser intercept range is so small? Why do you think the time to intercept is small? Acceleration takes a lot of energy and fuel - but if the missiles are small, they will be either harmless (deflected mechanically) or easily destroyed, because they will have limited amount of energy they can absorb before evaporating.
I think your lag issue can be solved by either a "spray and pray" strategy or just having enough power to cover the whole idea. Even if 3s distance is indeed enough to hide from my accelerator, any projectile you shoot from this distance, which is a million kilometers, will likely take hours to reach me, giving me enough times to shoot the hell out of them.
I am not shooting at you from that distance. The way i envision this is by having a larg-ish carrier vessel (Basically a big box with an engine slapped onto it, maybe a railgun to launch the missiles might help). This gets onto a high-velocity intercept of the target at a larger distance (lightminutes or hours) with an intercept velocity of ideally some percentage of c, lets say 0.1c. None of this costs any of the missiles fuel, because they are still in hangar. Once you have a reasonable high velocity intercept, you just throw the missiles out of the door (or launch them with a railgun if you went for that route). Now the carrier just goes home. You spread your missiles out a bit. And they are hard to see, as they are currently not accelerating. Wait until they are so close that you fear interception, and start randomwalking. The missiles should be spread out enough that their randomwalk circles don't overlap, and they are approaching fast. You have 30 seconds to shoot them if they get within 3 lightseconds. 10 seconds at 1 lightsecond. And there could be hundreds or thousands of them for a percentage of the cost of your gigantic space accelerator. And this assumes that you can correctly identify the still silent missiles at 3 lightseconds of distance.
Also, different question. Why don't you slap an engine on your large particle accelerators? Suddenly you don't have trench warfare anymore, but Blitzkrieg.
And i don't think there is in this situation any difference between a particle accelerator and a laser. Both shoot beams of stuff at basically the speed of light. Whether its charged particles or photons isn't that important.
Edit: Come to think of it, charged particles would make stuff weirder, because they repulse each other. This means that your beam spreads out over distance. Which probably limits your range a lot, but which might make intercepting stuff easier if you can really pump enough intensity into a specific area. I need to take a look at the maths when i have some time later.
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
A big problem with lasers is that they need to be on target for a sustained period of time (usually not that long, depending on the power of your lasers it could be milliseconds), which is hard to do when everything moves really fast.
Light lag is also not only a problem for the defender, but for the attacker too. If we assume that there are no humans aboard the space combat things (probably reasonable due to the lack of tolerance for acceleration) and a light lag of a few seconds in both directions, random maneuvering leaves a large area in which your opponent could possibly be, even if you have an absolutely exact (lightlagged) knowledge of his velocity and position.
(Lightlag calculation with some random assumptions: acceleration of 20g, 3+3 seconds lightlag means your target can have moved unpredictably by
dmax=0.5*a*t² = 0.5*20*10m/s²*(3s)² =900m
into any direction. This can be orthogonal towards you, so you basically have to hit the right random spot in an area of Pi*900²m²=2.54km². Assuming that the target has an area of 100m² that you can hit it on, this means that you have a chance of 0.004% of hitting with any non-steering projectile at that distance. Obviously this greatly improves the closer you get to the target. This is assuming both absolute knowledge of the target position AND absolute accuracy of your weapon.)
So as you can see, any non-steering weapon becomes useless very quickly against a randomwalking opponent if you get into lightlagged distances.
This leads to my assumption that missiles are the main offensive weapon. You can of course launch them through a railgun or something. You need to get their relative speed compared to the target to be rather large, so the time they spend in a range where they can reasonably be intercepted by lasers is minimal.
So a combat would look like this: Both oppenents get into an interception trajectory on each other, and shoot large swarms of missiles from railguns. They then attempt to change their trajectory to avoid the opposing missiles by making the missiles spend fuel tracking the target. The missiles counter this by spending fuel tracking the target.
The next phase is when the missiles get into intercept range, and happens very swiftly, because the relative velocity they have compared to the target is very high due to both the ships original velocities, and the launch velocity of the missiles. The missiles start randomwalking, while the ships try to shoot down as many as possible using lasers. A lot of missiles will die in the last moments before interception, but if one hits the target dies.
One could improve the chances of this by using stuff like nuclear shaped charges in the missiles, which allow them to detonate earlier and still destroy the target.
You can of course make this cooler by launching drones with lasers to intercept the missiles, the missiles using laser countermeasures like spraying chaff forwards. But everything still happens within moments.
I think your assumptions of "moments" is wrong. Why do you think that the laser intercept range is so small? Why do you think the time to intercept is small? Acceleration takes a lot of energy and fuel - but if the missiles are small, they will be either harmless (deflected mechanically) or easily destroyed, because they will have limited amount of energy they can absorb before evaporating.
I think your lag issue can be solved by either a "spray and pray" strategy or just having enough power to cover the whole idea. Even if 3s distance is indeed enough to hide from my accelerator, any projectile you shoot from this distance, which is a million kilometers, will likely take hours to reach me, giving me enough times to shoot the hell out of them.
I am not shooting at you from that distance. The way i envision this is by having a larg-ish carrier vessel (Basically a big box with an engine slapped onto it, maybe a railgun to launch the missiles might help). This gets onto a high-velocity intercept of the target at a larger distance (lightminutes or hours) with an intercept velocity of ideally some percentage of c, lets say 0.1c. None of this costs any of the missiles fuel, because they are still in hangar. Once you have a reasonable high velocity intercept, you just throw the missiles out of the door (or launch them with a railgun if you went for that route). Now the carrier just goes home. You spread your missiles out a bit. And they are hard to see, as they are currently not accelerating. Wait until they are so close that you fear interception, and start randomwalking. The missiles should be spread out enough that their randomwalk circles don't overlap, and they are approaching fast. You have 30 seconds to shoot them if they get within 3 lightseconds. 10 seconds at 1 lightsecond. And there could be hundreds or thousands of them for a percentage of the cost of your gigantic space accelerator. And this assumes that you can correctly identify the still silent missiles at 3 lightseconds of distance.
Also, different question. Why don't you slap an engine on your large particle accelerators? Suddenly you don't have trench warfare anymore, but Blitzkrieg.
And i don't think there is in this situation any difference between a particle accelerator and a laser. Both shoot beams of stuff at basically the speed of light. Whether its charged particles or photons isn't that important.
At the moment, we are just much better at cramming energy into a single proton than into a single photon. I have some clues to think that it might be due to physical limitations and it will stay that way. The shieldability depends on how much energy is there per particle, thus the protons are much better in penetration than the light. That's the rationale for the choice, but you are right that it doesn't matter too much for the discussion.
I obviously have engines on my accelerator and I if I know you have a similar weapon, I am randomwalking with it as much as you do. But that doesn't bring me to 0.1c or anything similarly silly. 0.1c is 34 hours of acceleration at 1g, so it's still almost 2 hours at 20g. I have high doubts you can make a large ship withstand more than 20g and even at that level, most of the weight you are carrying is there to keep it from going pancake at this force and you waste so much useful load. In any case, your carrier is not "going home", it spends 4 hours turning around and gets completely toasted during that time, if it didn't get toasted on the way. All of that assuming that it is actually energetically feasible to accelerate anything to such speed so fast.
I think your basic problem is that you underestimate the speed of light. The typical velocities of objects around the Earth are in tens of km/s at most, and that is how most of your spacecraft are likely going to move. You could in principle slowly accelerate to higher velocities, if you could get an energy supply, but how would such strategy help with, say, defending your immobile planet?
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
A big problem with lasers is that they need to be on target for a sustained period of time (usually not that long, depending on the power of your lasers it could be milliseconds), which is hard to do when everything moves really fast.
Light lag is also not only a problem for the defender, but for the attacker too. If we assume that there are no humans aboard the space combat things (probably reasonable due to the lack of tolerance for acceleration) and a light lag of a few seconds in both directions, random maneuvering leaves a large area in which your opponent could possibly be, even if you have an absolutely exact (lightlagged) knowledge of his velocity and position.
(Lightlag calculation with some random assumptions: acceleration of 20g, 3+3 seconds lightlag means your target can have moved unpredictably by
dmax=0.5*a*t² = 0.5*20*10m/s²*(3s)² =900m
into any direction. This can be orthogonal towards you, so you basically have to hit the right random spot in an area of Pi*900²m²=2.54km². Assuming that the target has an area of 100m² that you can hit it on, this means that you have a chance of 0.004% of hitting with any non-steering projectile at that distance. Obviously this greatly improves the closer you get to the target. This is assuming both absolute knowledge of the target position AND absolute accuracy of your weapon.)
So as you can see, any non-steering weapon becomes useless very quickly against a randomwalking opponent if you get into lightlagged distances.
This leads to my assumption that missiles are the main offensive weapon. You can of course launch them through a railgun or something. You need to get their relative speed compared to the target to be rather large, so the time they spend in a range where they can reasonably be intercepted by lasers is minimal.
So a combat would look like this: Both oppenents get into an interception trajectory on each other, and shoot large swarms of missiles from railguns. They then attempt to change their trajectory to avoid the opposing missiles by making the missiles spend fuel tracking the target. The missiles counter this by spending fuel tracking the target.
The next phase is when the missiles get into intercept range, and happens very swiftly, because the relative velocity they have compared to the target is very high due to both the ships original velocities, and the launch velocity of the missiles. The missiles start randomwalking, while the ships try to shoot down as many as possible using lasers. A lot of missiles will die in the last moments before interception, but if one hits the target dies.
One could improve the chances of this by using stuff like nuclear shaped charges in the missiles, which allow them to detonate earlier and still destroy the target.
You can of course make this cooler by launching drones with lasers to intercept the missiles, the missiles using laser countermeasures like spraying chaff forwards. But everything still happens within moments.
I think your assumptions of "moments" is wrong. Why do you think that the laser intercept range is so small? Why do you think the time to intercept is small? Acceleration takes a lot of energy and fuel - but if the missiles are small, they will be either harmless (deflected mechanically) or easily destroyed, because they will have limited amount of energy they can absorb before evaporating.
I think your lag issue can be solved by either a "spray and pray" strategy or just having enough power to cover the whole idea. Even if 3s distance is indeed enough to hide from my accelerator, any projectile you shoot from this distance, which is a million kilometers, will likely take hours to reach me, giving me enough times to shoot the hell out of them.
I am not shooting at you from that distance. The way i envision this is by having a larg-ish carrier vessel (Basically a big box with an engine slapped onto it, maybe a railgun to launch the missiles might help). This gets onto a high-velocity intercept of the target at a larger distance (lightminutes or hours) with an intercept velocity of ideally some percentage of c, lets say 0.1c. None of this costs any of the missiles fuel, because they are still in hangar. Once you have a reasonable high velocity intercept, you just throw the missiles out of the door (or launch them with a railgun if you went for that route). Now the carrier just goes home. You spread your missiles out a bit. And they are hard to see, as they are currently not accelerating. Wait until they are so close that you fear interception, and start randomwalking. The missiles should be spread out enough that their randomwalk circles don't overlap, and they are approaching fast. You have 30 seconds to shoot them if they get within 3 lightseconds. 10 seconds at 1 lightsecond. And there could be hundreds or thousands of them for a percentage of the cost of your gigantic space accelerator. And this assumes that you can correctly identify the still silent missiles at 3 lightseconds of distance.
Also, different question. Why don't you slap an engine on your large particle accelerators? Suddenly you don't have trench warfare anymore, but Blitzkrieg.
And i don't think there is in this situation any difference between a particle accelerator and a laser. Both shoot beams of stuff at basically the speed of light. Whether its charged particles or photons isn't that important.
At the moment, we are just much better at cramming energy into a single proton than into a single photon. I have some clues to think that it might be due to physical limitations and it will stay that way. The shieldability depends on how much energy is there per particle, thus the protons are much better in penetration than the light. That's the rationale for the choice, but you are right that it doesn't matter too much for the discussion.
I obviously have engines on my accelerator and I if I know you have a similar weapon, I am randomwalking with it as much as you do. But that doesn't bring me to 0.1c or anything similarly silly. 0.1c is 34 hours of acceleration at 1g, so it's still almost 2 hours at 20g. I have high doubts you can make a large ship withstand more than 20g and even at that level, most of the weight you are carrying is there to keep it from going pancake at this force and you waste so much useful load. In any case, your carrier is not "going home", it spends 4 hours turning around and gets completely toasted during that time, if it didn't get toasted on the way. All of that assuming that it is actually energetically feasible to accelerate anything to such speed so fast.
I think your basic problem is that you underestimate the speed of light. The typical velocities of objects around the Earth are in tens of km/s at most, and that is how most of your spacecraft are likely going to move. You could in principle slowly accelerate to higher velocities, if you could get an energy supply, but how would such strategy help with, say, defending your immobile planet?
Well, clearly if we are talking about interplanetary warfare we have progressed beyond the near future. Because either we are fighting a Mars-Earth battle, in which case I think it is far easier to ignore all the space-based clutters and toss rocks or nukes or whatever straight at the planet, or we are talking distances where feasible and easy acceleration to 0.1c is about the minimum needed to even consider waging the war.
Oh, and in a Mars-Earth battle, Mars has a considerable advantage due to being quite near a nice supply of rocks that can be tossed at earth.
E: that said, I thought the scenario was that someone had built an evil space station of doom (tm) and you, 007, are tasked with taking it out before he can do something useful with it. So you don't have to protect a planet. You just have to take out a (mobile) space station, or if you are Dr. Evil, protect your space station long enough to be able to launch your superweapon.
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
A big problem with lasers is that they need to be on target for a sustained period of time (usually not that long, depending on the power of your lasers it could be milliseconds), which is hard to do when everything moves really fast.
Light lag is also not only a problem for the defender, but for the attacker too. If we assume that there are no humans aboard the space combat things (probably reasonable due to the lack of tolerance for acceleration) and a light lag of a few seconds in both directions, random maneuvering leaves a large area in which your opponent could possibly be, even if you have an absolutely exact (lightlagged) knowledge of his velocity and position.
(Lightlag calculation with some random assumptions: acceleration of 20g, 3+3 seconds lightlag means your target can have moved unpredictably by
dmax=0.5*a*t² = 0.5*20*10m/s²*(3s)² =900m
into any direction. This can be orthogonal towards you, so you basically have to hit the right random spot in an area of Pi*900²m²=2.54km². Assuming that the target has an area of 100m² that you can hit it on, this means that you have a chance of 0.004% of hitting with any non-steering projectile at that distance. Obviously this greatly improves the closer you get to the target. This is assuming both absolute knowledge of the target position AND absolute accuracy of your weapon.)
So as you can see, any non-steering weapon becomes useless very quickly against a randomwalking opponent if you get into lightlagged distances.
This leads to my assumption that missiles are the main offensive weapon. You can of course launch them through a railgun or something. You need to get their relative speed compared to the target to be rather large, so the time they spend in a range where they can reasonably be intercepted by lasers is minimal.
So a combat would look like this: Both oppenents get into an interception trajectory on each other, and shoot large swarms of missiles from railguns. They then attempt to change their trajectory to avoid the opposing missiles by making the missiles spend fuel tracking the target. The missiles counter this by spending fuel tracking the target.
The next phase is when the missiles get into intercept range, and happens very swiftly, because the relative velocity they have compared to the target is very high due to both the ships original velocities, and the launch velocity of the missiles. The missiles start randomwalking, while the ships try to shoot down as many as possible using lasers. A lot of missiles will die in the last moments before interception, but if one hits the target dies.
One could improve the chances of this by using stuff like nuclear shaped charges in the missiles, which allow them to detonate earlier and still destroy the target.
You can of course make this cooler by launching drones with lasers to intercept the missiles, the missiles using laser countermeasures like spraying chaff forwards. But everything still happens within moments.
I think your assumptions of "moments" is wrong. Why do you think that the laser intercept range is so small? Why do you think the time to intercept is small? Acceleration takes a lot of energy and fuel - but if the missiles are small, they will be either harmless (deflected mechanically) or easily destroyed, because they will have limited amount of energy they can absorb before evaporating.
I think your lag issue can be solved by either a "spray and pray" strategy or just having enough power to cover the whole idea. Even if 3s distance is indeed enough to hide from my accelerator, any projectile you shoot from this distance, which is a million kilometers, will likely take hours to reach me, giving me enough times to shoot the hell out of them.
I am not shooting at you from that distance. The way i envision this is by having a larg-ish carrier vessel (Basically a big box with an engine slapped onto it, maybe a railgun to launch the missiles might help). This gets onto a high-velocity intercept of the target at a larger distance (lightminutes or hours) with an intercept velocity of ideally some percentage of c, lets say 0.1c. None of this costs any of the missiles fuel, because they are still in hangar. Once you have a reasonable high velocity intercept, you just throw the missiles out of the door (or launch them with a railgun if you went for that route). Now the carrier just goes home. You spread your missiles out a bit. And they are hard to see, as they are currently not accelerating. Wait until they are so close that you fear interception, and start randomwalking. The missiles should be spread out enough that their randomwalk circles don't overlap, and they are approaching fast. You have 30 seconds to shoot them if they get within 3 lightseconds. 10 seconds at 1 lightsecond. And there could be hundreds or thousands of them for a percentage of the cost of your gigantic space accelerator. And this assumes that you can correctly identify the still silent missiles at 3 lightseconds of distance.
Also, different question. Why don't you slap an engine on your large particle accelerators? Suddenly you don't have trench warfare anymore, but Blitzkrieg.
And i don't think there is in this situation any difference between a particle accelerator and a laser. Both shoot beams of stuff at basically the speed of light. Whether its charged particles or photons isn't that important.
At the moment, we are just much better at cramming energy into a single proton than into a single photon. I have some clues to think that it might be due to physical limitations and it will stay that way. The shieldability depends on how much energy is there per particle, thus the protons are much better in penetration than the light. That's the rationale for the choice, but you are right that it doesn't matter too much for the discussion.
I obviously have engines on my accelerator and I if I know you have a similar weapon, I am randomwalking with it as much as you do. But that doesn't bring me to 0.1c or anything similarly silly. 0.1c is 34 hours of acceleration at 1g, so it's still almost 2 hours at 20g. I have high doubts you can make a large ship withstand more than 20g and even at that level, most of the weight you are carrying is there to keep it from going pancake at this force and you waste so much useful load. In any case, your carrier is not "going home", it spends 4 hours turning around and gets completely toasted during that time, if it didn't get toasted on the way. All of that assuming that it is actually energetically feasible to accelerate anything to such speed so fast.
I think your basic problem is that you underestimate the speed of light. The typical velocities of objects around the Earth are in tens of km/s at most, and that is how most of your spacecraft are likely going to move. You could in principle slowly accelerate to higher velocities, if you could get an energy supply, but how would such strategy help with, say, defending your immobile planet?
You just do stuff earlier. I am fine with taking 34 hours to accelerate the carrier. And then taking 34 hours to decelerate it (Or throw it away if that is cheaper, it's only a box with an engine anyways). All of that acceleration is done beyond whatever the range of your gun to do anything at all is.
Time is never a problem, fuel usually is. If i am within range of the giant space gun building stuff to attack you, i am already dead. Thus i assume that i can start my maneuvers a few planets over. And you really only need that high of a speed when the opponent can both detect and accurately fire at small objects a few lightseconds away. And if your tech is good enough to do that, i assume that drive technology has made some progressions too.
The problem with all of this is always in speculating at what relative levels of tech what is possible. Is it harder to build a gigantic space particle accelerator, getting a medium vessel to percentages of the speed of light, detecting stuff at distances, or accurately shooting at those distances? What are the relative strengths of each technology in a civiliastion at a similar point in time?
First of all, please note that the depiction of lasers in almost all of the sci-fi is really silly; or the depicted weapons are not laser. First, laser moves at the speed of the fucking light, so as long as you can distinguish human-size objects in the scene, you will never see the shot actually moving, it is completely instant. Second, laser shots are perfectly invisible in vacuum, so you should be seeing jack shit instead. These slow-moving glowing shots can be at best some short bursts of plasma fired under pressure, but good luck keeping them focused like that over large distances.
In general, the depiction of any "action" in space is extremely inaccurate in most places for the simple reason that realistic things are mostly highly unfun, because they are either slow or very non-visual.
The most interesting thing about any space combat - yet one that goes mostly ignored - is that in principle, there is no range limitation for the weapons, because the vacuum of space doesn't stop anything - not mechanical projectiles, not light, not particle beams. Thus, the usual close combat of spaceships that is so often depicted is totally bogus - assuming that the participants aren't completely stupid. The whole idea of a small agile ship doing evasive maneuvers amidst laser beams is a fantasy created to make CGI scenes interesting. There is no way to react to something moving at the speed of light, because you will learn about the shot being fired at the exact moment it hits you. Not to mention that maneuverability of anything with humans on board will always be heavily limited by the ability of our bodies to withstand acceleration and thus the trajectories of human-carrying ships will always be highly predictable.
If there is ever a space warfare, I foresee it being a rather distant and thus visually very boring affair, the distance being essentially determined by the targeting precision of the weapons, but definitely far larger than human eyesight goes. It will also depend extremely on the ability to predict and counter-predict the moves of the opponent and there will be very little space for clutch human judgement, because everything will be heavily calculated by computers.
There is the general possibility of projectile-based mechanical weapons, but they have the inherent problems that any projectile can be shot down in principle, because it will inevitably be detectable before arrival. Thus, the most likely weapons are those whose shots travel at light speed, or very close to it. One option is the laser, which can be an invisible threat over extreme distances - the achievable convergence depends essentially only on the size of the device. However the laser can be actually countermeasured, either by having very reflective surfaces (probably not feasible) or by scattering non-transparent medium around your ship or in the general space between you and the opponent.
That leaves us with what I think will be the gun of the future and that is a particle accelerator. Surely, charged particles can be deflected by magnetic fields, but so far it seems that the achievable strength of the magnetic field is actually pretty limited - ironically, the acceleration is also done in magnetic fields (even though the acceleration is actually electrostatic usually), but it is much easier to accelerate a particle than to stop it, because during acceleration, you have precise control over where the particle is and you just can't make the same configuration of fields everywhere around you at once, as the particles are coming to you.
Small agile ships aren't probably gonna do anything in an area where huge space accelerators are available and thus the warfare will probably turn into a trench-like situation, where the trenches are not dug, but simply laid out as the distance between the enemies in which the divergence is enough for human life to be sustainable with feasible shielding.
A big problem with lasers is that they need to be on target for a sustained period of time (usually not that long, depending on the power of your lasers it could be milliseconds), which is hard to do when everything moves really fast.
Light lag is also not only a problem for the defender, but for the attacker too. If we assume that there are no humans aboard the space combat things (probably reasonable due to the lack of tolerance for acceleration) and a light lag of a few seconds in both directions, random maneuvering leaves a large area in which your opponent could possibly be, even if you have an absolutely exact (lightlagged) knowledge of his velocity and position.
(Lightlag calculation with some random assumptions: acceleration of 20g, 3+3 seconds lightlag means your target can have moved unpredictably by
dmax=0.5*a*t² = 0.5*20*10m/s²*(3s)² =900m
into any direction. This can be orthogonal towards you, so you basically have to hit the right random spot in an area of Pi*900²m²=2.54km². Assuming that the target has an area of 100m² that you can hit it on, this means that you have a chance of 0.004% of hitting with any non-steering projectile at that distance. Obviously this greatly improves the closer you get to the target. This is assuming both absolute knowledge of the target position AND absolute accuracy of your weapon.)
So as you can see, any non-steering weapon becomes useless very quickly against a randomwalking opponent if you get into lightlagged distances.
This leads to my assumption that missiles are the main offensive weapon. You can of course launch them through a railgun or something. You need to get their relative speed compared to the target to be rather large, so the time they spend in a range where they can reasonably be intercepted by lasers is minimal.
So a combat would look like this: Both oppenents get into an interception trajectory on each other, and shoot large swarms of missiles from railguns. They then attempt to change their trajectory to avoid the opposing missiles by making the missiles spend fuel tracking the target. The missiles counter this by spending fuel tracking the target.
The next phase is when the missiles get into intercept range, and happens very swiftly, because the relative velocity they have compared to the target is very high due to both the ships original velocities, and the launch velocity of the missiles. The missiles start randomwalking, while the ships try to shoot down as many as possible using lasers. A lot of missiles will die in the last moments before interception, but if one hits the target dies.
One could improve the chances of this by using stuff like nuclear shaped charges in the missiles, which allow them to detonate earlier and still destroy the target.
You can of course make this cooler by launching drones with lasers to intercept the missiles, the missiles using laser countermeasures like spraying chaff forwards. But everything still happens within moments.
I think your assumptions of "moments" is wrong. Why do you think that the laser intercept range is so small? Why do you think the time to intercept is small? Acceleration takes a lot of energy and fuel - but if the missiles are small, they will be either harmless (deflected mechanically) or easily destroyed, because they will have limited amount of energy they can absorb before evaporating.
I think your lag issue can be solved by either a "spray and pray" strategy or just having enough power to cover the whole idea. Even if 3s distance is indeed enough to hide from my accelerator, any projectile you shoot from this distance, which is a million kilometers, will likely take hours to reach me, giving me enough times to shoot the hell out of them.
I am not shooting at you from that distance. The way i envision this is by having a larg-ish carrier vessel (Basically a big box with an engine slapped onto it, maybe a railgun to launch the missiles might help). This gets onto a high-velocity intercept of the target at a larger distance (lightminutes or hours) with an intercept velocity of ideally some percentage of c, lets say 0.1c. None of this costs any of the missiles fuel, because they are still in hangar. Once you have a reasonable high velocity intercept, you just throw the missiles out of the door (or launch them with a railgun if you went for that route). Now the carrier just goes home. You spread your missiles out a bit. And they are hard to see, as they are currently not accelerating. Wait until they are so close that you fear interception, and start randomwalking. The missiles should be spread out enough that their randomwalk circles don't overlap, and they are approaching fast. You have 30 seconds to shoot them if they get within 3 lightseconds. 10 seconds at 1 lightsecond. And there could be hundreds or thousands of them for a percentage of the cost of your gigantic space accelerator. And this assumes that you can correctly identify the still silent missiles at 3 lightseconds of distance.
Also, different question. Why don't you slap an engine on your large particle accelerators? Suddenly you don't have trench warfare anymore, but Blitzkrieg.
And i don't think there is in this situation any difference between a particle accelerator and a laser. Both shoot beams of stuff at basically the speed of light. Whether its charged particles or photons isn't that important.
At the moment, we are just much better at cramming energy into a single proton than into a single photon. I have some clues to think that it might be due to physical limitations and it will stay that way. The shieldability depends on how much energy is there per particle, thus the protons are much better in penetration than the light. That's the rationale for the choice, but you are right that it doesn't matter too much for the discussion.
I obviously have engines on my accelerator and I if I know you have a similar weapon, I am randomwalking with it as much as you do. But that doesn't bring me to 0.1c or anything similarly silly. 0.1c is 34 hours of acceleration at 1g, so it's still almost 2 hours at 20g. I have high doubts you can make a large ship withstand more than 20g and even at that level, most of the weight you are carrying is there to keep it from going pancake at this force and you waste so much useful load. In any case, your carrier is not "going home", it spends 4 hours turning around and gets completely toasted during that time, if it didn't get toasted on the way. All of that assuming that it is actually energetically feasible to accelerate anything to such speed so fast.
I think your basic problem is that you underestimate the speed of light. The typical velocities of objects around the Earth are in tens of km/s at most, and that is how most of your spacecraft are likely going to move. You could in principle slowly accelerate to higher velocities, if you could get an energy supply, but how would such strategy help with, say, defending your immobile planet?
You just do stuff earlier. I am fine with taking 34 hours to accelerate the carrier. And then taking 34 hours to decelerate it (Or throw it away if that is cheaper, it's only a box with an engine anyways). All of that acceleration is done beyond whatever the range of your gun to do anything at all is.
Time is never a problem, fuel usually is. If i am within range of the giant space gun building stuff to attack you, i am already dead. Thus i assume that i can start my maneuvers a few planets over. And you really only need that high of a speed when the opponent can both detect and accurately fire at small objects a few lightseconds away. And if your tech is good enough to do that, i assume that drive technology has made some progressions too.
The problem with all of this is always in speculating at what relative levels of tech what is possible. Is it harder to build a gigantic space particle accelerator, getting a medium vessel to percentages of the speed of light, detecting stuff at distances, or accurately shooting at those distances? What are the relative strengths of each technology in a civiliastion at a similar point in time?
Yeah, I agree specifically with the last paragraph. That's probably a topic we should be fighting over first But it's really complicated and I have to type a whole lot of other text right now, that I am being actually paid for to do, so maybe some other time!
Would biological warfare via diseases also work? Different planets probably have different diseases which can be used. It has the benefit that all infrastructure on the planet remains so you can either use it or try to reverse engineer to look at the opponents technology.
Because they don't look secretarial enough? I think it's alot harder to pull off an explicitly obvious secretary costume as a male than as a female. I think you'd need some kind of prop (oldskool phone or headset or some shit). Honestly, perhaps it's the standard gender roles where the male in suit is the boss and the female helps. (is this -not so subtle- sexism discussion bait?) I don't think I'd actually think anything when I see a male or female in suit though, except for: huh, nicely dressed person.
On December 16 2016 02:23 Uldridge wrote: Because they don't look secretarial enough? I think it's alot harder to pull off an explicitly obvious secretary costume as a male than as a female. I think you'd need some kind of prop (oldskool phone or headset or some shit). Honestly, perhaps it's the standard gender roles where the male in suit is the boss and the female helps. (is this -not so subtle- sexism discussion bait?) I don't think I'd actually think anything when I see a male or female in suit though, except for: huh, nicely dressed person.
Psssst, it was a Thieving Magpie question. Of course it's a not-so-subtle sexism discussion bait.
But it's really complicated and I have to type a whole lot of other text right now, that I am being actually paid for to do, so maybe some other time!
EPT
