Space Artilerry/Big-ass cannons in space? Good or no?

[Saxtonite]

I remember watching the Anime Heroic Age. The anime has a decent focuses on fleet battles in space, and one of the interesting things shown in the anime is giant pieces or artillery in space; basically giant lasers that provide more firepower and can 'snipe' enemy ships and annihilate them. They move slower and take longer to aim but are effective, especially against larger enemy ships.

Is this a good idea to use in Space Combat, or no? I'll look for pictures.

[Ender]

We need more info to evaluate - are we talking space opera or hard sci fi, what kind of weapons, accuracy, etc.

As a common factor though, bigger weapon means more inertia and momentum. The inertia means it will take longer to bring to bear on the target. To counter that you need a more powerful turret, which needs t accelerate and decelerate the weapon. This will result in some jitter, so you then have greater settling time.

Basically, your weapons should never be any larger then they need to be.

[Saxtonite]

We need more info to evaluate - are we talking space opera or hard sci fi, what kind of weapons, accuracy, etc.

Space Opera mainly, the weapons are lasers but it seems that they could also be some sort of particle weapon. Well some of them surely are that, lasers don't go out the side of the turret and bend.

also, in Heroic Age there are several types of these weapons, I might like to add.

As a common factor though, bigger weapon means more inertia and momentum. The inertia means it will take longer to bring to bear on the target. To counter that you need a more powerful turret, which needs t accelerate and decelerate the weapon. This will result in some jitter, so you then have greater settling time.

Basically, your weapons should never be any larger then they need to be.

okay, thank you.

Also, here is some vids of one of the weapon types, here.
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1568258HRkB ... deoRec-mll

from 00:33 to 00:36.

[Saxtonite]

something I forgot, could these devices be used in a planetary defense position better than in any sort of offensive way?

also, from 4:00 to 4:47 in the vid mentioned above, has the weapons in actual use.

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1568258HRkB ... deoRec-mll

[Venator]

It all depends on the situation, as was said.

If, say, the enemy has FTL accurate enough to flank the "space snipers", they could be destroyed with ease without getting shots off.

[Covenant]

I know what you're getting at. Thing is, lasers aren't just pinpoint weapons, they can stay quite annoyingly potent even after their beam has become rather diffused. In hard sci-fi one of the primary ways you can kill off an enemy is by using a laser to futz with people's sensors to such a degree that they're inoperable. Just like with the real-life anti-missile lasers that worked by breaking their computer guidance (not blowing them up) your big honkin' space gun could hit a wide swath at longer-than-lethal range and still kill several vehicles by taking out their sensors. Then they can't see or shoot.

And if they've got their own lasers, and the lenses are off, you might also have a situation where the beam mount catches it and you cause a lot of pain to the enemy's weapons.

In more operatic sci-fi, you can assume that the beam works at very long ranges. At long, long ranges a ship doesn't need to alter it's course very much to lead a target (assuming this weapon is bow mounted), so a pretty straight-moving enemy could be killed without too much trouble if you had some time to calculate and fire. This gets into "Needle versus Brick" debates, and it all comes down to how good the defenses are, honestly, and how much the weapon costs.

Something else to consider is that the big gun doesn't have to be the final stage in the weapon--lasers and particle beams can be redirected after firing. Mirrors or magitech gravitational lenses work for laser-bending, and you can even use electromagnetic forces to bend a particle beam. Theoretically you could have a big gun fire a gigantic proton ray out into the middle of a fleet-size firefight, and have the actual killshot be directed by a smaller vessel whose purpose is to bounce the shot at the target.

You also haven't even discussed any time of mass driver, which could do this job real well too. Accelerating a kinetic payload to a high speed would take a big gun, and those warheads can carry very advanced guidance packages and submunitions. One big redwood-sized bullet could blow itself open to reveal a huge amount of bullet-sized submunitions, and at the proper speed (and in the right setting) those would be much more lethal than a raybeam, while also being a lot harder to avoid. It doesn't take much to mess up a ship when you're talking relativistic velocities.

I'd say overall that space sniping makes a lot of sense from a cost-to-benefit ratio. But you need to have the setting allow for it. Star Wars, for example, doesn't work well. Big ships are also very fast, carry a huge amount of very long-range weapons themselves, and shields are expected to survive a great deal of punishment. Artillery has to get extremely large and resource-heavy before it gets strong enough to be more worthwhile than a Star Destroyer, except in the case of planetary sieges. In Star Trek, where ships are regularly ambushed, a space sniper would work quite well though.

So, your situation needs to have a few of these:

1) Availability of long-range weapons that retain killing power at dramatic distances. If you're too close you might as well use more efficent weapons and just mount them on cruisers instead of dedicated snipers.

2) Slow speeds in combat to prevent flanking or ignoring the sniper ship. In real life naval battles, mobile artillery were just called Battleships.

3) Threshold defenses, where you can survive until a weapon of specific power exceeds your threshold and you explode. Settings where shields can withstand longterm bombardment force your snipers to be too big.

and

4) Poor enough sensors that you're able to hide or conceal these giant weapons to keep them from being the first target the enemy attacks, and that your enemy isn't able to simply lock-and-fire back at it with kinetics and ballistics.

In any case, in space, bigger isn't always necessary. Putting a hole in someone's ship is nearly bound to cause some awful damage. But a really big laser means you can shoot longer and have a more distant kill. If your enemy has lasers half your size, you'll be able to blind them or destroy them long before they'll be able to get anywhere within firing range of you, so you win in that controlled of a circumstance.

But if your gun gets so big that it won't be able to survive a concerted attack with missiles or kinetics then it's too big, since any gigantic weapon that can't keep itself alive is just a bad idea.

[Nyrath]

There was an ancient paper and cardboard wargame called Holy War. The game designer was of the opinion that bigger was better. He was talking titanic aperture lasers, since in the microgravity environment a laser could theoretically be of any size.

As he put it: "The next time you watch Battlestar Galactica, imagine how well a fighter jet would fair against a laser beam one thousand miles in diameter. In space, bigger is better."

He was over-simplifying things, but it is food for thought.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

The big issue with lasers is that the focusing apparatus must be able to focus a Gaussian beam km away. Gaussian beams can be incredibly potent so long as you converge the beam somewhere within the rayleigh range of the beam.

[Covenant]

4) Poor enough sensors that you're able to hide or conceal these giant weapons to keep them from being the first target the enemy attacks, and that your enemy isn't able to simply lock-and-fire back at it with kinetics and ballistics.

Problem with this: if the sensors are poor enough that it won't see the giant weapons up front, will sensors be good enough to accurately target ships at extreme range?

Probably not--these were called artillery pieces afterall. Most artillery work with a spotter. Presumably you'd have ships in front relaying messages back to guide the large space laser to it's targets with up-to-date targetting data and all the enemy would see is a giant explosion as one of their ships goes up in a flash every few seconds.

So in a setting where sensors are crappy enough to get confused, or not be able to see at long range, or whatever, communications will still be able to provide a targetting window for the big lasers--but will do so in a fashion that allows the sniper artillery cannons to avoid enemy fire.

[Saxtonite]

thank you all for your answers. Also, would orbiting space artillery or ground-based anti-orbital cannons be better for defending a planet. Or would a combination of both be good?

[SylasGaunt]

In the actual source material in question they certainly were since the humans in there had 3 kinds of opponents.

1.) Bronze Tribe- The guys who use big psychically shielded and propelled asteroids as carriers for truly hideous numbers of gribly space bugs. The lasers are good here because they can take out a shielded bronze-tribe nest at long range in a single shot.. along with all the bugs near it. Basically you're talking about something with the capability to frag a carrier ship well outside the combat range of its non-FTL capable parasites. It also works against the bronze-tribe gribble-swarm since it'll handily vaporize its way through the entire mass of them killing scads.

2.) Silver Tribe ships- Which seemed to be much better than human ships so you want to hit them with the biggest gun possible.

3.) The Silver Tribes Nodos- Again we come back to having to hit them with the biggest gun possible to have a hope of stopping them.

The others have covered reasons why they may or may not work well depending on other settings.

[Jaevric]

thank you all for your answers. Also, would orbiting space artillery or ground-based anti-orbital cannons be better for defending a planet. Or would a combination of both be good?

Orbital weapons don't have to worry about atmospheric affecting the weapons -- or the weapons affecting the atmosphere. It is also, presumably, easier to build a large weapon system in microgravity versus on a planetary surface.

Depending on who you're at war with, having all your heavy weapons in orbit might reduce the likelihood that they'll simply fire weapons into the system from outside the range of your guns and aim for where they know the planet will be when the missiles get there. It depends on how interested they are in taking the planet and its population intact. If I don't care about the planet's ecology or population and I know it has heavily fortified weapons all over the surface, I'm going to be tempted to look for options that will let me kill those weapons from outside their range regardless of what it does to the planet. If I know the weapons systems are all in orbit around the planet and I don't want a massacre on my hands, I might be willing to trade some of my ships to destroy those defenses without killing off a lot of extra people in the process.

[Lord of the Abyss]

The novel The Farside Cannon made the point that a laser doesn't need to be powerful enough to melt holes in things to be lethal against ships - since dumping heat is difficult in space it just needs to be strong enough to overheat the ship/station and kill the crew. A lot easier than melting metal. And even if you dodge, it could just keep firing at your new location until the target ran out of fuel - and distances being what they are in space it'll have a long time to keep firing.

The Farside Cannon was composed of thousands of individual lasers, spread out over a large area in rough lunar terrain; even a nuke that didn't get shot down was unlikely to damage it severely.

[Covenant]

It's also notable to point out that the same problem with an atmosphere that makes it somewhat unappealing to fire beams out of makes it useful for shrugging off blasts. Superheating the atmosphere with longrange laser blasts is lousy for the planet, but if it's just a defensive outpost (like Venus or Mars could be) and not a civilian-stuffed colony then it might not matter.

Just make sure the weapon you're firing either benefits or ignores the problems of atmosphere, or that the planet you're on has no atmosphere. A moonbase wouldn't have any of the problems of air to disrupt the beam, and it's also easier to build and it has lots of benefits in terms of being able to build the reactors and heat sinks deep underground where the mass of the planetoid can soak enemy fire.

Also, if you're already in a setting where Big Guns are superior to small guns, a moonbase with optimized firing angles or refraction satellites to correct the beam could be bigger than the biggest ship your enemy could field. And the advantages in terms of heat management mean that it could also fire much more often.

[DrStrangelove]

Moderately large relativistic electromagnetic cannons make pretty nice weapons if you have the background tech to support them