Ship Boarding in Space Combat

[Korto]

SPWell, here goes.

SPThe aim of this thread is to make boarding an undamaged, fully operational enemy ship, in the middle of combat, as a way of defeating that ship, not only possible, but a sensible and valid tactic. At the same time, ranged fire is also to be useful.
SPI believe the main method in doing this will be by contriving the future technology in such a way as to make it lead inevitably to the required conclusion.
SPThis may be a fools mission, but I feel eminently qualified.

SPSeaSkimmer was also kind enough to give me some input, including some sensible objections, so at some point I'll be going through those and seeing what I can do to make them go away. This thread will also contain a discussion of the way ship protective fields (aka al Kembri fields), and interplanetary drive (aka Momentum drive) work, for I hope obvious reasons.

SPLooking at the time in history when boarding was indeed a real tactic, it suggests the following:
SP1) A ship must be able to catch another ship, without the pursued ship having to be crippled first.
SP2) Long-range fire needs to be ineffective - Weapon fire could be inaccurate
SP3) Even at close range, fire must be only modestly effective - ship armour could be superior to ship weapons
SP4) Infantry need to be able to get to the ship, and able to force entry.

SPI'll start with the drive. This was going to be relatively simple, but a day or two ago while I was thinking through a solid projectile being fired and impacting, the conclusions made it anything but. Those thoughts will be the post for tonight.



SPThe Momentum Drive
SPTo use the Momentum drive, first the Momentum drive field is activated. This completely envelopes the ship.
SPSecond, a "Zero Point" is created. This locks into the drive system the current velocity of the ship as zero. As far as the drive is concerned, the ship is at complete rest. It's just everything else that's moving.
SPThird, simple jet propulsion is used to give the ship some movement in the desired direction. It doesn't have to be a lot.
SPFourth, the Momentum field is then used to lower the mass of the ship relative to the rest of the universe. In accordance then with Conservation of Momentum, the ship goes faster. There is a maximum speed limit of approximately 0.1c, for complex theoretical reasons, but mainly because I didn't want to have to deal too much with Relativity.
SPNote - While momentum is conserved, energy isn't. The ship picks up kE as it goes faster. The assumption is that as long as the field is operative, that debt is held in abeyance. As soon as the field drops, mass and velocity revert to normal, and there is no debt.

SPSimple!
SPYeah, right. Then I thought about it.

SPSome Thought Experiments
SPAttacker and Victim are both on board ship, (mass reduction 100,000x). Attacker shoots victim with a needle pistol (velocity 1000, mass 1g, kE , kE 0.5kJ). If the shot was affected by the mass reduction, it would presumably be traveling at 1e8 m/s (1/3 the speed of light), weigh 0.00001g, and have a kE of 50 MJ. From whence comes all this energy? It’s one thing to wave airily and say it all vanishes when the field drops, but what happens in the meantime? Does the person explode? Can the ship deal with the release of 50 MJ like that? Is the pistol battery expected to supply 50 MJ (which it certainly can’t)? What if the release of this energy does work that cannot be expected to reverse itself when the field drops?
SPNo, for those reasons, and many others, everything on board ship must occur in a normal fashion. The needle travels at 1000m/s, and has 0.5 kJ. The victim doesn’t attempt to flee down the hallway at 3.6 million km/h.

SPNext, the Attacker takes control of a rail gun, and shoots a cannonball off the side. It’s a 1kg ball (10,000 m/s, 50 MJ). If, as established above, it’s traveling at normal speed and mass on ship, does this mean that when it leaves the field it grows to 100 tonnes, at 0.1 m/s and 1kJ? From whence came all this extra mass? It certainly didn’t have it when it was loaded on the ship.
SPNo. The projectile must have normal mass in the outside, which would then imply normal speed (as on the inside it had normal mass and normal speed).

SPDoes this mean then that there is nothing different? A shot had normal mass and normal speed inside the ship, and outside the ship. Nothing special.
SPBut there is a difference. It’s stipulated that the mass of the ship has been reduced a hundred thousand times, and has sped up. Everything onboard is affected. When something leaves the field, it regains its mass and slows down. How to reconcile these two positions?
SPThe answer is that how things look depend on where the observer stands. An observer on the ship sees everything normal on board ship, but outside everything is extremely massive and extremely slow. An observer outside sees everything normal outside, but in the ship everything is extremely light and extremely fast.
SPHow could this be? I can think of two possibilities.

SPThe first is the simplest to explain, but perhaps the most difficult in far-reaching effects. Time flows differently outside then inside. Time for the ship is sped up, to be precise it’s sped up the equal amount to the speed multiplier. This means that from the outside view, the ship accelerated a hundred thousand times and traveled the distance in a day it would otherwise take 274 years, but from the viewpoint of inside the ship, the trip took 274 years, while only a day passed outside.
SPThis is fascinating, but having occupants die of old age in the space of a few hours is not entirely useful as a method of travel.
SPSo maybe they’ve invented suspended animation to deal with it. They’re awoken if trouble is detected, and the ship may automatically slow down (which means time also slows down, and everything speeds up around them).
SPFor space combat, it would be a case of “The quick and the dead”, where the accelerated experience months every minute, and the normal stand around as statues. Lasers would be needed, as once a projectile leaves the momentum field, it would enter the slow time stream. A two-hour engagement would be over in less than a tenth of a second.
SPOut of combat, one could imagine starbases with factories under the effect, doing hundreds of thousands of days of work in a day. Obviously, the logistics would be interesting, but I’m sure something could be worked out.
SPTalking about logistics brings up energy. It is obvious that outside energy coming in (for instance, sunlight) would be attenuated by the same amount time is sped up. It would be spread out over more time, and the outside would be very dark. However, internal power supplies would be fine, so the question would be how good is the amplification to see the outside.
SPA year’s crops in the blink of an eye? Eight different researchers need a hundred hours of computer time today? The uses are likely endless.

SPThe second is more difficult to explain, but lacks the far-reaching consequences. Use the Schrodinger’s Cat solution; that is, everything is very light and fast on board the ship, or everything is very heavy and slow outside, or both, or neither, but as long as no-one observes the other, the situation can continue.
SPTherefore, as long as mass is reduced, no-one outside can observe inside, and no-one inside can observe outside. That’s right. They’re flying blind.
SPWhile the ship’s field is at Unity (that is, no mass reduction), they would scan the surrounding, visual, radio, etc, and then accelerate. This makes them blind, but the computer displays extrapolations of what’s where. They would go for a distance, then slow back down to Unity, have another look around, then go for another distance. A series of high-speed hops.
SPExactly what this will do to ship combat is hard for me to grasp. A ship at Unity would see the opposing ship moving as a featureless blob, but could measure its speed and direction. It could open fire (with lasers, most likely, or possibly missiles with their own momentum fields), or it could plot an intercept course and hope the other ship doesn’t stop for a look around. If both ships are aware that they’re fighting, it could be a set of short hops with shooting and attempts to intercept, but there would have to be war-gaming to try and get any idea of how this would work.
SPIt may be pointed out that “no observation” would also require an inability to make physical contact, essentially both would be completely invisible and intangible to the other, to which I say “Shut up”.

[Formless]

Looking at the time in history when boarding was indeed a real tactic, it suggests the following:
SP1) A ship must be able to catch another ship, without the pursued ship having to be crippled first.
SP2) Long-range fire needs to be ineffective - Weapon fire could be inaccurate
SP3) Even at close range, fire must be only modestly effective - ship armour could be superior to ship weapons
SP4) Infantry need to be able to get to the ship, and able to force entry.

Since this is science fiction and not history, there are also come things you can take into account:

1) There are times when you want or need to take the ship or its cargo intact. You may be trying to take political prisoners, confiscate evidence, gather intelligence, use the vessel for false flag or terrorist attacks, etc. In fiction ALL of these can become a plot hook.

2) Not all weapons need be equally destructive. If there are ways of disabling a ship without destroying its structure or killing its crew (directly) it can be used to enable the above even without inaccurate shooting. EMP is one real world example that could be exploited.

3) The definition of a "spacecraft" is much more fluid than a ship in a naval context. Space stations qualify just as much as anything else, as do probes, satellites, asteroid mines, and if you want to get really pedantic even planets and moons count. This means that there are entire classes of spacecraft that have no propulsion system at all, but may be important enough to capture intact. The tactics of doing so will be the same as if you were taking an enemy ship that has gone adrift due to engine failure.

Example scenario: the defensive perimeter of one faction makes heavy use of solar power stations both for civil and military purposes. Their warships can be made more compact by using energy beamed directly to them instead of having to generate it all by themselves, or even re-concentrating it using combat mirrors for heavy fire and bombardment. However, since the stations are used for civilian power generation it is politically expedient to take them intact (treaty, need to demilitarize them, large permanent population of civilians, etc.).

This scenario can be tweaked for hardness as one sees fit. In fact, FTL beaming and travel might create new interesting possibilities such as using them to power one's own fleets. Or if you want a harder environment but don't see how this fits into a "conventional battlespace", remember that space combat does NOT look like ground combat, and that the distances between factions is not necessarily fixed (see: orbital mechanics) or required to be very far away (such as combat between completely space faring factions living out of habitats surrounding, oh, lets say Jupiter).

Trying to imagine technobabble solutions that escape all unfortunate implications is foolhardy. Using informed logic instead leads one to more elegant solutions.

Ed: misspellings and typos

[lPeregrine]

One small problem: if you can't see in or out while the field is up then that laser/missile/whatever can't cross the boundary. Essentially the ship is invulnerable as long as it has its field up, which means it's going to be virtually impossible to kill another ship that wants to disengage from combat, and incredibly difficult to time a shot against a ship that stops and drops its fields occasionally to fire its own weapons. Since flying blind is probably accurate enough to avoid demonstrating that whole "any sufficiently interesting drive is a planet killer" rule against a civilian population a ship that is the target of a boarding attack can simply put up its field and fly away.

Also, you should add a couple more requirements:

5) Boarding troops must be able to defeat the defenders (including fixed turrets/locked doors/etc) without damaging the ship too much or allowing a self destruct, if intact capture is the goal.
6) Boarding troops must somehow be able to cause more damage than the boarding craft just tossing a nuke through the hole in the hull, if destroying the target is the goal.

[Korto]

SPTo be honest, lPeregrine, I kinda noticed the problem. In fact, I believe it's even worse. If the outside can't observe the inside, and the inside can't observe the outside, then I believe they're both completely invisible and intangible to each other. To which my response is, I don't fucking know what to do about that. The idea of flying blind is kind of appealing, but being invulnerable isn't.

SPAs for your points 5 and 6, I don't believe (5) is a big problem, if the defending side can reasonably expect mercy on capture, and I decide that due to weapons used + ship design, lethal damage to the ship is unlikely. In fact, the nature of the weapons and power source may not even naturally lend itself to natural self destruct, and any such thing would require being deliberately put in (which many may not do, civilian craft certainly not).
SP(6) is a good point, which I hadn't thought of. This would rely on the attacker having nuclear devices, which would restrict it to military vessels. One possible response could be the ship being boarded deliberately attaching itself to the attacker. "If I go, you go."

avoid demonstrating that whole "any sufficiently interesting drive is a planet killer" rule against a civilian population

SPActually the nature of this drive minimises the effect. The extreme speed/low mass only lasts so long as the field is intact. As soon as the field fails (due to some generators being destroyed, hitting the atmosphere should do it), reality instantly snaps back and the ship returns (instantly) to normal speed and normal mass, and all that unearned kE vanishes. What I forgot was how much effect just falling in from the outer solar system would have; going from 50 au (the standard distance a ship appears out) to 1 au (earth orbit) would, if I calculated right, put it at 42km/sec anyway, from a standing start. Still, better than 0.1c

SPFormless:
SP1) True, in fact many boardings may revolve around pirate action, to steal cargo, kidnap for ransom, etc.
SP2) However, I want the boarding battle to mean something. If the ship has already been crippled from afar, there would be few circumstances where a sensible crew would want to put up a fight.
SP3) Yes, there are star bases and colonies, but they're easier to imagine boarding.

SPPoint taken about too much technobabble, but I believe that also the way of fighting war follows technology. My preferred way is to lay down some base rules, and then extrapolate to see where they lead. Sometimes they lead to places interesting and unexpected; sometimes somewhere just plain unhelpful.

---

SPI like the overall idea of the Momentum drive, but the secondary characteristics of it could change with more thought.
SPA few of these "secondary characteristics", as I'm currently thinking about it.
SP* It can't be used in an atmosphere
SP* You can only travel in a straight line. To turn, you've got to return to Unity, and use your jets.
SP* You can "twiddle" the field, speeding up and down at no significant energy cost (to make targeting difficult). The ability to do this depends upon the mass of the ship v surface area of field (the lower the mass, the higher the acceleration/deceleration).
SP* While the normal maximum is 0.1c, you can go faster following in another's wake. Perhaps up to double speed.
SP* If something solid is simultaneously touching the ship and is also partly outside the field, the field fails. (nb, field depth = 1/200 total field surface area).
SP* It takes noticeable time to establish a field (including when it's failed, see above). It also takes time to drop to Unity and turn, but not as much.

[Bright]

1) There are times when you want or need to take the ship or its cargo intact. You may be trying to take political prisoners, confiscate evidence, gather intelligence, use the vessel for false flag or terrorist attacks, etc. In fiction ALL of these can become a plot hook.

The first rationalization that came to my mind - spaceships are simply so expensive that destroying them is considered a waste and capturing them intact a major gain.

[Simon_Jester]

Korto, a general thought:

Point taken about too much technobabble, but I believe that also the way of fighting war follows technology. My preferred way is to lay down some base rules, and then extrapolate to see where they lead. Sometimes they lead to places interesting and unexpected; sometimes somewhere just plain unhelpful.

The main problem I have is that the complexity of your technobabble creates a sharp barrier to entry for me- you have several interacting pieces of made-up hardware, and as a casual reader I can't figure out which one should do what under which circumstances.

To give an example of a setting where, whatever other problems exist, too many technobabble elements is not one of them:


David Weber's Honorverse. There is a LOT wrong with that series, but it serves to illustrate my point.

Does Weber have a lot of technobabble? Yes. But most of it is not complex. By and large, each piece of technology does a very simple thing which can be understood easily, and each part can be understood in isolation from the other parts.

They have flying cars powered by gravity control. But you don't need to know details about how the flying cars work. A drooling halfwit could understand them, they are basically "cars that fly really fast."

They have gravity-control-powered machine guns, but these are "machine guns that machine gun stuff really well." That's all there is.

They have gravity-control enhanced fusion reactors, which are more complicated- you have to remember two facts: "power plants work really well," and "they explode if they get hit." Simple, doesn't create a lot of awkward questions about how it interfaces with other technologies.

They have industrial nanotechnology, but that is all in the background and isn't really needed to understand anything. They have medical nanotechnology, but it's basically "medicine that works really well," with a sideorder of "bad guy mind control poison that takes over your brain." If you're confused about what it does you can still enjoy and understand what's going on.

Et cetera. Each piece of handwavy technology is a single-function device that does one thing, which can be understood with a very simple sentence like "medicine that works very well."

About the only thing in the setting that is complex is the impeller wedge, which is both "thing makes stuff go fast in space," and "thing protects stuff from other stuff in space," but "it only protects stuff from some directions, and not very well from others, and not at all from others."


Now you, you have ... I've kind of lost count. A drive that depends on numerous details and tricks, a personal force field with at least three different classes of failure modes, et cetera.

You might actually be well served by sitting down and trying to write a "Simple English" description of each of your separate pieces of technology in your setting, and seeing just how many separate clauses it takes to explain what's going on with each device.

[lPeregrine]

As for your points 5 and 6, I don't believe (5) is a big problem, if the defending side can reasonably expect mercy on capture, and I decide that due to weapons used + ship design, lethal damage to the ship is unlikely. In fact, the nature of the weapons and power source may not even naturally lend itself to natural self destruct, and any such thing would require being deliberately put in (which many may not do, civilian craft certainly not).

It isn't necessarily a fatal problem, but it's something to be aware of. Consider a small-caliber machine gun in an armored turret at the end of a long hallway the attacker needs to use to reach a vital target. This is going to be pretty lethal to a boarding party, but the turret is pretty much immune to return fire of similar power. Now the attackers have to get out the heavy weapons and risk blowing up something important along with the turret. Even something as simple as a locked door becomes a difficult obstacle. You can probably cut through it if you have time, but are you absolutely sure that you won't also be cutting through the coolant line to the ship's reactor and killing everyone?

(6) is a good point, which I hadn't thought of. This would rely on the attacker having nuclear devices, which would restrict it to military vessels. One possible response could be the ship being boarded deliberately attaching itself to the attacker. "If I go, you go."

You wouldn't even need nukes necessarily, just conventional bombs. If you're using boarding because ship armor is too tough for ranged weapons to be effective then you can just replace your boarding transports with missiles that cut through the hull and drop bombs inside instead of troops. You have to come up with a compelling reason why, if you don't care about taking the ship intact, you are boarding it instead of just blowing it up the easy way.

You can "twiddle" the field, speeding up and down at no significant energy cost (to make targeting difficult). The ability to do this depends upon the mass of the ship v surface area of field (the lower the mass, the higher the acceleration/deceleration).

Note that this contributes even more to the field being complete invulnerability. If you can vary your speed at will then once you turn on the field the volume of potential locations for your ship almost immediately grows to a point that any enemy has no chance of figuring out where you are to shoot at you. Combat will never happen outside of the most desperate possible situations because a losing or outmatched ship can simply turn on its field and evade any chance of attack.

You can only travel in a straight line. To turn, you've got to return to Unity, and use your jets.

This isn't really a big drawback. Straight-line travel is enough to escape from any fight (turn your field on and become invulnerable, fly away until the potential region you could be in is far too big for your pursuit to have any chance of being in range to fire when you drop it). As long as you're smart enough to pick a straight-line course that doesn't hit anything you don't need to turn.

If something solid is simultaneously touching the ship and is also partly outside the field, the field fails. (nb, field depth = 1/200 total field surface area).

This doesn't work. Remember, you have to block any information crossing the field and keep everyone blind. If an object can pass into or through the field then you just broke that blindness. Ships can toss out remote sensor pods that poke out of the field and then return with all the information the ship needs.

And of course then you're back to the problem of what happens if something is half inside the field and half outside (but without touching the hull). Either you break physics and have half the object existing with its free energy outside the field, or you cut away anything that crosses the boundary which means that anything attempting to enter the field (a bullet, for example) is just destroyed on contact and you have perfect invulnerability. And of course if you go with the "destroyed on contact" version a ship can escape boarding simply by turning on its field and becoming completely immune to any attempt to touch it and deliver troops.

[lPeregrine]

To be honest, lPeregrine, I kinda noticed the problem. In fact, I believe it's even worse. If the outside can't observe the inside, and the inside can't observe the outside, then I believe they're both completely invisible and intangible to each other. To which my response is, I don't fucking know what to do about that. The idea of flying blind is kind of appealing, but being invulnerable isn't.

Two potential solutions:

1) Introduce some kind of time limit on using the field. For example, maintaining an active field requires an exponentially-growing amount of energy so after a few seconds of immunity you have to drop the field for a few hours and become vulnerable to enemy fire. You can use it for a well-timed dodge, but if you use your field first your opponent can use their field to match your move once you become visible again, appear next to you, and force you to fight. The drawback to this is that you completely cripple the idea as a long-distance travel option.

2) Put a limit on how much energy the "nothing crosses the field boundary" rule can handle. If there's too much energy coming in or going out the field can't successfully form. If you set the threshold properly a ship under laser fire can't escape, and you could even set it so low that you have to get far enough out from a star that the intensity of the sunlight you're getting doesn't block your field from forming. And of course most of the interesting things in the setting would be within that no-field radius so you can use the field for interstellar travel to and from a battle but you'll have to fight the hard way.

Of course the bigger problem you face here is that the more you introduce special-case rules the more complicated your imaginary technology becomes and the more likely you are the lose the reader's interest. Add too many special cases and imaginary principles of physics and you end up with a wall of technobabble that isn't really any better than just going with the traditional handwave of "it's an engine, it makes the ship go fast".

[Simon_Jester]

The complexity and special cases are my concern too. I remember Korto's version of a forcefield-shield-thingy, and it has at least three elaborately defined failure modes. Same basic problem: when understanding what a piece of your technobabble does requires three paragraphs of exposition, the reader will either fail to understand it, or get annoyed that you slipped a technical dissertation in the middle of the story.

[Korto]

SPYou're comparing apples and oranges, Simon, with this and Honorverse. Honorverse are books, meant for popular reading. I'd never inflict this stuff on my readers; it's gibberish . This is meant to be my private reference material, so I know how the stuff works, so I'll be able to describe things consistently.
SPIt's a barely coherent mess that I'm trying to make internally consistent, and I need to bounce it off some victims interested critics so I can make it work.
SPBut your point's taken. I'll try to clean the stuff up, make it more comprehensible, and keep out unnecessary shit.

SPHi. My name's Korto, and I'm a Complexity-aholic, with severe ramble-istic tendencies. Sorry.

SPOn the Momentum Drive, while I like the primary concept of the field (reduce mass, go faster), I don't like either of the two explanations. The ships can't be invulnerable in flight. I'm going to have to go back, and redo from start.

SPNow for the protective field, which Simon's mentioned. It's been re-thought from feedback received, works a bit differently, and is simpler.

SPThe alKembri field
SPThe field absorbs “free energy” (EM, kinetic, etc; not potential energy), and converts it into “field energy” which is dispersed over a wide area and absorbed by the armour as heat energy.
SPThe field absorbs 100% of energy from an attack perfectly perpendicular to the field, falling to nothing from an attack parallel to the field. It does not affect energy leaving the field.
SPA field will not affect an object with mass travelling below a certain velocity.
SPA field has a quality called "Tuning". A highly tuned field disperses energy further, but has a higher minimum velocity limit for physical attacks then low-tuned fields.
SPA field also affects the armour, absorbing and dispersing heat from the armour. This, known as the "Jester effect", has the useful effect of rapidly dispersing hot spots.
SPNot all the field energy is absorbed by the armour. Some make it to the field emitters (feedback), which then spread it evenly throughout the entire field (where it gets reabsorbed as heat). Too much feedback causes damage to the emitters.
SPHow much is too much is determined by the size and quality of the emitters.

SPThis field has brought close and hand to hand combat back as a useful tactic. It is not only conceivable but likely that a well armoured assault trooper will survive a short dash unharmed through even heavy personal weapon fire and into hand to hand, where weapons designed to exploit the field peculiarities can be used.

[Ahriman238]

So, Dune-type shields with a lot more thought put into them? I heartily approve.

There was a short story I read in an anthology once, can't find the thing now, where troops were lodded into little clear spheres in a revolver chamber and actually fired at the enemy ship. The enemy had some kind of Celtic name and a stargate-like portal tech, I believe the implication was that they were the ancient Fae. The other thing I remember was everyone had these huge claymores, maces and axes equipped with thruster packs for fighting in zero G. I think the idea was that at least these weapons allow you to correct your own flight unlike the recoil of a firearm.

[Korto]

SPA last point about the alKembri field
SPMomentum is conserved, and is transmitted evenly over the entire facing side of the field, to the emitters, which are normally solidly embedded in the back of the armour plates.

SPMomentum Drive Current status.
SP"Momentum Field" is created around the ship. This typically takes a few minutes.
SPMass is lowered relative to the rest of the universe. Conservation of momentum causes speed to increase.
SPWhile the amount that mass can be lowered like this is theoretically unlimited as long as the (roughly) 0.1c speed limit is observed, the momentum field grows increasingly unstable the greater the speed multiplier.
SPalKembri field feedback can collapse an unstable momentum field
SPWhen a field collapses, it has to be re-established from start.
SPA ship can be maneuvered while not at Unity (changed from what I said earlier)
SPIf anything is touching the ship AND is partly outside the alKembri field, the momentum field cannot be established
SPIt is possible to accelerate and decelerate by "twitching" the field, for no significant energy cost; this is used to make laser targeting very difficult.
SPWhen two vessels with momentum fields meet, the fields pool momentum between them such that they will be both going in the same direction and speed. (This might or might not be a good idea)

---

SPAs I said, Skimmer presented some problems with boarding; here they are and some ideas on how to deal with them. I'm not guaranteeing the ideas are good ones.

How on earth do you avoid the battle destroying the ships value and any purpose of capture? The enemy will have ample time to wreck important systems as you fight into it and destroy them with gunfire and grenades anyway.

SPIf the ships are outwardly very tough, with armour and shields, it may be that the only way to reliably even mission-kill them is to use a weapon significantly larger than a ship that size could reasonably carry, or to get on board. The aim could be to just plant a BFB (big fucking bomb) inside the shields, but that may still require getting in, out, and away. If the enemy in response latches onto your ship, it could then turn into a battle to gain control of whatever’s clamping you. (Ceramic steel composite is magnetic, so electromagnets under the armour could work).
SPMy armour and shields are not so good as to resist a point-blank nuclear blast. To which I reply that it would be very hard getting a bomb close against point defense. To which I get trumped by the question "Then how the hell did you get the boarding party there?"
SPMost boarding may be against civilian targets, which wouldn’t be expected to be as well armed, and may be carrying valuable cargo.
SPThere may be a tradition of “Honourable Surrender”, where surviving crew after the battle are guaranteed their lives and treatment as long as they didn’t deliberately act to destroy the ship; which infers that those that do destroy their ship and survive are killed out of hand. This sounds like a Tai!Qu tradition, as they have more interest in raiding, and less qualms about killing the helpless.

Also if the enemy is at your mercy, why don't you just send in robotic war machines? They could be very crude and still work if you had enough of them. That'd be a lot less openly suicidal, and you could well already be towing the ship away while you figure out how to force the crew to surrender anyway. Otherwise boarding an enemy ship is like fighting room to room, except the rooms are full of equipment that might be capable of exploding and the house has a giant magazine somewhere full of ammunition that might blowup at any second if you shoot past the wrong bulkhead. Oh and since the walls are steel, you can't just knock holes in them with sledgehammers to gain entry and avoid the endless natural killzones. Casualties would be preposterously high taking a large ship. Thousands dead ect.. bonus since the ship is bound to be depressurized and even minor leaks in spacesuits could cause death rapidly, unless you make counterpressure suits work. I think that would be a basic requirement to even start to think about fighting this way, barring full on powered armor. Or more ideally powered armor with a counterpressure suit under it. Of course then why not make the power suit remote controlled for this purpose ect…

SPIf ECM has achieved the solid upper hand, then robots could be largely useless in combat actions. The target's own alKembri field acts against him, as it interferes hugely with the EM spectrum. Antennae can poke out of the field, but this means a gap in the field which may be exploitable, they may be vulnerable to EMP attacks (although this then requires an explanation of why that doesn’t trash the ship. Perhaps targeted beam such as a microwave gun?) Alternatively, there could be receivers inside the field to pick up “slant light”, EM that made it through the field due to its angle, which is then recombined by in-suit computers, but the quality, while good enough for humans, is too poor for military encrypted communications.
SPThere may indeed be simple robots, to do simple tasks, but not trusted for anything further than that.
SPThe alKembri field creates opportunity for hand to hand combat, something which robots could quite reasonably suck at.
SPAll suits are counter-pressure, in fact, our style of pressurised suit are only found in ancient history museums. Armour plates are laid over the top.
SPThe victim ship may not be crippled, and at your mercy, but instead temporarily immobilised trying to restart the Momentum drive (eg, after being collapsed by a chance laser hit) when you latched on. Latching on prevents it from going anywhere, but it's still otherwise fully operational.

Thus boarding a major ship is more likely a job for hoards of regular troops controlling hoards of robots then special forces. Special forces die as easy as anyone else. No purpose is gained in expending your elite hand picked men for such a meatgrinder. Indeed any form of direct action mission is the least desirable use of special forces, except the niche role of hostage rescue when you have no other choice. Basically if the SOF can’t win extremely quickly, they are better off not fighting.

SPThis is referring to the Daughters boarding ships; however (and Skimmer wasn’t aware of this, as I wasn’t specific) the Daughters act more in a role similar to Golden Age pirates, attacking civilian ships and colonies. Given the problems he mentions, they would avoid attacking military vessels.
SPThis is however a valuable insight given there are other groups out there then the Daughters, and some would indeed be taking on military vessels.

[Zeropoint]

If ECM has achieved the solid upper hand, then robots could be largely useless in combat actions.

Why should they be? Yeah, remotely operated drones would be useless if enemy ECM is blocking communications, but a robot, with its own on-board computer controlling it, should be able to operate just fine. Even if your boarding robots can't use radar, lidar, sonar, or other advanced sensors because they're being jammed, they still have cameras. If things are bad enough that simple vision doesn't work, then organics won't be able to see, either.

[Korto]

SPTheir AI is not that advanced. Better than ours, sure, but not hugely so. In the absence of external control, the robot would be completely autonomous once activated. That would be fine for simple tasks, but once things got complicated, results could be unpredictable. The words "Unpredictable" and "Heavily armed warbot" would not seem to me to be ones to bring a tear of joy to a military-man's eye.
SPUnless he's in Alpha Complex.
SPI can imagine robots being used for simple, easily defined tasks, but anything involving judgement in a complex, constantly changing environment would require people.
SPMore than a little of this has to do with Burnside's Zeroth Law.

[Sea Skimmer]

Enemy can't jam a fiber optic cable streaming behind the drone.

[Korto]

SPNever thought of that. While the protective field they use would interfere, there're ways around that problem; they could either leave a small gap in the field for the cable to run through, or they could slant the cable in. Slanting it in through the field would cause corruption in the signal, but I wouldn't think there would be need for encryption in a cable signal, so it could be simple and heavily redundant.
SPThe cable would be vulnerable to attack, I imagine. Apparently fibre optic cable has little shear strength, compared to wire, and can be broken by a sudden strike or flex. Explosives come to mind.
SPYou know, I can go with this. It's giving me boarding, and room to room close combat. As long as a well-trained, well-equipped assault soldier is superior one-on-one to a drone in close quarters, I can imagine an attack using drones to avoid the initial carnage, spring ambushes, disrupt kill-points, and so on. The defenders obviously would have counter-measures, perhaps thinking about what it was like attacking a castle might be helpful.

[Zeropoint]

As long as a well-trained, well-equipped assault soldier is superior one-on-one to a drone in close quarters

I hate to offend human chauvinists (and aren't we all, at least a little?) but I don't see why we should expect humans to be better than robots at tasks like combat, which don't require high-level creative thinking. Early prototype humanoid combat robots exist now. By the time that spacecraft boarding actions become necessary, those projects will have had, I'd guess, at least 50 years of development, not to mention the improvements in materials science, computers, and power storage. I find it difficult to imagine that the top-end robots of 2063 won't be faster and more accurate at combat tasks like shooting the enemy and moving to cover.

Machines are getting better over time. Humans aren't.

[Simon_Jester]

We've explored this before, for most of us we've explored it at least several times a year for the last several years- I'm not disputing it as such. But I will confess that at a certain point it becomes tiresome and you fall afoul of the problem I described once and which (to my surprise) got quoted elsewhere.

At a certain point, being 'realistic' by observing this over and over and treating it as a flaw in other people's stories when our expectation is not met is impoverishing us, not enriching us.

It is pointless for us to try and expect all visions of the future to converge on a single set of assumptions and predictions that we then call "realistic science fiction." While "machines will take over fighting some time in the 21st century" is a prediction that certainly seems realistic, and is probably the way to bet, right now it doesn't make sense to rewrite all literature on the assumption that this prediction will come true. We have enough problems making good art without forcing literally all writers to back up and rewrite their stories on the grounds that a combat drone is better than a human being.

[Korto]

As long as a well-trained, well-equipped assault soldier is superior one-on-one to a drone in close quarters

I hate to offend human chauvinists (and aren't we all, at least a little?) but I don't see why we should expect humans to be better than robots at tasks like combat, which don't require high-level creative thinking. Early prototype humanoid combat robots exist now. By the time that spacecraft boarding actions become necessary, those projects will have had, I'd guess, at least 50 years of development, not to mention the improvements in materials science, computers, and power storage. I find it difficult to imagine that the top-end robots of 2063 won't be faster and more accurate at combat tasks like shooting the enemy and moving to cover.

Machines are getting better over time. Humans aren't.

SPA few points I'd like to make.
SP1) I fear you may have misunderstood the purpose of this thread. This wasn't a "I believe there will be space battles with cutlass-swinging pirates boarding ships and fighting it out man to man in the future, and here's why" thread, this was a "I want there to be space battles with cutlass-swinging pirates boarding ships and fighting it out man to man in the future, and here's my ideas on how to go about it" thread. It's political reverse engineering. Start with the answer you want, and then work out the question that gives it.
SP2) There's a difference between long range shooting combat in a simple environment at well defined targets, and an up-close chaotic brawl in a hostile complex environment potentially involving decoys, disguise, and whatever else the opposition can think of. Modern computers can shoot a missile out of the sky, but ever watched them play soccer? I deliberately said their AI was not that much more advanced then ours. It's an area, along with a number of others, that seems to have plateaued.
SP3) Human IQ has been increasing every generation. Some village in Italy (I think) has a new mutation protecting the possessors from heart disease. We are actually getting better over time. Just saying.
SP4) Predicting the future is a game I don't play. Who the fuck would have predicted mobile phones a hundred years ago? The internet fifty years ago? And I'm still waiting for my flying car.
SP5) SF doesn't have to have anything to do with what you expect the future to actually hold.

[Simon_Jester]

Personally I have a certain admiration for those who wish to tell a story, for the glory of it, that is defiantly humanist, as opposed to computerist, in which people have a role even if we presently think machines will dominate.

All credit to Steve Savitsky, but this sort of expresses the sentiment:

Once my friends and I read science fiction tales
We dreamed of space, and rockets to the moon.
Some day we'd live to walk upon the planets;
The future, oh it couldn't come too soon.

Now it's long past the time we called the future
And still we carry on from day to day
The wonders of tomorrow still elude us;
Reality keeps getting in the way.

And the starlit crystal spires along the Grand Canal,
The cloudlight on the warm Venusian sea,
Have vanished, like the stuff that dreams are made of;
The future isn't like it used to be.

We watched as gallant men rode thunder to the sky
Our probes brought distant planets into view:
The dry and cratered plains of Mars and Venus--
Some dreams were dead before they could come true.

The Saturn Five once carried spacemen moonward
We've lost the plans to build her kind again
Bureaucracy and budgets dragged her under
Her launching pad stands rusting in the rain.

And the starlit crystal spires along the Grand Canal,
The cloudlight on the warm Venusian sea,
Have vanished, like the stuff that dreams are made of;
The future isn't all it used to be.

The century's last year was safely far away
We'd have machines that talked with us, and more.
We never knew the challenge we'd be facing
Was code we keypunched forty years before.

Atomic powered rockets were a pipe-dream;
Most cities still burn coal to chase the dark.
The monorail that once ran to the spaceport
Takes children to an outing in the park.

And the starlit crystal spires along the Grand Canal,
The cloudlight on the warm Venusian sea,
Have vanished, like the stuff that dreams are made of;
The future isn't what it used to be.

But the future that we lost is still someplace out there
Orion still rides hellfire toward the blue,
And rockets proudly land upon their tailfins,
As God and Robert Heinlein meant them to.

Yes, someplace there are old fans who remember
The way the future was when we were young,
And when the chains of space and time slip from me
I'll be part of the song that once was sung.

And I'll share a song with Rhysling,
beside the Grand Canal,
Ride lightsails on the endless starry sea
When I've become the stuff that dreams
are made of
In the future of my childrens' memory.

[Sea Skimmer]

SPNever thought of that. While the protective field they use would interfere, there're ways around that problem; they could either leave a small gap in the field for the cable to run through, or they could slant the cable in. Slanting it in through the field would cause corruption in the signal, but I wouldn't think there would be need for encryption in a cable signal, so it could be simple and heavily redundant.
SPThe cable would be vulnerable to attack, I imagine. Apparently fibre optic cable has little shear strength, compared to wire, and can be broken by a sudden strike or flex. Explosives come to mind.

You can put it in cable armor and it will be fine enough. The cable would spool out from the drone so even if it gets snagged on something, it can just keep playing out more cable. The biggest problem might be several drones tangling together on different cables. More so if you are fighting in a ship with no gravity then one that has gravity.

The US Army made a 15km range anti tank/helicopter fiber optic guided missile in the 1990s called EFOGM that worked, while the European Polyphem missile had 60km range and a turojet engine so it flew like a cruise missile while doing it. It was even supposed to work from submarines with the wire trailing back underwater. Neither of these saw mass production, but for reasons unrelated to any technological failure. More because of a focus on fire and forget weapons, and sudden attention to armed UAVs.

Also anything that breaks the cable will probably break the drone as well. This is when both sides start spamming bombs at each other, and then either the ship is blown up, or the attackers start cutting through bulkheads to try to gain easier entry somewhere else.

In any case a very basic AI could simply perform a set series of commands to go 20 meters, turn left, go 50 meters, explode against that fortified bulkhead door. Where talking things like the German Goliath here as much as some powered robot warrior.

If this ‘protective field’ can interfere with light waves inside an enclosed medium, you might want to think about the broader implications of what that means. Are these things distorting all light touching them all the time? Do they look like some shimmering bright white blur or some such? What effects does this have on living tissue?

Lasers repeated by beacons are also an option, though smoke would be the biggest enemy for them.

Now as for radio jamming in general because the distances are very short you don’t need a lot of radio jamming power to have some kind of effect on enemy communications, but by the same hand the attack could use extremely powerful directional antennas to control his drones and require in turn stupid powerful amounts of jamming. In real life most tactical radios on vehicles are maybe 50 watts but could still be useful at 50 miles with a simple antenna, more much with a big complex one, but they can also be fairly readily jammed. Now make that be 50 watts directional beam at 50 feet, well, jamming that might not be so easy. How many microwave oven powered jammers are going to be mounted on the walls with self contained power supplies?

Rather then blanket declare jamming blocks everything, it might be more interesting to say it protects key citadel areas of the ship, which are fortified on a spherical basis to protect key systems from capture as long as possible, rather in concept like the safe rooms being built into merchant ships today to stop pirates. The approaches would be fortified, including stuff like internal armor bulkheads on all sides and jammer equipped, while the bulk of the ship which is stuff like sleeping quarters or just cargo space is not. The more important the ship the bigger the crew and the bigger the citadel areas, the most important ships might have redundant citadels so that even overpowering the crew in one does not actually grant control of the ship, short of ripping apart all the wiring ducts to physically seize control of the engine computers ect...even then various software tricks might thwart doing so any quicker then it takes to reduce the citadels. Course the people in the citadels might really want to surrender rather then being slaughtered, which is the original problem with all this. Nobody is going to fight back unless its always a fight to the death or they have a serious chance of rescue if they can delay a useful period of time.

So it seems to me you'd better have fast FTL speeds among other considerations, so that ships can be saved, and boarding parties must rapidly capture a ship at all costs, or else cut and run if they cant. Then you get your desired hyper intensive boarding actually having a real to not turn into Stalingrad in Space. Though it might anyway. Surprise would be of utter importance as we've mentioned before I think in the PMs.

[Korto]

You can put it in cable armor and it will be fine enough.

SPAnd it could be given an alKembri field as well, although that would be expensive.
SPThe major reason for the field is to bring back melee combat as a sound tactic in the right conditions, ie, close engagement. So, assuming there is close- and melee combat going on, the cable should still be enough of a weak point to, not rule them out, but to make them less effective then people (but when you lose a drone, you don't lose a person).

In any case a very basic AI could simply perform a set series of commands to go 20 meters, turn left, go 50 meters, explode against that fortified bulkhead door.

SPI'm all right with this, following a simple program. I just don't want them making difficult weighted decisions in a complex environment. I want that left for humans and other biologicals.

If this ‘protective field’ can interfere with light waves inside an enclosed medium, you might want to think about the broader implications of what that means. Are these things distorting all light touching them all the time? Do they look like some shimmering bright white blur or some such? What effects does this have on living tissue?

SPYou know, I've just realised, I've NEVER considered what the field would look like from the outside! I just, unthinking, subconsciously assumed it was invisible. But it can't be. Least, I don't think so. I'll think about it. I'll think about its effect on living tissue later.
SPAnyway, here's some info about the alKembri field that's either new, or I forgot to mention above.
SPThe field is generated by a network of emitters. The field has a depth and each emitter has a maximum radius determined by the field SA. If some emitters are destroyed so that the radii no longer meet then that area is no longer covered and the total field SA is reduced, reducing the maximum emitter radius and field depth. If enough SA is lost as to reduce the radius so that the emitter separation means the radii no longer meet, the whole field collapses.

SPNot all the field energy is absorbed by the armour. Some make it to the field emitters (feedback), which then spread it evenly throughout the entire field (where it gets reabsorbed as heat). Too much feedback causes damage to the emitters.

SPA alteration I'm considering to improve its performance against explosives is "Feedback damage occurs from too much imbalance in feedback compared to neighbouring emitters".
SPSize of emitter has no effect upon size or depth of field emitted, which is determined solely by the total SA of field. Larger emitters require more power to run, but have more feedback tolerance.
SPThe field interferes with EM radiation, meaning vision and radio signals. A common solution is to catch ‘slant light’, light passing through the field at a shallow angle, and bring that in where the image is reconstructed and enhanced. Unfortunately, significant chaotic disruption occurs to the signal in passing through the field and the reconstruction can be best described as being like an analogue TV with a bad signal, ghosting, colours wrong, snowy, but usable. For radio and similar communications, it means that only low-density, heavily-redundant signals work, and anything that simple is easily decrypted. (Actually, all energy is corrupted that is capable of it, but others don't matter so much.)
SPThe field also interferes with electron flow. Electronics within the field skin will not work unless made completely parallel to the field. Electronics completely contained inside the enclosed area, however, works fine.

So it seems to me you'd better have fast FTL speeds among other considerations, so that ships can be saved, and boarding parties must rapidly capture a ship at all costs, or else cut and run if they cant. Then you get your desired hyper intensive boarding actually having a real to not turn into Stalingrad in Space. Though it might anyway. Surprise would be of utter importance as we've mentioned before I think in the PMs.

SPThe interstellar drive is teleportation in up to 6 LY hops, but with an 11 day wait period after a hop. For technical reasons they appear at a distance of 50 au out from the system centre.
SPThe interplanetary drive can deliver a maximum velocity of 0.1c, at very little energy cost BUT it uses a field emitted from the alKembri field emitters to completely encompass the ship to do this. This drive field is very unstable at high speed and is easily destabalised by protective field feedback from energy hits, which will cause the drive field to collapse and have to be re-established, which takes some minutes. During these minutes the ship is what's known as a "floater".

SPSo what I was hoping for to allow boarding was the combination of armour and protective field making the ship very tough to crack from range, but it can be immobilised for short periods. While it's immobilised, the aggressor can attempt to swoop in and latch on (both ships interplanetary drive fields will merge, or because of the attachment, the field will no longer completely encompass the ship. Has the same result.) and try to force entry. The defender would try to dislodge the attacker to get moving again, or alternatively to counter-board.

[Korto]

SPOK, let's give this a try.

If this ‘protective field’ can interfere with light waves inside an enclosed medium, you might want to think about the broader implications of what that means. Are these things distorting all light touching them all the time? Do they look like some shimmering bright white blur or some such?

SPThe field absorbs light directly impinging on it, partially absorbs and slightly distorts/diffracts light entering on a slant and wont affect light heading away from it. Therefore I think it'll look like this:
SPWith the light coming from the direction of the viewer, the shielded person will look like a silhouette, with a very faint corona glow with what look like faint rippling shadows, if there's no other light to drown it out.
SPWith the light coming from behind the shielded person, shining towards the viewer, then the shielded person will again look like a silhouette (although for the more mundane reason). However, there's a clear corona with rippling shadows of faint rainbow colours*.
SPWith the light coming from the side or all around, the wearer will appear to be in heavy rippling shadow, but with a faint curling, twisting play of rainbow colours* all over the surface, like on a film of oil.

SP* Strictly speaking, I suspect the colour effect would really be so dispersed, random, and swiftly changing that it would actually look white, like a faint white glow. However, I plead author's prerogative, because I prefer the rippling rainbow effect.

What effects does this have on living tissue?

SPOuch. Thinking about it, living tissue passing through the field would be quickly reduced to the ambient temperature of the field, although reduced may be the wrong word since the only obvious way for heat to leave the shield / armour system is by radiation, so the ambient temperature may be quite high. Also, anything inside the body that relies on rapid movement, (eg how fast is cellular proton transfer?) will be affected and slowed down. I honestly don't know if this is a problem, the lowest speed limit is a few hundred metres a second.
SPHowever, this speed limit thing will affect chemical reactions, and, this is interesting, nuclear reactions too. The field may act as a Wall of Death! (tm) for anything passing through it.
SPI'm wondering how well explosives, and particularly a nuclear explosion, would work if they were immersed in the field. Any reactive particle travelling into the field will have its energy stolen, anything travelling away would be allowed to go. Probably wont do it any good.
SPHowever, I don't see this solving my problem with explosives, as surely a way could easily be found to cause the explosion to happen at a 'stand-off' distance.
SPThis entire section here may be something I can work with, or it may be something I'm just going to have to pretend doesn't exist, that is "Move along, move along, nothing to see here." I'll have to work out what the shield ambient temperature would be if in a standard-temperature environment, for one thing.
SPHowever, shields protect their wearers from the effects of their own shields, and the effects of other people's shields.