Why does sci-fi seem to have a hard-on for energy weapons?

[Borgholio]

With the exception of nBSG, I can't think of any sci-fi shows or movies where the ships are armed with projectile weapons. It's always plasma weapons, phasers, disruptors, lasers, turbolasers, etc...

Now I get that energy weapons are practical if you get into a lot of fights and can't always skip to the nearest supply depo to refill ammo. And in the case of SW, turbolasers are just orders of magnitude more destructive than projectiles. But it seems to me that in certain shows, especially Star Trek, that projectiles would be devastatingly effective compared to phasers or disruptors...especially vs opponents like the Borg.

So it got me thinking, why do we never see projectile turrets or other weapons in most modern sci-fi? Is it the cool factor? Or is there some reason why projectiles just aren't practical or useful? As an example, I picture a starship the size of a Galaxy with several turrets comparable in size to the 16" gun turrets an an Iowa class. Instead of chemical propellants and high explosive warheads, they would be fired via whatever exotic technology they want to use and fit them with a nuclear or antimatter warhead. Hard to shoot down if they travel fast enough or in a salvo, could fit them with small impulse thrusters to accelerate them even faster or provide a level of guidance for longer-range shooting, and a hit from a 2-ton projectile travelling at a few hundred kilometers per second would cause a deal of hurt even without a multi-megaton warhead.

So, what gives?

[Zixinus]

Probably a number of things.

First, nothing says "this is the FUTURE!" like energy weapons.

Second, they do not carry the violent association that a normal firearm would. Very few people are killed by lasers or plasma or so on. People will also more readily believe that a laser weapon will only stun. You'll have a harder time convincing people of that with a regular firearm.

Third, it is probably easier to pass past censorship and ratings. Having a children's show use real guns will result in letters and parent organizations talking about gun-indoctrination or something. You can dodge that with using colorful energy beams that have no real-life equivalent. Hence GI Joe.

Fourth, visuals. Having colorful energy beams dance across the screen probably looks better than regular guns firing (which is just a flash and unpleasantly loud noise). Not to mention that you can copyright the exact look and sound, to the joy of merchandisers.

Fifth, you can make up anything you damn want in terms of energy weapons. How do phasers have a "stun" setting that applies to a wide spectrum of species with very different biology and anatomy? Nobody really cares, it just does. Very handy when you want the thing to do what you want for the plot.

[Tribble]

At least Star Wars makes an attempt at explaining why we see the energy weapons, which should be invisible in a vacuum. If I remember Shadows of the Empire correctly there's a line saying that the visible part of the bolt is some kind of ionised matter that is used to help them with targeting.

[Eternal_Freedom]

For an out of universe explanation, I think it has something to do with "energy weapons" being waaaay cheaper to do effects for in studios. The prop can be whatever you like and cost about £2 (rather than a replica or actual firearm), the effect of firing is easy to achieve and you don't need blood splatter or squibs to simulate getting hit, you just cry in pain and fall down dead (or disappear). The same apples to ship to ship combat. It was all done with models, so you can't really set off explosions or break them, you'll need them for the next episode. So you use your energy weapons, you show it hit the ship, there's a flash, and that's it. Or you show it hit the ship, there's a bigger flash and the ship is gone, like oBSG.

[Simon_Jester]

First of all, see here:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... JustBetter

So no, it's not just Battlestar: Galactica.

So it got me thinking, why do we never see projectile turrets or other weapons in most modern sci-fi? Is it the cool factor? Or is there some reason why projectiles just aren't practical or useful? As an example, I picture a starship the size of a Galaxy with several turrets comparable in size to the 16" gun turrets an an Iowa class. Instead of chemical propellants and high explosive warheads, they would be fired via whatever exotic technology they want to use and fit them with a nuclear or antimatter warhead. Hard to shoot down if they travel fast enough or in a salvo, could fit them with small impulse thrusters to accelerate them even faster or provide a level of guidance for longer-range shooting, and a hit from a 2-ton projectile travelling at a few hundred kilometers per second would cause a deal of hurt even without a multi-megaton warhead.

So, what gives?

One obvious issue is... it's not common in SF as written but it occurred to me a few years back. If you are firing 'dumb' projectiles that can't steer toward a target, then the speed at which those projectiles travel has a huge impact on whether you can actually hit a target. Consider, how long does it take an SF spaceship from a given setting to change course (speed up, slow down, turn) enough to be several times its own length away from where it was headed originally? If it takes a ship a minute to change course that far, then if you rely on weapons that take a minute or more to reach the target (say, muzzle velocity 100 km/s at a range of ten thousand kilometers), you're going to miss a lot. In fact, you'll hardly ever hit the target at all.

This was a real problem in historical naval battles; one of the reasons why 20th century battleships and other cannon-armed warships had hit rates of only a few percent is that the typical ship could turn, zig-zag, and move a quite noticeable distance in the tens of seconds it took artillery shells to get from the gun to the target at long range.

When dealing with kilometer sized spacecraft capable of, say, suddenly kicking in a 1g acceleration sideways, which is fairly common in SF, you are pretty much guaranteed to miss the target if you give the enemy more than, oh, 10-15 seconds to get out of the way. The smaller the target, the worse the situation gets, likewise the higher the acceleration the worse it gets.

And if you do the math, if you're firing at a target of a given size and acceleration, such that the target can sidestep at least a noticeable distance in the time it takes your projectile to arrive, your hit probability is going to decline with the inverse fourth power of the muzzle velocity of your unguided weapon. In other words, a 20 km/s weapon will hit sixteen times as often as a 10 km/s weapon, and a 40 km/s weapon will hit sixteen times as often as that. Although "sixteen times as often" as a one-in-a-million chance of hitting is still pretty slim.

This immediately makes lasers, particle beams, and any technobabble weapon that moves at light-speed very appealing... because it will probably have a 'muzzle velocity' orders of magnitude higher than a typical mass driver. Even if the projectile weapon is just as powerful as a bolt from your laser cannon, the laser is far more likely to actually hit the target, because the target will have less time to get out of the way after you fire the laser.

The only way I know around this is to rely on self-guided projectile weapons. Which is certainly practical- you discussed it. But at that point you run into the old ECM/ECCM "wizards' war" and the distinction between a bullet and a gun-launched missile becomes a bit ambiguous.

[Formless]

With the exception of nBSG, I can't think of any sci-fi shows or movies where the ships are armed with projectile weapons. It's always plasma weapons, phasers, disruptors, lasers, turbolasers, etc...

Now I get that energy weapons are practical if you get into a lot of fights and can't always skip to the nearest supply depo to refill ammo. And in the case of SW, turbolasers are just orders of magnitude more destructive than projectiles. But it seems to me that in certain shows, especially Star Trek, that projectiles would be devastatingly effective compared to phasers or disruptors...especially vs opponents like the Borg.

So it got me thinking, why do we never see projectile turrets or other weapons in most modern sci-fi?

Are you really asking this question? We totally do see projectiles in sci-fi. Especially since the 90's ended and the First Person Shooter in video games made guns cool again by making them tacticool. That is a major medium now, you know. But even before that, in ship to ship combat missiles (or torpedoes, for those who wanted to emphasize the supposed similarity between space and naval combat) were always a popular weapon. Star Trek has them, Star Wars has them, BSG has them, etc. Cannons went out of style because their relevance to modern naval combat plummeted with the advent of the aircraft carrier and irrelevance of destroyers and battleships, but missiles and especially nuclear missiles were more relevant than ever to air combat and strategic considerations. So the sci-fi television and films of the times reflected that. However, lasers aren't bound to the same limitations as projectile cannons, because they travel at the speed of light and all that, and they have the advantage of being composed of shiny special effects!

Is it the cool factor? Or is there some reason why projectiles just aren't practical or useful? As an example, I picture a starship the size of a Galaxy with several turrets comparable in size to the 16" gun turrets an an Iowa class. Instead of chemical propellants and high explosive warheads, they would be fired via whatever exotic technology they want to use and fit them with a nuclear or antimatter warhead. Hard to shoot down if they travel fast enough or in a salvo, could fit them with small impulse thrusters to accelerate them even faster or provide a level of guidance for longer-range shooting, and a hit from a 2-ton projectile travelling at a few hundred kilometers per second would cause a deal of hurt even without a multi-megaton warhead.

For the audience, its the cool factor. Shells travel too damn fast to see what the hell is going on, so none of that bullshit jargon means anything to them. All they see is flash of light at the barrel, and an explosion at the destination. This should be obvious if you stop to think about the medium of storytelling-- what sounds cool in text looks lame on TV or the big screen. You can try to make up for this with tracers, but as I'll get to in a second, why bother? A missile at least leaves a trail behind the rocket, and when you say that it is a guided missile, its self explanatory as to what advantage this has over a dumb bullet. Furthermore, much of the audience for sci-fi then and now are drawn to sci-fi for the same reason they were drawn to James Bond movies-- for the cool gadgets. Love of technology for the sake of it is a big driver for war stories in the first place, because war stories offer lots of screen time for machine porn. But not every machine in SF is going to look cool. It needs to look futuristic-- it needs to look chrome.

Lasers at the time of the 50's and 60's when this cliche was popularized were a new, unfamiliar technology which few people would realize don't work the way they appear on screen, so they fit the bill perfectly. Later on, things like plasma became the substitute because the visuals were well established enough in peoples minds to be self-justifying, but more people were now aware of how lasers specifically work so new jargon was needed.

And for a writer who really cares about the relative advantages on the battlefield, a laser travels fast enough to cross the distances of space easily, whereas a bullet will more often miss unless you lead your target by a million miles. Space is far vaster than usually seen on TV. And in Star Wars, the official line for why bullets are less popular is that they are heavy and bulky compared to batteries. Definitely a disadvantage for a spaceship, and for handheld lazors it can also be handwaved. Which means you get all the advantages of an 80's movie gunfight, but no gun enthusiast can complain that your guns shouldn't have that much ammo, or that no one seems to reload.

So, what gives?

What gives is that its mostly HARRRRD SF fans who automatically assume bullets are better, without considering the nature of the medium, or the inherent limitations of firearms; whereas Hollywood writers consider what is best for the story based on the history and cliche's of the medium, and go with the rule "if it ain't broke, don't touch it" so those cliches have staying power. The second mindset is really better for a writer to take, though doing something different occasionally is obviously healthy. For me, seeing some SF go back to the PEW PEW Chrome Rockets style would be a nice break from some of the grrritty reelizm that has saturated some parts of the genre, like video games.

[Borgholio]

Are you really asking this question? We totally do see projectiles in sci-fi. Especially since the 90's ended and the First Person Shooter in video games made guns cool again by making them tacticool. That is a major medium now, you know. But even before that, in ship to ship combat missiles (or torpedoes, for those who wanted to emphasize the supposed similarity between space and naval combat) were always a popular weapon. Star Trek has them, Star Wars has them, BSG has them, etc. Cannons went out of style because their relevance to modern naval combat plummeted with the advent of the aircraft carrier and irrelevance of destroyers and battleships, but missiles and especially nuclear missiles were more relevant than ever to air combat and strategic considerations. So the sci-fi television and films of the times reflected that. However, lasers aren't bound to the same limitations as projectile cannons, because they travel at the speed of light and all that, and they have the advantage of being composed of shiny special effects!

Let me clarify, I'm not referring to torpedoes or missiles. I'm referring to projectile cannons, mass drivers, railguns, etc...

With modern naval combat, guns did indeed fall behind missiles and aircraft and they do have shortcomings. In space, however, the shortcomings are not as relevant. Range isn't an issue since a guided projectile can have the same range as missile, not to mention being smaller (less fuel to carry) and harder to shoot down (full salvo of shells vs a rack of missiles).

All they see is flash of light at the barrel, and an explosion at the destination.

nBSG had vapor trails behind the shells. Either they were residue from the launch, or they were small engines behind the shells to increase their speed further.

a laser travels fast enough to cross the distances of space easily, whereas a bullet will more often miss unless you lead your target by a million miles.

Only if you're talking about combat at a range of a million miles...which we never see. At ranges of what we see in Star Trek or even Star Wars (Battle of Endor), a projectile launched at a few hundred kilometers per second would be very likely to hit a Star Destroyer or especially the Executor. And in ST battles such as the large fleet actions in DS9, how could projectiles NOT miss?

And I know you didn't mean it this way but just to pick nits, even a laser will have to lead the target by about 6 or 7 seconds at a range of a million miles.

What gives is that its mostly HARRRRD SF fans who automatically assume bullets are better, without considering the nature of the medium, or the inherent limitations of firearms; whereas Hollywood writers consider what is best for the story based on the history and cliche's of the medium, and go with the rule "if it ain't broke, don't touch it" so those cliches have staying power.

Well how exactly are bullets NOT better? I mean look at the most cliche example of all, The Borg. They are reason enough for the Feds to start stocking at least a small number of machine guns on board their ships, and possibly consider larger ship-mounted mass-driver weapons.

Then consider what we see from normal non-Borg combat. It's been demonstrated many times that shields in Star Trek are actually fairly resistant to energy attacks, but can be crumpled like an egg by kinetic impacts such as ramming. So if I knew that I could launch, say, a 1-ton projectile at a fraction of C towards a target where only one hit was needed to pierce the shield and impact against the bare hull, then why wouldn't I want that over phasers that require multiple shots and may not even work to begin with?

[StarSword]

With the exception of nBSG, I can't think of any sci-fi shows or movies where the ships are armed with projectile weapons. It's always plasma weapons, phasers, disruptors, lasers, turbolasers, etc...

SGC fighters and battlecruisers in late Stargate use railguns. This includes after they get access to Asgard plasma beams in SG-1: "Unending", because the railguns have a much higher rate of fire and can track small targets like Wraith darts a lot better, so they work better for point defense.

Firefly doesn't see much ship combat, but the RPG specifies that kinetic weapons are quite common (we see some during the fleet battle in Serenity). They even use homing KK missiles.

If we include popular video games, Mass Effect uses almost nothing but mass accelerator weapons. Even Reaper beams and Thanix cannons are railguns, albeit ones that fire a stream of molten metal instead of a slug. Lasers are strictly knife-fight range weapons and for point defense.

UNSC ships in Halo carry spinal railguns. Then of course we have the Super MAC satellites which carry a railgun that will punch through a fully shielded Covenant capital ship and retain enough momentum to kill the one behind it.

[Borgholio]

SGC fighters and battlecruisers in late Stargate use railguns. This includes after they get access to Asgard plasma beams in SG-1: "Unending", because the railguns have a much higher rate of fire and can track small targets like Wraith darts a lot better, so they work better for point defense.

Oh duh...how the fuck could I forget that?

[Jub]

Let me clarify, I'm not referring to torpedoes or missiles. I'm referring to projectile cannons, mass drivers, railguns, etc...

With modern naval combat, guns did indeed fall behind missiles and aircraft and they do have shortcomings. In space, however, the shortcomings are not as relevant. Range isn't an issue since a guided projectile can have the same range as missile, not to mention being smaller (less fuel to carry) and harder to shoot down (full salvo of shells vs a rack of missiles).

Mass drivers have more need for structural bracing than a missile launcher, the extra structural strength required means added mass that could, depending on how high velocity you want your round to be, more of a mass penalty than missiles. Missiles can also be told to sit and wait in an area where as a shell can only be fired and then steer into a target. In fact in space, with sufficient technology, I'd think that solid projectiles would be worse than either lasers or missiles.

Only if you're talking about combat at a range of a million miles...which we never see. At ranges of what we see in Star Trek or even Star Wars (Battle of Endor), a projectile launched at a few hundred kilometers per second would be very likely to hit a Star Destroyer or especially the Executor. And in ST battles such as the large fleet actions in DS9, how could projectiles NOT miss?

And I know you didn't mean it this way but just to pick nits, even a laser will have to lead the target by about 6 or 7 seconds at a range of a million miles.

You see it all the time in sci-fi actually. Look at shows like LoGH or Gundam and the ranges involved in their battles. Sure they aren't live action, but you've been painting with a pretty broad brush here.

Well how exactly are bullets NOT better? I mean look at the most cliche example of all, The Borg. They are reason enough for the Feds to start stocking at least a small number of machine guns on board their ships, and possibly consider larger ship-mounted mass-driver weapons.

Then consider what we see from normal non-Borg combat. It's been demonstrated many times that shields in Star Trek are actually fairly resistant to energy attacks, but can be crumpled like an egg by kinetic impacts such as ramming. So if I knew that I could launch, say, a 1-ton projectile at a fraction of C towards a target where only one hit was needed to pierce the shield and impact against the bare hull, then why wouldn't I want that over phasers that require multiple shots and may not even work to begin with?

Federation versus the Borg is one scenario out of many. Normally, a laser will be quicker to aim (you can have a fixed laser and a rotating mirror system) versus a mass driver or gun. Plus you can't shoot down a laser so the only counter measures are going to be pretty much passive in nature.

Plus you have to think of things like how much of your ships hull space mass drivers take up versus phasers. How much space for supplies, crew quarters, hanger bays, etc might be taken up by the magazines for these weapons which are really only needed against the Borg.

[Gandalf]

A person who has been shot by a laser/phaser/other can fall down bloodless on television, and keep a PG rating. A person who has been shot by a gun of some sort will draw blood, theoretically increasing the rating. A higher rating usually means fewer people will see it, and money will be lost.

For the most part, nobody really cares about the distinction except for people who whine that some sci-fi isn't hard enough, but they represent a pretty small part of the overall market.

[Simon_Jester]

Borgholio, would you maybe mind responding to my post?

[Borgholio]

Borgholio, would you maybe mind responding to my post?

Sorry, thought I had. Whoops.

One obvious issue is... it's not common in SF as written but it occurred to me a few years back. If you are firing 'dumb' projectiles that can't steer toward a target, then the speed at which those projectiles travel has a huge impact on whether you can actually hit a target. Consider, how long does it take an SF spaceship from a given setting to change course (speed up, slow down, turn) enough to be several times its own length away from where it was headed originally? If it takes a ship a minute to change course that far, then if you rely on weapons that take a minute or more to reach the target (say, muzzle velocity 100 km/s at a range of ten thousand kilometers), you're going to miss a lot. In fact, you'll hardly ever hit the target at all.

Right, but if muzzle velocity is higher than 100km/s (or increases due to the projectile having it's own micro-engine), if it's guided, or if the combat distance is only in the range of a few hundred km (which is what we see on-screen most often), then they become far more accurate.

This was a real problem in historical naval battles; one of the reasons why 20th century battleships and other cannon-armed warships had hit rates of only a few percent is that the typical ship could turn, zig-zag, and move a quite noticeable distance in the tens of seconds it took artillery shells to get from the gun to the target at long range.

Exactly, but assume for a moment that the battleship shells were guided so they could home in on the target? That changes things a great deal. Missiles would of course have a greater range but as we see today, missiles can be fooled, evaded, and intercepted. A guided shell or a slug from a railgun...not so easy.

This immediately makes lasers, particle beams, and any technobabble weapon that moves at light-speed very appealing... because it will probably have a 'muzzle velocity' orders of magnitude higher than a typical mass driver. Even if the projectile weapon is just as powerful as a bolt from your laser cannon, the laser is far more likely to actually hit the target, because the target will have less time to get out of the way after you fire the laser.

Let's be clear, I fully accept and appreciate the advantages of a weapon such as a laser, particle cannon, or something that travels at or near the speed of light. I'm not saying they'd be useless. Quite the contrary, just like how they're experimenting with replacing the CIWS Phalanx with laser interceptors in the modern navy, using energy or particle weapons for point-defense or close-in combat vs fast targets makes perfect sense. But if you're talking about large anti-ship weapons that are intended to take down a heavily armed warship, why assume that a laser is automatically the best weapon? Yes it's easy to aim and hard to evade, but what if a railgun shell could actually do significantly more damage? Would it then make sense to continue using lasers if they really didn't do as much damage as you need them to?

[Formless]

Let me clarify, I'm not referring to torpedoes or missiles. I'm referring to projectile cannons, mass drivers, railguns, etc...

Your clarification is pointless in context. A projectile is a projectile, and to be blunt your proposed "Smart Bullets" are virtually identical to Star Trek's Photon Torpedoes (which are usually depicted as coming out of the launcher with most of the velocity they are going to have).

With modern naval combat, guns did indeed fall behind missiles and aircraft and they do have shortcomings. In space, however, the shortcomings are not as relevant. Range isn't an issue since a guided projectile can have the same range as missile, not to mention being smaller (less fuel to carry) and harder to shoot down (full salvo of shells vs a rack of missiles).

It answers your question, though, doesn't it? "Why does SF use the weapons SF uses." Besides, I'm with Jub about the relative merits of missiles over bullets. Recoil can be a real issue with cannons, and spacecraft have weight to consider. And you are ignoring the range issue-- not solving it. Making it worse, not making it better. Missiles have so much fuel because that is what it takes to get that range. To get the same velocity, a mass driver (preferentially a coilgun, railguns have erosion problems that make them infeasible) will have so much recoil it will either rip itself off of its mountings, or act as an engine for the ship pointed in the wrong direction. Plus, a "Smart" bullet will need fuel for maneuvering thrusters anyway, which have to be fairly strong to overcome inertia.

Frankly, warheads are essential, IMO, to making up for projectile's problems with accuracy. A nuclear blast can fill a good volume of space with lethal radiation, and that's before doing any kind of shaped charge trickery like bomb pumped x-ray lasers or Casaba howitzers, which makes them even more efficient weapons. Even if you don't want to go the nuclear rout, simply blowing the casing into a cloud of shrapnel can make it more likely to at least score a few hits, like a shotgun.

nBSG had vapor trails behind the shells. Either they were residue from the launch, or they were small engines behind the shells to increase their speed further.

That only makes sense because rail guns literally strip their own rails with every shot. Ask the Navy. They've done the real world tests.

Only if you're talking about combat at a range of a million miles...which we never see. At ranges of what we see in Star Trek or even Star Wars (Battle of Endor), a projectile launched at a few hundred kilometers per second would be very likely to hit a Star Destroyer or especially the Executor. And in ST battles such as the large fleet actions in DS9, how could projectiles NOT miss?

First, they can. These ships in such shows jink and move all over the place, and Star Trek actually tried whenever possible to show greater ranges until later in the franchise when CG became cheap. That's why you got so many scenes where the battle is shown primarily from the POV of the bridge and limited shots of the individual ships. It helped lower the SFX budget as well. Second, if realism is a non-issue, who cares whether its a pewpew lazor or a tracer bullet? No one in the audience. Books by contrast are a different medium, so thy more often feature different circumstances and weapons than Star-X franchises.

And I know you didn't mean it this way but just to pick nits, even a laser will have to lead the target by about 6 or 7 seconds at a range of a million miles.

Measure that out in terms of arc length and you will see how much of an improvement that is over a mass driver.

Well how exactly are bullets NOT better? I mean look at the most cliche example of all, The Borg. They are reason enough for the Feds to start stocking at least a small number of machine guns on board their ships, and possibly consider larger ship-mounted mass-driver weapons.

Did you completely zone out when I said that bullets take up weight and volume on your spaceship or person? Or the places where people stated that a pewpew gun is easily given handwavium setting like "stun"? Okay, here's one. Firearms are fucking loud and will cause permanent hearing damage in the small, echoing confines of most spaceships. Seems like a good reason to adopt phasers if you have them, and they work on 90% of all your enemies. Special cases like the Borg are special circumstances where you call in specialists, unless you are Gene Roddenberry who probably thought of special forces as one of those evil military things we don't need in the future. Except when we do, but then we call it Starfleet and claim that its primary mission is exploration (makes me wonder what kind of exploration...).

Star Trek is its own beast, and its problems should not be taken as representative of all SF. It is a unique franchise with its own internal logic. And in that internal logic, phasers are seen as a politically correct weapon which people treat as a swiss army knife with lots of secondary uses. Hence why they don't even look like guns as we know them. They are designed to look like tools. And Starfleet prefers to solve their Borg problem with modulating the frequency or whatever-- its not like the Borg are immune to phasers either. Common sense

Then consider what we see from normal non-Borg combat. It's been demonstrated many times that shields in Star Trek are actually fairly resistant to energy attacks, but can be crumpled like an egg by kinetic impacts such as ramming. So if I knew that I could launch, say, a 1-ton projectile at a fraction of C towards a target where only one hit was needed to pierce the shield and impact against the bare hull, then why wouldn't I want that over phasers that require multiple shots and may not even work to begin with?

Maybe because they can't cost effectively accelerate 1-ton projectiles to a fraction of C within combat distances? Maybe because torpedoes already fill the niche of projectile weapons just fine in their universe? Why should people give you the time of day when you are making Olympic leaps in logic like "ramming works, ergo bullets work better than the weapons they are already using"? Moving anything to a fraction of C takes so much goddamn energy that even mentioning it pretty much concedes handwavium anyway, at that point we are back to the reverse question-- "what makes this better than a weapon that is pure handwavium like a LAZOR?"

[Simon_Jester]

One obvious issue is... it's not common in SF as written but it occurred to me a few years back. If you are firing 'dumb' projectiles that can't steer toward a target, then the speed at which those projectiles travel has a huge impact on whether you can actually hit a target. Consider, how long does it take an SF spaceship from a given setting to change course (speed up, slow down, turn) enough to be several times its own length away from where it was headed originally? If it takes a ship a minute to change course that far, then if you rely on weapons that take a minute or more to reach the target (say, muzzle velocity 100 km/s at a range of ten thousand kilometers), you're going to miss a lot. In fact, you'll hardly ever hit the target at all.

Right, but if muzzle velocity is higher than 100km/s (or increases due to the projectile having it's own micro-engine), if it's guided, or if the combat distance is only in the range of a few hundred km (which is what we see on-screen most often), then they become far more accurate.

We see short ranges on screen NOT because those ranges are realistic given the ship speeds (or stated weapon ranges) involved... but because of the desire to create flashy CGI for viewers.

If you can't accept that we shouldn't be having this conversation.

If you CAN accept that, then you need to consider my argument later about the relationship between hit rate and muzzle velocity (which I can prove if you need). If your railgun shells fire at .1c, then there is a wide band of engagement ranges at which a laser will hit the target ten thousand times more frequently than a 'dumb' shell from the railgun. Even if railgun rounds are, say, 500 times more effective on impact than a laser bolt it took equal time and energy to fire... they still lose.

Granted there are various ways to tilt the balance back in favor of the railgun. But having a raw, intrinsic prior hit probability ten thousand times worse is a pretty serious disadvantage to cope with. And that's making the VERY favorable assumption that you can in fact boost a shell to 10% of lightspeed in a barrel no more than, say, 100 meters long.

Also, let me point out that there is no obvious reason to assume that it's "easier" to build a mass driver firing kiloton-range impactors than a beam weapon firing kiloton-range blasts/bolts/rays/whatever.

This was a real problem in historical naval battles; one of the reasons why 20th century battleships and other cannon-armed warships had hit rates of only a few percent is that the typical ship could turn, zig-zag, and move a quite noticeable distance in the tens of seconds it took artillery shells to get from the gun to the target at long range.

Exactly, but assume for a moment that the battleship shells were guided so they could home in on the target? That changes things a great deal. Missiles would of course have a greater range but as we see today, missiles can be fooled, evaded, and intercepted. A guided shell or a slug from a railgun...not so easy.

Why would a shell's guidance system be any harder to fool than a missile's guidance system? It's literally exactly the same problem. The shell needs to be told where to go- it needs to be fed commands from the firing ship, or it needs some kind of radar or other sensors built in to tell it what to do. In real life, guided shells and guided missiles fly at pretty much the same speeds and use similar technologies (laser homing, GPS guidance) to home in on their targets.

If I can jam the radar of an incoming missile, I can jam the radar of an incoming guided shell. If my point defense lasers can vaporize the missile, they can vaporize the shell, or at least damage it badly enough that it will not hit my hull as an intact, formed, solid impactor.

For that matter, a relativistic artillery shell IS a particle beam for all practical purposes as far as the target is concerned; I can justify that comment too, if you need me to, but it would take more space than I care to spend right now.

This immediately makes lasers, particle beams, and any technobabble weapon that moves at light-speed very appealing... because it will probably have a 'muzzle velocity' orders of magnitude higher than a typical mass driver. Even if the projectile weapon is just as powerful as a bolt from your laser cannon, the laser is far more likely to actually hit the target, because the target will have less time to get out of the way after you fire the laser.

Let's be clear, I fully accept and appreciate the advantages of a weapon such as a laser, particle cannon, or something that travels at or near the speed of light. I'm not saying they'd be useless. Quite the contrary, just like how they're experimenting with replacing the CIWS Phalanx with laser interceptors in the modern navy, using energy or particle weapons for point-defense or close-in combat vs fast targets makes perfect sense.

Actually, the situation is reversed from real life. Atmosphere is better at stopping light and particles than it is at stopping formed hunks of metal, so formed hunks of metal carry farther- thus the Navy's reasons for working on short range lasers and long range railguns.

But even once you get up into the upper atmosphere, the roles reverse- the Air Force wants a laser, not a railgun, to shoot down ballistic missiles from a 747, you'll note. Because it's much easier to hit a target moving at several km/s with a laser than with a 'bullet' that is itself moving at several km/s. At least, it is easier once you get most of the atmosphere out of the way, by flying in a 747 above most of the troposphere and firing the laser at missiles that have climbed dozens of kilometers into the sky on the way to their targets.

In space, with literally nothing to impede the progress of any weapon, the laser's "short range" problem completely evaporates, as does part of the particle beam's problem. Meanwhile, the potentially unlimited combat ranges at which you can expect to fight make muzzle velocity far more significant.

I mean for crying out loud, just imagine a fight between two starships orbiting the same planet- they could easily be thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers apart. Any weapon that can be seen coming from a couple of minutes away has basically no chance of hitting the target unless it is guided, and if it's guided then there are a lot of ways to interfere with that guidance.

But if you're talking about large anti-ship weapons that are intended to take down a heavily armed warship, why assume that a laser is automatically the best weapon? Yes it's easy to aim and hard to evade, but what if a railgun shell could actually do significantly more damage? Would it then make sense to continue using lasers if they really didn't do as much damage as you need them to?

As noted, if the laser has 1/100 the damage potential but ten thousand times the hit rate... the laser wins. Moreover, it is NOT a proven assumption that the railgun would do 100 times more damage in the first place, given roughly equal, comparable levels of technology applied to the problem.

If you simply assume in advance that this must be true, it will seem obvious to you that 'railguns are just better...' but in that case you are begging the question, by assuming that which you set out to prove.

[biostem]

If we're talking about in-universe reasons, then I have a few thoughts on the matter:

1. These ships already have tremendous power plants, so instead of having to integrate entirely separate systems, they can just tap into those power sources to supply the "ammo" for the energy weapons.

2. While it's never really represented correctly, I believe most sci-fi shows consider energy weapons as traveling at or near C, (even though most on screen evidence shows otherwise).

3. Energy weapons tend to lose coherency as they travel, while a projectile could conceivably keep going, thus proving to be a hazard to a nearby planet or vessel.

4. Energy weapons tend to not have any/all of the recoil that a projectile weapon would have, thus you don't need to deal with the kind of bracing one would require, if you use energy weapons instead. Similarly, for personal weapons, the amount of training and/or concerns with using one in zero-g isn't as prevalent.

5. In most depictions, energy weapons have variable yield - you can tone down or up the destructive power of your weapons so as to do fine cutting, to drilling, to vaporizing.

[Sea Skimmer]

Beam weapons that don't need ammunition, or only trivial amounts of ammo are mighty massively appealing compared to guns or missiles even if they have a fraction of the firepower. At least in space and for air defense. That's mighty handy if the nearest supply base is a month, or ten years, away from you, while nuclear fission or fusion engines might allow the transport of centuries of fuel.

In contrast, as far as super high velocity guns go, they may never be possible. We know megawatt range lasers will work. Even much less then hard sci fi might be entirely unable to make something like a 100km/s gun, particularly one that can be aimed by any manner other then pointing the ship at the target, and even a 1000km/s projectile could still be burned up by enemy lasers or other beam weapons. Just because something is a shell and not a missile doesn't mean you can't intercept it. Another problem is relative speed, even if the projectile can course correct making it a missile, it might strike with little or no effect if the enemy can accelerate away from it enough. If you want super high velocities out of weapons, anything even close to light speed, odds are your gun is just going to turn into a free electron laser capable in principle of being both a gun and a laser anyway.

The only real problem with the sci fi focus on beam weapons is they tend to be so painfully slow, but that's because they are all inspired by tracer fire and the battles take place at close range. Phasers don't have that problem and seem like a very favorable weapon, no matter the limitations of firepower.

For ground action, having a lobbing trajectory is mighty nice and we don't often see beam weapons with any sort of arc. Except at least,well I just watched MST3K Gamera vs. Barugon and Barugon blows up a nuclear missile base with a indirect fire rainbow beam attack.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... Fj8#t=2950

Don't see that every movie. Of course one might easily contend that in the future C-RAM style systems, like a bunch of phasers on trucks, could simply shoot down any plausible artillery attack.

[StarSword]

For ground action, having a lobbing trajectory is mighty nice and we don't often see beam weapons with any sort of arc.

This actually came up in one of the more mil-SF SWEU novels set during the Clone Wars (Jedi Trial). A ground battle between a droid army and a private militia devolved into something vaguely reminiscent of the Battle of the Somme because neither side had any non-line-of-sight artillery to speak of. Both sides dug in and basically couldn't dig each other out for a while. Then they tried to turn it into the Battle of the Crater and things got weird.

Also, supposedly the reason the AT-AT is so damn tall is to lift its line-of-sight weapons over obstructions.

[Sea Skimmer]

The AT-AT claim is just nonsensical really, if line of sight was the goal the guns would be near the top, something like a quarter to a third of of its entire height is wasted for that. Hell they could at least be on the top of the head and not the bottom! Anyway its still not enough to provide anything close to vertical fire until the range is down to a few hundred meters.

[biostem]

The AT-AT claim is just nonsensical really, if line of sight was the goal the guns would be near the top, something like a quarter to a third of of its entire height is wasted for that. Hell they could at least be on the top of the head and not the bottom! Anyway its still not enough to provide anything close to vertical fire until the range is down to a few hundred meters.

Yeah... I always interpreted the AT-ATs as more of an intimidation weapon. Sure, they *may* be useful as an actual transport, but only in very specific circumstances where a shuttle or speeder wouldn't suffice...

[Borgholio]

Your clarification is pointless in context. A projectile is a projectile, and to be blunt your proposed "Smart Bullets" are virtually identical to Star Trek's Photon Torpedoes (which are usually depicted as coming out of the launcher with most of the velocity they are going to have).

How is it pointless? There is a distinct difference. A photon torpedo does virtually zero damage due to the kinetic velocity of it's impact. It requires a warhead to do any kind of meaningful damage at all. A shell can cause mayhem simply by impacting the target due to it's mass, the warhead is just an extra "fuck you" to the target. Hell, you might not even need a warhead at all if you get the thing moving fast enough. Look at an armor-piercing sabot round used by modern battle tanks.

And you are ignoring the range issue-- not solving it. Making it worse, not making it better. Missiles have so much fuel because that is what it takes to get that range. To get the same velocity, a mass driver (preferentially a coilgun, railguns have erosion problems that make them infeasible) will have so much recoil it will either rip itself off of its mountings, or act as an engine for the ship pointed in the wrong direction. Plus, a "Smart" bullet will need fuel for maneuvering thrusters anyway, which have to be fairly strong to overcome inertia.

How am I ignoring the range issue? We don't even know for certain what the effective range is of a Star Trek phaser, for instance. If it's greater than 20 or 30 thousand km, then I will concede that phasers are the way to go, but we don't know for sure what the max range is. On screen it's within a few kilometers, in dialogue it's a few hundred km to about one light-second...if I remember that episode correctly.

To compare that to a coilgun, I think we need hard numbers on both the muzzle velocity of a Federation coilgun, as well as what kind of bracing might be required.

Iowa Class 16" Gun - Can lob a 2700lb shell nearly 800m/s.
M1 Abrams 120mm smoothbore - 1.7km/s using the sabot round
Modern railgun prototypes - 6km/s projected at full power with a ~20 pound slug

So with modern materials and technologies, we can already get projectiles moving at 6km/s. With 24th century technology, it's reasonable to assume they can get the things moving far faster than we can. How much faster? Honestly...I have no idea how to calculate that. As far as structural bracing, it's also safe to assume that their ability to brace against recoil will be far superior to our own too.

Measure that out in terms of arc length and you will see how much of an improvement that is over a mass driver.

With dumb slugs, yeah you're right. But I am making the assumption that 24th century munitions will have guidance systems and have a limited ability to "steer" towards the target. Yes, I know that opens up all sorts of issues with ECM affecting the guidance systems, but would that not be the same if you're trying to get an accurate sensor lock on a distant target when you're using lasers?

Did you completely zone out when I said that bullets take up weight and volume on your spaceship or person?

So you take away some of the wastefully large crew quarters and convert them into magazines. The full load of 1,200 16" shells on an Iowa is 1,500 metric tons. Compared to the 4.5 MILLION ton mass of a Galaxy class, we're talking a fraction of a percent mass. Not significant. If you wanted to load up on extra ammo, you could easy hold ten thousand shells of that weight. Cut the weight of the shells and you can easily hold 20k or even more. That's plenty of ammo with very little space taken up or mass added.

Now as for personal weapons, did YOU zone out when I said the should stock a *small number* of machine guns? I never said they should replace their entire armory. A ship that could be months or years away from help should pack like a Boy Scout. Mostly phasers, but maybe a few Klingon disruptors, a few dozen machine guns and some ammo, etc...is that so unreasonable?

Maybe because they can't cost effectively accelerate 1-ton projectiles to a fraction of C within combat distances?

Despite all my searching, I can only find acceleration rates for starships...not for torpedoes. So I guess I can't prove that they'd be capable of doing that.

you are making Olympic leaps in logic like "ramming works, ergo bullets work better than the weapons they are already using"?

Oh I am not, why don't you go back and read what I actually said. I said that *IF* a projectile works better than a phaser, why wouldn't I want to use it instead? I used ramming as an example because, surprise surprise, most examples of kinetic attacks in ST are ramming attacks. I can recall an instance of a dud Dominion torpedo smashing into the hull of the Defiant, but I don't remember if the shields were down or not.


Now for Simon:

We see short ranges on screen NOT because those ranges are realistic given the ship speeds (or stated weapon ranges) involved... but because of the desire to create flashy CGI for viewers.

If you can't accept that we shouldn't be having this conversation.

Ok for the sake of this argument I can accept that.

If you CAN accept that, then you need to consider my argument later about the relationship between hit rate and muzzle velocity (which I can prove if you need). If your railgun shells fire at .1c, then there is a wide band of engagement ranges at which a laser will hit the target ten thousand times more frequently than a 'dumb' shell from the railgun. Even if railgun rounds are, say, 500 times more effective on impact than a laser bolt it took equal time and energy to fire... they still lose.

Ok I get what you're saying, but at what ranges are you considering? If you're launching at .1c and the range is 1,000km, it's almost instant hit anyways so a laser would have little advantage. For there to be a difference regarding range, since .1c is 30,000km/s, then you're talking ranges of at least 30,000km (one second travel time), right? Or something more?

Also, let me point out that there is no obvious reason to assume that it's "easier" to build a mass driver firing kiloton-range impactors than a beam weapon firing kiloton-range blasts/bolts/rays/whatever.

Are we talking energy input or bracing vs recoil?

Why would a shell's guidance system be any harder to fool than a missile's guidance system? It's literally exactly the same problem. The shell needs to be told where to go- it needs to be fed commands from the firing ship, or it needs some kind of radar or other sensors built in to tell it what to do. In real life, guided shells and guided missiles fly at pretty much the same speeds and use similar technologies (laser homing, GPS guidance) to home in on their targets.

Conceded. I did not think that one through very well.

If my point defense lasers can vaporize the missile, they can vaporize the shell, or at least damage it badly enough that it will not hit my hull as an intact, formed, solid impactor.

Unless the point defense gets overloaded by the sheer number of shells being lobbed at it.

For that matter, a relativistic artillery shell IS a particle beam for all practical purposes as far as the target is concerned; I can justify that comment too, if you need me to, but it would take more space than I care to spend right now.

No, I know how a particle beam works...but to be honest I never considered calling it a relativistic artillery shell.

If you simply assume in advance that this must be true, it will seem obvious to you that 'railguns are just better...' but in that case you are begging the question, by assuming that which you set out to prove.

Railguns sounded better to me from the outset based on flaws I perceived to exist in the way energy weapons were portrayed in certain SciFi titles. And yes I will admit, that my perception is based on what I see on TV and on Film. But since what I see on the screen has been explained away as flashy CGI rather than a realistic portrayal of combat...the advantages of railguns don't appear to be as great as I once thought.

[Sky Captain]

In a sci fi setting with tactical FTL allowing to jump within few hundred km of enemy fleet guns may be favorable if they do more damage to target than energy weapons.
Otherwise if typical combat ranges are measured in light seconds and more like it often is in writtten sci fi then gun type weapons are pretty pointless because hit probability is close to zero even for ridicolously fast 1000 km/s shell.

[biostem]

Now what would be interesting would be if a ST ship coupled a special purpose replicator with a coil gun of some sort - then you could tailor your ammunition based upon the target you're fighting. Since ST ships haven't been demonstrated to change direction too suddenly, I wonder if the computer could come up with a reliable firing solution based upon visual tracking and predictive algorithms. I do feel, however, that trying to use "smart bullets" would be a waste - all the mechanisms to steer the rounds for a relatively small destructive payload...

[Simon_Jester]

How is it pointless? There is a distinct difference. A photon torpedo does virtually zero damage due to the kinetic velocity of it's impact. It requires a warhead to do any kind of meaningful damage at all. A shell can cause mayhem simply by impacting the target due to it's mass, the warhead is just an extra "fuck you" to the target. Hell, you might not even need a warhead at all if you get the thing moving fast enough. Look at an armor-piercing sabot round used by modern battle tanks.

Given that photon torpedoes carry nuclear or more-than-nuclear warheads, it may simply be that your idea of what constitutes "causing mayhem" by kinetic impact is something a Trek ship would normally laugh off.

Real life nuclear bombs are pretty big, heavy things; if they fall on a house the sheer physical weight would do some real damage to that house. That doesn't mean someone would seriously consider the idea of removing the explosive package from the bomb just because the bomb "can cause mayhem simply by impacting the target."

How am I ignoring the range issue? We don't even know for certain what the effective range is of a Star Trek phaser, for instance. If it's greater than 20 or 30 thousand km, then I will concede that phasers are the way to go, but we don't know for sure what the max range is. On screen it's within a few kilometers, in dialogue it's a few hundred km to about one light-second...if I remember that episode correctly.

We have repeated references across multiple parts of the series which do refer to fights taking place at ranges of hundreds of thousands of kilometers, at times. And not at other times. It's a limitation of working with Trek scriptwriters.

But there's something very problematic about saying something like:
1) Trek has inconsistent scriptwriters, who sometimes have Trek fight at short range.
2) Therefore Trek has very short ranged weapons.
3) Therefore, Trek people are stupid for using their existing weapons at long range, when it would be smarter to use other weapons I just made up.

So with modern materials and technologies, we can already get projectiles moving at 6km/s. With 24th century technology, it's reasonable to assume they can get the things moving far faster than we can. How much faster? Honestly...I have no idea how to calculate that. As far as structural bracing, it's also safe to assume that their ability to brace against recoil will be far superior to our own too.

Yes, but enough to make up for the fact that phasers deliver kiloton-per-second levels of firepower? Maybe they can do that... but we can't just assume they can do that.

With dumb slugs, yeah you're right. But I am making the assumption that 24th century munitions will have guidance systems and have a limited ability to "steer" towards the target. Yes, I know that opens up all sorts of issues with ECM affecting the guidance systems, but would that not be the same if you're trying to get an accurate sensor lock on a distant target when you're using lasers?

With a beam weapon you have the ship's sensors to take advantage of, these are larger than can be mounted on a missile. Also, if you want a guided projectile, well... in Trek, a fast-moving, guided projectile with a big blob of antimatter inside is called a "photon torpedo" and they use them all the time.

They're just not the big steel blocks you seem to want to see punching holes in people's hulls, but they ARE pretty much the logical response to the design pressures you describe.

Oh I am not, why don't you go back and read what I actually said. I said that *IF* a projectile works better than a phaser, why wouldn't I want to use it instead? I used ramming as an example because, surprise surprise, most examples of kinetic attacks in ST are ramming attacks. I can recall an instance of a dud Dominion torpedo smashing into the hull of the Defiant, but I don't remember if the shields were down or not.

The point being that you really, really don't know that projectiles work better than phasers in all ways. Or that it would be fully practical to replace the phaser mount with a mass driver of comparable size and expense and get a weapon system of equal or greater effectiveness. If there are serious disadvantages to using projectiles that you haven't thought of, they could easily explain why people don't do that more often.
______________________________________________

If you CAN accept that, then you need to consider my argument later about the relationship between hit rate and muzzle velocity (which I can prove if you need). If your railgun shells fire at .1c, then there is a wide band of engagement ranges at which a laser will hit the target ten thousand times more frequently than a 'dumb' shell from the railgun. Even if railgun rounds are, say, 500 times more effective on impact than a laser bolt it took equal time and energy to fire... they still lose.

Ok I get what you're saying, but at what ranges are you considering? If you're launching at .1c and the range is 1,000km, it's almost instant hit anyways so a laser would have little advantage. For there to be a difference regarding range, since .1c is 30,000km/s, then you're talking ranges of at least 30,000km (one second travel time), right? Or something more?

"There is a wide band of engagement ranges." Assuming typical soft-SF accelerations in the tens or hundreds of gravities, a ship can accelerate enough to 'sidestep' by a distance equal to its own length in a matter of a few seconds. Suppose an enemy ship can make such a sidestep in two seconds. If so (I can prove this but would rather not now, I'll do it if you need)...

1) The enemy ship can move far enough in 5-6 seconds that hitting it becomes very unlikely with an unguided weapon of any kind.
2) For your imagined relativistic railgun that is a range of, say, 150 thousand kilometers.
3) For the laser that is a range of 1500 thousand kilometers.

Anywhere in between those ranges, the laser hits a lot more often than the railgun. In the extreme case (3), the laser is still going to be hitting sometimes at a range from which it is a complete waste of time to fire the railgun.

You can try to compensate by giving the railgun a guided shell, but then it all devolves into details like how good the guidance system is, and how the hell you designed a guidance system capable of surviving the utterly insane acceleration required to fire this gun. Seriously, we're talking more acceleration than would be experienced by the 'potato' in a nuclear potato gun, I suspect millions of times more force than results from being shot out of any earthly cannon.

You can't just say "lol guided" and assume that solves your problems for you.

Also, let me point out that there is no obvious reason to assume that it's "easier" to build a mass driver firing kiloton-range impactors than a beam weapon firing kiloton-range blasts/bolts/rays/whatever.

Are we talking energy input or bracing vs recoil?

Both. Plus other issues- waste heat, need for on-mount capacitors, vibration which is a separate problem from recoil but still serious...

[Seriously, one of the biggest limits on where you could put stuff like radar and rangefinders on a battleship was "will the blast from the ship's own guns firing rip this radar antenna right off the hull?" This kind of issue is real]

If my point defense lasers can vaporize the missile, they can vaporize the shell, or at least damage it badly enough that it will not hit my hull as an intact, formed, solid impactor.

Unless the point defense gets overloaded by the sheer number of shells being lobbed at it.

Can you throw out kiloton-range kinetic impactors fast enough to swamp my point defense? Because I need a lot less energy to burn down one impactor than you need to fire it. Given that you're already probably missing pretty often, this could get energy-intensive very quickly.

For that matter, a relativistic artillery shell IS a particle beam for all practical purposes as far as the target is concerned; I can justify that comment too, if you need me to, but it would take more space than I care to spend right now.

No, I know how a particle beam works...but to be honest I never considered calling it a relativistic artillery shell.

Think about the amount of energy the projectile has, and divide by the number of particles it contains. For practical purposes your 'shell' is a mass of high-energy iron nuclei and electrons... loosely bound together by a weak interatomic force.

The amount of energy required to tear apart the shell into its component atoms, and maybe even to strip the electrons off the atoms themselves and start splitting their atomic nuclei up, is thousands of times less than the energy you put into the round on the way out the barrel. So from the point of view of the target, it's getting hit by a highly concentrated blob of fast-moving charged particles that just happen to hang together a bit better than usual. Defense against such an impact is indistinguishable from the steps you'd take to defend against (very very intense) radiation from a particle beam.

If you simply assume in advance that this must be true, it will seem obvious to you that 'railguns are just better...' but in that case you are begging the question, by assuming that which you set out to prove.

Railguns sounded better to me from the outset based on flaws I perceived to exist in the way energy weapons were portrayed in certain SciFi titles. And yes I will admit, that my perception is based on what I see on TV and on Film. But since what I see on the screen has been explained away as flashy CGI rather than a realistic portrayal of combat...the advantages of railguns don't appear to be as great as I once thought.

To be fair, if ships really DO fight within pistol range of each other regularly (i.e. an astronaut with a pistol could stand on one hull and hit the other), railguns become more appealing. Especially in a setting like Trek where ship hulls are relatively vulnerable to solid impacts and don't seem to come with extra-thick slabs of special armor materials.

But you can't generalize upward from that to say that they're optimal everywhere or under all conditions.

[Esquire]

Can somebody explain what the difference is between a missile and a guided projectile in space is supposed to be? How is your smart shell supposed to steer itself, if not by engines? It's not like fins and aerodynamic guidance will work in a vacuum... at that point, you've basically got a magnetic-launch missile system like we see in the Honorverse.