A Logic Question About the Future of (Space) Warfare

[Nephtys]

The obvious difference to me is that monetary costs of a soldier taking a bullet to the head are a lot lower then monetary costs of, say, losing an entire fleet of spaceships in an hour. Of course, I pulled most of that out of my ass, and either way, this isn't the thread for it. It is true that war is usually costly and wastefull, so, point conceded...

Cost does have military relevance, so I'll talk about it. When you combine Von Neumann machines, A.I., and the kind of resources asteroids and moons represent, hardware is cheap. Humans take decades to properly mature, and are not expendable munitions.

Look at what we do today, with our relatively primitive technology. We expend a huge amount of hardware and munitions per soldier, because it's easier to replace a cruise missle or artillery shell than it is a soldier. Plus, hardware doesn't involve problems like morale or morals; you can sacrifice an unlimited amount without feeling guilty ( oh, my poor bullets; how they must have suffered ! ) or worry about your missles panicking and flying away.

It's actually cheaper and more economical to lose a soldier than a missile. If you want to raid a camp with ten soldiers, and one or two of them won't make it home, it's still net economic win over hitting the place with a cruise missile.

Of course, that's politically and morally in the wrong, but saying unmanned anything is expendable because no life involved is wrong. Hardware isn't going to be cheaper just because you have offworld mining. Said costs in transport will offweigh it's advantages over terrestrial mining, and raw materials are hardly ever the deciding factor in the cost of anything complex. It's the expertise and equipment needed to make it.

[tharkûn]

2. Whatever a fighter can do, a missile/UAV can do better. Period.

Delay final choice of fire/no fire with WMD. With a UAV you are limited by timelag in range and with a missile you may well be surrendering you ability to call back the attack once you launch. Even today a lot can happen while an ICBM is in fligh, going to a stellar scale makes it that much more dynamic. You are going to need something to merely patrol volume and having only big ships gives problems with divisibility of force unless you are given extremely trigger happy ROE. For a long time the military is not going to entirely trust the computer with the final friend/foe call.

3. Hiding in space is very possible. You'll just need to shut down whatever'll give any reasonable signature, and rely on radar-absorbant coating. And range. And praying that you aren't overheating. Any thermal scanning system will be pretty useless outside of the equivilent of point blank range anyway.

Thermal detection is overrated. It will be ludiciously easy to seed space with false heat signatures - just get some nice rocks that soak up IR/Vis and periodicly heat them with a high (for modern measures) powered laser. Thermite and other substances can easily give off more IR/vis than a warship and you could easy make your warship look like a large chunk of heated aluminium oxide.
"Do we have the enemy on IR yet, Lt.?"
"Sir, we have 2,376 confirmed IR signatures and 219 probable candidates for the enemy vessel."

[Lord of the Abyss]

It's actually cheaper and more economical to lose a soldier than a missile. If you want to raid a camp with ten soldiers, and one or two of them won't make it home, it's still net economic win over hitting the place with a cruise missile.

Of course, that's politically and morally in the wrong, but saying unmanned anything is expendable because no life involved is wrong. Hardware isn't going to be cheaper just because you have offworld mining. Said costs in transport will offweigh it's advantages over terrestrial mining, and raw materials are hardly ever the deciding factor in the cost of anything complex. It's the expertise and equipment needed to make it.

First, with cost you need to consider more than just cash. Don't forget than raising a person from childhood, recruiting them and training them as a soldier takes a lot of time and resources. The morale effects of losing human soldiers is also a cost of sorts. A missle from an automated factory takes far less time to make, and no one cares if it gets expended. That's why human wave assaults have largely gone out of fashion; munitions can kill people and be replaced faster than people can be replaced.

Transport in space can be nearly free; solar/magnetic sails, solar powered mass drivers and similar technologies ( when we make them ) can throw cargo around for little cost.

As far as the expertise/equipment needed to make the hardware, I postulated earlier the widespread use of Von Neumann factory-machines; the equipment needed replicates itself for nothing, and the only expertise needed is that of the original designers.

[wolveraptor]

It's pretty pointless to say that 1 soldier isn't worth a fleet of spaceships, since there will NEVER be a scenario the space battle is much more costly than the ground battle. If the enemy's assault is so pussy that it would only kill a single soldier on the ground, it sure as hell wouldn't even scratch a massive starship.

The objective of space warfare is to prevent damage on the planet itself. What's more valuable, a fleet of ships, or a massive chunk of the planet's economy? The difficulty of space warfare would be locating the enemy before they manage to land.
Which brings us to cloaking and detection. I suspect that staying undetected is far more difficult in the vast reaches of empty space between solar systems or the outer planets. This might make it more difficult to hide, as your ship would stand out like a sore thumb against the near-absolute-zero backdrop. However, the only battles likely to take place there are those of attacking pirates, who aren't there to defend planets. Of course, piracy would probably be rare, because most ships would not be stocked with accessible money (as most finances would be electronically handled) or food. Stealing a ship's weapons and tech is unlikely, because in order to steal it, you'd have to ruin and disable it. The only concievable use for piracy would be to salvage scrap metal, and you might as well do that in a junkyard, without the combat. So really boarding a ship is unlikely, as are space marines, now that I've thought about it.

So you're stuck detecting your enemy near a planet. The attacking enemy will conspire to seed the space with false bait, as someone else suggested. This makes hiding easier (for them). They wouldn't do this in outer space as 1. there's no combat that's likely and 2. you're not hanging around in the same spot long enough for junk to make a difference. I can imagine warships cramming themselves with large amounts of junk to jettison to provide a smokescreen for invasion.

This brings me to another point; a warship that wants to be efficient probably wouldn't carry the invaders aboard; they take up to much damn space and life support. No, warships would probably be intended to distract or neutralize the invadee's space defense so that the landing craft can, well, land. So the real targets for defensive spaceships are landing craft, not warships.

[wolveraptor]

Sorry for the double post, but I wanted to share my concept of a guided missile. First, the ship's computer would give the missiles a target, which they would follow with their own sensors, making adjustments to account for the target's motion. The missiles themselves would look like spheres with retractable thrusters on all sides. This would make changing direction much easier than if they were arrow-like. After all, they don't need to worry about air resistance, but rather momentum. The sphere would extend the thrusters in one direction, and retract and extend as needed to change course.

[Lord of the Abyss]

It's pretty pointless to say that 1 soldier isn't worth a fleet of spaceships, since there will NEVER be a scenario the space battle is much more costly than the ground battle. If the enemy's assault is so pussy that it would only kill a single soldier on the ground, it sure as hell wouldn't even scratch a massive starship.

The objective of space warfare is to prevent damage on the planet itself. What's more valuable, a fleet of ships, or a massive chunk of the planet's economy? The difficulty of space warfare would be locating the enemy before they manage to land.

A space dwelling culture might not value planets much at all. Why drag things up and down a gravity well when you can get it from an asteroid with less fuel ? The space battle may be more costly than the ground battle because there won't be a ground battle. Also, planets are big, can't dodge or run and impossible to hide; they may be considered too vulnerable to be worth having.

This brings me to another point; a warship that wants to be efficient probably wouldn't carry the invaders aboard; they take up to much damn space and life support. No, warships would probably be intended to distract or neutralize the invadee's space defense so that the landing craft can, well, land. So the real targets for defensive spaceships are landing craft, not warships.

Strikes from orbit will probably destroy any major defenses long before landing craft are sent. "Space is the ultimate high ground" and all that.

[Patrick Degan]

Sorry for the double post, but I wanted to share my concept of a guided missile. First, the ship's computer would give the missiles a target, which they would follow with their own sensors, making adjustments to account for the target's motion. The missiles themselves would look like spheres with retractable thrusters on all sides. This would make changing direction much easier than if they were arrow-like. After all, they don't need to worry about air resistance, but rather momentum. The sphere would extend the thrusters in one direction, and retract and extend as needed to change course.

This would not be a practical configuration for a missile. Aerodynamics may not be a consideration, but magazine storage and fuel storage are still important factors. A spherical missile contaning the fuel supply and engines of a standard tube-rocket would take up greater volume and require a larger launcher. Not as many missiles could be carried by the base ship, which would reduce overall combat effectiveness by reducing available firepower.

Also, manoeuvering is not so simple an operation as just firing a thruster in the direction you want the missile to go. It will take X amount of time for the thruster to overcome the missile's inertia and induce a change in vector, and if the missile is moving at a very high forward velocity to begin with, the time interval for a manoeuver can be a very long one, comparatively speaking. You may as well stick with a standard tube-like rocket with thrust-vanes on the main engine outlet and throttlable output as a means of inflight manoeuvering. It will perform about the same way and without the volume storage penalty of the spherical design.

[wolveraptor]

Planets still are massive population centers, and have a helluva lot more resources than an asteroid. Unless humanity become so widely spread that space contains enough resources to support them all, we'll still require planets. Besides, if humanity was that widely spread, they probably wouldn't be a united empire, but rather a scattered group of self-governing settlements. Such would be the nature of most space-cultures. And if we did come into contact with alien space-o-philes, we wouldn't be fighting over planets, but we might seek to destroy their space colonies, should they be a threat. And instead of guarding planets, we'd attempt to guard wealthy asteroids.

It's true that space based attack systems could neutralize ground defense, but only if ground based installations weren't underground, or defended by other means, such as a laser that could destroy nuclear missiles in transit. Besides, that's what a planet's space fleet is for; to destroy enemy ships that want to attack the ground.

As for my missile model, could you explain how a tube-like missile actually manages to change the direction its nose is pointing? I don't think I understood.

[Patrick Degan]

As for my missile model, could you explain how a tube-like missile actually manages to change the direction its nose is pointing? I don't think I understood.

Through the use of thrust-vanes to deflect the engine discharge. This would cause the missile to slew about to one side, then the vanes are opened straight-out again for direct thrust to complete the change in vector. It would likely be necessary to do at least two burns with the vanes adjusted in opposite angles for thrust-deflection to limit the missile's pivot before firing on the main burn sequence to complete the manoeuver and straighten the missile's filght along the new direction.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Planets still are massive population centers, and have a helluva lot more resources than an asteroid. Unless humanity become so widely spread that space contains enough resources to support them all, we'll still require planets.

Thing is, those resources are hard to haul out of a gravity well; spacefarers might not consider them worth the effort of looting. An attack on a planet is more likely in my opinion to be an attempt to destroy an enemy, not conquer and loot it. Also, unlike asteroids most of a planet's resources are far undergound and inaccessable.

It's true that space based attack systems could neutralize ground defense, but only if ground based installations weren't underground, or defended by other means, such as a laser that could destroy nuclear missiles in transit. Besides, that's what a planet's space fleet is for; to destroy enemy ships that want to attack the ground.

A space based culture might not care about the biosphere, or the planet might be lifeless like Mars. In that case, an few asteroids or comet will destroy the enemy, and leave any resources available for extraction ( if that is the motive ). This assumes a rather ruthless group of people, of course.

[Junghalli]

Just a few thoughts.

Size is a big factor here. The bigger you are the more mass you have and the longer it will take lasers to turn all that mass into vapor. Also a big ship can obviously mount bigger powerplants and lasers.

Of course, unless you push your ships to Executor size a single hit with a nuclear or kinetic missile will still utterly destroy them. Introduce missiles into the arena and it might be more economical to produce lots of smaller ships.

Since real world rules dont allow thosand terawatt lasers and their accompanying powerplants the lasers would be probobly be beween high megawatt (light guns) or a few hundred gigawatt (uber battleship of doom's primary gun) at best.

Just out of curiousity, what's the highest practical realistic energy output for a fusion power plant?

Internaly much of the ship is used by equipment, armour, provisions etc. Crew numbers between 10 to 30 only living in cramped quarters like a submarine.

The problem with relying heavily on automation is that you invite the Trek problem of having all your systems knocked out by a few hits to critical systems. Heavily automated ships are pretty much by definition more fragile, since they're more heavily dependent on sensitive machinery and centralized control. There is something to say for the Empire's philosophy of giving each turbolaser its own independent power plant.

[Lord of the Abyss]

The problem with relying heavily on automation is that you invite the Trek problem of having all your systems knocked out by a few hits to critical systems. Heavily automated ships are pretty much by definition more fragile, since they're more heavily dependent on sensitive machinery and centralized control.

That depends on what kind of automated systems you use. A "swarm" type system composed of many small, relatively simple units is going to be much harder to disable than a centralized system. In fact, it would likely be harder to destroy than it would be to kill any humans on board; a sufficiently decentralized system should be able to keep functioning as long as power is available, even if the ship is swiss cheese.

[Nephtys]

Automation will be dead required. There's no 'downside' to using it. You'll have some human crew, but the life support requirements of people is not trivial at all. People are waste mass, needing water, oxygen, food and structures to house them. (Beds, bathrooms, hallways). A computer by comparison is very small, perhaps one the size of a bookcase can do everything a human can with a control panel for firing weapons or running sensors automatically.

In a realistic scenario, there will be no 'few' hits. If you get hit at all, you've got a massive problem. Redundancy is nothing new, so instead of one bookcase, you put another one downstairs.

[Sarevok]

Of course, unless you push your ships to Executor size a single hit with a nuclear or kinetic missile will still utterly destroy them. Introduce missiles into the arena and it might be more economical to produce lots of smaller ships.

Problem is hitting a laser armed warship with a missile. An enemy warship could be moving at a relative velocity of several thousands meters per second and be tens of thousands of km away. A realistic missile with rocket propulsion iis not going to be faster than rockets we can build today, maybe even slightly slower since they need to be carried on a ship and need to be small. At previously mentioned ranges they can take hours to reach their target during which time the target can burn them with lasers.

The problem with relying heavily on automation is that you invite the Trek problem of having all your systems knocked out by a few hits to critical systems. Heavily automated ships are pretty much by definition more fragile, since they're more heavily dependent on sensitive machinery and centralized control. There is something to say for the Empire's philosophy of giving each turbolaser its own independent power plant.

Humans crew members can be a liability in space combat. They need food, lifesupport and when ship is taking damage die pretty quickly if something goes bad near them. Besides flying and fighting in space is too complex for humans to handle without help from automation. If lasers do prove to be the dominant weapon in space having fewer humans and more equipment and armour is a better choice since ship can survive longer that way.

[Mr Bean]

Mr Bean : Why not just program the missile to follow the same flight path as the UAV and when launch point is reached just begin lock on and home in to target ?

Because you can't get a missle back. A Fighter(UAV style that is) servers two purposes

First since your not relying on the MK I Eyeball it lets you make your UAV look just like your carrier through radar/heat mimicing. And it also gives you extra platforms and angles from which to lob missles at said enemy.

Plus it gives you the dual bonus of letting you hide your carrier in plain site, as far as the enemy can see you have ten carrier's, four of which are armed UAV's the others are decoy's and the last is the acutal carrier.

As stated above, it takes just as much energy to speed up as to slow down so which target your enemy picks will make a large impact on the battle(Unless he's doing the same thing)

Is it the three headed strait for him? The two looping around to cut-off his escape route? Or is it the last four heading in radom directions AWAY from him, prefering to cut and run rather than fight.

Second advantage is your missle can jam but if it suddenly arches in and tries to start hitting the enemy they will figure out quickly its a missle rather than a decoy.


Third advantage is your UAV's let you drop "sleepers", steathed missles in its wake as it heads in that are preploted towards the enemy a minute or two after launch letting your UAV retreat to saftly or move closer in.

They will react to the first set of missles going active only to find that the missle armed UAV is two thousand miles closer and just toss two missles strait towards where they are boosting to.

[Patrick Degan]

Of course, unless you push your ships to Executor size a single hit with a nuclear or kinetic missile will still utterly destroy them. Introduce missiles into the arena and it might be more economical to produce lots of smaller ships.

Problem is hitting a laser armed warship with a missile. An enemy warship could be moving at a relative velocity of several thousands meters per second and be tens of thousands of km away. A realistic missile with rocket propulsion iis not going to be faster than rockets we can build today, maybe even slightly slower since they need to be carried on a ship and need to be small. At previously mentioned ranges they can take hours to reach their target during which time the target can burn them with lasers.

The actual problem is that any laser powerful enough to fire a beam which would have effective destructive power over very long distances would most likely be a fixed-axis mount along the longitudinal plane of the ship i.e. a bow-mounted emitter. Laser beams ultimately end up falling prey to spreading as the propagation distance increases, which of course also means a consequent falloff of beam strength as the spread-radius increases.

Also, you underestimate missiles. The AIM-135A ASAT missile (small enough to be carried on the underwing pylon of an F-15) which was tested by the Air Force in the 1980s had a terminal velocity of 6.6 km/sec. If our hypothetical attack ship A launches a missile with equivalent performance to the AIM-135A at target B which is either 15,000 km distant or will intercept a point along its directional vector 15,000 km distant, the missile will close distance with the target in under 40 minutes. The problem is far worse if the attacker is coming toward the target and therefore closing distance very rapidly. For example, at a range of 15,000 km, if the two vessels are both moving at 20km/sec, they will intercept one another in only 375 seconds. The AIM fired by the attack ship will close to target in slightly over 5 minutes.

[Patrick Degan]

Slight correction: the ASAT missile was designated ASM-135A.

[Junghalli]

A realistic missile with rocket propulsion iis not going to be faster than rockets we can build today, maybe even slightly slower since they need to be carried on a ship and need to be small.

Any universe where space travel is practical will have to have propulsion systems better than chemical rockets.
For instance, for my own universe I use a plasma torch rocket. You take a gas like hydrogen and run it through loops through a tokomak style fusion reactor until it becomes superheated, and that's your rocket exhaust. For a missile you use the same thing, only miniaturized. It would be much faster than anything built today.

[Surlethe]

Problem is hitting a laser armed warship with a missile. An enemy warship could be moving at a relative velocity of several thousands meters per second and be tens of thousands of km away. A realistic missile with rocket propulsion iis not going to be faster than rockets we can build today, maybe even slightly slower since they need to be carried on a ship and need to be small. At previously mentioned ranges they can take hours to reach their target during which time the target can burn them with lasers.

In general terms, in the atmosphere, the missile's propulsion is limited by air resistance. In space, the rocket keeps accelerating until it runs out of fuel; since it's not limited by air resistance, the rocket will certainly outperform today's missiles. If you think about it, in the atmosphere, the rocket stops accelerating and reaches a constant velocity. In space, it will keep accelerating -- that is, if we use the same rocket, its velocity will continue to increase beyond the velocity of the airborne rocket, which in turn implies it will certainly reach its destination more quickly.

Mathematically, on a distance v. time graph, the airborne rocket's point lies on a linear equation, the spaceborne one's, on an exponential. It is a trivial matter to determine which one will arrive first.

[Patrick Degan]

Any universe where space travel is practical will have to have propulsion systems better than chemical rockets.
For instance, for my own universe I use a plasma torch rocket. You take a gas like hydrogen and run it through loops through a tokomak style fusion reactor until it becomes superheated, and that's your rocket exhaust. For a missile you use the same thing, only miniaturized. It would be much faster than anything built today.

For large spacecraft propulsion you will most certainly employ nuclear propulsion or better, depending on the tech level of your civilisation. But for small missiles, solid fuel would still work quite adequately. And I doubt there would be any feasible method for miniaturising fusion-based propulsion into a a package as small as a missile comparable to the ASM-135.

[Neko_Oni]

I'm not sure how well radar absorbent material would fair in the space environment, micrometeorites and radiation might destroy it's radar defeating properties pretty quick.

Back onto missiles, modern air-to-air missiles can pull in excess of 20g during their boost phase. Space ship-to-ship missiles will probably be able to exceed that. Will that make them fast enough to evade defensive laser fire?

Also missile warheads have two real options, kinetic energy (maybe with a fragmentation charge to ensure the weapon reeks havoc through a larger area) or nuclear explosive (how much energy would be needed per square metre to disable or even damage a ship?).

[tharkûn]

Back onto missiles, modern air-to-air missiles can pull in excess of 20g during their boost phase. Space ship-to-ship missiles will probably be able to exceed that. Will that make them fast enough to evade defensive laser fire?

How fast can your laser acquire, target, and fire? In any event if you want to pull truly stupendous g's you can just slap a shaped block of graphite or whatever on the back of the missile and have a laser, say from your helpful UAV, superheat the graphite and to provide thrust. The limiting factor in the case will be your laser, and assuming combat lasers are viable that shouldn't place too much of a limit on exhaust velocity.

[Surlethe]

Back onto missiles, modern air-to-air missiles can pull in excess of 20g during their boost phase. Space ship-to-ship missiles will probably be able to exceed that. Will that make them fast enough to evade defensive laser fire?

Assuming the missile's acceleration is known, it would probably be linear, and therefore predictable; since the missile's v << c, the only problems I see with targeting incoming missiles with lasers are equipment imprecisions.

[Sea Skimmer]

For large spacecraft propulsion you will most certainly employ nuclear propulsion or better, depending on the tech level of your civilisation. But for small missiles, solid fuel would still work quite adequately. And I doubt there would be any feasible method for miniaturising fusion-based propulsion into a a package as small as a missile comparable to the ASM-135.

A liquid fueled rocket would be a better option, since that way you can shut down the main engine after getting the missile up to speed, and then have it turn back on to maneuver in for a final intercept. ASAT had a bunch of tiny little rocket motors in the kill vehicle for that purpose, but they provided very little maneuvering capability and the fighter launching the missile had to be in a very precise spot to make an intercept.

[HSRTG]

Maybe I missed this, or maybe just everyone is assuming this and I'm just especially retarded, but everyone seems to assume that the ship's main drive is ALWAYS firing and ALWAYS operational at setting: Thrust. In real life (ref Apollo missions) the thrusters fired to get the ship in to the correct orbit w/minimum amount of fuel expended. Is it SLIGHTLY possible this might happen in the future?

Next: If you know that the enemy is defending a planet/rich asteroid, why wait until you know you're in detection range of guardian ships? Launch the guided missiles a little bit (say 24-48 hours) beforehand, then give final targeting data once your sure of the target, with a narrow-beam radio transmission to the missiles that you fired. The ship itself is not given away, and the enemy instantly has a problem.

As to how the missiles know what to pursue, give each one a small, cheap CPU. Say 150-200 MHz with a bit of memory? Once the missiles get themselves moving at a reasonable (and no I don't know what this is) speed, have the engines shut off and coast in to the target. And no, I have no idea for countermeasures to large point-defense lasers. This attack is for Maximum Stealth Mode, intended for 1-3 ships, if that.

Or maybe I'm just blowing hot air and am a waste of oxygen.