Fighters in space

[tharkûn]

What does this mean? Well, let's plug a few somewhat arbitrary numbers in there, shall we? Lets assume that you missile can go 300m/s/s with a burn of 30 seconds and starts off with a relative velocity of 400m/s to the target. The target is a human-piloted fighter, and the best acceleration it can pull is 90m/s/s. Maximum range of the missile is 147,000 m, or 147km. In order to ensure that the human-piloted fighter cannot evade the missile by outrunning it, you have to close to at least 106.5 km.

Alternatively, say you have a drone-controlled fighter with just twice the acceleration rate of the human-piloted fighter, 180m/s/s. In order to ensure that the drone-controlled fighter, you must close to at least 66km.

Wow you are dumb. You beleive a drone fighter will only be 2x as slow as short range missile? HOW STUPID ARE YOU?

Think about it. First off your fighter has to accelerate out, and then turn around and accelerate back. For each kg of empty mass it needs 20 of fuel (or 10 or whatever ... remember this is NEWTONIAN) so your fighter is carrying the missile (and its fuel) so it needs 10 times the mass of the missile in fuel to accelerate home.

Further this should strike you as uniformly stupid. The VAST MAJORITY of your mass is FUEL. Any formula has to be an INTEGRAL because your mass is non-constant. If your fighter can sustain 180 m/s/s your missile is looking at least 1800 m/s/s.

And that is how you can outrun a missile.
Assuming infinite fuel, moronic numbers, and generally pulling it out of your ass, yes.


Depends on how fast you can accelerate the projectile.
No it is still useless except at point blank ranges, you have seconds to turn a few degrees to get out of the way. Rail guns are point blank useless at anything but point blank range.

If you are actually stupid enough to build a rail gun for anything beside strategic bombardment ... then you have a ROYAL bitch for recoil.

You need to remember that materials have limits and the velocities needed to make railguns viable would rip most ships apart.

Lasers are a brain bug? Right. On Earth, lasers disperse more than they would in space thanks to our atmosphere. Dispersion of a laser in space is very minimal. Dispersion of a laser is much, much slower than that of unfocused light. Now, I will direct you to the military laser currently under development which can track, target, and destroy a super-sonic artillery shell, in the Earth's atmosphere. I also ask you again, just how much armor do you plan on putting on your missiles in the first place? The better that they can withstand a point-defense laser, the more time the other guy is going to have to shoot at it.
The current laser being deployed in Israel has ranges in the km ... NOT the 100,000 km.

Quantum communication is NOT highly theoretical, we can do it today, and it's much farther advanced than quantum computing. We can even transmit quantum encryption over the air for a short distance. Do you even know what you're talking about?
This is standard EPR right? Yes it is theoretical to use it on a ship. One of the basics of EPR entanglement is that the entangled particle doesn't interact with anything else (this can be done in a laboratory) ... how do you plan on ACCELERATING IT?


The longer the range of the missile in space, the more time you have to shoot it down or evade.
Which is why there is an optimal range. Which is why anything less than nuclear weapons is going to be stupid.


So you're putting as much armor on each of your missiles as your capital ships? Wow, those missiles must have shit for acceleration rates then...
No you see unlike the arty shells they want to shoot down now, my missiles will be jacketed in Uranium, filled with D20 or DLi and have a very small amount of explosives buried deep inside. Heating the missile to prematurely set off the explosives is NOT an option. Blowing apart the missile is not an option. The Uranium sheild is a BITCH to burn through or to critically heat.

So you're putting as much armor on each of your missiles as your capital ships? Wow, those missiles must have shit for acceleration rates then...
Read Turing.

Chess is an algorithm, its just a tree where you look for the best board position possible on the tree. Really if you haven't read Turing I strongly suggest you do.


See above equations. Also, how the hell are you going to get a large explosion in space? The absence of an atmosphere really screws that whole idea up. If you want an area-effect weapon, you're probably better off making some sort of fragmentation missile that spews superheated kinetics all over the place at high velocities. Of course, since it's an unfocused blast, most of those will likely wind up missing the target.
Thermonuclear kinetic boost missile. Thermonuclear radiation enhanced missile. Anything less doesn't have a prayer of hitting.

Drone fighters have a massive advantage over human fighters in this regard with just twice the acceleration.

DAMMIT GET THIS THROUGH YOUR THICK, THICK SKULL - ONCE YOU RUN OUT OF FUEL YOU ARE DONE ACCELERATING. THE LIMITING FACTOR IS FUEL ... not engine size.

Long tactic burns for fighters mean they need 20 kgs of fuel for each kg burnt under tactical burn. You are NOT going to be going 1/2 the speed of the missile, you are going to be going 1/10 (and that is HIDEOUSLY GENEROUS). You are not going to be able to do some dumb missile dance, you have 1 big accel away from the carrier and 2x as big of one getting back. You cannot completely accel/decel at will - you get to do it TWICE in the course of the WHOLE FRIKKING MISSION.

A directed fire weaon is so much more efficient than an unfocused shrapnel-nuke it isn't even funny.
Except when the enemy can shoot it down before it hits them.

Weight can easily be converted to mass, so long as we understand that the gravitational force of Earth is the intended gravity.
Yes and there is no other source of gravity a space fighter might care more about To be bluntly honest your weight in space is ZERO (or close enough nobody cares about the difference). Hence the term weightless.

Let's see, you don't know what an algorithm is, you don't know what quantum cryptography is, you don't know what greater acceleration rates mean to a missile platform, etc. and so on.
I'll take Alan Turing's word of yours, "Go is a game, Chess in algorithm."

QC means you need to use entangled particles, so far so good. The problem ... they cannot interact with other particles ... how do you accelerate them in space?

you don't know what greater acceleration rates mean to a missile platform, etc. and so on.
Know I realize that pretending you can gun at max thrust indefinately is moronic and that you have virtually no room to manouver before you run out of gas and don't make it home. I also realize that anyone who thinks a missile in space is only go to be 2x as fast as fighter carrying multiple missiles (and the fuel needed to accelerate the whole works home) is a rank idiot.

You'll be able to do a lot better at evading a missile or other weapons system if you can sustain more than 6 G's of acceleration.

FUEL, FUEL, FUEL ... the limiting factor is FUEL. You cannot make high g accels indefinately ... its fuel prohibitive.

What the hell does the effectiveness of weaponry have to do with the practicality of AI pilots?
I don't know but somebody decided realistic space fighters would be armed with lasers that have a 300,000 km lethal range ... I view that as stupid, physics agrees with me.

A percent? My dear boy, one who accuses others of building strawmen should never attempt to make straw giants.
Sigh, idiot.

Mass of an F-22 -18150 kg. Mass of the pilot MAYBE 100 kg. Mass of pilot support systems, likely the same. But hell let's be generous and say the pilot and support systems mass out at a whopping 500 kg. It's 2.7% of total. And note that unlike an F-22 our space craft has to carry the entire mass of its prollent (no free oxygen). 2% is GENEROUS.

He understands that... he also understands that removing a major source of mass (life support + human) will substantially improve the performance of the fighter.
Since when does 2% of your mass amount to ANYTHING significant. Your weapons will mass multiplicatively more. Your fuel is going to be 2/3 of your mass and up. I defy you to name a modern craft where pilot and support is more than 10% of total mass.

If you don't think AI's are equal to the task, then I dare you to play your chess program on the highest setting and win. Let me know when you realize that you can't do it (unless you are a grandmaster, and even then Deep Blue would still own you).
Chess is a piss simple algorithm. It's relatively easy to evaluate board positions (number of peices, weight of peices, good/bad rooks/queens/bishops/knights, pawn structure, etc.)

What kind of idiot lets Microsoft program their fighter AI?

Find any such bugs in a system programmed by someone who cares more about reliability than about sales. Linux, for instance.

How about the fact that the US NMD anti-ballistic missile software was bugged?

They are only pumping billions into it.

Oh goody, you have someone else sitting at the terminal wired for the output. And exactly how would you get there, hmm? How would you thwart the biometric identification systems that are likely to be present at any critical piece of equipment. And exactly how would this be diferent than commandeering a fighter for your own use... especially considering that unlike a fighter, where you can escape back to your home base, in the case of you stealing drones the ships' crew would know EXACTLY where you are, storm in, and either shoot you in the head or capture yoiu for interrogation and then shoot you in the head. Sorry, but all you have proven is that drones are a bad idea if your security sucks as much as it does on Star Trek, in which case you'd be fucked anyway.
You compromise the drone officer, like by threatening the life and well being of his family.

Um... that's why you put LENSES on your lasers, dumbass. And exactly what is the effectiveness of point-defense mechanism supposed to prove, except that human fighters have no chance whatsoever of surviving?
Lenses do not allow you to keep you laser focused indefinately, given a nuke pumped x-ray laser ... how in hell do you lense that?

Get off it yourself. And enough with the strawmen. The point is that EVERY SINGLE WEAKNESS A DRONE HAS, A FIGHTER HAS TOO, ON TOP OF WHICH YOU ADD ALL THE WEAKNESSES OF A HUMAN PILOT. Do you get it now?
A drone has a drone operator instead of pilot. In space g tolerance is not the limiting factor ... FUEL IS.

Not if they're not alive. Just program the computer to open the cockpit while in space...
What moron would build a cockpit on a spacecraft? Anything you see is too close to do beans about anyways. The pilot is going to be internal, much like on a tank. The only reason for a cockpit is to see things directly in your feild of vision ... range is too great in space. Use an internal screen with HUD.

Besides which in combat you want a self-contained flight suit (think Tie pilots).

Besides, what kind of an idiot do you have to be to think that hotwiring the systems would allow you to achieve any kind of reasonable combat performance?

You can turn around and GO HOME.

No, the reason they don't use these systems is because OPERATOR security is never a given. Computer security IS a given, otherwise there would be no such thing as a trusted system.

Do you realize that there are still files which are physical access only?

And you think that drones can't be programmed to ignore illegal orders? I'd like to see just one piece of solid evidence ot support this idiotic assumption.
Sigh what makes orders illeagal? The context in which they are given. It is legit to blow a hospital to hell and back IF the enemy is firing out of it. Human pilots tend to balk at these orders, unreasonably so even if the CO says it is necessary. Drones wired to follow the exact letter of the law are easy dupes.


You seem to have some serious pre-concieved notioins about the flexibility of computers. Once again, I point out that you CANNOT predict what a computer program wil do with a particular input set without actually RUNNING the program, and unless you have some magical way of predicting exactly what the conditions for a given battle are, your damn simulations are useless.

By the way, his point was that there are a finite number of POSSIBLE actions that won't result in you just getting shot. Frankly, if you can tell me a comlete list of those actions in any given situation, then you can anticipate a human's actions as well (and if they do something that's not on that list, they're already dead).

The point is the data needed to predict a human doesn't come in a nice compact precoded form like source code. If you had data equivalent to a human's source code you might be able to predict it ... you won't.


And oftentimes that turned out to be the wrong decision. Human FoF can be fooled more easily than human friend-or-foe, because humans are not as perceptive as computers and therefore cannot check nearly as many variables. Oh, and please provide some actual data to back up your bullshit about human instinct being in any way reliable, especially given that it hasn't prevented numerous darwin awards from being distributed.

In war the stupid remove themselves from feild.


Completely computable my ASS. Do you have any idea about how long it would take our best supercomputers to compute EVERY possible chess game? Here's a hint: it's longer than the present age of the universe.

Dumbass completely computable just means the problem is completely tractable. There are problems that given an infinite amount of time basic algorithms CAN'T numerically predict.
I.e. try teaching a neural net the function y=1/x on the open interval between 0 and 1.

Radiation would kill human pilots far faster than drones.
Why? Radiation death is going to come from heating the fuel. Not frying the circuitry. The human is going to be buried inside of metres of metal and fuel.

Shrapnel attached to the nuke itself would be vaporised by the blast and therefore unable to affect anything. You're thinking about shrapnel from objects destroyed by the blast and then accelerated outward by the shcokwave, which would be nonexistent since there are no such objects and there is no shockwave.

No I'm think about the nuclear kinetic transfer weapons the US and the Soviets were researching. Its a third (fourth?) generation weapon that was nixed with the test ban.

You know, your entire argument seems to be that the superior performance of drones as a launch platform, either for missiles or direct-fire weapons, is irrelevant because the launching platform is dead anyway. That being the case, you have just proven that drones are the only option because humans would never agree to pilot those things if they are going to die anyway... concession accepted.
The point is drones add a layer of weakness ... the cyber level. You have to deal with all sorts of fun crap. From code debugging an AI, to hacking to repairing hardcoded circuitry. In a battle between drones and fighters it is most likely a draw ... the advantages of either side are not worth spitting about. The problem is that adding on a huge amount of AI code to control the fighter adds strategic weakness. I'd take pilot deaths over that level of threat.

Which is why you use fighters as the launching platform. Stop being wishy-washy and idstracting from your main argument so that we may point out how crappy it is.

Then quit having people put forth crappy ideas like all long range missiles.

May I point out that the U.S. military enacted that policy when "computer" meant something that takes up an entire room
Bzzt. Wrong the entire system was rehauled in the 80's

This assumes that you have a computer with two orders of magnitude faster processor, and that you can also find some way of determining what it will do when exposed to the actual situation, as opposed to just the input you feed it.
Just build a computer 1000 times as big as one that fits on a mobile fighter. Let's not make this too hard.

AND it assumes that every copy of the program will be EXACTLY the same, AND it assumes that it won't be modified significantly while you're doing your analysis, AND it assumes that you can actually IMPLEMENT the proper response, AND it assumes that your enemy didn't run the AI through a similar process while designing it in order to ensure that finding a foolproof strategy against it is IMPOSSIBLE. Frankly, I'm getting tired of these bullshit assumptions.
Frankly I'm tired of the BS assumption of Omnipotent AI's. Look on defense you have prepare for every possible eventuality. Let's say there are 1 million possible basic eventuallities. I have to optimize *1* to win if I get the iniative, you have to optimize *1 million*.

simple extrapolation of the computing power of $1000 (today's money) computers over the last 100 years, as outlined in The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil.
Oh utter BS then. I'm sorry but what happens when you reach 1 electron transistor? What happens when you are pushing information internally at c? Extrapolation like that crap is not good out till the end of time. We will quickly run into the wall for processing power (1 electron gates).

Your overoptimistic claims on the size of life support show you truly know nothing of space flight.. Do a little research, please. Check, say, the Apollo project. Compare the craft used to the unmanned craft. But you won't, and you'll spew the same stupidity. One meter squared indeed. Of course, the possibility exists for technology to advance that much.. But by that point, computers will have miniaturized to the point a drone is an engine with missile pods.
Apollo was a science program ... not a fighter. Care to compare HMS Beagle with an ironside?

1 metre CUBED (honestly this is not that hard volume has CUBED units ... one, two, three dimensions) is not unreasonable. You have yet to show that pilot takes up more space.

Nice claims about high G accel being impossible. You obviously don't keep track of the real world. A Martian probe a year or three back made accel and deccel that would laminate human pilots to the underside. The trip took it only a week. But you ignore this.

Dumbass. I said it is Irrelevant. You can't continious accel or decel with LIMITED FUEL. Given the mass of fuel required its PROHIBITIVE to do any long time burns at top thrust.

And, you ignorant little boy, accel matters. Despite your ignorance, nuclear weapons in vacuum do not have blasts dozens of klicks in diameter. And with proper ECM and PD, one can shoot one down.
If and only if your opponent is stupid enough to shoot beyond optimal range. The point of a fighter swarm is to overwhelm the defenses. You do this by firing at optimal range.

1. A cruiser has more space for more fuel, and is deployed for such long periods it can easily pick up speed slowly.
This is why you use carriers. In combat your cruiser will have a bigass target profile, in combat the carrier hides.

2. A high thrust engine is not needed.
A high thrust engine IS needed. Thrust is measured in Newtons which is MASS times acceleration. If you have a have a prohibitive mass you need a high thrust engine to get even slow acceleration.

That's the most ridicuosly arbitrary number I've seen you throw out. With a large vessel, one can easily ration fuel better.. But you think on such stupid terms, I can't see how you got this number and think it appears to everything.
Dumbass. Fuel is consumed based on ENERGY. Kinetic energy is 1/2 mv*v. The amount of fuel needed is going to be given by that. You cannot use less fuel than that dictated by the kinetic energy requirement.

The number is NOT arbitrary. It is derived from the fact that it is among the most optimal chemical reactions known to man and is currently the optimal method for generating thrust (they use it BECAUSE IT WORKS). If you can find a system that is better than 10 to 1 ... fine by me. If you can find a rocket engine that can go at max burn for > 5 minutes again fine by me ... just give me the link. You do realize that REAL space craft are 90+% fuel by weight and they have total burn times of only a few minutes? Right?

4. Hence why they are unneeded.
Right so all the targets you want to hit are going to be at short range right?


You, of course, just magically assume a fighter is better than a battleship. Why? The only reason a battleship is crippled on Earth is the CURVE OF THE EARTH. Their projectile weapons are limited to near LOS.
BS. Cruisers today have 100's of km in range with missiles, fighters still there? Oh yep. Firing beyond the horizon is even possible with rocket assisted munitions.

The reason a big ass ship is screwed comes down this:
target profile

With a fighter I can orientate to present a real slim target to my enemy, thus he has a much harder time targeting me. So long as I out number him I can ALWAYS present my best profile. Your big ass ship doesn't have that option. Sure it can present a small profile to ONE fighter, but if I have two groups angling in from opposite directions ... then one of gets an easy shot.

Further the fighter has divisibility of force. Half of my fighters can engage your cruiser, they need only survive long enough for the other half to get past your cruiser and on to their target.

Get up with times this is not WWII. The best idea is to present a CHEAP target with nothing but engines, sights, and missiles.

You insist on expensive, short range, low G, HUMAN PILOTED fighters for space. Their carrier is still a target, you know.
If you can find it. That is why you use recon craft to find the enemy far, far away from the carrier (or high power optics from somewhere that is not the carrier). Hitting the carrier, yes it is the enemy's goal ... which is why you work to ensure combat never comes near the carrier.

And a fighter, of course, is a bright light moving around in space from all the high energy systems, having to expend fuel so often, etc. Compared to my theorized submarine-style cruisers, they'd never notice it until it had already unloaded it's full missile load into space heading for them.
Whatever it shows up on optics long before it is in missile range.

What would the fighters do? Certainly not catch up with the missiles. Intercept the cruiser itself? Keep in mind range of weapon is going to be more often than not the range of detection, and my cruisers run silent, not burning hot like a fighter swarm.
So it's coasting? Lay a minefeild. Take point shots at the missiles. Submarine style doesn't exist in space. You track everything optically, with newtonian limits its max V is much lower than c.

Windows 95 was a commerical OS, written with backwards compatibility for MS-DOS which was written for backwards compatibility with some other really old funky system.
MS-DOS was Q-DOS (quick and dirty operating system) which was a rip off of CPM that Gates used when IBM offered him the ability to produce their OS. As far as I know there was no backwards compatability.

And you are trying to compare Win95 to a miltary program??
Military software comes through bugged as well. In one glaring example the software DOE used to keep track of fissile material would occasionally "misplace" the data files and the location would be lost. This was discovered when the Russians started to implement the system themselves and found it was not as accurate as the shoeboxes with paper slips they had been using (I kid you not), according to their studies after 10 years they would have lost track of enough fissile material for over 1000 nuclear bombs If THAT system can be screwed up, I have every confidence there will be exploitable bugs in AI software.

[SirNitram]

BWHAHHAAHAHAHA. You think combat will take place within OPTICAL ranges?! You are a moron. I'm sorry. You're just too ignorant to debate with. Optical ranges! Your ignorance about lasers is almost as bad!

If your ideas are limited to optical range, the first power with decent laser weaponry is going to fry your eyes from a lightsecond away. Or are you so stupid you don't realize a laser's range is unlimited if it doesn't have atmosphere to disperse it?

[Beowulf]

tharkun, you have managed to completely discredit the entire idea of fighters. As you have so kindly pointed out, the fighter will have burntimes measured in minutes at most, which means most of the time they will be just coasting. Seems like it would be relatively easy to hit w/ a a directed energy weapon. Short ranged missiles would have an extremely short burn time, because they would most likely be using a solid fuel motor, which has a much lower specific impulse than liquid fuel engines. Any manueveuring on the target's part would lower the maximum range.

Also, chess in not an algorithm. An algorithm is finite. A chess game can be contructed which is infinite. Therefore chess in not an algorithm. Also, you're using an appeal to authority.

How is an enemy going to shoot down a laser beam?

Who says that you have to use a chemical fired engine, anyway? Why can't they use a NERVA style engine, which has a much higher specific impulse, on the order of ten times higher. Also, that 3% savings in mass from the replacement of the pilot would give a much higher delta-v, as can easily be ascertained from the rocket equation. Delta-v is god in space.

Before you start complaining that missiles could use NERVA engines, I must say the those require a certain size before they become effective. Either way, it's going to be a big missile to have the required delta-v.

[data_link]

Let me explain this in the simplest possible way: YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

Let me explain this in the second-simplest possible way:

Wow you are dumb. You beleive a drone fighter will only be 2x as slow as short range missile? HOW STUPID ARE YOU?

Think about it. First off your fighter has to accelerate out, and then turn around and accelerate back. For each kg of empty mass it needs 20 of fuel (or 10 or whatever ... remember this is NEWTONIAN) so your fighter is carrying the missile (and its fuel) so it needs 10 times the mass of the missile in fuel to accelerate home.

Further this should strike you as uniformly stupid. The VAST MAJORITY of your mass is FUEL. Any formula has to be an INTEGRAL because your mass is non-constant. If your fighter can sustain 180 m/s/s your missile is looking at least 1800 m/s/s.

Wow, you are dumb. You actually seem to believe that newtonian propulsion nessecarily implies CHEMICAL propulsion. You completely ignore the FACT that no self-respecting commander would waste his time on fighters without maneuvering capability (which chemically propelled ships would BE). Frankly, we won't see space combat systems until SOMEONE puts a nuclear reactor in space, because that is the only feasable power source in space. And if you've got a nuke reactor on your ship, then your engine exhaust velocity is greater and the amount of propellant required becomes far smaller.

No it is still useless except at point blank ranges, you have seconds to turn a few degrees to get out of the way. Rail guns are point blank useless at anything but point blank range.

If you are actually stupid enough to build a rail gun for anything beside strategic bombardment ... then you have a ROYAL bitch for recoil.

You need to remember that materials have limits and the velocities needed to make railguns viable would rip most ships apart.

Define point-blank range.

The current laser being deployed in Israel has ranges in the km ... NOT the 100,000 km.

A. This is Israel, not the U.S.
B. You still have not shown that this has any bearing on the range of lasers not subject ot the effects of atmospheric scattering/absorbtion.

This is standard EPR right? Yes it is theoretical to use it on a ship. One of the basics of EPR entanglement is that the entangled particle doesn't interact with anything else (this can be done in a laboratory) ... how do you plan on ACCELERATING IT?

Thereby neatly ignoring the fact that it works even while applying a constant upward force sufficient to impart an acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 so as to counter the force of gravity.

Which is why there is an optimal range. Which is why anything less than nuclear weapons is going to be stupid.

And why piont-defense is a possibility.

No you see unlike the arty shells they want to shoot down now, my missiles will be jacketed in Uranium, filled with D20 or DLi and have a very small amount of explosives buried deep inside. Heating the missile to prematurely set off the explosives is NOT an option. Blowing apart the missile is not an option. The Uranium sheild is a BITCH to burn through or to critically heat.

Except that according to you, most of the missile's mass would have to be fuel, so the missile has no maneuvering capability and I can shoot it down with my railgun since it doesn't have enough fuel to evade. Unless perhaps you think that you can put a nuke reactor on the missile to provide power - but that would make my point about fighters being able to maneuver valid. Oh, just how are you going to maintain that tangled web of idiocy?

Chess is an algorithm, its just a tree where you look for the best board position possible on the tree. Really if you haven't read Turing I strongly suggest you do.

LIFE is an algorithim. What do you think the brain is, if not a computer? And what's your freaking point?

Thermonuclear kinetic boost missile. Thermonuclear radiation enhanced missile. Anything less doesn't have a prayer of hitting.

Useless, and beyond useless, unless you score a direct hit.

DAMMIT GET THIS THROUGH YOUR THICK, THICK SKULL - ONCE YOU RUN OUT OF FUEL YOU ARE DONE ACCELERATING. THE LIMITING FACTOR IS FUEL ... not engine size.

Long tactic burns for fighters mean they need 20 kgs of fuel for each kg burnt under tactical burn. You are NOT going to be going 1/2 the speed of the missile, you are going to be going 1/10 (and that is HIDEOUSLY GENEROUS). You are not going to be able to do some dumb missile dance, you have 1 big accel away from the carrier and 2x as big of one getting back. You cannot completely accel/decel at will - you get to do it TWICE in the course of the WHOLE FRIKKING MISSION.

And yet, you completely ignore the fact that the fighters are not limited to chemical propulsion, and so can carry more fuel than the absolute minimum.

Except when the enemy can shoot it down before it hits them.

And you're going to do that how? Remember that according to you, point-defense doesn't work.

Yes and there is no other source of gravity a space fighter might care more about To be bluntly honest your weight in space is ZERO (or close enough nobody cares about the difference). Hence the term weightless.

And your ability to nitpick is insignifigant, next to the power of the FORCE.

I'll take Alan Turing's word of yours, "Go is a game, Chess in algorithm."

QC means you need to use entangled particles, so far so good. The problem ... they cannot interact with other particles ... how do you accelerate them in space?

Asked and answered.

Know I realize that pretending you can gun at max thrust indefinately is moronic and that you have virtually no room to manouver before you run out of gas and don't make it home. I also realize that anyone who thinks a missile in space is only go to be 2x as fast as fighter carrying multiple missiles (and the fuel needed to accelerate the whole works home) is a rank idiot.

I also realize that you presume ahead of time that fighters will be limited to chemical propulsion. I love how you contradict yourself.

FUEL, FUEL, FUEL ... the limiting factor is FUEL. You cannot make high g accels indefinately ... its fuel prohibitive.

Unless you happen to, I don't know, USE THRUSTERS WITH A HIGH EXHAUST VELOCITY, SUCH AS NUCLEAR THRUSTERS? Or do you think that all thrusters are limited to the same exhaust velocity as chemical thrusters.

I don't know but somebody decided realistic space fighters would be armed with lasers that have a 300,000 km lethal range ... I view that as stupid, physics agrees with me.

Are you trying to emulate Darkstar or something? I'll say it again: LASERS IN SPACE ARE NOT SUBJECT TO ATMOSPHERIC SCATTERING.

Mass of an F-22 -18150 kg. Mass of the pilot MAYBE 100 kg. Mass of pilot support systems, likely the same. But hell let's be generous and say the pilot and support systems mass out at a whopping 500 kg. It's 2.7% of total. And note that unlike an F-22 our space craft has to carry the entire mass of its prollent (no free oxygen). 2% is GENEROUS.

There. Right there. Before I only suspected it, but now I have PROOF that you are really stupid enough to believe that space fighters will be limited to chemical propellant.

OH, and I love how you conveniently ignore all the OTHER things that would be nessecary, such as radiation shielding for the pilot, oxgen tanks, CO2 scrubbers, a pressurized hull, control systems, and let's not forget that by leaving out the pilot you can make the whole damn fighter smaller (because you no longer need room to mount the pilot) (and no, Wong, I don't mean anally). As I said: those who accuse others of making strawmen should not attemt to build straw giants.

Since when does 2% of your mass amount to ANYTHING significant. Your weapons will mass multiplicatively more. Your fuel is going to be 2/3 of your mass and up. I defy you to name a modern craft where pilot and support is more than 10% of total mass.

Your bicycle. (Hey, you didn't say it had to be a fighter)

Chess is a piss simple algorithm. It's relatively easy to evaluate board positions (number of peices, weight of peices, good/bad rooks/queens/bishops/knights, pawn structure, etc.)

Then let's see you WRITE an evaluation algorithim that works, if it's so easy.

How about the fact that the US NMD anti-ballistic missile software was bugged?

They are only pumping billions into it.

Let's just ignore the fact that our missile defense program is just a big stunt show anyway and that even the guys working on the system think it's not going to work. What motivation would they have to return quality software?

Oh, and you still havent' shown me any bugs in Linux. Concession Accepted.

You compromise the drone officer, like by threatening the life and well being of his family.

Which means precisely WHAT? You don't think that a drone operator would be screened for loyalty? My, you are an idiot. Oh, and thanks for conceding that it would be easier to steal a fighter than it would be to compromise the drones.

Lenses do not allow you to keep you laser focused indefinately, given a nuke pumped x-ray laser ... how in hell do you lense that?

Since nuke-pumped X-ray lasers are one-time use weapons anyway, you lense it the way you would lense any other type of high-power laser. After all, if the laser isn't going to survive, why should the lens be any different?

A drone has a drone operator instead of pilot. In space g tolerance is not the limiting factor ... FUEL IS.

No, in space the limiting factor is POWER - which is why for any decent space-based weapons platform you use a nuclear reactor. And guess what? One of the advantages of a drone is taht it does not need inordinate amounts of radiation shielding from its own reactor.

What moron would build a cockpit on a spacecraft? Anything you see is too close to do beans about anyways. The pilot is going to be internal, much like on a tank. The only reason for a cockpit is to see things directly in your feild of vision ... range is too great in space. Use an internal screen with HUD.

Besides which in combat you want a self-contained flight suit (think Tie pilots)

So, what? You are saying that there's no hatch, no ejection mechanism, NOTHING that could be used to get the pilots in and out of the fighter?

Besides, the last thing you want is for a self-contained flight suit to be REQUIRED - pressurized suits would have your pilots waddling to thir ships instead of walking.

You can turn around and GO HOME.

Sorry, but the missile that the enemy fighter just shoved up your ass while you were fiddling with the circuits is going to make that difficult.

Do you realize that there are still files which are physical access only?

Oh, you mean like the core software on the proposed drones?

Sigh what makes orders illeagal? The context in which they are given. It is legit to blow a hospital to hell and back IF the enemy is firing out of it. Human pilots tend to balk at these orders, unreasonably so even if the CO says it is necessary. Drones wired to follow the exact letter of the law are easy dupes.

Ah. So in the example you have provided me, the correct thing to do is to DESTROY THE HOSPITAL, thus meaning that you are showing drone judgment to be SUPERIOR to human judgement. You aren't making your case very well.

The point is the data needed to predict a human doesn't come in a nice compact precoded form like source code. If you had data equivalent to a human's source code you might be able to predict it ... you won't.

Ever hear of DNA? There's your core software, all rolled up in one little molecule. And you fail to refute my point that even IF you had the core software, you still couldn't predict it in real combat conditions. Concession Accepted.

In war the stupid remove themselves from feild.

Thank you for conceding that Drones have superior FoF recognition capabilities, and that human instinct is so unreliable that it often leads to their own demise.

Dumbass completely computable just means the problem is completely tractable. There are problems that given an infinite amount of time basic algorithms CAN'T numerically predict.
I.e. try teaching a neural net the function y=1/x on the open interval between 0 and 1

Been there, done that. I have a neural net computer right now that can give you the EXACT value of that function anywhere on the range you specified, except for zero itself, and that's only because there IS no valid solution for X=0. Although, my standard computer can do the same thing far more quickly.

Why? Radiation death is going to come from heating the fuel. Not frying the circuitry. The human is going to be buried inside of metres of metal and fuel.

Okay, so first you ignore the fact that ionizing radiation will fry the circuitry far faster than it sill impart any significant energy to melt the ship. Then you overlook the fact that radiation shielding for Gamma radiation (the type you're going to be getting from those missile explosions) will be hundreds of tons (unless you can find a way to manufacture a 12-inch thick lead wall that is only a few kilos). THEN you overlook the fact that computer circuitry will take much higher doses of radiation than your human pilot before dying. So, in conclusion, you ARE imitating Darkstar.

No I'm think about the nuclear kinetic transfer weapons the US and the Soviets were researching. Its a third (fourth?) generation weapon that was nixed with the test ban.

Perhaps you can provide me with more information about what you are talking about then? Because it sounds like you are talking bullshit.
(Please reference a website, I cannot trust you to interpret the information accurately)

The point is drones add a layer of weakness ... the cyber level. You have to deal with all sorts of fun crap. From code debugging an AI, to hacking to repairing hardcoded circuitry. In a battle between drones and fighters it is most likely a draw ... the advantages of either side are not worth spitting about. The problem is that adding on a huge amount of AI code to control the fighter adds strategic weakness. I'd take pilot deaths over that level of threat.

Sorry, but if you have a fighter platform where probable survivability is LOWER than that of a TIE fighter, then either you live in feudal-era Japan or else NO ONE is going to pilot that thing. And you have yet to prove that AI is a weakness.

Then quit having people put forth crappy ideas like all long range missiles.

I am not responsible for the stupidity of other people.

Bzzt. Wrong the entire system was rehauled in the 80's

May I point out that you are still appealing to irrelevant autority.

Just build a computer 1000 times as big as one that fits on a mobile fighter. Let's not make this too hard.

You have those running DURING BATTLE? For every single enemy fighter?Because that's the only way you are goint ot get any useful information out of it.

Frankly I'm tired of the BS assumption of Omnipotent AI's. Look on defense you have prepare for every possible eventuality. Let's say there are 1 million possible basic eventuallities. I have to optimize *1* to win if I get the iniative, you have to optimize *1 million*.

Too bad that all I have to do is make it impossible for you to optimize, and not optimize anything myself. OH, and I love how you IGNORED my point about the program responding differently in real combat thani n your bullshit simulations, my point about implementation, my point about programs varying based on combat experience, and my point about the program changing while you're doing your analysis. Concession Accepted.

Oh utter BS then. I'm sorry but what happens when you reach 1 electron transistor? What happens when you are pushing information internally at c? Extrapolation like that crap is not good out till the end of time. We will quickly run into the wall for processing power (1 electron gates).

EXCUSE ME? Since when is it utter BS to extrapolate a mere 25 years into the future, especially when we are nowhere near the limits you described? And frankly, I love your implication that the limit for processig power is LOWER than a computer which we already KNOW works - the human brain. Tell me, when are you going to ask Wong for your "Darkstar clone" title?

Apollo was a science program ... not a fighter. Care to compare HMS Beagle with an ironside?

1 metre CUBED (honestly this is not that hard volume has CUBED units ... one, two, three dimensions) is not unreasonable. You have yet to show that pilot takes up more space.

Wow. His prediction was right on the money. You completely ignored his point and started spewing the same old retarded bullshit again.

Dumbass. I said it is Irrelevant. You can't continious accel or decel with LIMITED FUEL. Given the mass of fuel required its PROHIBITIVE to do any long time burns at top thrust

Asked and answered.

If and only if your opponent is stupid enough to shoot beyond optimal range. The point of a fighter swarm is to overwhelm the defenses. You do this by firing at optimal range.

Again, enough with the "fighters can't maneuver" bullshit.

This is why you use carriers. In combat your cruiser will have a bigass target profile, in combat the carrier hides.

Oh yeah... You're going to hide a ship from which a thousand sensor signatures suddenly appear from the same location. Yeah, right.

A high thrust engine IS needed. Thrust is measured in Newtons which is MASS times acceleration. If you have a have a prohibitive mass you need a high thrust engine to get even slow acceleration.

Wow. So you can nitpick his arguments. Good for you.

Dumbass. Fuel is consumed based on ENERGY. Kinetic energy is 1/2 mv*v. The amount of fuel needed is going to be given by that. You cannot use less fuel than that dictated by the kinetic energy requirement.

The number is NOT arbitrary. It is derived from the fact that it is among the most optimal chemical reactions known to man and is currently the optimal method for generating thrust (they use it BECAUSE IT WORKS). If you can find a system that is better than 10 to 1 ... fine by me. If you can find a rocket engine that can go at max burn for > 5 minutes again fine by me ... just give me the link. You do realize that REAL space craft are 90+% fuel by weight and they have total burn times of only a few minutes? Right?

More proof that you limit your thinking to chemical propulsion.

Right so all the targets you want to hit are going to be at short range right?

No, he assumes that a ship with a few powerful long-range direct-fire weapons that can retain stealth is better than a ship that lauches many HOT fighters and is therefore easily detected at long range.

BS. Cruisers today have 100's of km in range with missiles, fighters still there? Oh yep. Firing beyond the horizon is even possible with rocket assisted munitions.

Missiles of course being a more recent development, when his whole point was the reason why carriers became dominant IN THE FIRST PLACE, dumbass.

The reason a big ass ship is screwed comes down this:
target profile

With a fighter I can orientate to present a real slim target to my enemy, thus he has a much harder time targeting me. So long as I out number him I can ALWAYS present my best profile. Your big ass ship doesn't have that option. Sure it can present a small profile to ONE fighter, but if I have two groups angling in from opposite directions ... then one of gets an easy shot.

Further the fighter has divisibility of force. Half of my fighters can engage your cruiser, they need only survive long enough for the other half to get past your cruiser and on to their target.

Get up with times this is not WWII. The best idea is to present a CHEAP target with nothing but engines, sights, and missiles.

The reason yoiur fighter is screwed is because it is HOT. Don't you realize that the easiest way to detect a ship in space is from the heat generated by it's engines, NOT with radar?

Also your carrier is screwed because there is a significant length of time between your fighters being launched and reaching their destination. While launching, the sensor profiles of the fighters is a dead giveaway of ti's location, which the battleship can then use to fire a nice railgun slug with a nuclear warhead attached for maximum damage. Meanwhile remaining completely undetected until it fires its weapon, and by then it's too late for the carrier to do anything about it.

If you can find it. That is why you use recon craft to find the enemy far, far away from the carrier (or high power optics from somewhere that is not the carrier). Hitting the carrier, yes it is the enemy's goal ... which is why you work to ensure combat never comes near the carrier.

And you still ignore the concept of IR sensors, and the idea that combat can happen at BVR, even with direct-fire weapons.

So it's coasting? Lay a minefeild. Take point shots at the missiles. Submarine style doesn't exist in space. You track everything optically, with newtonian limits its max V is much lower than c

Wonderful. And you ignore the fact that the missiles might be SHIELDED {as any smart person would od with a cruise missile.) Also, if your thermal profile is low (as it would be for a coasting ship), and you have good radar-absorbant bodies, you are basically invisible. Optics has nothing to do with it (and indeed, if combat is taking place far from a star, they CAN'T have anything to do with it: not enough light).

MS-DOS was Q-DOS (quick and dirty operating system) which was a rip off of CPM that Gates used when IBM offered him the ability to produce their OS. As far as I know there was no backwards compatability.

Nit. Pick.

Military software comes through bugged as well. In one glaring example the software DOE used to keep track of fissile material would occasionally "misplace" the data files and the location would be lost. This was discovered when the Russians started to implement the system themselves and found it was not as accurate as the shoeboxes with paper slips they had been using (I kid you not), according to their studies after 10 years they would have lost track of enough fissile material for over 1000 nuclear bombs If THAT system can be screwed up, I have every confidence there will be exploitable bugs in AI software.

Congratulations. You completely miss the point by dodgning with yet another irrelevant example. OH, and I love how you use something that has no resemblance whatsoever to AI software to prove that there are bugs in AI software, when the whole point of AI software is to respond appropriately to things that the programmers DIDN'T predict, and the reason for all bugs is that the programmers didn't predict something.

ENOUGH WITH THE BULLSHIT ARGUMENTS, DARKSTAR!

[Hotfoot]

Wow you are dumb. You beleive a drone fighter will only be 2x as slow as short range missile? HOW STUPID ARE YOU?

Plug in whatever numbers you like, dumbass, the result is still going to be the same. I said those numbers were arbitrary for a reason, it's just to illustrate a point. But let's say we tack on an extra zero to the acceleration rate of those missiles, so they accelerate at 3,000m/s/s, rather than 300m/s/s What does this mean?

Need to launch missile at least 1,429.5 km out to ensure a hit against a human-piloted fighter
Need to launch missile at least 1,389 km out to ensure a hit against a drone-controlled fighter

It doesn't matter HOW fast you make the missile, drones still have the advantage.

Further this should strike you as uniformly stupid. The VAST MAJORITY of your mass is FUEL. Any formula has to be an INTEGRAL because your mass is non-constant. If your fighter can sustain 180 m/s/s your missile is looking at least 1800 m/s/s.

Doesn't change a damn thing. Get over it.

Assuming infinite fuel, moronic numbers, and generally pulling it out of your ass, yes.

Not infinite fuel, just more than the missile.

As for "pulling it out of my ass", see above.

No it is still useless except at point blank ranges, you have seconds to turn a few degrees to get out of the way. Rail guns are point blank useless at anything but point blank range.

My, but your wall of ignorance is going at full power, isn't it? Look at what I said again. Its effectiveness depends on how fast you can accelerate the projectile. As the velocity it leaves the cannon increases, so does the effective range and the usefulness. Is that so difficult to comprehend?

The current laser being deployed in Israel has ranges in the km ... NOT the 100,000 km.

It also has to deal with atmospheric dispersion. That's not a problem in space.

This is standard EPR right? Yes it is theoretical to use it on a ship. One of the basics of EPR entanglement is that the entangled particle doesn't interact with anything else (this can be done in a laboratory) ... how do you plan on ACCELERATING IT?

No, this is quantum cryptography. You don't need to accelerate anything. It works through polarizing light.

Which is why there is an optimal range. Which is why anything less than nuclear weapons is going to be stupid.

No you see unlike the arty shells they want to shoot down now, my missiles will be jacketed in Uranium, filled with D20 or DLi and have a very small amount of explosives buried deep inside. Heating the missile to prematurely set off the explosives is NOT an option. Blowing apart the missile is not an option. The Uranium sheild is a BITCH to burn through or to critically heat.

It's also a bitch to accelerate. Concession accepted, your missiles are slow as all hell. Not to mention that the way you're going through uranium, you won't be able to make very many of these missiles in teh first place, especially if you're tossing them around like candy as you seem to be trying to do.

You're better off making the shell of the missile superconductive, but then I doubt you'd care much for logic at this point.

Read Turing.

What the hell does Alan Turing have to do with acceleration rates of missiles?

Chess is an algorithm, its just a tree where you look for the best board position possible on the tree. Really if you haven't read Turing I strongly suggest you do.

Chess. Is. Not. An. Algorithm. It is NOT a step-by-step process to solving a problem, it IS the problem. How someone plays chess is an algorithm, the game itself is not.

Thermonuclear kinetic boost missile. Thermonuclear radiation enhanced missile. Anything less doesn't have a prayer of hitting.

Yet you never explain how. Evasion noted.

DAMMIT GET THIS THROUGH YOUR THICK, THICK SKULL - ONCE YOU RUN OUT OF FUEL YOU ARE DONE ACCELERATING. THE LIMITING FACTOR IS FUEL ... not engine size.

Shut up and do the math. I've provided the equations, you can supply the numbers. Feel free.

<snip more ridiculous, knee-jerk nonsense>

Except when the enemy can shoot it down before it hits them.

A laser is a directed fire weapon. You can't shoot it down. Next?

Yes and there is no other source of gravity a space fighter might care more about To be bluntly honest your weight in space is ZERO (or close enough nobody cares about the difference). Hence the term weightless.

No shit. Did I ever say otherwise? No. What's your point?

I'll take Alan Turing's word of yours, "Go is a game, Chess in algorithm."

Appeal to authority noted. Let me know when you're capable of forming your own thoughts.

QC means you need to use entangled particles, so far so good. The problem ... they cannot interact with other particles ... how do you accelerate them in space?

Don't need quantum computing for quantum encryption, you don't need entangled particles, you just need light and some sunglasses (gross oversimplification, but still accurate to a point).

<snip more idiocy>

The point is the data needed to predict a human doesn't come in a nice compact precoded form like source code. If you had data equivalent to a human's source code you might be able to predict it ... you won't.

And yet we've been predicting the actions of humans for centuries, if not longer.

<snippity snip snip>

Why? Radiation death is going to come from heating the fuel. Not frying the circuitry. The human is going to be buried inside of metres of metal and fuel.

Really? So you're going to have the human pilot buried under meters of lead shielding? Hey, look, we can build the drones out of a lighter material because we don't need to worry as much about radiation. It takes less fuel to accelerate the ship. Thank you.

[SWPIGWANG]

So do we need drones and fighters at all? Or the fuel cost of return makes them useless? I'm thinking having a large missile ship with one way sensor drones to direct weapons, and run on stealth in combat and coast (via low emission drives/coil gun/whatever) the missiles out before ignition if needed to hide my location. Alternatively, laser ships that pings the enemy with greaser of doom (TM) if the tech becomes avaible.

[MKSheppard]

Just take a look at this......A missile can turn 60+ gees without any inertial
Dampening tech.....

A human pilot can withstand, what 9.0 Gees without inertial dampening
tech?

[MKSheppard]

Attack defence and other functions. When each drone is built it is given multiple (wer're talking millions here) possible tactics and strategies. They can be directed to choose one by their parent vessel, or choose one based on a descision making algorithm. As such they are pretty much imaginative, Some may even be allowed to choose diliberately flawed tactics to confuse the enemy.

Uh, the AI Pilots in IL-2 Sturmovik are pretty dumb compared to a real guy....

Just put a fucking missile up their ass and save the CPU cycles....

[MKSheppard]

The AI I would propose would be based of a combination of neural nets & expert systems, which closly mimics the human brain(but is really really fast)

IT'S DEREK SMART! RUN FOR YOUR FUCKING LIIIIIIVES!

[MKSheppard]

This is fucking insane.......I bow out of this one officially....

I can't tell who is for what or shit...."Let's blow it and go home
folks!"

+fires randomly in all directions+

[Vympel]

Derek Smart- isn't he that psycho who made the travesty that was Battlecruiser 3000AD (though that wasn't so much his fault as Take 2's?)

I hear he actually made Battlecruiser Millenium, which is actually remarkably stable and playable.

Still a psycho though. He does have his fans though.

[Sardaukar]

This thread is way too long and I didn't read it.

But I would say it depends on the tech level of your sci-fi.

[Xon]

Just take a look at this......A missile can turn 60+ gees without any inertial
Dampening tech.....

A human pilot can withstand, what 9.0 Gees without inertial dampening
tech?

Why are you agreeing with tharkûn by saying that?

Thats the pro-drone argument for why having a human pilot in a fighter sucks!

[Xon]

The AI I would propose would be based of a combination of neural nets & expert systems, which closly mimics the human brain(but is really really fast)

IT'S DEREK SMART! RUN FOR YOUR FUCKING LIIIIIIVES!

Hey, no need to be unneedly nasty, calling me Derek Smart ...
I've actually played Battlecruiser 3000AD, after i figured out how to quit, which took a while, or maybe I just reset my computer I cant remember, I got rid of that crap.

Can you thing of any other way to structure an AI?

Expert systems are practically in everything that that does any decision making, and neural networks are great for computer learning(granted there are other ways but I cant be bother listing them)

Plus, tharkûn is on the anti-drone, pro-human pilots side.

[MKSheppard]

Thats the pro-drone argument for why having a human pilot in a fighter sucks!

Like I said, this thread is insane.....fuck it all...

[Xon]

This thread is way too long and I didn't read it.

But I would say it depends on the tech level of your sci-fi.

Unless you have some really of tech, like no computers whats so ever, the computer will always be better for these type of situations. If the sc-fi in question doesnt have any computers, how the hell did they get into space anyway?

[NecronLord]

Attack defence and other functions. When each drone is built it is given multiple (wer're talking millions here) possible tactics and strategies. They can be directed to choose one by their parent vessel, or choose one based on a descision making algorithm. As such they are pretty much imaginative, Some may even be allowed to choose diliberately flawed tactics to confuse the enemy.

Uh, the AI Pilots in IL-2 Sturmovik are pretty dumb compared to a real guy....

Just put a fucking missile up their ass and save the CPU cycles....

One what the hell is "IL-2 Sturmovik"
Two what relavenace does it have?

[Vympel]

One what the hell is "IL-2 Sturmovik"
Two what relavenace does it have?

1: A really fucking Mad Game. Best WW2 flight sim Ever.
2: No relevance whatsoever judging from reading this thread.

[SirNitram]

So do we need drones and fighters at all? Or the fuel cost of return makes them useless? I'm thinking having a large missile ship with one way sensor drones to direct weapons, and run on stealth in combat and coast (via low emission drives/coil gun/whatever) the missiles out before ignition if needed to hide my location. Alternatively, laser ships that pings the enemy with greaser of doom (TM) if the tech becomes avaible.

That's the idea I back. A fighter, be it human piloted or drone, is limited by mass. The idea of a reactor in one is nice, but more likely you'll be toting fuel for an ion engine(Which, of course, our resident moron doesn't understand. Therefore he thinks it follows the same requirements as a chemical engine like an F-22.). The fuel load for Deep Space 1, the probe NASA used to prove this and other techs, went up to something like 300 km/s on 87 kg of fuel. Kinda anally rapes his claims of 20 pounds of fuel for every pound of dry weight, don't it?

Of course, he challenged us to name one vehicle that is not mostly fuel. And I will now do so: The USS America, a nuclear aircraft supercarrier. We have nuclear reactors for vessels now. No reason they can't be brought into space, and fusion may well have advanced enough to be feasible by the timeframe we're on. Hell, Antimatter is on the drawing board, and is well within our abilities. As they said of the Manhattan Project: We have the physics down, the engineering is all that's left. We can make AM now. It's called the Cashmir Effect. We need lots of money to refine it and make a proper facility to harvest large amounts, but it's not impossible.

Tharkun's foolish declarations of optical range combat will vanish within the first generation of vessels with good radar and laser based weaponry. Lasers will most likely remain the weapon of choice for a while, as they are unbeatable for propagation speed, effective range, and energy efficiency. Once ECM catches up, lasers will get kicked back, and missiles, capable of rapidly correcting course and tracking targets, will become prevalent. Hell, a heavy missile whose 'warhead' is a bomb-pumped X-ray laser could be lethal, as it doesn't even need to get terribly close.

Feel free to consider and debate, Tharkun will be back to erect more of his Wall Of Ignorance.

[Hotfoot]

That's the idea I back. A fighter, be it human piloted or drone, is limited by mass. The idea of a reactor in one is nice, but more likely you'll be toting fuel for an ion engine(Which, of course, our resident moron doesn't understand. Therefore he thinks it follows the same requirements as a chemical engine like an F-22.). The fuel load for Deep Space 1, the probe NASA used to prove this and other techs, went up to something like 300 km/s on 87 kg of fuel. Kinda anally rapes his claims of 20 pounds of fuel for every pound of dry weight, don't it?

A small nitpick, but the ion engines of the type on Deep Space 1, while efficient, are not terribly powerful. Of course, there are alternatives to chemical propulsion which are both more efficient and more powerful, but I digress.

Of course, he challenged us to name one vehicle that is not mostly fuel. And I will now do so: The USS America, a nuclear aircraft supercarrier. We have nuclear reactors for vessels now. No reason they can't be brought into space, and fusion may well have advanced enough to be feasible by the timeframe we're on.

Well, the problem is that in space, you will still need fuel in the form of reaction mass. A naval carrier uses the energy generated by its reactors to spin the propellers, but the thrust is provided by the water pushed by the propellers (in turn pushing against the ship). Without anything to push the ship forward, you're rather dead in space. However, as methods of propulsion become more and more of a reality, having nuclear reactors on board can be very useful as the ignition for the reaction.

Feel free to consider and debate, Tharkun will be back to erect more of his Wall Of Ignorance.

It's tharkûn, idiot, get it right! Your entire post is obviously bullshit if you are wrong on such a mind-numbingly obvious detail.

[HRogge]

BWHAHHAAHAHAHA. You think combat will take place within OPTICAL ranges?! You are a moron. I'm sorry. You're just too ignorant to debate with. Optical ranges! Your ignorance about lasers is almost as bad!

If your ideas are limited to optical range, the first power with decent laser weaponry is going to fry your eyes from a lightsecond away. Or are you so stupid you don't realize a laser's range is unlimited if it doesn't have atmosphere to disperse it?

Can you tell me about a sensor system with MORE range than passive optical ? Active sensor systems are dangerous, you can detect them at double range. And in space there is no other passive detection system than "optical" ( just call it passive EM detector/camera ).

[SirNitram]

BWHAHHAAHAHAHA. You think combat will take place within OPTICAL ranges?! You are a moron. I'm sorry. You're just too ignorant to debate with. Optical ranges! Your ignorance about lasers is almost as bad!

If your ideas are limited to optical range, the first power with decent laser weaponry is going to fry your eyes from a lightsecond away. Or are you so stupid you don't realize a laser's range is unlimited if it doesn't have atmosphere to disperse it?

Can you tell me about a sensor system with MORE range than passive optical ? Active sensor systems are dangerous, you can detect them at double range. And in space there is no other passive detection system than "optical" ( just call it passive EM detector/camera ).

If you expand 'optical' to 'passive detection', then you are, in fact, right. However, Tharkun thinks it'll be limited to what the Mark I Eyeball can see.

[data_link]

BWHAHHAAHAHAHA. You think combat will take place within OPTICAL ranges?! You are a moron. I'm sorry. You're just too ignorant to debate with. Optical ranges! Your ignorance about lasers is almost as bad!

If your ideas are limited to optical range, the first power with decent laser weaponry is going to fry your eyes from a lightsecond away. Or are you so stupid you don't realize a laser's range is unlimited if it doesn't have atmosphere to disperse it?

Can you tell me about a sensor system with MORE range than passive optical ? Active sensor systems are dangerous, you can detect them at double range. And in space there is no other passive detection system than "optical" ( just call it passive EM detector/camera ).

If by "optical" you mean all electromagnetic frequencies, then you are correct. However if you mean only the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, then sorry, passive IR is far superior (esp. when you are nowhere near a star)

[tharkûn]

To accelerate you need to ditch mass going in the opposite direction at high velocity. This means that even with a nuclear powered craft (i.e. a nuclear powered ion engine gets its acceleration by shooting off high velocity ions). Momentum is conserved, so the only to get a net change in momentum for your craft is to eject something with a net momentum in the opposite direct.

For every 10 m/s you gain you need to eject something with momentum of 10*your mass m kg/s. Now some candidates for propulsion (real world):
1. Nuclear powered ion engines. These are LOW acceleration engines, indeed most of these thrust equivalent to the weight of a bloody sheet of paper on earth. All told they are about 10 times as efficient as chemical rockets … however they are SEVERLY limited in that the engine needs to run for days, weeks, months and more to get up to real velocities. Higher exhaust velocities mean higher E/B fields and have loads of problems with frying the circuitry.
2. Solar sails. These are more fuel efficient (as in you need no fuel) … but you can utterly forget about high g loads.
3. Nuclear explosive propulsion (project Orion) – max acceleration was about 1 g. This also assumed a huge shock absorber, which a fighter is not going to have (plus it needs you to drop 5 1 kilotonne bombs per second out the back).
4. Laser sails. Upper limited dependant on how much power you have firing from home (lower limit around 10 million gigawatts). Major drawback being you need a 1000 km fresnel lens to make it work (can we say NO maneouverability) and you need a 1000 km wide sail.
5. Coil/railguns. These use high EM fields to toss rocks out the back and use the acceleration from that. These are less efficient than chemical engines.
6. Chemical Propulsion: Standard rocketry. To date it is the only realistic propulsion method on the drawing board that comes close to human g thresholds. Everything else has piss poor max g loads in comparison.

(all figures courtesy of NASA’s lerc)
You may wank off to your hearts content about a mythical propulsion technology that allows you to get to 30 g and sustain it for anything more than minutes. But it has ZILCH for grounding in real science. We know how to make and do all manner of propulsion … chemical propulsion is the only way to go for high g loads. Nothing else comes remotely close in space. If you have REAL data showing a SCIENTIFICALLY BACKED propulsion system that works, then let’s here it.

Okay let’s run some REAL math for Newtonian rocketry, this is not my area of expertise (hell I C’d it when I took it) so bear with if I screw up.

Your drone leaves its launch bay and promptly accelerates at 4 g for 10 minutes. It’s total velocity ends up being 23535.96 m/s (note this requires 276.97megajoules per kg). Now how fast is your exhaust traveling? Currently ion engines run about 50,000 m/s so you needed to dump 4.7% of your final mass, let’s arbitrarily halve that (by say doubling the exhaust velocity) and say you only need 23.5% of your final mass. Of course in the first half you needed accelerate half the propellant mass, this meant you needed 23.5% of that mass or about 2.7% of your final mass … so on and so forth.

What we find is a nice equation that delta V = int[(q x Ve) / (M - qt) dt] where q is the rate at which propellant is expelled, Ve is exhaust velocity, and Mass is your initial mass. So we come out with 23535 = int[(q x 100,000)/(M-q*t) dt, 0, 600). Which if I do my integration right comes out to be:
23536 = -100000*ln(M-600*q) + 100000 ln(M)


or

e^(-23536/100000) = 1 – 600*q/M

or you are using up 3.5*10^-4 of your initial mass per second. This means you have 2861 seconds of total burn time … before it becomes impossible to maintain the stated acceleration regardless of your power source. The propellant can be xenon, gaseous water, an ideal gas, neutronium pellets or mini black holes … unless you can get faster exhaust velocity you have finite burn time at your top acceleration.

Note, dumbasses, this makes NO assumptions about the power supply. It only depends upon the velocity of your exhaust.

So instead of running at 4 g’s for 10 minutes let’s run at 40 g’s for 1 minute.

Delta V is still 23536 m/s. Ve is still 100,000 m/s. Only the burn time changes; so you end up with .35% of your mass lost per second of burn time. This leads to a maximum burn time of 286 seconds before it is physically impossible for the engine to run as specified.

Is it ENTIRELY reasonable to say that you cannot have more than minutes of high g burns? Yes because longer burn times require the engine to thrust at lower g forces early in the burn. Unless you can magically up the propellant velocity orders of magnitude you are simply limited by physics.

Now we know that q/M0 = e^(delta V/Ve)/burn time

So let’s say we use this engine and keep q and Ve constant., but double dV and burn time. This means you just increased your starting mass by 57%. In other words if you start at some V0 (on the carrier) and accelerate away you need to stop at some point. Now let’s add in the needed acceleration to return to the carrier in the same time it took you get out … your mass just went up 86%. You pay through the nose for every second of burn time, you have to carry the propellant for the burn and the propellant to acceleration that additional fuel.

Please note this COMPLETELY ignored the fact that you are physically limited by how fast you can expel propellant. Radically high q values are not achievable (the physical systems blow due to pressure, electrical problems, etc.). Scaling becomes a huge issue as the area of your nozzles (or whatever it is where you expel propellant) decreases with the mass ^2/3.

Now we have the fun of the fighter vs the missile. Let’s say the fighters carry 10 missiles a pop. That means the fighter has a non-propellant mass AT LEAST 10 TIMES AS MUCH as the missiles. Propellant mass makes it even worse … the fighter has to carry the mass for the missile, its propellant, and propellant for the decel/recel to get home.

So let’s give the missile a q half that of the fighter, and a mass 1/20 … the missile comes out over 10 times faster.

In short guys I’m being hideously generous on EVERY figure. I’ve run the numbers with an engine excessively more powerful and excessively more efficient than anything in the real world or projected to exist. I’ve given you double today’s ion exhaust velocities without introducing the very real restrictions on q that makes ion engines inferior to chemical rockets for quick high g thrust. The fact of the matter is the limit is on your PROPELLANT, not the thrust your engine can duke out. You WILL run out of fuel and find your overhead mass to be prohibitive to keep up constant high g burn … this is why rockets use multiple stages to break orbit … they drop overhead mass as their fuel supply winds down.

In short yes INDEED space combat is going to be slow and straight line. Yes missiles (in particular short range missiles) are going to kick the crap out of anything else at the same range. Now if one of you wants to suggest that ANY form of propulsion based off of REAL PHYSICS can do better ... be my frikking guest. Bring numbers. One line comments pulled out of your asses don't cut it. To date nothing gets much more than 5 g's max acceleration and nothing maintains that acceleration for long. We already have nuclear reactors in space (see Cassini) ... it doesn't allow you to cheat on momentum.

A few quotes I'm going to address:
tharkun, you have managed to completely discredit the entire idea of fighters. As you have so kindly pointed out, the fighter will have burntimes measured in minutes at most, which means most of the time they will be just coasting. Seems like it would be relatively easy to hit w/ a a directed energy weapon. Short ranged missiles would have an extremely short burn time, because they would most likely be using a solid fuel motor, which has a much lower specific impulse than liquid fuel engines. Any manueveuring on the target's part would lower the maximum range.
Energy requirements. Hitting long ranges requires a BIGASS laser, ones with any respectable range are going to require gigawatt power levels. Further you need massive lenses, as in km wide fresnal lenses. Shooting a laser in vacuum DOES cause the beam to expand.

Why can't they use a NERVA style engine, which has a much higher specific impulse, on the order of ten times higher. Also, that 3% savings in mass from the replacement of the pilot would give a much higher delta-v, as can easily be ascertained from the rocket equation. Delta-v is god in space.
Because that 3% is using a gratuitiously generous estimate. I'm taking the mass of an F-22 and that required for the pilot, I'm ignoring propellant mass and weapon mass. The other side conveinently ignores the added mass required for a large fast AI (one that can actually track through these multi-million variable combat functions they talk about). All told a reasonable expectation is likely an order of magnitude or more lower, I tried to be gratiutiously generous and they come back with bloody apollo and talking about pilots WALKING in a bloody fighter. Yes I understand that drones have slightly better combat performance, but that is minimal for space combat until you have godly amounts of energy or propulsion beyond anything even projected today.

I simply view the added risk of the cyber threat to be greater than the benifits possibly gained from droning.

Before you start complaining that missiles could use NERVA engines, I must say the those require a certain size before they become effective. Either way, it's going to be a big missile to have the required delta-v.
I understand that. Space craft are going to BE big. There is no getting around it ... you need to carry your propellant (unlike oxygen burning planes). Space fighters will likely be the size of the Saturn V, short range missiles will be frikking huge. Long range missiles will be unbeleivably huge. Space is BIG, small stuff doesn't have the ability to patrol/engage anything that is not better served by orbital platforms.

Unless you happen to, I don't know, USE THRUSTERS WITH A HIGH EXHAUST VELOCITY, SUCH AS NUCLEAR THRUSTERS? Or do you think that all thrusters are limited to the same exhaust velocity as chemical thrusters.

All higher exhaust velocity does is change where the upper limit is ... and it isn't all that great. Both Orion (projected Mars delivery program) and Daedulus showed rather well that nuclear propulsion is NOT better than chemical. Orion called for nuclear explosions every 12 seconds to maintain 1 bloody g how much overhead mass do you plan on carrying?

Are you trying to emulate Darkstar or something? I'll say it again: LASERS IN SPACE ARE NOT SUBJECT TO ATMOSPHERIC SCATTERING.
Right so if you shine a laser in space it will never have a wider diametre

Are you honestly came that lasers don't disperse in space? Do you have ANY evidence that beam width is independant of path length? A single SHREAD of evidence supporting the idea that ranges of 100,000's of km are viable for any reasonable power limit?

There. Right there. Before I only suspected it, but now I have PROOF that you are really stupid enough to believe that space fighters will be limited to chemical propellant.
Use whatever damn propellant you like just show me it is physically viable to:
Have whatever exhaust velocity you claim.
Mantain suffienct mass flow for a given area.
Can be built with normal materials with normal strength.
Is scaleable with acceptable overhead.

You claim it can be done ... your burden of proof. I suggest you trying reading up on Orion and Daedalus.

OH, and I love how you conveniently ignore all the OTHER things that would be nessecary, such as radiation shielding
It's called the fuel and hull. Merkava's already use these to supplement NBC protection.

oxgen tanks
Only a dumbass would carry a tank when a smaller rechargable rebreather is more effective.

CO2 scrubbers
See above. Use an electrochemical reaction to drive the reaction O2 + C -> CO2 in reverse, it is simple and small.

a pressurized hull
Why?

control systems
Are buttons and a joystick. If you don't have a direct neural jack (which we have with chimps today).

Your bicycle. (Hey, you didn't say it had to be a fighter)
And I get called a nitpicker when I point out that volume comes in metres cubed and that weight in space is zero ...

Consider yourself hereby rechallenged to name a FIGHTER that has 10% mass devoted to pilot survival. Consider yourself challenged to name a SPACE CRAFT (uncluding fuel weight) that devotes more than 1% of its mass to pilot survival.

Then let's see you WRITE an evaluation algorithim that works, if it's so easy.
Define a function f(x1, y1, x2, y2 ...) that gives a numerical value for the board position (including terms for peice values, goodness and badness of peices, centre control, etc.). Then begin evaluating boards. Follow the tree dictated by best possible move for you, worst possible move for you by your opponent. Deviation from optimum occurs in a weighted fashion. Is this slow to converge? Yes. Does it converge? Yes. It is just a question of computing power. Better modles have few advantages other than converging MUCH faster.

No, in space the limiting factor is POWER - which is why for any decent space-based weapons platform you use a nuclear reactor. And guess what? One of the advantages of a drone is taht it does not need inordinate amounts of radiation shielding from its own reactor.
No you still need propellant. I generally include propellant under fuel. There is NO BLOODY WAY TO GET AROUND PROPELLANT LIMITS. You have a maximum mass flux (defined by the physics of the hardware you use) and a maximum exhaust velocity (again defined by the physics of your hardware).

So, what? You are saying that there's no hatch, no ejection mechanism, NOTHING that could be used to get the pilots in and out of the fighter?
Hatch? It's the crawl space needed to service the fighter. Ejection? No. How is ejecting going to help you? Anything capable of taking out your fighter is going to fry your ejection system.

Besides, the last thing you want is for a self-contained flight suit to be REQUIRED - pressurized suits would have your pilots waddling to thir ships instead of walking.

WALKING? WTF? This is a FIGHTER. Walking occurs on the carrier ... not on the fighter. Think DAMMIT how much space is there in an F-22 cockpit? Hell any of the F, SU series? The pilot space in a fighter is to SIT in.

Been there, done that. I have a neural net computer right now that can give you the EXACT value of that function anywhere on the range you specified, except for zero itself, and that's only because there IS no valid solution for X=0. Although, my standard computer can do the same thing far more quickly.
No you have one that works on the CLOSED interval. Again I'll take the word of people far more knowledgable than you than you appeal to self-authority.

Okay, so first you ignore the fact that ionizing radiation will fry the circuitry far faster than it sill impart any significant energy to melt the ship.
Melt the ship ... what the hell? The first thing to happen is the radiation is going to pass through your fuel, given a REALISTIC fighter that means solid hydrogen and oxygen. It will excite these atoms up and come back down having imparted some energy (aka Stokes), this will then VAPORIZE the solid oxygen and the gas expansion will create a rather large amount of pressure that blows the engine.

The pilot/computer is going to be buried under metres of fuel (think the booster tank on the shuttle) and plenty of metal.

THEN you overlook the fact that computer circuitry will take much higher doses of radiation than your human pilot before dying. So, in conclusion, you ARE imitating Darkstar.

Know I just realize that the fuel needed for the trip home works as effective radiation sheilding for a lethal human dose. It will still vaporize and take out propulsion, but by the time it fries the human the ship is long gong.

Perhaps you can provide me with more information about what you are talking about then? Because it sounds like you are talking bullshit.
Sorry hard copy only

The effects of nuclear test-ban regimes on third-generation-weapon innovation

Dan L Fenstermacher, Science & Global Security '90 Volume 1 Issue 3.

Not everything has a web page. Feel free to search for yourself I suggest looking for the "Prometheus programme".

May I point out that you are still appealing to irrelevant autority.
Right the guys who control real world WMD's know nothing about how to keep WMD's secure.

Too bad that all I have to do is make it impossible for you to optimize, and not optimize anything myself. OH, and I love how you IGNORED my point about the program responding differently in real combat thani n your bullshit simulations, my point about implementation, my point about programs varying based on combat experience, and my point about the program changing while you're doing your analysis. Concession Accepted.
Right provided with input sufficiently simalar (remember it is all digitized and the other guy never says his test data) its going to come out completely different. I'm sorry I don't reply to every bloody half assed point you guys make. Sir natrum is now gloating because I say "optics" instead of EM radiation.

EXCUSE ME? Since when is it utter BS to extrapolate a mere 25 years into the future, especially when we are nowhere near the limits you described? And frankly, I love your implication that the limit for processig power is LOWER than a computer which we already KNOW works - the human brain.
The human brain doesn't work in binary. Surprisingly we actually have more than 2 values in an impulse. I distrust all these extrapolation of computer hardware over the last 100 years because the techniques used to make the crap is so vastly disimalar. Tell me how valid is your 25 year projection when applied to Turing machines?

Further Bell Lab's estimates in 10 years we reach the limit on: insulaters (at a whopping 6 atoms thick), optical cables (we are at 10,000 photons and falling, Moores law is about to be a bitch), etc.

Tell me, when are you going to ask Wong for your "Darkstar clone" title?

When you morons actually post reasonable and valid numbers that show you are right instead of pulling generalizations out of your ass.

Wow. His prediction was right on the money. You completely ignored his point and started spewing the same old retarded bullshit again.
An F-22 has an upper ceiling ludicriously high up ... it needs jack for life support space. EVA's are done by modern astronauts ... they need jack for life support space. He posted an example of a SCIENTIFIC SHIP, not a military fighter, most people understand the difference (of course the guy who thinks walking in a fighter is a necissity ...)

Again, enough with the "fighters can't maneuver" bullshit.
How much propellant do you feel like lugging?

Oh yeah... You're going to hide a ship from which a thousand sensor signatures suddenly appear from the same location. Yeah, right.
Decoys

It is piss easy to generate false hot spots in space.

More proof that you limit your thinking to chemical propulsion.
No I limit mine to the methods NASA extensively studied and Newton's laws of motion (namely that momentum must be conserved) ... you seem to forget this one.

No, he assumes that a ship with a few powerful long-range direct-fire weapons that can retain stealth is better than a ship that lauches many HOT fighters and is therefore easily detected at long range.
And your long range weapon is going to survive coming through a continual swarm of short range AMM's how?

The reason yoiur fighter is screwed is because it is HOT. Don't you realize that the easiest way to detect a ship in space is from the heat generated by it's engines, NOT with radar?
Really sherlock? Which is you simply heat the whole friggin area. IR detection is a bitch to hide in space ... so don't simply provide plenty of other hot targets (like dumping cold recon planes out the hatch as you accelearation away) and they have them lace the area with IR.

I do hope your IR sensors have high angular resolution if you plan to see anything but a giant blob.

Also your carrier is screwed because there is a significant length of time between your fighters being launched and reaching their destination. While launching, the sensor profiles of the fighters is a dead giveaway of ti's location, which the battleship can then use to fire a nice railgun slug with a nuclear warhead attached for maximum damage. Meanwhile remaining completely undetected until it fires its weapon, and by then it's too late for the carrier to do anything about it.


Whatever. Your railgun will have piss poor velocity or cripple the ship. Ever wonder why something like the LOSAT KEM can beat the bloody crap out of any KE weapon coming out of a railgun?

And you still ignore the concept of IR sensors, and the idea that combat can happen at BVR, even with direct-fire weapons.

No I'm assuming ALL combat will happen beyond visual range, I'm assuming it will happen within OPTICAL range, i.e. with the range that EM signals can be differentiated

Wonderful. And you ignore the fact that the missiles might be SHIELDED {as any smart person would od with a cruise missile.)
Name a sheild that either KEM or HEM can't blow the hell through?

Congratulations. You completely miss the point by dodgning with yet another irrelevant example. OH, and I love how you use something that has no resemblance whatsoever to AI software to prove that there are bugs in AI software, when the whole point of AI software is to respond appropriately to things that the programmers DIDN'T predict, and the reason for all bugs is that the programmers didn't predict something.

Code is bloody code. My point was the number of bugs in the souce code goes up with the length of the code. I can offer numerous examples of this, you have yet to show that AI code is magically not effected by the human error in coding that effects ALL OTHER APPLICATIONS. AI is just another application, it suffers from the same coding errors as anything else.

Need to launch missile at least 1,429.5 km out to ensure a hit against a human-piloted fighter
Need to launch missile at least 1,389 km out to ensure a hit against a drone-controlled fighter

It doesn't matter HOW fast you make the missile, drones still have the advantage.
Damn what happened to your 60 (0r whatever) percent difference? It is now a whopping 2.9%. Thank you very much, as I noted before the drone has a few percentage points better performance at best, even using your highly flawed analysis.

I have always acknowledged that drones have slightly better combat performance I have just said it is minimal and now your own bloody numbers agree with me.

Doesn't change a damn thing. Get over it.

Repeat after me: MAGNITUDE.

The miniscule better combat performance is not worth the added cyber risks.

Not infinite fuel, just more than the missile.

As for "pulling it out of my ass", see above.

That's why it's BS. The fighter needs more fuel PER UNIT MASS ... this will never happen so long as you have compotent missile design crews. The only reason modern fighters stand a chance is because they attack with altitude and gravity burns againsts missiles ... this doesn't happen in space. The missile will have more fuel per unit mass and any fuel you add will eventually slow down your average acceleration.

No, this is quantum cryptography. You don't need to accelerate anything. It works through polarizing light.

"Strangely, it is the receiver, Bob, who makes the first move. He prepares two photons, or two spin-half particles (which exist in one of two states - spin up or spin down), jointly in an "entangled" state. He stores one particle and sends the other one to the sender, "Alice", who stores it. To ensure that the entanglement is maintained, each particle must be kept isolated from its surroundings. When it is time to send a message, Alice performs one of four special operations on her stored particle before transmitting it back to Bob. For the spin-half particles these four unitary operations, performed by the quantum gate U, are equivalent to: doing nothing (unit operation), or rotating the spin by 180 degrees about the x, y or z axes; for photons these operations correspond to polarisation rotations. The operations have to be unitary to maintain the quantum mechanical coherence of the particle."
Now how in hell do you intend to accelerate at high g, subject the particle to who knows how many induced feilds thanks to Lenz's law and still maintain quantum entanglement?

It is one thing to do do biphoton experiments ... it is another to do it in a combat fighter. Have they even managed it with any but photons?

Yet you never explain how. Evasion noted.
I'm sorry I'm not an expert in third generation nuclear weapons, are you?

Appeal to authority noted. Let me know when you're capable of forming your own thoughts.
Appeal to authority is the ONLY thing that justifies definitions, especially techinical definitions.


So do we need drones and fighters at all? Or the fuel cost of return makes them useless? I'm thinking having a large missile ship with one way sensor drones to direct weapons, and run on stealth in combat and coast (via low emission drives/coil gun/whatever) the missiles out before ignition if needed to hide my location. Alternatively, laser ships that pings the enemy with greaser of doom (TM) if the tech becomes avaible.


You can't fight without at least giving the enemy your location. Given the state of optics you will be targeted from black body before you close to your kill range.

The fuel load for Deep Space 1, the probe NASA used to prove this and other techs, went up to something like 300 km/s on 87 kg of fuel. Kinda anally rapes his claims of 20 pounds of fuel for every pound of dry weight, don't it?
Yes and how many g's was it accelerating at? Ion engines (and all forms of efficient propulsion) have crap for acceleration. Look at the numbers

The USS America, a nuclear aircraft supercarrier. We have nuclear reactors for vessels now. No reason they can't be brought into space, and fusion may well have advanced enough to be feasible by the timeframe we're on.
Right and your propellars will propel you how?

Its called conservation of momentum. You have to have fuel (energy + propellant). Efficient systems have crap for top accelerations, fast accelerators have crap for efficieny and in both cases it is do the physics of the situation.

Hell, Antimatter is on the drawing board, and is well within our abilities. As they said of the Manhattan Project: We have the physics down, the engineering is all that's left. We can make AM now.
Right and it only costs a quadrillion dollars a gram

You see anti-matter, unlike Manhattan is a NET ENERGY LOSS.

Tharkun's foolish declarations of optical range combat will vanish within the first generation of vessels with good radar and laser based weaponry. Lasers will most likely remain the weapon of choice for a while, as they are unbeatable for propagation speed, effective range, and energy efficiency. Once ECM catches up, lasers will get kicked back, and missiles, capable of rapidly correcting course and tracking targets, will become prevalent.
Lasers are optical devices. If you ever take an optics lab don't be surprised when you work with lasers. How in hell you intend to get out of optical range whilst using optical weapons is beyond me.

I have yet to see a single shread of evidence showing that lasers have anywhere near the ranges needed for combat without massive powersupplies (like say 100's of gigawatts).

If you expand 'optical' to 'passive detection', then you are, in fact, right. However, Tharkun thinks it'll be limited to what the Mark I Eyeball can see.
Damn you are stupid. I spefically state you can't see anything and explicitly state that there will be no cockpit because you be engaging far beyond the range of the human eye.
"op·tics ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ptks)
n. (used with a sing. verb)
The branch of physics that deals with light and vision, chiefly the generation, propagation, and detection of electromagnetic radiation having wavelengths greater than x-rays and shorter than microwaves."

How many strawmen is that SN? Can you even debate real positions or do you just tilt against strawmen anyone with basic reading comprehension can understand?

[SirNitram]

More nonsense from Tharkun, ignoring actual, real life proof in favor of equations(Deep Space 1 and it's efficient engine system, for example). Claims of strawman in an attempt to shore up his ridiculous position. Ignoring the mountains of evidence against him. The usual.