Destructionator XIII wrote:Obviously, phasers don't exist, nor do super military laz0rz, but the technology of aiming without turning big things does.
Imagine a small scale model. Take a flashlight and a few mirrors. You don't have to rotate the flashlight to change where the beam is going. With a pair of mirrors, you can very quickly redirect the light to even point behind it.
The Enterprise's phasers do this same idea. They can point the ship's power in many different directions without having to rotate the ship nor to wait for a big physical turret to move. It doesn't really matter what angle you approach it from - the full power of the ship's phasers can still hit you.
If you adopt a system like this, gun placement doesn't matter much, and neither do a lot of traditional naval tactics.
Works for lasers- from the infrared to the ultraviolet. Does not work for mass-accelerating weapons of any kind, or for X-ray lasers. Both of those systems will require a long acceleration line to get a good run-up, and trying to redirect the weapon with a lightweight reflector/ski-jump just means you break things.
For missiles, of course, it works even better than for lasers; you can theoretically eject a missile, have it pivot and light off the main engine in a direction that was
through the hull when you took the shot. Not even the Big E can manage that.
If the enemy fires at ship A and ship B is some distance off in a triangle kind of thing, it can shoot at the enemy's stuff from the side. Ship A defending itself would have to either shoot it head on or try to outmaneuver it, and both options kinda suck.
Trying to intercept fast-moving projectiles from the side is likely to be harder than hitting them head-on, because you have to track the projectile as it crosses your field of view. And given probable uncertainties in your fire control, if something is closing head-on its position is known within a small circle; from the side it's known within a larger ellipse. This could be problematic.
But, I wouldn't worry about crossing the T or forming a wall or whatever. That's to counter mobility and bring firing arcs into one place, and that either doesn't matter (it just doesn't help you nor hurt the enemy) or doesn't take a lot of effort anyway.
Formations would only matter in space if you're trying to multiplex the output of your own platforms' sensors and ECM into a larger pattern- say, if you want to combine the feeds from 20 ships' telescopes into a single Very Large Array.
Firing arcs can matter, or not matter, depending entirely on how ships are designed, which depends on details of what they're armed and equipped with.
That's because in Star Trek everybody fights at pistol range.
Mobility matters even less at longer ranges.... to dodge a bullet up close, you have to be super fucking fast. When you're very far away, you can give yourself a gentle nudge and be out of the way by the time it arrives; you don't need great mobility even if you accept dodging as useful.
Indeed, this is one of the reasons to open the range - to dodge things you otherwise wouldn't be fast enough to dodge.
...Uh, when you say "mobility doesn't matter," do you mean "being able to move doesn't matter?" Or "being fast isn't better than being slow?"
In the first case, by the argument you yourself just made, being able to dodge matters- especially at long range. At pistol range, it doesn't matter, but then neither I nor anyone else here really expected space battles to be fought at pistol range.
In the second case, the faster you are, the closer enemies have to be before they can hit you reliably. If you are more agile, or have a smaller target profile, you have an advantage in that you can hit them before they can hit you- statistically speaking, and always allowing for fluke lucky shots or the magic of guided weapons.
The counter to this is using fast-moving weapons- lightspeed lasers or particle beams if possible. Basically, the amount of room a target can dodge into before your shot arrives scales with the fourth power of the time it takes your shot to get there- so doubling muzzle velocity means you only have to saturate 1/16 the amount of sky to score a hit.
(Similarly, closing range might be to use your mobility to get out of the other guy's firing arcs, but when you have a system that can point anywhere very quickly, this is impossible even up close.)
I would never advocate that tactic, it's practically useless unless we posit accelerations in the thousands of gravities.
But, I don't accept dodging as useful in space, and here's why: it isn't free, not at any range. Let's say you want to jitter around at very long range, so you don't have to move much while reducing your enemy's hit percent.
You're probably using a rocket which throws shit out the back to push you around.... shit you can't get back.Suppose the enemy can fire constantly at you, so you have to continually dodge to stay alive. You're constantly losing mass, even when he misses! If you brought armor instead of fuel, you could let him hit you... and get the same situation. Sure, he's constantly hitting, but the end result is the same: you constantly lose mass.
Moreover, with the armor, you may well be able to return fire, which could be difficult when dodging due to issues of vibration screwing up your own aim and efficiency.
There are problems with this analysis. For one, it depends on the relative performance of engines and weapons. In settings where the 'typical' ship to ship weapon is a megaton-range kinetic impactor,
damn straight you may lose less mass by firing your thrusters to get out of the way than you would if it hit you over the head.
For another, impacts that hit your armored ship don't just delete mass in a clean, bloodless process. A constructed object that's getting hit by high-energy weapons can experience shock waves, radiation that penetrates the armor belt and affects the interior, and damage to surface features like its own sensors, weapons, and engines. Whereas a well-designed ship will be able to fire its own engines without anything unduly destructive happening as a side effect.
Also, the armor adds a
permanent mass penalty, because you have to cart it around all the time, not just when you're being shot at. If 20% of the mass of your ship is ablative armor, then that's 20% of its mass that is not devoted to more fuel to get more delta-v, or to more weapons and sensors to target and destroy enemies, and that's 25% more fuel that has to be burned to get the ship onto a given course from a given starting vector.
For all these reasons, it's not easy to say "armor > speed" under these conditions.
Let's consider other weapons. What about a guided missile tough enough that armor is useless? Well, dodging this is really a complete waste of time, since in all probability, anything you can do mobility wise it can do better. And, of course, the costs are still there in fuel and shit. What about the alternatives?
You could launch your own little missiles to intercept their missiles. This pretty easily beats dodging anyway; you can take them one to one at worst, whereas moving out of the way is probably going to burn shitloads of mass.
Mobility might matter here.... but it will be the mobility of your throw-away countermeasures, not of your ship.
What about an unguided gun? Well, dodging might help here, even at shorter ranges, but even so, you could just as easily take it down with a one-to-one ratio of disposable countermeasures, even better if you're packing light. Sit back a little and burn a wee but of the bullet to throw it off course. Dirt cheap.
This relies on bullets being easy to track- I wouldn't count on that if I were you. And lasers wind up being bloody impossible to track, of course.
The faster something moves, the easier it is to take down too, since you can use its own speed against it. It has to get up to high speed and get by your counters... your counters just need to get in its path some way out from your ship. Much easier job.
The faster it is, the faster it crosses the envelope defined by the accurate range of your own weapons- how short is your fire control loop, from first detection to HOLY SHIT INCOMING to zap to target destroyed? And if you rely heavily on lasers because of how easy they are to retarget, you don't get this effect at all- it takes the same number of joules of light energy to vaporize an incoming rock that moves at 100 km/s as it does to vaporize the same rock when it moves at 1 km/s.
This can cut both ways.
In theory, I can have the engines pointing at a 45° angle to the centerline and burn some combination of them to move. The only real drawback is that my peak acceleration isn't as good as it could be- but at 'cruising speed' accelerations, which are lower, it makes no difference. And I get a considerable evasion advantage at long range, because I'm using the high-acceleration main engines as maneuvering thrusters. The drawback is the need for a reinforced and more complicated hull to handle acceleration along multiple axes.
