Space thread

Space.

>Depends. Most landed-based species are use to working with combat in 2 dimensions, rather than 3, so even in space when they have all 3 to work with they still have a habit to operate in 2. So, it's easy to take advantage of that train of thought, but it's not the end-all-be-all.

Considering that battle between two individual space ships would be one dimensional, I doubt that.

When two ships meet, the only thing that decides the battle is range and your ability to move far enough from your initial position that you can introduce uncertainty regarding if the weapon will hit you or not.

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That reminds me of something I've wondered about before - might the ships of a system or planetary defence fleet (or depending on your space nation's style, an internal security fleet) benefit from having ships that are short-legged in their endurance capabilities, but have comparatively oversized weapons, armour and engines (and possibly communications, if it'll be tied to system defence and monitoring satellites)

As they don't have to travel very far and are always relatively close to base facilities, you could make them more powerful than equivalent ships designed for long cruises.

If they were to be used in an offensive manner they'd probably need a huge fleet train, compared to the regular fleet

Monitors, ships designed around a really big weapon but with little else, might also see use in some space fleets - they're a real thing, to boot

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Defense sats are good. Even if an offensive force can pic them off before advancing, the fact that they HAVE to pic them off is to your advantage. They are a layer of defense that needs to be deal with. They can't risk trying to land ships while you have the ability to blow them out of the sky, and if you can shoot down incoming missiles that's good too.

Star forts are not really going to work, because without magic shields they are not durable than a ship is. If they get a clean hit on your 'fort' its scrap metal.

So what you want instead is area denial and suppression installations. They are not designed to be impenetrable, they are designed to have weapons that make approaching the planet dangerous.

Supplement this with ground-based defensive weaponry, and interceptors. Planetary defense is one of the few points where the idea of a 'space fighter' actually makes sense, because you can hide on the planet and then drop a lot of small attack craft into orbit fairly quickly. The fact that the fights have a short range doesn't matter, because if you are defending a world you are expecting the enemy to come to you. As long as you still have interceptors, they can't risk entering your orbit without you shoving a bunch of nukes up their asshole with a surprise wing of interceptors.

So really, the best way to defend a planet is to give it so many different layers of defense that its just a tremendous pain in the ass to approach it and try and hold orbit. You can't flat out stop them, but you can make them pay in blood until its not worth it anymore.

This, of course, presumes they actually plan on invading your world and taking it. If their goal is to just blow up the planet, all they need to do is get that weapon past your defenses. So that depends on what sort of weapon it is and whether or not you can intercept it. Nothing else matters, there.

>because without magic shield
Some variant of shielding tends to be common in these sorts of things, which I think is okay - it gives more allowances for exchanges of fire than the one-hit-kill you'd see in harder sci-fi (unless you go the hollowed out asteroid route)

Incidentally, has anyone else here read A Confusion of Princes, by Garth Nix?

What about something half way between a ship and a fort?

How do you like your space forces?

Space Navy? Airforce+ ? Or completely new?

And what do people think about multi-nation planets?
They seem vanishingly rare in space fiction

I'm a fan of space Navy. When you enter onto the galactic stage things tend to condense from "land/sea/air" to just "space/planet".

Multi-nation planets tend to be the result of insurrections. Again, when you're on the galactic level, having political disputes on the planetary level is counterproductive. If there are multiple "nations" and they're not fighting each other, then it's because they're part of some planet-wide EU type thing.

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Multi nation planets are fine if they are homeworlds.

But colony worlds resulting from single colony ships/expeditions would have unified origins. There has never been a time in that planets history when their civilization didn't have a central power structure, and for a long time anyone who tried to operate outside of it would have failed simply due to lack of resources and infrastructure. Its hard to survive on your own when you can't breath outside the domes that are owned and operated by the government.

Something new would be neat. Don't know what would it be called, or its officers ranks, or if it'd be ships or crafts or what have you, or what its doctrine would be.
Otherwise, air force's always interesting just because it's different from the usual. Always works out the same in practice, though.

Multi-nation planets are superfine. I don't get what'd prevent different nations from landing ships on the same planet. No reason planets are common enough everyone can just fuck off in their own direction or that ship are cheap enough that everyone can have their own and not rely on other nations taking them through known routes, to a common planet.

>is counterproductive
When has this ever stopped anyone?

I mean, your typical space empire usually takes a lot of inspiration from the age of sail, right? Where you had really close neighbours glaring at each other at home while their miltaries conquered shit all around the globe, often right next to someone else's shit, so why don't you get multi-planetary empires that nevertheless had to share planets

Habitable planets (assuming they are habitable straight off the bat) are often pretty rare - in the history of the setting why wouldn't two or more space-civs see it as worth sending someone to once it's discovered? (think bongs, frogs and spics all sending people to mainland America)

At least once things get full space opera, because the first people there presumably come with a navy, but I could still see nations co-habiting a planet happening - even in space opera habitable planets tend to be rare.
IDK, maybe I'm just a bit bored with a whole planet being considered all as one thing

Messed that up

>At least once things get full space opera,
I could see mono-nation planets being more reasonable
>because the first people there presumably come with a navy

>Always works out the same in practice, though.
Yeah, expectations have being built already.
Stargate did Air Force I think, but I haven't seen it.

I prefer them to be their own separate service in my settings.

Still never thought of a good name for them though.

You call them a Spacy, obviously.

Spacy is dumb

DUMB

Yeah if you want them to be the butt of jokes and have the nickname "Kevin"

Stargate did do air force, but mostly we saw them use the stargate. When ships popped up, they rarely discussed organization (and like half the time, it's SG1/SGA1 running it all, just the four of them, lel). The air force did fly these spaceships though, same deal in Russia. But they don't talk about how they do it in other countries. I like the look of the BC-303.

THERE IS NO STEALTH IN SPACE. Your enemy knows where you are, what direction you are moving, and your thrust. Inertia means that is not a surprise factor. If someone can see you, and has the physical ability to hit you from where they are, then you live at their whim.

Multination planets are a failure to conserve detail. Space as age of sail means planets are ports or countries at best. If every planet has a dozen countries you have to care about, then its just a clusterfuck of space spanish and space Portuguese.

You misunderstand, user. He isn't talking about hiding from you to introduce uncertainty. He is talking time-to-target evasion ability.

Any sublight weapons will have a window between when the target detects the attack and when that attack reaches them. The bigger the window, the better their chances are at getting out of the way and making the attack a clean miss. Given the distances involved, even a very small course deviations, or even just changing your acceleration, can turn a kill shot into a clean miss.

The most reliable way to increase that window for evasion is distance. So distance matters in a space battle.

Relativistic weapons make this much less of a problem but even a relativistic weapons, as long as it is not >= C, had a window. Its just that, within a certain range, that window is so small its worthless. But further out, that window becomes more significant.

Of course, relativistic weapons create their own problems. Getting anything going that fast in time for combat relevance requires either a level of magitech such that maybe space stealth DOES exist now, or a ship that will send itself careening off into the void/smash itself to pieces the first time it fires.

>Habitable planets (assuming they are habitable straight off the bat) are often pretty rare - in the history of the setting why wouldn't two or more space-civs see it as worth sending someone to once it's discovered?

Funding an extrasolar colony expedition is mad expensive. Orders of magnitude more difficulty to accomplish than the trip to America for ANY level of technology, even just using canoes.

Its only really worth it if you get an entire planet to yourself as a result. By the time someone is dumping the trillions of dollars into sending a colony ship, you can damn well bet that said nation is already claiming ownership of the planet. Only a few other superpowers will be able to contest the claim, and they can avoid the hassle just by setting their sights on a different world.

Even in the situation where multiple ships did get sent to a single world: not all such colony ships would survive to make successful colonies, and the colonies established by those ships would have to rely on each other to a much greater degree than either of them rely on their parent nation. It would take some serious hatred and xenophobia to prevent them from blending into a single nation as they grew, and if they hate each other that much one of them probably kills off the other in the early years anyway.

>If every planet has a dozen countries you have to care about, then its just a clusterfuck of space spanish and space Portuguese.
I think that sounds pretty rad - having just the Caribbean in space would be pretty rad, and you've got what, the Seven Years War and the Revolution that followed to draw inspiration from, and then there's all the shit in the East Indies as well.
And actual companies with private armies to add a bit of space megacorp flavour

But yeah, people just treat entire planets like ports or islands

>and they can avoid the hassle just by setting their sights on a different world.
Because worlds are so easy to get to and plentiful.

While they might merge a bit, you still get areas that are isolated but have two or more groups on them that have both failed to wipe each other out or merge totally - I can't see really big weapons being something packed in the colony ships, and planets are fucking big - you can just be on the other side or something.

When a planet is found I can see all of the powers capable wanting to get a colony there, and damn if anyone's going to stop them - not that they could, without starting a war and murdering the boatload of civilians going out to make the colony

My spacecraft service usually starts as a cooperation between a navy and an air force, and wet navy operations are increasingly relegated to a coast guard type service.

>Because worlds are so easy to get to and plentiful.

Honestly? Yeah.

The idea that we are going to find a planet already fit for human habitation is about as likely as waking up tomorrow to find out that you are secretly royalty of a magic kingdom and your wizard powers just came in.

Even if you find a world that has, by sheer stroke of random luck, habitable temperatures and low radiation and water? You are still going to have to build a planetary ecosystem from the ground up, and that includes inventing soil. None of your seeds from Earth are going to be able to grow in unprocessed alien rock. The 'dirt' we take for granted is the result of millions of years of continuous processing by microbes and animals.

The only difference between building a colony on the moon and building a colony on Tau Sirius 9 is that, 500 years from now, the colonist on TS9 *might* be able to go outside the archology without a breathing mask and have plants there they can eat the fruit of.

Not a lot of institutions have the timescale and resources to operate that sort of colony, and having multiple such colonies on the same world requires them to have their shit together otherwise their competing terraforming projects will fuck each other up.

Its cheaper and more profitable to build a colony somewhere else that you never plan to terraform, and just use it as a trading post/mining colony/strategic value point. Because you are building just the hab, not a planet.

Doesn't matter - any space weaponry at that point will not be "aim and shoot and hope you hit". No no, user: space weapons at the point of 'no stealth in space' are "fire and forget" - they WILL hit the target they are aimed at, because that target, no matter how far away it is, is always easy to identify and track.

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I'm fucking boring, but in the book I'm working on Navy handles the ships and the crewing of them. Marines handle the defense of the ship and the fighters/bombers. Air Force handles moving the army and any planetary things. Army handles the normal stuff, but Rangers are the guys who board enemy ships and cause havoc.

You continue to misunderstand, no one is talking about stealth in space.

The original post talked about introducing uncertainty as to whether the enemy can hit you by putting range between you and them.

>they WILL hit the target they are aimed at, because that target, no matter how far away it is, is always easy to identify and track.

This is nonsense, what are you trying to say? That a 30kms railgun slug can not be dodged at sufficient range? That it can hit moving targets millions of km away?
Space combat vessels would be covered in manoeuvring thrusters and point defence, at a certain short range they are helpless to dodge or stop projectiles but beyond that they can dodge or otherwise avoid projectiles.

>lasers

Still doable at light second/minute or beyond ranges. Lasers also lose power massively via diffraction very, very quickly which is a problem if the space ships are armoured.

This must be why no airplane or submarine has ever been defeated in battle.

Much like dogs, war planners and field commanders can't look up.

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>And what do people think about multi-nation planets?
>They seem vanishingly rare in space fiction

While this is usually lazy writing, there is actually a "real" reason for this. In most sci fi, planets are assumed to be colonized by a relatively small number of people from a single source culture. This creates what's known as a "founder effect", resulting in a culture which is vastly more homogenous than you'd get on earth itself, because everyone on the planet is descended from the same stock. Even if you add immigration, immigrants would likely be self selected, or filtered by the receiving world, for cultural compatibility.

>I affirm that next to the soul the most beautiful object in the galaxy is a spaceship!

-Alejandro Jodorowsky

The extension of the orbit guard; into the system guard. Since there's no chance in hell to get out of solsys in the timeframe of the setting, it works enough.

You basically got what I had in mind. System defense vessels are exceedingly good at what they do, but they lack the "legs" to operate outside of the system they're charged with protecting. The vast majority of said vessels are constructed in-system and lack an FTL drive because that's just extra mass and energy that could go towards more armor or guns.

That said, most of the warships in setting mount some form of spinal armament, so monitors are definitely a thing. They range from purpose-built warships to little more than a gun with a ship attached.

>How do you like your space forces?

The Navy gets the space warships and any Marine forces, the Army gets to deal with planetary operations and occupations, and the Air Force gets folded into the aforementioned two branches. The only new branches are a separate command for dealing with planetary and in-system defense, and a unified special forces command.

There might also be a SAC equivalent for handling the KKVs and other such doomsday devices, but I haven't quite made up my mind yet.

I like you already.

Describe this "Voidship" to me. Also the science behind your boarding torpedoes.

>A Confusion of Princes, by Garth Nix
Sell me on a book, user.

1-of by Nix, if you know his other stuff.

I'd say the world building is probably the best but, but the interaction between the MC - who's really heavily augmented for the most part - and the regular humanity are pretty neat.
He's basically told that he's going to be Emperor of the galaxy, then is forced to realise that he's not alone in this.

It's pretty alright, nothing momentous or anything

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Did someone say ayylmaos

My breakdown of armed forces.
>Navy operates the big ships with the navy air arm operating the smaller craft off said ships
>Marines accompany the navy as the only way for them to attack and hold territory ground side. Reliant on navy for air support.
>Army does planetary defense work. Usually equipment, training, and supplies are left up to the planet/system.
>Air force is the same as the army. Some wealthy systems even have their air force run inter-system monitor ships.

To the multinational planet I can see coalitions or hell even a planet and system serving as a demilitarized zone.

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Even then I think it's unlikely that there wouldn't ever be a disagreement concerning politics or cultural matters. Such disagreements would ultimately evolve into parts of the colony declaring independence from the rest. Such independent parts would either be allowed to create their own settlements, which would begin new countries, or would be eradicated, which would most likely lead to tyrranical world government with an underground resistance movement.
In my opinion any planet developed enough to have all its continents settled is very likely to have either multiple countries or an oppressive world government. Peacefully unified worlds should be an exception.

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>Describe this "Voidship" to me

Well first things first, Voidships are how I got around the restriction of there being no real stealth in space. While the ships certainly have low-observability features to reduce detection in "real space", those mostly consist of advanced heat sinks and a hefty ECM suite. However, the primary "stealth" feature of the ships is their ability to navigate the void used for FTL travel. While all FTL-capable ships travel through the void, only dedicated spaceships are capable of properly navigating through it and hiding in it. In essence, they're the closest thing the setting has to space submarines.

However, unlike their naval equivalents, while voidships have dedicated sensor arrays capable of looking into real space, they cannot fire without re-entering real space, as FTL drives are large and power-intensive, making FTL munitions impractical at best. Anyways, unlike their counterparts in the Raumkriegsmarine, voidships are primarily missile armed, with a combination of nuclear missiles and thermonuclear shaped charge weapons. Both of which are primarily delivered out of the gauss-assisted missile tubes at the stem of the vessel. Most voidships also carry a few general-purpose guns and missile tubes for last-ditch engagements. They also aren't generally part of major fleet actions, as they'd get shredded by the gun armament of any decent warship.

As far as classifications go, Hunter-Killers do exactly what you'd expect, which is to say nuking orbital assets, space stations, and logistics vessels, as well as commerce raiding. Siege Voidships are basically SSBNs, and are typically tasked with taking out hard targets with really large nuclear weapons or kinetic kill vehicles, as well as sneaky bombardment of planetary bodies. Finally the Void Frigates (or Special Operations Frigates) are used for stealthy insertion and extraction of special operations units, as well as the transportation of said units.

Daily reminder that everything harold white says is wrong.

this looks very close to good except for the stupid protrusions which make no sense than putting picatiny rails on your car

Looks to me like that segment can be rotated, presumably for artificial gravity. Probably as a manufacturing aid, or for during long travel.

radius too small altho there is no scale.
you need at least 600m radius for artificial gravity to avoid vertigo. preferably more.

it also only works right if you stop the ship from traveling and then you could just spin the ship.

let me show you my design.

it assumes a couple of things: armor must be spaced and several meters thick because incoming projectiles will have so much kinetic energy you must give them time to annihilate themselves, the ship will either travel continuously with 1G to achieve good time or couple up with an other ship and spin around their central axis to provide artificial gravity in the same direction travel would.

the ship tries to provide as little surface to detection and hits as possible and most armor is on the front also non essential systems and storage spaces are in the way of incoming fire.

Rotating sections are always a bad idea. Too much added weight from the two massive electric motors used to rotate and counter rotate, not to mention that the gyroscopic precession acting on the hull would require the flight systems to be more complicated to compensate.

here is an other layout that tries to better preserve firepower under enemy fire to keep the ability to retaliate.

the ship would turn it's frontal armor or at least it's thin armored beltside to the enemy. and fire missiles from vertical blocks. ship is about 10x30x150 meters and adheres to the principles of anything not accelerating in space is a sitting duck anyways so travels with continuous acceleration from 1-3G, carries hundreds of anti ship missiles (mostly relative speed kinetic cruisers) and more defensive ones (small nukes fired into volley or as chaff/smoke).

the more i think about it the less sense it makes for a spaceship to look anything else like a fucking brick.

cylinders are acceptable too.

yeah but from the point of armor you want to cover more with less. a cylindrical would have no weak spots but no strong sides either.

with a brick you can hide a lot of space behind thin sides and it's mostly against debris and nearby explosions from passing warheads anyways as you will be facing your enemy fire that can hit you head on with your 15 meters of frontal composite armor.

Considering the energies involved, tanking does not seem a likely strategy in space warfare. You cannot tank a nuke. Armor is just a waste of mass.

>it also only works right if you stop the ship from traveling and then you could just spin the ship.
You don't need to "stop" the ship, you merely need to stop accelerating.

>Also the science behind your boarding torpedoes.

This one isn't going to be as lengthy, but I hit the character limit in my other post.

Anyways, boarding torpedoes were developed for a far simpler reason than the voidship. The Raumkriegsmarine needed a way to insert marines into a hostile vessel, while keeping the enemies engagement window as short as possible. So, to that effect, the boarding torpedo was developed. The fact that they could be deployed from standardized torpedo tubes was just an added benefit, although most warships have dedicated launch areas for the weapons. Standard capacity for a torpedo is five power armored marines.

In any case, boarding torpedoes are normally launched in a 1:3 ratio alongside empty pods and other dedicated countermeasures, in order to minimize losses before the Marines can breach the enemy ship. Once launched, the torpedo receives command guidance from the warship it has been launched from, although it can also follow a preprogrammed route in case of a loss of contact with the launching vessel. On the way to the target, the torpedoes guidance system will move the weapon in an erratic manner, attempting to confuse enemy point-defense systems. 30 seconds before impact, a single-use gravity compensator - of similar type to the one used on drop pods fires, counteracting the shock of the pod suddenly decelerating. (It's a handwave, I know, but a wholly necessary one)

Anyways, now that the torpedo has made contact with the hull of the enemy vessel, several magnetic clamps make purchase on the hull, and the grinding ring on the front of the torpedo is used to cut through the hull. The ring is of a similar design to what would be seen on a terrestrial boring machine or an asteroid mining vessel, and can cut through most hulls in a fairly efficient manner. Once the hull has been cut through, a shaped charge throws the cutting ring forward, allowing the marines inside to begin their boarding action.

You can, however, intercept a nuke. I suspect actually getting a nuke to contact would be rare, and most hits would be from lighter railguns, with projectiles too small and fast to be effectively intercepted, and lasers, which you can *only* tank.

nukes work in space very differently than in atmo user.
they mostly just burn intensely for a split second.
anything within a few hundred meters will be burned badly even shockwaves can form from escaping ions. a few km away it's only dangerous to sensors and small missiles.

>You don't need to "stop" the ship, you merely need to stop accelerating.
that's the same thing in space.
for a spaceship there is no speed only acceleration.

You said "stop the ship from traveling".
Nothing prevents you from coasting from the Earth to the Moon without accelerating all the time, yet, you're still clearly travelling.

If you want to cover more with less, a cylinder has a larger internal volume for the same surface area as a cuboid.

yeah but you put thinner armor on the entire surface larger profile for detection from a distance for same volume and heavier armor to the same effect.

for certain situations it would be better not to have weak side and strong for guided missile destroyers i think it would be just the thing that gives them an edge.

true, but you will get to anywhere a hell of a lot faster with continuous g and there is the problem of changing direction of g force from acceleration to sitting in place and rotating.

basically it would be a serious challenge in engineering to provide living spaces accommodating both direction lot's of redundancy or rotating rooms meh. my design only has one vector for g force it's like a skyscraper you can put the furniture in the same way too.

Sensors can be blinded, and if you fire enough ordinance or fakes you can over saturate any defense system. Nukes only need to be within a kilometer to vape ships, and that's only for lower yield weapons. Bigger boom = greater vape radius.

You act like this isn't common knowledge for space enthusiasts.

>continuous acceleration
Nice bullshitium engine, user.

it's the best sublight travel form.
you can reach insane v-s very fast. with nuclear torches or fusion drives it's actually possible to achieve that for years in fuel efficiency.

it's our best bet to conquer near space if we can't wiggle across some space magic barrier. actually achievable as our current understanding of physics goes today.

so your opinion is shit.

>Nukes only need to be within a kilometer to vape ships
That's just straight up wrong.

>You act like this isn't common knowledge for space enthusiasts.
then you should know that you can absolutely armor up against nukes as far as warships go. nukes are quiet flaccid in space. i mostly think of them as chaff burning out sensors or blinding them with various forms of radiation destroying missiles or swatting away debris. not serious weapons.

energy density is only enough to vaporize anything in a few hundred meters. the explosion itself is very different with no atmosphere to constrain it.

From we all know where:

>A one kiloton nuclear detonation produces 4.19e12 joules of energy. One kilometer away from the detonation point defines a sphere with a surface area of about 12,600,000 square meters (the increase in surface area with the radius of the sphere is another way of stating the Inverse Square law). Dividing reveals that at this range the energy density is approximately 300 kilojoules per square meter. Under ideal conditions this would be enough energy to vaporize 25 grams or 10 cubic centimeters of aluminum

Pretty sure the ship would crumple like a tin can. Impulsive Shock is a fucker.

>energy to vaporize 25 grams or 10 cubic centimeters of aluminum
so it would scratch the surface of the outer layer of the whipple shield... or not depending on ceramic coating and whatnot.

Spallation and shock will destroy the superstructure and kill the crew.

Again, from we all know where:

First off, the weapon itself. A nuclear explosion in space, will look pretty much like a Very Very Bright flashbulb going off. The effects are instantaneous or nearly so. There is no fireball. The gaseous remains of the weapon may be incandescent, but they are also expanding at about a thousand kilometers per second, so one frame after detonation they will have dissipated to the point of invisibility. Just a flash.

The effects on the ship itself, those are a bit more visible. If you're getting impulsive shock damage, you will by definition see hot gas boiling off from the surface. Again, the effect is instantaneous, but this time the vapor will expand at maybe one kilometer per second, so depending on the scale you might be able to see some of this action. But don't blink; it will be quick.

Next is spallation - shocks will bounce back and forth through the skin of the target, probably tearing chunks off both sides. Some of these may come off at mere hundreds of meters per second. And they will be hot, red- or maybe even white-hot depending on the material.

To envision the appearance of this part, a thought experiment. Or, heck, go ahead and actually perform it. Start with a big piece of sheet metal, covered in a fine layer of flour and glitter. Shine a spotlight on it, in an otherwise-dark room. Then whack the thing with a sledgehammer, hard enough for the recoil to knock the flour and glitter into the air.

Next, the exposed hull is going to be quite hot, probably close to the melting point. So, dull red even for aluminum, brilliant white for steel or titanium or most ceramics or composites. The seriously hot layer will only be a millimeter or so thick, so it can cool fairly quickly - a second or two for a thick metallic hull that can cool by internal conduction, possibly as long as a minute for something thin and/or insulating that has to cool by radiation.

After this, if the shock is strong enough, the hull is going to be materially deformed. For this, take the sledgehammer from your last thought experiment and give a whack to some tin cans. Depending on how hard you hit them, and whether they are full or empty, you can get effects ranging from mild denting at weak points, crushing and tearing, all the way to complete obliteration with bits of tin-can remnant and tin-can contents splattered across the landscape.

Again, this will be much faster in reality than in the thought experiment. And note that a spacecraft will have many weak points to be dented, fragile bits to be torn off, and they all get hit at once. If the hull is of isogrid construction, which is pretty common, you might see an intact triangular lattice with shallow dents in between. Bits of antenna and whatnot, tumbling away.

Finally, secondary effects. Part of your ship is likely to be pressurized, either habitat space or propellant tank. Coolant and drinking water and whatnot, as well. With serious damage, that stuff is going to vent to space. You can probably see this happening (air and water and some propellants will freeze into snow as they escape, BTW). You'll also see the reaction force try to tumble the spacecraft, and if the spacecraft's attitude control systems are working you'll see them try to fight back.

no it would be caught in the whipple shields next layer and there is no shock in space only what the structure would allow for which is designed to mitigate it.

>a few km away it's only dangerous to sensors and small missiles.

now gimme the figures for 3 and 5 kms!
guess what it would maybe burn your retina but that's it.

>there is no shock in space only

Impulsive shock. From the metal heating at supersonic speeds. The energy from the nuke hitting the hull causes it.

>now gimme the figures for 3 and 5 kms!

This is just for a 1Kt bomb. If you want to have a bigger radius, just up the yield. Defensive capability is limited by heat radiation surface area. You just make yourself a bigger, slower target and the benefits suffer from diminishing returns.

not going to work with 5 layers or composite armor designed to stop meteors the size of pebbles traveling with relativistic speeds.

and guess what there is actual vacuum between the plates so you don't get any shock forming whatsoever except between your ears right now.

>angry liberal intensifies

Can we not have a discussion without insults in this world anymore?

>If you want to have a bigger radius, just up the yield.
you can up the yield all you want add an other km and it's all the same. distance is a bitch in space. if you fire big nukes then small nukes will intercept them at safe distances.

the armor is really only for the "fallout" not to take direct hits.

where is the insult?
if i though there is vacuum between his ears i wouldn't suggest shock bouncing there from butthurt.

Wot

>if you fire big nukes then small nukes will intercept them at safe distances.

Using nukes as defense seems to be a bad idea mass-wise.

Whipple shield armor will be burned off by a single good nuke strike, and you can only defend yourself for as long as your heat radiators aren't oversaturated, and you just make it easier for the missiles to see you the longer you use your point defense.

>so you don't get any shock forming whatsoever except between your ears right now.

What's that supposed to mean?

it means the butt-hurt caused by realizing how the yield increases energy linearly but with distance it decreases by r^2 and a few kms away it's pretty much worthless as i stated is bouncing around in his skull making his ears ring i imagine.

have to go to sleep hope this thread will be around tomorrow.