If many smaller tanks/robots are preferred over one single giant tank/robot...

If many smaller tanks/robots are preferred over one single giant tank/robot, doesn't the same apply to one single giant spaceship?

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not when your giant spaceship has hangar bays and point-defense turrets

Depends on the size of the power sources available. No matter how many small ships you have, not one of them is gonna be large enough to carry a nuclear fusion reactor power plant, for example.

Depends if it's manned or unmanned.

Like with ships, a mass of smaller crafts with as much weaponry as it can carry are generally more likely to achieve victory over larger ships... but the chance for the people aboard the smaller ships to die is increased by a lot.

So basically, suicide boats>battleships, but who'd serve on a suicide boat?

I propose that the same would be true in space, but space combat is most likely going to be entirely unlike any planet-bound combat anyway, so it's hard to tell.

no. big space ships work like aircraft carriers.

That assumes the suicide boats can carry enough firepower to overcome the defenses of the battleship, it depends on the technology of the setting. No matter how many snaller ships you use, if none of them have the power to even stress the shielding of the larger ship then it doesn't matter how many you throw at it. Zero damage multiplied by anything up to and including infinity is still zero.

One giant ship can house a huge power plant, tons of weapons, some kind of defense like a shield, and tons of other stuff because it is flying in space. In space, you don't need to worry about thing like square-cube law as much so making giant things is perfectly legitimate. It's like making a ship for water but even better. If you make a giant mech with all sorts of crap attached it will just sink into the pavement under its own weight (barring crazy tech like NGE's absolute terror field).

Also, in space you don't need to worry about crazy terrain. What happens to your death mech when it needs to cross a swamp, or a ravine, or a mountain range?

Tanks are limited by civilian infrastructure that need to still support their weigh and size, road, bridges, street corners, etc. Mechs have the same limitations plus in addition the problem of concentrating their weigh on a much smaller foot surface, making some of these problems much worse. Naval ships and spaceships don't have that need.

You compare spaceships to Navy, not to Army. Especially if bigger ships can have stronger shields, heavier guns, and can launch smaller ships.

That assumes that shields are a zero-sum thing, and either no-sell an attack completely, or are destroyed by the incoming fire. It's much more likely that they'd work on some kind of capacitor system, and deflect incoming attacks up until a point where they were overloaded, which you could do either with a couple really big guns, or lots of little guns, and the effect'd be just the same.

That's just video game logic. If you're in a gravitational field, many objects or large objects being present doesn't weaken the fields effect on any one object. What if your shielding is just redirecting the momentum of the offending objects? Then you'd have a situation where you could have an infinite potential for protection as long as any one object couldn't resist the redirection by virtue of being massive enough.

Alternatively, enough objects/mass would begin propelling the ship with the shielding itself by virtue of momentum transfer. Either way, overloading it isn't necessarily going to be possible with many small attacks.

What they said basically. You need big ships to carry big guns, big shields, big transgalactic drives, and big hangars stuffed with smaller fighters, bombers and torpedo boats.

that depends on the purposes of the craft.

For a weapons platform/gunboat yes small and fast are the preference, but those craft need a place to land eventually, and thus a carrier ship/station is utilized.

Meanwhile personnel/cargo ships are best being a big as fucking possible to move as much in one trip as the physics of the universe will allow.

Yeah it depends on the tech but a gravitational shield sounds already far away. Imagine how hard spatial fights would be if no shields existed, and only metal armor prevented you to "sink" like it is today. Logic would tend to build really long range missiles or carriers that can hit from far away but don't get hit easily

> a mass of smaller crafts with as much weaponry as it can carry are generally more likely to achieve victory over larger ships
Big assumption, since in space you can simply go as big as you like and hide behind 7000 plates of armour no amount of suidice ship will ever penetrate.

>you can simply go as big as you like and hide behind 7000 plates of armour
That's a big assumption too

in space, your ship does not have to support its own weight, allowing you to pile on as many point-defence guns, armor, shielding, fighters, etc. as you want, limited only by engineering

this means that, depending on the weapons of the setting, you may need a minimum gun size to penetrate the enemy at all, meaning its go big or go home

there are exceptions, if a single fighter has the punch to damage a capital ship, then size becomes a liability (like star wars)

What I want to know is where the Sathanas sits in the spaceship power rankings. Gotta be higher than most of the Imperial Navy, right?

If we can take anything away from FS2, it's that the GTVA ought just to have taken all the money that they spent on the Colossus and put it into snubfighters.

Bear in mind that weight, a tremendous consideration for tanks in both their field operations and transport to the front, has no bearing in space.

Inertia says hi. I assume you want to move that battle-city? Even if your setting has inertial dampeners you don't want the only thing keeping the ship from flying apart being a powered system.

>max speed is no more than 80 km/h
>main weapon maximum range (BFRed x4) is no more than 3 km, and are fixed forwards
Yeah, it can make stars go nova, but it takes 80+ of them to do so.

They did in this FS2 mod, Blue Planet. All kinds of new crazy awesome ships and tactics designed to fight Shivans in general and Sathanas ships in particular.

childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/2016/09/03/go-small-or-go-home/

Take a look at this.

There comes a point where the one big thing is strong enough that the little things can't hurt them.

Case in point, pic related will always beat the military, no matter how many are coming.

>What if your shielding is just redirecting the momentum of the offending objects?

What's the formula for momentum, user?

space is big, there is a lot of room to accelerate or decelerate

either that or its like star wars where ISD II is a lot more agile than the smaller ISD I

is me

I just wanted to say I based this post on IRL naval warfare (or at least simulations of IRL naval warfare) where massed ships won out time and time again against bigger ones. In the simulations, the optimal version IIRC was a mixed force with a few "cleaner" ships that had many smaller but accurate weapons, so they took down multiple of the opposing force's smaller ships before going down, hence tipping the scales.

So, realistically right now, passive defensive stuff massively outweighs the thing it has to defend against. I.e. kevlar vs. a bullet, or tank armor vs. a grenade. Just imagine how thick of an armor you'd need to survive a nuclear warhead (which would comparatively be minuscule in weight/size).

Active defense (point defense lasers?) is better, but it can still be overwhelmed.

So yeah, I'd still go with mass of drone fighters with little to no defense aside from high mobility and maybe some point defense vs missiles.

Spacecraft aren't constrained by things like gravity, roads, mud and what-have-you.

A bigger vessel can mount a bigger engine, bigger power plant and basically everything in greater size or quantity.

Star Destroyers should be zipping past TIE Fighters instead of the other way around.

>Spacecraft aren't constrained by things like gravity

Well technically they are, it's just different than on earth. Also asteroids and objects say hi

Economies of scale mean that you can just add more engines as you add mass, you can actually add more engine relative to mass as you go bigger Big ships likely have greater thrust to mass ratios and so are more manouverable than small ships.

Asteroids are pretty damn far apart in real life.
Its tricky to run into one on purpose, hitting one accidentally isn't worth worrying about.

>Star Destroyers should be zipping past TIE Fighters instead of the other way around.

>what is mass
>what is delta-v

Are you stupid?

Well, except that forces of acceleration, mass and momentum would still be things you have to deal with, gravity or no.

What about all the debris you'll encounter any time you approach a planet ? It's already becoming a problem in our time so imagine the future

depends on the setting desu desu

Realistically, read this>and im sure Project rho has an article on it or something

Yes but having more thrust is how you deal with them.
In space where you don't have to worry about holding up your weight or drag all that matters to manoeuvrability and speed is the thrust to mass ratio.

And how the fuck are you gonna MOVE that ship?

No. Small tanks and robots can use this thing called 'cover'.

There is no cover in space. You want your ship to be as large as is practical so your weapons can be as powerful and accurate as possible.

Any 'small ship' roles can be fulfilled by drones.

More thrust->more strain->needs to be even heavier so that it can take the forces applied to it, to say nothing about maneuverability.

This putting aside the fact that manned craft has a hard limit on how fast it can accelerate either way (cause anything faster than what the humans abroad can take means your crew is now red slurry).

No.

Land battles are not air battles or sea battles or space battles. Each environment has its own particular needs and disadvantages.

In most cases a land battle is going to be limited by the physical practicalities of gravity. That is to say, you may have a giant assfuck tank or robot the size of a motel, but it must weigh so much - unless you have magic materials or power fields (and somehow overcome the energy requirements of those fields without tipping the scales even further) - that beyond that size, the practicalities of just, you know, turning to face a more mobile enemy force become enormous.

In space, however, you don't have this problem (but you do have problems with relativity on large vessels, which can be overcome by saying "they already travel faster than light, fuck you"*). Instead you have a couple of interrelated problems: space is very, very big and space has fuck all in it. From that arise the problems of energy (how do little ships get all that way, and is it really efficient) and energy loss (small bodies lose more heat and other radiation into space per kg of mass than large bodies do, because they have a higher surface area relative to their volume). So for space, large vessels - even just acting as carriers - make sense, and from that decision comes all kinds of tech tree crap, like "we've built a space barn, let's put another fuckhuge reactor in it to power some planetfucker guns".

*if they don't already travel faster than light, you've pretty much fucked yourself putting all your resources into giant ships for intra-system combat.

With thrusters?

Like in the films then? Han brags about outrunning the 'big Corellian ships' and star destroyers keep pace with the Millennium Falcon several times.

The idea that they're slow wet-boats comes in part from games. In the films they're as fast as their fighters.

How the fuck are you going to stop it moving?

P.S. Maneuverability and flexibility is key in war. Lets use an extreme example and say you have 1 giant ship vs 100 small ships. The small ships will all split up and raid the enemy shipping while his one ship can only attack your static emplacements or defend their own.

If it leaves to attack your world, your ships can attack its undefended home base. Now you've eliminated its ability to refuel and repair. As it travels, you harry and ambush it. It doesn't need to be destroyed, just rendered inoperable. Lets say you down its sensors (since they will need to be located externally to function), the ship is blind and deaf and essentially out of the battle. It'll have to launch recon craft for intel and you can pick those off.

IRL huge ships use large swarms of screening ships because they will just be swarmed and destroyed without an escort.

Mobility issues aren't the same on ground and on water / in space.

Can't wait to play Blue Planet now that I have a joystick again. I'd rather fly with the GTVA than Earthers, though. Ah well.