How do you like your space war my melanin enriched brethren

space battles in the future will never have ship to ship battles, nor boarding parties, etc. all space battles with be ground battles in space, each side will provide their side of the battlefield where ground troops will be deployed, they will fight for territory over these massive platforms, they wont be just flat out either, with each side providing their own platform sections of the battlefield, they will have pre-installed bunkers, trenches, hills, etc. placed in a strategically defensible formation so that its defensible and advantageous for the owners side, maybe some will e modular so as to change strategy with moving terrain or simply replaced because it has suffered too much damaged from the fighting.
why? idk, the idea just came to me reading your comment and found it funny so i thought i would share

I love capital ships somewhere between Kirk's Enterprise and a Star Destroyer in size. I love human scale boarding action and dudes in space suits being flung across the void to do so. I love mecha, bioships, orbital drop paratroopers, planetary defense cannons, beam weapons everywhere, and nebulae as cover. I love mass drivers, relativistic guns, and FTL maneuver hijinks. I love aliens that fight with swords and can survive naked in vacuum for hours. I love planet busters and CIWS railgun spam. I love the old nuke-a-roo teleporter trick. I love tactical wormhole molestation. I love tying Newton and Einstein's physics up together and abusing them for badass makeshift weapons. I love physical delivery of computer viruses.

Gentlemen, I love spess war.

I like this guy's ideas.

Especially the space knights. The romance of WWI dog fighting but in space.

If you aren't forming a battle line and exchanging broadsides like it's 1916, what's the point?

Individual operator boarding parties or mecha can't do much in that environment. You can't even have a single heroic ship captain make that much of a difference.

No, but a squad of soldiers in power armor being fired out of boarding torpedoes, or a squadron of fighters, or a flight of warships can.

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Long, with massive casualties on both sides.

over in picoseconds

As long as you don't forget the details of all the horrible things that happen to people when their ship gets grazed by enemy weaponry. Just like what happened to soldiers' bodies when they'd just get grazed by Napoleonic weaponry.
Bullet skimmed past your calf? Gotta cut off the whole leg now.
Split fingernail? There goes your whole arm.

WTF is that

Fukken slow and impractical

Do we even know what culture ships look like under their fields.

The GSVs are implied to be rectangular prisms I believe.

>Bullet skimmed past your calf? Gotta cut off the whole leg now.
>Split fingernail? There goes your whole arm.

Shattered bones, high as fuck risk of infections, all those fun things

>skimmed past your calf
Nah, mate, only if the bullet hit the bone

I like them mostly unrealistic.

It's a mix of dogfights, bombing runs of smaller ships on bigger ships, broadsides, artillery, and more. Also boarding parties.

Would it be weird to have a setting where the different space forces all have quite radically different design philosophies and styles?

Say you've got one faction where the ships are basically guns with greebles, a la halo - there's generally a huge spinal weapon with the engines opposite it, the bridge is roughly where the sights would be and the crew spaces are in the stock/trigger area.

Then you've got another faction, whose ships are a translation of Napoleonic tall ships in space - most, if not all, their weapons are in a massive broadside, their engines are above (and possibly below) the main bulk of the ship in mast-like extensions/arrays, and the crew is housed centrally, with the rear being for the officers

A third faction is based on WWII/cold war planes - their bridge is at the front, in "bombers" most weapons are pointed "down" from the ship, while "fighter" style designs are mostly forwards, secondary weapons cover their other sides, and engines are commonly mid-mounted (though some are at the rear)

The last of the factions has ships that are reminiscent of WWII battleships - big turreted main guns, bristling with secondaries, bridge and power plants in the armoured centre, a vague diamond shape etc.

Or would it likely be a bit of a jumbled mess with little coherent theme or style?

I love this. There is nothing that says everyone should adopt the same fighting tactics.

If you have aliens who like broadsides and humans who like to RAMMMING SPEED and get to boarding enemy vessels then perfect.

Pair that with and and we have the makings of a perfect cluster fuck of a space opera

I actually don't like that image. Ships are too similar between sizes. It's basically the same model just scaled. You are never going to have it unless ships use the same weaponry and are designed for exactly the same roles as other ships.

Yes having the same chassis within the size class is ok. But between classes even if overall shape will be somewhat similar chassis should still change. Especially if other factors (like stress on main ship frame) come into play.

>Not depressurizing ship before combat and not wearing space suits.
They got what they wanted.

It sounds like it would be a cool setting.

I played in game with similar concept based on Fading Suns I think. Maybe.

Humans: Humanoid mecha fighters based on the fact that humans had effective neural interface for interacting with them and powered armor plating that was creating force fields to protect the frame. It was not possible to scale it to the capital ship size. At least not with the current technology.
So humans had a lot of carriers with elite fighter wings that were capable of taking even on capital ships.

Space rats: Giant spheroid ships with a lot of long range weapons and missiles. And they also were carriers for a lot of small fighter craft that were basically guns with powerful engines. They either were trying to nail you from maximum distance or drown in waves of armed to the teeth but paper thin fighters.

Space "elves": Don't remember if we ever had seen their capital ships up close. They were mostly blips on the radar. On the other hand we did see their fighters that used some high end holographic defense systems. Also even their most shitty pilots could run circles around you. Only the fact that they had basically no armor could somewhat counteract that. They still were a nightmare to deal with. The fact that they could pull off insane accelerations and enter battle and disengage basically at will didn't help either.

It depends on the setting's technology I guess.
You just need to tweak the setting's sci-fi big lies to accommodate multiple design philosophies.
I mean, I'd say it's unlikely, what with missiles (and later RKVs) looking to dominate real-life's meta in the near future.
It's sci-fi though, do what you like. Just justify it!

A race with psionic entities who pick up and throw moons with their minds?

You are like a little baby.

Are we talking relativistic moons here?
If so, there's a clear hard counter to these guys leaving them the fuck alone and praying to every god you've heard of that they don't notice you
Either that or wait till they run out of moons

I'm thinking Destiny scale here. I mean, the battle between the Reef Born Awoken and the fallen involved throwing a literal fucking moon at them and then the Hive show up and their main ship is just slight bigger then our moon and we're talking about a race who's main mode of doing things is to hollow out entire planets and moons and turn them into spaceships.

If we're extrapolating on current warfare to determine what spaceship battles would be like, the Pentagon's close to being able to use lasers as a defense against missiles, if we're going with realism.

Using directed energy as a method of intercepting and detonating missiles, the point where automated laser turrets might make missiles redundant.

If you insist on having space battles while being as hard sci-fi as possible, we're looking at a rock-paper-scissors system of missiles beat kinetic weapons, kinetic weapons beat lasers, lasers beat missiles.

Although, lasers probably wouldn't have any offensive capability, so a spaceship would require some other weapon as means of securing the kill.

The Air Force is putting invisible beam lasers that can punch through engine blocks on the next version of the AC-130 gunship and it should be deployed within a couple of years. We're looking at an IRL shift towards lasers and railguns for short to medium range aerial and naval combat, with missiles reserved for BVR strikes on targets with no lasers of their own. Infantry will continue using guns due to weight issues with the power supplies for said lasers.

childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/

I dunno. This stuff, while cool, just sorta looks like its trying to hard to be mature and gory. Im sure in actual space combat their would be tons of safety measures and tricks to help prevent this shit.

What is tech is advanced enough to equip missiles with micro FTL engines?

Take no prisoners-all barrels hot-"The shields are down and enemy infantry are boarding, sir!" "RAMING SPEED!"-all out war.

Best (and worst) part?
Barrel rolling while ramming so the enemy infantry on board can't retreat.

Space War? Cold, clinical, careful. These are vessels that would take years to assemble, if not more, and enter battles that has no chance of salvage or recovery. Actual orbital mechanics and battle speeds would mean any salvage craft would have to already be there and would require so much propellant that it would be unreasonable for it to achieve much of anything other then stabilizing friendly craft's orbits. It would not be capable of actually saving a single wreck form orbital interface or to stop from losing one to deep space.

Space Battles? I like tense build ups to a climatic showdown at short range. An exchange of long range missile fire, defeated by medium range energy weapons that while capable of cutting the thin skin of a missile, would not be able to cut the thick armor belts of capital vessels. No for that you need to actually hit with a nuke, which is unlikely, or close to ranges that would make ballistics the primary gun. "Point blank" volleys of railguns shattering hulls and spilling gas and blood into the void. Marines catapulted through the void in power armor trying to rip vital defenses off the enemy hull to give their side a point defense advantage to finally land a missile capable of cracking the hull in two. Fighters and bombers dueling like submarines with stealth and passive sensors; each side knowing that the instant they are detected in the swirl and chaos of battle, they are dead. All the while carefully maneuvering along the path of the enemy's exhaust to hide them from sensors and the dangerous energy weapons seeking them and their heavy payload of nuclear munitions.

We see the ships under their fields all the time.

I don't recall if -OUs were even described as having obscuring oval fields.

Yes, my favorite part is boarding action, too bad it's rarely a viable option because of all the firepower, shields and such, you really gottta go out of your way to make it a "realistic" alternative to firefights between ships. And it's rare to have it in strategy videogames.

Kinda irrelevant. If a laser hits the ship, it's done for.

Something that allows for both fast paced dogfights and massive lumbering superships.

So far I haven't found an rpg system that allows for that. Any suggestions?

Gundam style battles with big ships in the back looking at charts and firing lasers into nothingness, hoping they hit while smaller ships/mechs have intense dogfights at the frontlines.

Then we are looking at fights starting in different star systems. Like side A is in one system and side B is in another. And they exchange FTL missile attacks. FTL sensor drone scouting raids and so on.

Depends on the tech. For example if we have super drives or sublight warp then even those who are now tumbling in space after their ship was destroyed can be easily picked up.

After battle you'll have a lot of people in space suits floating in space. because even if their ship was cut in half it won't kill them. Unless it had an antimatter storage. Depressurization+space suits also prevents fires on the ship due to hits and some other small problems that happen when ship suffers minor damage.

In a more down to earth setting where propellant is a concern in such a case picking up people after a fight will be pretty hard but even fusion drives will allow it. Though not all of them depending on the trajectory.

>These are vessels that would take years to assemble
Applies to almost all warships

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Tedious and played at light minute/hour ranges.

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I like mine the EVE Online way, minus the TIDI.

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Do ALL Culture ships look like dildos?

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Long range engagements with torpedo salvos trying to overwhelm the enemy point defense systems. Mass accelerator cannons are used in brutal close quarter engagements that usually leave both ships crippled or disabled.

Tell me what this is from my man.

Space Warfare by Isaac Arthur
youtube.com/watch?v=xvs_f5MwT04

IIRC these are human ships from HALO and thus all have Ship length MAC cannons.

What is this from again?

I bet you like Battlestar Galactica then, right?

It's the Culture. Do you really have to ask?

Legend of Galactic Heroes

The Expanse - Donnager Class vs "Stealth Ship" Class
youtube.com/watch?v=SpfCkkKP9eE

The Expanse - Tachi Class vs "Stealth Ship" Class
youtube.com/watch?v=XhKWeGXduzs

>stealth in space

Triggered, but still a good scene though.

I true warrior would never fight from half an AU away from their enemy.

If you're going to kill someone you damn well be prepared to look them right in the eye from your cockpit and know that if your skill and craft are better then their head will be taken with a thunderous roar of a rail cannon.

>that which speaks is named tikkukit
>kuk it
i can see why would it want to capture the only male on the all-female fleet

“and was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems.”

From Excession.

Boarding action. Lots of boarding action and escape pod action when shit hits the fan.

Fuckin love scrambles to the escape pod.

>Ships are super valuable and rated for use up to several hundred years
>It's not uncommon for a ship to trade hands several times through force of violence being easier to repair damages rather than build a whole ship from scratch
>War fighting has adopted to these strategies which puts emphasis on disabling then boarding the vessel.
>Only in the worst case scenarios do you scuttle the vessel and even then someone will no doubt come by and put the various bits and pieces back together.

Oooh that's pretty slick.

What if you take it a step further and, while the technology can be maintained, no one knows how to even build a ship from scratch or just lacks the technological capacity to perform such a feat. They were just discovered (and are still being found) all throughout the galaxy and as such all ships are worth a fortune.

Or perhaps there are "constructed" ships that go sublight and aren't as durable/lack advanced weaponry.

That seems a bit much. Maybe the tech to build vessels that can travel between systems is really hard to do and only very very few groups can actually build one from scratch. Maintaining them is easy and there are plenty of ships that can travel from planet to planet with comparative ease and people would rather spill blood on the consoles than be subservient to the few who can make the sort of ships for them.

What's the point? If you destroy enemy ships it won't matter - because they will be dead.

You basically make yourself to spend a shitton of resources and personnel (and put your own ships in additional danger) to maybe win a little.

The only way I see it working if cheap teleportation devices that work at large enough distance are a thing. But then you can teleport bombs as easy as people and deal with enemy faster.

FTL?

Yeah but in LoGH laser tech is so advanced that if it so much as grazes a ship, no amount of armor will protect the while thing from being melted like butter. Literally the only thing that can protect the ships is shields, and then only sorta.

Keep in mind that in Legend of Galactic Heroes the Imperial ships were designed for nobility who see war as a game. Things like depressurized cabins wearing spacesuits would go against that.

but doesn't the other guys also do it?

Only the millitary ones. GSVs look like bricks, and CGUs are smaller bricks.

That's mostly cruisers and desteroyers that get blown up in one hit, Battleships can survive getting hit more than once, and Beams bounce off the Brynhuld's curved reflective hull.

Because you'd have to turn your planet's industry to build the sort of ships of that value and even then you may not even have the know-how to even do it and can't even reverse-engineer the ones you do have.

So rather than be economically subservient to some assholes you can you fight some guys and take their ship and add it to your group which then might get taken later and you repeat the process over and over again.

I understand, but I am not a fan of, big space battles that take incomprehensible distances away.

I much prefer smaller battles that are much closer.

>Fighting around a space station
>Defending a wormhole
>Not having a massive logistic chain behind you and having to worry about ammo and supplies

>People think this is how it worked back in the day

No. When will this family Guy meme of if you even get scratched you die from infection even come from?

And how do you board them? Besides using super teleporters I mean.

You postulated that ships are hard to create. Therefore any boarding shuttles will suck compared to them and will be blown out. Or will cost a shitton and still be at risk of being destroyed.

The same as I like my revenge: cold.

Shadowrun, fampire.

Wait until it docks and hijack it there.
Hack the system and give yourself admin privileges.
Sneak aboard the supplies and hold it for ransom.

All kinds of way, bruh.