Other than energy shields and heavy armor, how might a spaceship defend itself from attacks?

There is no stealth in space.

Nuclear flares.

>Dodging guided munitions in space
You'd want to be able to dodge shit like railguns, but a spread of guided torpedoes wouldn't give much of a shit about your maneuvers when your ship has to take care not to splatter its crew against the wall.

>energy shields and armor
I can think of a pile of reasons extra armor is shit on a spaceship: requires exponentially larger engines to offset, makes your maneuverability shit/super fucking energy expensive, still won't save you from heavy munitions.
Energy shields are space magic, and I can't imagine a civilization capable of swatting significant amounts of kinetic/thermal/electromagnetic energy aside with "energy fields" wouldn't have weapons capable of drawing a vector through space, launching "energy" (read: particles) at near-c, and deleting whatever that line intersects.

You're going to want to active countermeasures to kill missiles/torpedoes before they tear the hull open, maneuverability to reduce the odds of a dumb projectile landing a hit, and enough armor and internal structure to keep the ship from popping like a soda can after a single hit.

Unless you're talking about a space opera setting. In which case, why outsource your imagination when you're free to magic away?

Watch some Battlestar Galactica and Mass Effect. Not be all, end all sources for the subject matter but it'll give you plenty of inspiration.

I know you said energy shields, but I liked Macross' pinpoint defense shields. For some PLOT related reason they didn't have an omni-directional shield and instead had three small shields they could use to intercept enemy fire. Hilariously they used trackballs to control the shields.

Shields and weapons that phase through dimensions.

Traveller had Sandcasters for throwing chaff/ECM/literal sand in the way of delicate missiles or focused laser beams.

Alternity had deflection inducers which took gravity tech and tried to 'bend' things around the vessel, even beam weapons.

The entirety of Macross is wonderfully low-tech. They also couldn't use the shields if they wanted to fire the main cannon if I'm not mistaken.

>laser beams
Problem with those is that you cannot react to them at all if we're talking realism.

They do have an effective range, so you can preempt them at least.

Chaff?

You can be proactive in anticipation of lasers, and take evasive maneuvers or deploy diffracting countermeasures. It's just impossible to know if they've been fired or where they'll hit beforehand.

youtu.be/xvs_f5MwT04

I like the idea of using artificial gravity to defend a ship.
Either using it to curve the path of projectiles away from the ship using some negative gravity, or using it to direct projectiles into certain parts of the ship that have a ton of armour, leaving the rest of the ship unarmoured, but unlikely to be hit.

Doesn't work that well with lasers though, so it depends on the setting.

The trouble is getting a powerful enough gravity field to actually affect something significantly.

Don't forget focusing the shields on the carrier deck (forearm) in mech mode and using it to punch the enemy dreadnaught, then having all the destroids on the deck pop up and launch all their shit inside the enemy ship.

By outnumbering the enemy.

>able to manipulate gravity
>still throwing kinetic projectiles at each other's vessels
This is why we don't give phasers to cavemen desu

May as well invent a tachyon laser that kills your enemies before they were born.

>Remember that time you spontaneously aborted in your mother's womb?
>IT WAS ME, BARRY!

>requires exponentially larger engines to offset
Offset what?

There is no gravity, you idiot. Instead of larger engines, you need MORE engines for maneuvering

>wasting energy on keeping a ball of energy hot and relying on heat damage
>Not just using a railgun that penetrates armour and gets just as hot, but only when it needs to be hot during and after penetration

^This

Why wouldn't large space ships have man/alien controlled or A.I. control small fighters held in ship bays. It's possible they could even have an infinite supply if Replicators are a thing. Imagine a race of 4armed, 2-headed mercenary aliens who can pilot 2 of these ships at once.

Dodge rolling.

>aliens who can pilot 2 of these ships at once.
By remote means from within the safe confines of the mothership that is

>NERA (Nuclear Explosive Reactive Armor)

Fighters are a poor choice for space combat, you don't need that kind of force projection as you can deliver the same payloads from the carrier.

CIWS/ Flak-cannons. Chaff, ecm, missilebarrage, drones, evasion...

Interceptor drones?
Ferrous asteroids manipulated by magnetic fields?

Strike first.
Evasive maneuver.
Chaff launchers etc. Stuff that can throw off enemy targeting systems.
Quick self repair.
Launching a bunch of small drones or fighter jets.
Large scale projections / effective cloaking.
Hacking enemy systems to prevent their weapons from firing.
Anti projective defense systems that shoot down projectiles en route.

More engine = bigger engine. Doesn't matter if you have two putting out a gee each or one putting out two gee.

Ablative shields like small drones or ships that take the hit.

Maybe collecting asteroids that are around you with some gravity field. If hit, the parts will refigure itselt.

Energy collecting devices for lasers.

Missile with stuff in it that either lessen the energy level of lasers or that re-routes projectiles.

Array of mini lasers that targets laser or projectiles and stop it

...

Considering "realistic" space combat would be taken at tremendous range with lasers, there's no real defense except specialized reflective plating and not getting hit.

As said above, CIWS, Chaff, Evasion are one way to go.

Another is to have jump engine. Small distance flicker jumps to evade, or another way to put such engines to torpedoes, to counter enemy ciws.

From a bit I'm working at:
Ships come in flying saucer and torch variants. Saucers don't care about fuel much, torches do. Torches can be faster while their fuel lasts.
Saucers can use stealth (senors are pretty bad and there is no AI) but a boosting torch is pretty much automatically spotted.
Primary weapon is the torch powered long range missile, typically with a directional warhead a la Casaba-Howitzer.
Missiles have limited automation and will typically be escorted by a torch fighter (500-1000 ton range). The fighter carries short range missiles and point defense. The fighter also carries a number of remote control operator station and communications gear, to control missiles.
Short range missiles carry megaton range basic nukes and use unreasonably efficient solid fuel rockets. (torches also have unreasonable Isp and thrust)
Point defense is typically short range missiles, lasers, rapid fire cannon or railguns shooting timer fuzed shotgun or nuclear shells.
Electronic warfare plays a part. Maneuver only really helps with setting up attacks and avoiding unescorted long range missiles.
Missile attacks are gambles. You want the missile in as close as you can to get a good probability of hit with the shaped nuke beam. A contact hit would be devastating but in practice that would only work with a cripple.
Outright destroying ships is something to be avoided. There are rare superheavy elements in saucer drives and to some extent in fusion reactors and torches.
(I want a setup where ship stats are relevant and logistics are a thing - if you have 20 LRMs in the launcher array and 30 in the hold unfueled, that's what you have.
Problem is the attempts I've made at a system for it - looking to make it around Savage Worlds - have been too defense biased, leading to no fun and magdumping being necessary.)

>This is why we don't give phasers to cavemen desu
What are you talking about? If you have strong gravity control, then kinetic weapons become and amazingly good idea. You could build massive gravitational synchrotrons, and hurl chunks of tungsten out at relativistic speeds. Electromagnetic weapons are all held back by either difficulties with coils, charging the projectile or the need for the barrel to make contact the projectile. A "gravity gun" has none of those limits, and can throw projectiles as speeds only limited by it's size and the strongest gravitational fields you could create.

Stealth
Onboard telepath mind-raping enemy gunners/tactical officers
Preemptive EMP mines to shut down incoming missiles before they get close enough to do damage.
Highly-conductive hull outer plating that distributes laser heat evenly across the surface so that damaging it takes stupid amounts of energy, especially for a large vessel.

Mine capsule encased brother of interstellar means.

Fragmentation of the ship into smaller, more manuverable ships.

Also, watch/read the Expanse for more realistic spaceships

On the realistic side of things, light armour IE wipple shields, and wide angle casaba howitzers as point defence.

If you want something cool but is just a variety of shield, look up Langston Fields in some of Jerry Pournelles books. Covers the ship in impenetrable black orb that absorbs all energy. Ships need to poke their sensors and weapons out through it and can be shot off, the field can only hold so much energy and it changes colours up through the rainbows as it radiates more and more energetically. Once it's too much it can burn into the protected ship. It helps developed a setting where ships tend to surrender rather than be destroyed.

Guided munitions would be easier to dodge because they're not going as faster as lasers and will run out of fuel if you go evasive.

...

I'm getting PTSD flashbacks

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>trackballs

I never realized how adorable those are.

In a "realistic" setting that still has high-powered interplanetary spacecraft, delta-V differentials rule all.

Armor is mainly an anti-laser measure. Lasers are the main dedicated-military weapon, but missile buses are a cheap and effective alternative if you don't do a lot of war. Dedicated military ships will have banks of point-defence missile to stop leakers from missile salvos if they overwhelm the main lasers.

Then there's counterbattery with lasers, shooting the other ships mirrors through the lenses. So multiple output points are likely to be a thing.

>You'd want to be able to dodge shit like railguns, but a spread of guided torpedoes wouldn't give much of a shit about your maneuvers when your ship has to take care not to splatter its crew against the wall.

Same dynamic as airplanes with guided missiles, however: you can still dodge over a certain range. The missiles have more maneuverability, so inside a certain range you're screwed, but farther away the aircraft has more fuel. It can maneuver to force the missiles to maneuver instead of coast, and thus run them out of fuel.

In this scenario it is a good idea to launch multiple shots, both at him and the surrounding area he could move too

Like several anons have said, maneuvering will be more important than shields or armor.

Also, ECMs. Your ship's AI can hack enemy missile guidance systems to throw them off course, attempt to disrupt enemy sensors to create a false image on their radar, possibly try to forcefully override the enemy systems and lock them out of their own consoles. All kinds of fun stuff.

Good luck, I'm behind 7 falcons.

You might want to spend a bit less time taking EW knowledge from fiction.

You can absolutely jam their sensors. Everything else you mentioned is possible only if you're fighting gibbering retards who don't use encryption or basic computer security.

>mass an intertia don't exist in space
Square-cubed law applies to superstructure and engine cross-sections, dingus.

>Guided munitions would be easier to dodge
Only at close range. Given sufficient distance to accelerate, a modest spread of guided missiles is going to create a zone of interception that a crewed ship can't get out of without killing its occupants with g-force.

By repressing their heat emissions and deflecting signals. Something like stealth planes avoiding radar, except in space.

Because space is big, and spaceships- even amazingly huge ones- are pretty small.

Space is also pretty empty.
As a matter of fact, space is much emptier than spacecraft are small.

So your stealth ship stands out like a giant glowing beacon of "FUCK MY ASS PLEASE". Doubly so when it's accelerating.

No idea if this is already posted but.....
projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardefense.php

Repressing.....

You do realize just how cold space is?
You would need to make yourself appear below zero.

For a spaceship, that is nigh impossible.

These are good ideas, and remind me why I'm shit at hard sci-fi. But wouldn't temperature not be easily-detectable at long range (because short-range would be figurative knifefighting with spaceships) due to the whole vacuum thing?

Maybe just doing 'the best you can', aided with a bunch of decoy ships that give off slightly more heat and radio noise...

The problem is heat spreads.

And in a vacuum, it can spread very quickly.

It would literally flow out like a beacon, screaming "Here is my ship"

So unless we're talking system-long distances that can have the heat blotted out by stars, you will detect them.

But then again, if you're attempting to shoot someone at that range, then clearly science has advanced to a point where powerful enough sensors would also exist for the express purpose of that.

Considering that gravity control will still probably decay with R^2 as a weapon it will be pretty close ranged. On the other hand making a sublight warp drive for dodging without acceleration will be a top notch defense.

A: Acceleration requires thrust. Thrust means throwing high-energy stuff into space so Newton's 3rd works. That means giant plumes of hot stuff. You CANNOT accelerate meaningfully without telling everybody in the system where you are. And if you don't accelerate meaningfully but do get detected, the enemy can just lob a missile at you from a month away and know they'll hit.
B: Space is cold and empty. And the only way to get rid of heat in space is to radiate it. So you either cook to death in an insulated shell, have nothing that generates any heat (so no computers, engines, life, etc), or give away your position.
C: Even if YOU aren't generating emissions, all it takes to break your stealth is a giant radio broadcast tower beaming EM in all directions. Whoops, you're either reflecting that EM and visible on radar or absorbing that EM and heating up.

Replicators don't make them infinite. You still need to haul mass from which fighters will be made. Which means you can as well carry ready fighters.

Replenishing destroyed fighters after a fight by eating asteroids is ok.

youtube.com/watch?v=xvs_f5MwT04
Reflective skin, evasion, hitting first and hitting hard.

Lots and lots of Flak and Chaff

...

Using massive amounts of negative energy a void in space is formed expanding outwards at the speed of light. Because the local expansion of space is greater than the speed of light it is physically impossible to traverse that distance. Therefore, a spacecraft with such a barrier would be absolutely impossible to hit.

Here's a novel idea. Rather than try to hide why not blast all frequencies and forms of detection with so much junk it makes monitoring with anything except direct caramas all but useless?

camo : look like a dead comet/asteroid lazily tumbling through space. Alternatively, look like a friendly instead of the enemy.

It's amazing how many folks say some variant of "there is no stealth in space". Translation : "I have no imagination." Everybody talks about trying to be cool like the background radiation so your heat doesn't give you away, but that it can't be done. Guess what is one of the many things our nuclear submarines do so as not to be detected by the enemy? Uh huh. They hide their heat. But hey, why not go the other way? Why not compress your waste heat emissions and turn them into a burst of x or gamma rays? Disguise yourself as an intermittent stellar phenomenon, a regularly pulsing neutron star.

Bribery.

long distance jamming:
>be advised fleet, we're getting some attenuated interference coming from this direction
>yeah, we're seeing it from this direction, let's triangulate
>visual confirms hostile vessel
>lob torpedo volley in that direction, which happen to have direct cameras among their array of targeting scanners
>RIP

close range jamming
>establish direct optic commlink to battlegroup
>hey, this fucker's jamming us
>triangulate
>pound them with kinetic rounds
>RIP

Drunkwalking. At range the ships jink and boost around using RCS thrusters and gimbals. It makes the ship almost impossible to track for a firing solution at extreme range.

>gee that's weird, why are sensors suddenly picking up radiation bursts where there were none before
>and why is the astrometry software tracing it to this point 2.5au away
Natural celestial sources of radiation spikes would be well catalogued, and making loud noises out of nowhere in the middle of a silent room is the opposite of hiding. It might confuse an unsuspecting civilian transport for up to a minute before they figure it out, but a minute is fuck-all time to pull off a surprise in space.

Yes because the opposing force couldn't do something similar or breaking through the jamming is that easy.

>For some PLOT related reason they didn't have an omni-directional shield

They did. It was a very bad idea when they used it, but the second time they used it, it saved the human race.

>The entirety of Macross is wonderfully low-tech.

Just the macross itself, more important what the setting lacks in some forms of tech (before they develop shit like the black hole missiles) it makes up for in sheer firepower. Golg Boddole Zer's main battle fleet contained 4,795,122 capital ships, and it was one fleet out of a thousand. Of just the MALES of their species.

>breaking through the jamming
Pointing a laser at an allied ship's shielded laser receptacle - which they are conveniently aiming at the nearest allied ship per jamming protocol - and using it to tap out messages isn't hard.

First rule of stealth in space: don't try to sneak up on a fleet. Go full Sun Tzu with false ID mind games and isolation of an easy target, or go home.

Because noise jamming is basically putting a giant "MURDER ME" sign on your face.

And if your hardware is half-decent, you can just "cover up" the source of all low-penetration wavelengths. So it won't block IR detection.

My thoughts on the matter is not to use this in a mass engagement.

Single out and hunt down individual ships and use noise and violence to keep them from calling for help, pillage them and then be on your way before anyone can come and help.

Speed and 1 on 1 combat is essential for this strategy to work.

So your idea is to shout REALLY LOUDLY so nobody notices you blowing up ships?

The goal is to interrupt the targets coms and scanners. Are you saying it's impossible point all that at a single target rather than broadcast it everywhere?

Shitting EM at a ship will in absolutely no way hinder their ability to emit. And if you're shitting EM at just them, everybody in the system will hear them loud and clear.

Hence the need for speed and violence.

That said, it's not as if we have a set of rules to go by so we may as all well be making shit up according to our individual tastes. I suppose electronic warfare can be coupled with physical hacking, like say having an inside man on the target vessel or a missle probe that intereacts with the ships systems and attempts to subvert them.

All equally viable unless we have something concreate to work with.

You're confusing the hell out of me.
If you plan to swoop in and wreck some fucker, why do you care if they can hear replies to their distress calls?

Furthermore, how the fuck do you expect to be able to sustain this? You'll swoop in, guns blazing and broadcasting your position systemwide. Then you'll, what? Somehow avoid combat while still picking off ships?

Fuck, how would you even "single out and hunt down" a single ship?

Trading vessels, luxury liners, personal vessels, smugglers trying to stay off the main paths?

Will all have escorts in a state of war.
And you can't smuggle in space by "staying off the main paths".

Seriously, get this through your head already. EVERYBODY in a system with basic detection gear knows where everybody else is.

DIdnt that backfire one time?

Provided the ship Is large enough, flight decks to launch smaller squadrons of fighters/bombers. Anything else I'd normally recommend Is all over the thread. Full of really great points, you guys know your shit.

Electronic countermeasures.

And then simply not getting hit. Weapons scale so much faster than armor does.

>What is look-through?

Sensors scan the frequency range randomly at super quick intervals and see if the jammed target is still broadcasting. The moment they stop, it turns off its jammers. It detects it again? It turns on the jammers.

This shit has been around since the 60's.

And again, how in the world is shouting at the target going to stop them from sending a distress call?