Space Ships Thread

Well, what exactly there is that prevents RKV and AI spam? Most of realistic space combat would be space sniping from long distances and that is boring to most audiences.

Starsector is an amazing game for something in Eternal-Alpha, due to both the dev(s) and the modding community

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>This is a theory of mine, please pick it apart because it's important to my setting details.

Is your setting Hard SciFi or Space Opera?

>Fighters should be the primary weapons in space combat
This is highly unlikely.

Drones or missiles of equivalent size will inherently have better performance in relation to thrust to mass ratio and maximum acceleration. The need to accommodate a human pilot and life support for a human pilot will increase the mass of the vehicle and the physical limitations of human beings will put a hard cap on the ability of the vehicle to maneuver. In addition unless the space military in question considers trained pilots to be completely expendable the fighter must necessarily carry enough fuel to reach their mission area, perform their mission and then also return to their parent vessel, which increases their mass at the expense of payload.

Additionally given the enormous distances involved in space travel and how easy it is to detect an operating spacecraft drive anything that fighters are approaching will see them coming from a long, long way away and an armed spacecraft is going to react by either maneuvering or shooting at the fighters with its own weapons, in the event that the spacecraft is larger than the fighters is likely has a larger power plant and bigger laser optics, meaning it will have dramatically longer effective ranges so the fighters are going to be subject to invisible point defense fire from outside of their own weapons range.

The advantage to a fighter over a drone or missile is that they have a decision making human being in them. In many cases that just isn't necessary or even desirable. In cases where you need a force capable of independent decision making with human accountability you would want to use fighters, in cases where you need to blow up an enemy warship in interplanetary space you would use expendable and equally lethal anti-shipping missiles instead, using fighters would just be needlessly throwing human beings into a wall of CIWS for no reason.

It's also pertinent to remember that missiles, drones and fighters are all just different applications of the same technologies.

- A missile is a drone with a warhead instead of weapons.
- A drone is a fighter with a guidance system instead of a pilot.
- A fighter is a missile with weapons, a pilot, life support and extra fuel.

If you can build one of them you can and probably will build all of them.

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RKV doesn't work against mobile targets with its acceleration times.

AIs are not needed when you can supplement your crew with expert programs. If you use AI it still will mostly use expert programs to run the ship. Because they are smaller and faster. So the difference in actual combat performance will be due to programming abilities of people/AIs at home base and not due to lack of reflexes.

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This is fucking aids

It all depends on your setting background assumptions.

Is most combat in orbit around a planet? Intercepting a fleet in interplanetary space traveling between planets? Wacky space opera hijinks blazing all around solar systems?

These all entail different time scales. In hard SF, hours to split seconds for orbital combat or days to weeks for interplanetary combat.

Remember that space is a single medium unless you're using devices like hyperspace. Geography is measured in dv and range between orbits. In most such cases, if your megaships have sniper weapons, they are going to shoot down any fighters closing in from beyond the range of those fighters; unless they are hidden over the horizon or all weapons are incapable of inter-orbtal ranges.

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The "Space Fighter™" in real life won't be anything like a fighter plane for the same reasons nothing in space is anything like a ground, sea, or air vehicle.

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>How autistic about Fighters are you

I think there's two types of spaceships in scifi. Soft scifi has spaceboats which tend to be based on loose impressions of whatever period of naval and/or air warfare catches the writer's fancy. Space fighters originate from this context. What's telling is that they usually behave as if they're flying in a different medium from the warships. They're really planes, and the ships are really ships. There's no real point in nitpicking them because the intention was never for it to make sense in any real world context. As long as it's consistent all is good.

Hard(er) scifi has spaceships based on the space environment, not on wet ships or airplanes. Building on that, it will have warships based on the tactical and strategic environment you derive and contrive from the space environment, and so on. You don't need to be 100% realistic to go in this category. I think the main distinction here is "based on space" vs "based on the sea and air". Space fighters tend to not make much sense here.

A lot of my favorite scifi is in the former category but the latter is what's really my jam. It also tends to be sorely underutilized and I wish people would do more with it.

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Thank you for your feedback, I feel like I might be on the right track, but I've learned some new concepts I hadn't even considered for combat between starships.

I'm creating a Space Opera setting, but I want to do some research into Hard Sci-Fi as a foundation for the setting's internal consistency. Even outright fantasy sometimes considers the logical conclusions to monster ecology and magic.

If primary means the most number available I'd agree. I'd also think with zero gravity, massive starships will have enough armors to prevent fighters or smaller class ships from taking it out. Thus, everybody will be trying to have the biggest starships possible. Like how germans went to try build maus tanks in ww2. Maus failed due to fuel consumption, size, and speed. In space none of these will matter (compared to smaller starships, anyway).
However, I'd think capital ships sailing side by side firing guns at each other might occur a few points whenever shielding technology overtakes weapons technology. Assuming, it is probably cheaper to use particle beam/laser weapons - since it is gonna be charged by reactors or something, thus having no need to create more missiles, they could be stopped if ships have electromagnetic forcefield - if you create negative electric field, most of the energy will be bounced back, if you use a strong enough magnetic field, the beam will just go around the same way lights travel around planets. If this happens simply blowing them up with missiles or kinetic weapons may be neccessary, and with smaller ships being unable to penetrate bigger ships with massive armors, capital ships may line up next to each other - close enough for the missiles to be effective anyway.

If I had a starship size classification that follows pre-carrier-beats-all navy theme, so that it is
fighter-corvette-frigate-cruiser-destroyer-carrier-battleship then what would you suppose be the most acceptable size comparison classification for non-military spaceships? I was thinking like naming ships something like dive boat(since landing on planets would be the closest to diving in this universe)-mining ship (with allusions to fishing boat)-passenger-freighter/cargo-colony ship or something like that, but I am not sure if that sounds okay.
On a probably unrelated note Dunkirk was a great film.

All of this depends heavily on your tech assumptions. Usually though I don't think armor would be a winner. Space is pretty friendly to offense, and the faster your propulsion tech makes you go the more true that is because the more energy anything you fling at the enemy ship has. It doesn't mean armor can't be useful - it might be particularly useful against laser fire and it might still help contain damage from a kinetic strike even if it can't stop it. Think of it like infantry body armor: It's helpful in many cases, but it's still not a good idea to stand up and try to tank a hail of machine gun fire.

That said, since it depends heavily on your assumptions you can probably make a set of assumptions that gets you big, armored warships. If lasers are your weapon of choice and they generally beat missiles, there might not be any practical way to actually do a kinetic or nuclear attack because the lasers would swat any missiles or small craft away at long range. Big ships would be heavily preferred since they can fit bigger optics and a laser with a longer effective range beats one with a shorter effective range every time. The square-cube law also makes the mass of armor work out nicer for bigger ships. You can tune the power of your lasers however you like to make armor as effective as you want it to be. You might end up with a situation where your beams can burn off laser optics, sensors, thrusters and anything else that needs to be on a ship's surface, but have a hard time actually piercing the hull. In that case missiles might be used to finish off crippled ships.

It's just about the only scientifically accurate ship here, dipshit. Educate yourself on both the setting and astromechanics.

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>strapping giant turrets and space shuttles to the side of a giant bullet is "scientifically accurate"
And they appear to be just regular old fashion battleship pea shooters not railguns. The future is now old man. Why use those when missiles exist?

Those are ace, very cool space ships.

I'm not a great fan of that design but this is funny because the only real world design for a space battleship looks like this.

That drawing is bound to be somewhat speculative since this only existed in the form of a model which has been destroyed and was never shown publicly. It also wasn't a detailed design study as far as I know but just an illustration of what sort of thing they could do with the technology. But still, it's a giant bullet with strapped on naval turrets and shuttles for reentry.

I had an idea for a classification based basically on "how far can the ship go?"
Orbital (so basically super-shuttle) is a Corvette, Interplanetary is a Frigate, Stellar is a destroyer, Interstellar is a cruiser.

I thought size might be better since, with zero gravity, one might not really need to accelerate- thus with enough vacumn space, one could theroratically go forever. Like voyager records or new horizons satelite (the one that passed Pluto), would technically both be stellar. If you say those won't count since they are single use unmanned vehicle. At a universe that makes space battlecruisers, I assume it'd be easy enough to make a manned spacecraft that could hold at least one person for indefinite amount of time using either cryogenics or loads and loads of non perishable food and oxygen, just to ruin this classification system.

Someone makes a pointless gimmick craft just to break a classification system and go "gotcha!" and then... nobody cares people keep using it anyway.

If you're classifying spaceships by range it would be based on their intended use. You might be able to take a little boat across the Atlantic and go "See! This is a seagoing ship!" but it's really not gonna ruin any shipwright's definitions.

>I'm creating a Space Opera setting, but I want to do some research into Hard Sci-Fi as a foundation for the setting's internal consistency. Even outright fantasy sometimes considers the logical conclusions to monster ecology and magic.

I'd take a cue from modern naval warfare and use that as a starting point. Overwhelming a ship's defenses with a dozen cheap missiles is a sounder strategy than sending over a handful of planes to attack.

I rather like the combat as shown on The Expanse.

I like the idea of rail guns that use iron-rich asteroids as projectiles.

yes that is certainly true that gimmick craft wouldn't neccessarily break the definition once it becomes the norm, but since satelites can already travel upto interstellar and it hasn't even been a 100 years. If first serious boat ever in this universe's history was a seagoing ship anyway that could cross the atlantic. I don't see why that universe would classify ships by range, or minimum range would be significantly long - since first ships were interstellar anyway. How would that be classified? A smaller spacecraft that first went interstellar vs a newly created massive moon like spacecraft that only orbits for some reason, even though it isn't completely stationary. Would that be an exception?

Also, if the ships are ranged by their intended use. Who is standardizing the definition of intended use in their world? The shipwright who created the ship? A guild of shipwright? Government inspection? Would the criteria include something like average life support expentancy per maximum crew and passengers/cargo?

It's backwards thinking, for instance, interplanetary ships being Frigates doesn't mean that a frigate is a ship capable of interplanetary travel, but that ships build for a viable efficent interplanetary and not further are classified as frigate.

efficiency of travel would result in a certain size. My idea would be that they aren't tons of ships, really only hundreds at most, and those would mostly be shuttles/corvette, with only 3-5 interstellar cruisers, and therefore, there isn't a lot of different classes and generations of ships (2-3 at most), so like 3 types of corvettes, 2 types of frigates, 2 types of destroyer, 1 lose type of cruiser which are more one of kind but follow the same kind of specs.

To be honest, much as I love space opera stuff, 'realistic' fighters will probably look like naval cannons with thrusters and drone or remote operated and designed to basically be giant, spess sniper rifles.

So in otherwards: 'dog fighting' is basically going to look like a 2fort sniper war.

But for personal preference, I tend to like fighters as being about the size of a large pick-up truck (albeit probably a lot heavier) with anything smaller usually being some super-minimalist machine either not truly meant for a fight, or expected to always have plenty of support.

I guess this wont work in my setting. Where travel efficiency difference is supposedly negligible. Tons of ships. Supposedly lot of different classes and generations.

What would your universe be calling your non-military ship classes, if at all? with names like cruisers, frigates, destroyers definitely military origin, I'd assume a large luxury liner type ship wouldn't be called destroyer class, or something like that.

I like to use lots of terms for those.
Depends of the dT and how well armed they are. For example, a Galleon it's a well armed trade or freight vessel of great size (more than a tipical cruiser), used to freight important cargo in bulk and able to jump, the carrack is the less well armed and dt, poorer couisin. The brig is the same as a galleon but a lot smaller ( bigger than frigate tiers dt tough)being the poorer cousin the carabel, while the cutter is the name for the little, well armed jump capable trade vessels, the sloop for the less well armed.
Then you have free traders, Bulk freighters, Passenger liners, cargo containers, Bricks (little container tuggers for intraestellar hauling) etc.

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As far as ship scales goes I've always had a soft spot for smaller private ships that are heavily customized versions of mass production cargo and patrol ships.

I also like the idea of ships as long range boosters/weapon platforms for mecha, though realistically it'd proably make more sense to make it a regular ship sense there's no reason for humanoid machines bigger than an exoskeleton to exist in space. Though what if you had a privater ship crew that bought the failed prototype of a space type mech, but then mounted it on their ship as a gun turret/ manipulator suite? With the ability to fold in for out of combat cursing of course.

As a mainly pulp/space opera peasant could you explain that a bit more? How would be a Space armada based on that, if they could have a FTL engine (using unbotanium/antimatter as fuel) but not more space magic .

I don't see why not, for a space opera game/setting mechs are okay. If you want to go full Hard sci fi it would be mroe complicated, but I can see very well a kind of otlaw Serenity/cowboy bebop with mechs instead of fighters/boats.

I see space fighters being used similar to patrol boats. Bigger is better in open space, but you can't just put a battleship anywhere when you're dealing with planets and space stations.

There's nothing to prevent you putting a battleship anywhere you can put a fighter.

The thing is you don't often see a blend of mechs and fighter craft. Most mecha series tend to have mechs as the primary combat machine with big battleships providing support with long range cannons and acting as a repair dock. On the flip side series that use fighters hardly ever have anything beyond the power loader from Aliens.

I'd wanna see a setting where the two exist side by side, but serve different roles in the battle field. Maybe ships are more for high speed attacks over longer distances, where as mechs are better for mid to close range combat around space stations and asteroid fields.

Seems like you would like Jovian Chronicles, the ones than did Heavy Gears (or votoms in the western way). It's basically Gundam being made be canadians as a table top game. It also has some of my preferd star ships.

It takes a lot more energy to shift a battleship's orbit than to launch a fighter.

One of the mechs (than are meh, I prefer votoms/heavy gear style).

And some starships with some space fighters.

The setting, while not very exiting, it's quite well done and more into Hard Sci fi than lots of other.

Recently started playing Elite: Dangerous again, and reminded myself that they're developping an RPG, with a playtest adventure already out. But, being playtest, it's comparatively barebones, and it'll probably be a while until the actual core rules come out

So, I was wondering, are there are RPGs that can simulate ship-to-ship combat in a satisfying manner, be it one-man-fighter skirmishes, multicrew ships, or a mix?

It'd be cool to see a massive ship be hit from another ship so far away they could see it. This kind of tactic would be best since you don't have to worry about earths gravity, or better yet use planets and stars to fling projectiles at your enemy.

Yeah, but you can only afford to build a few battleships, compared to many smaller ships. So when Venus learns that the UNSC Ki Moon had been dispatched to Mars, the Venusians Rose up in rebellion against the Corps...

I remembering reading about this when I was looking into alternatives to Mekton and GURPS for a mecha campaign that never materialized. How is it? I'd be interested to know how it handles creating custom units and mech to ship combat.

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There's definitely merit in the idea of a "patrol cutter" rather than a ship designed to fight a conventional war. It would be in part a monitor for shipping lanes, an on-call emergency response vessel, and a tariff and customs enforcement boat.

Of course, it would need to carry some arms in order to back up this mission with force. But they would tend to be smaller, shorter ranged, and precise.