Space Ship Weapons

Speaking of mass driver ships, i got a cool (probably not very practical but fuck it) idea.
Let's say you are battling aliens and have to make a devastating first strike against an alien fleet.
You know what point they are going to warp out of (due to techno magic) and you cant lay mines there or pre-set any obstacles either (due to technobabble, plasmabubble that disintegrates matter at warp out point).
So you do the next best thing, you calculate how long it will take for them to warp out and during this time you move your fleet to another position in the solar system.
From this point you fire your mass drivers at the location where the enemies will be in X amount of time, timing your shot so that they are outside the warp bubble when the aliens dewarp but will soon after that impact with them.
After this, you perform several micro jumps within the system, positioning yourself near the area where the mass rounds will fly by you, then as they fly by you, you fire a second salvo and now there are twice as many mass rounds flying in close proximity towards same goal.
Repeat this as many times as you have time/want.
Watch as enemy fleet dewarps and gets hammered from all sides by a literal wall of mass rounds that hit simultaneously.

Honestly, space weaponry is an oxymoron. Not to go on forever about how space wars would never happen but ultimately in space where there is no cover, range is king (assuming FTL weaponry). Say the railguns are used as long range hull busters. Railguns cannot be scaled down due to absurd recoil and huge portions of your ship are used as a recoil sink or whatever. The 'slug' is fired with such speed and density that onboard weapon defense systems cannot stop the projectile. They know for a fact it's coming but by the time you know, how the fuck do you stop that in time?

Only the biggest ships have railguns. Big ships counter big ships due to the inherent problems with maneuvering large bodies. There is no real way for large ships to quickly maneuver themselves out of the path of fire from any weapon thus, armor up to invulnerable status. This means large ships are actually EVEN LARGER due to the insane amount of defense is necessary. This means they are practically only vulnerable to railgun systems and internal sabotage or micro-ships/drones finding cracks in the hull to exploit.

Since these large ships are only breakable by obscene weapons like railguns, they also started carrying railguns (a technology that is typically overkill and inefficient).

Smaller ships still have a purpose. They are agile and can simply avoid the shot of a railgun that takes a relatively long time to charge, aim and fire. Smaller ships can also be used to raid, dump drones, etc. Large scale fleet battles typically see large ships firing railguns at each other trying to puncture their massive hulls while smaller ships run sabotage missions, attempt a boarding missions into 'cracked' ships or usually do the killing blow. A railgun will crack the outer layer but smaller ships can get into the crack and blow it up from the inside (Usually by spinning which is a cool trick or having a one-in-a-million shot).

Sound ok?

Kill all the overwrought bullshit. If you can't read it handing upside down in a utility closet, the insignia are too complicated.

The loops and red bars are fine, the diagonal bullshit and all the fucking swords are garbage.

Bars and Stars gentlemen.

>Is that a good enough justification?
Yes.

>How can I stick to it and still justify the use of strikecraft and missiles?
Strikecraft are suited for an unique mission: go within the target's ECM field which prevents unmanned systems and electronic targeting and fire a nuclear blaster as crudely as WW2 fighters used rockets. Said cannon is actually a kind of one-shot shaped charge which narrows the explosion forward enough that it becomes a nuclear-powered energy shotgun. It usually isn't enough to breach the hull or cripple a capital ship, but it strips vulnerable systems off the enemy hull, like the laser point defense, cameras etc.

Then the missiles become effective against big targets. But they usually work against strike craft which can't pack all the countermeasures and respective power plant.

>(c'mon, those ships are lame)
When did blowing up nuclear bombs to go up became lame? And nuclear-pumped x-ray lasers? I based the above on reading the site.

>i don't understand the difference between velocity and acceleration, the post

Rail gun rounds are cheap, they're just forged/cnc designed metal chunks

Missiles are expensive and require possibly volitile fuel and guidence chips

Missiles can still be used but could be more secilized payloads like em countermeasures, self replicating WiFi viruses, attachable tracking rounds, or sensor rounds for quicker shot recalculation

Strike craft could be more for interdiction, ground support and work in orbits or around asteroids or other orbital installations. Also laying mines and sensor nets

I was going to replace the swords with simple lines for each rank. Ratings get white lines, petty officers get red lines and warrant officers get gold lines.

I'm working with the same concept, and I must say, there isn't much TO explain. A fuckhuge mass driver is a good idea in space warfare, but there is no way in hell you can make it turret mounted unless you have magical super-small and super-effective conductors for power and heat. And even if you do, you must remember that recoil is a thing, and is generally bad news bears for a spacecraft if it happens off-thrust-axis.

>How can I stick to it and still justify the use of strikecraft and missiles?

Strike craft should be like gunships: multi-crew, short-ranged fire support used for tasks that are too much even for a corvette (like running anti-smuggler patrols around a space colony) or zerg rush the enemy and overwhelm their offensive and/or defensive capabilities.

Missiles should be more like automated mines. They are launched into an area where they then become dormant (pretty much undetectable), only activating when an enemy ship passes in close vicinity. They are used to deny advantageous positions and lock down certain movement vectors. They can be used for direct attack normally, but it is considered a rather desperate act (for example when you have too much waste heat to fire the mass drivers).

>When did blowing up nuclear bombs to go up became lame?

When you realize that the Orion drive only looks good on paper, but is utterly retarded otherwise.

One thing I'm thinking about is a Space Navy that has an organic composition instead of a hierarchic one. There are no ranks or similar distinctions, the whole thing runs kinda like a huge family. You have a commander at each level (ship/squadron/task force/fleet) whose orders are absolute, but otherwise, you are on your own. Stick to your business, try to be productive and not disruptive, the rest is largely meaningless. There is only so much you can do on a spaceship, after all.

I think the ranges of space combat more or less require spinal mounted weapons.

If a battleship is just a mobile armored gun emplacement, and space is really big, then you want the biggest gun possible to engage targets at the longest range possible, which means building the ship around the gun. If you want more guns, bring more ships. A ship with turrets firing in a broadside doesn't make as much sense when you don't have to worry about stabilizing the guns against the waves anymore, and at the most likely ranges in space, it will always be easier to just point the whole ship at the target.

As for missiles, even a missile will benefit from being launched by a large spinal mass driver. The only weapons that don't make sense to spinal mount are lasers (which have to be wide rather than long) and point defenses (which will engage at closer range)

So the ideal space battleship is a long pointy thing with a single spinal mounted gun that may or may not launch missiles, and a secondary battery of some sort of turret mounted point defenses.

A space destroyer would be a smaller ship with a point defense weapon in a smaller spinal mount (it can rotate much faster effectively making it a mobile turret) There may or may not also be cruisers with a greater focus on turret based weapons, but they will be kept away from the front lines of any serious engagement. Their job is to lead squadrons of destroyers, escort battleships, and patrol places where battleships are not expected to be a problem.

Specialized missiles
sensor disruption, FTL drive inhibitors, Micro warp missiles that are long range and make tiny FTL jumps to avoid countermeasures.

>spinal mounted

sounds painful

That would be an interesting system for a clan based faction or for space nomads but I don't see how it would work in a professional volunteer navy.

Also, I am boring and stick to the Space Navy tropes as close as possible for my main faction.

Didn't even know they bothered with flagships seeing as how expandable ships seem to be in LoGH.

>Spinal mounted point defense

wat?

And in Alliance side most of their flagships are made from same pattern.
In the empire on the other hand they got enough money to build a specialized personal flagship for the admiral in question.

Why do they all employ 19th century Napoleonic infantry tactics in space? There doesn't seem to be any maneuvering at all, they just all get in a clump and shoot at each-other.

> They know for a fact it's coming but by the time you know, how the fuck do you stop that in time?

Dont stop, evade. Space is big, and near misses offer no rewards. If they are aiming across your flight path, almost any deviation will result in a miss.

This effectively shortens the nigh-infinite actual range of your weapons to the effective kill range of where an enemy ship realistically has trouble evading the shot in time. Your slug can be moving at 99% lightspeed, but if your target is 3 light days away they have plenty of time to move the few dozen meters in any direction required to save themselves. They might even do it incidently before they know you fired.

It's been a while since I watched the series, but in the books they do go on about how Yang's flagship is a cruiser (the Hyperion) instead of a battleship like the rest of the fleet flagships.

You mean the "wall of battle"? Since they've concentrated all weapons in the bow, it's the only formation needed.

If you mean fleet manoeuvres, they don't always use the "thrust forward and bang away" one. Good admirals do stuff like encircle the enemy, and the great admirals remember that space is 3D and form their fleets into doughnuts or spheres on occasion.

>Rail gun rounds are cheap, they're just forged/cnc designed metal chunks
Actually not metal chunks. They are probably plastic or some other radar transparent material in a metal casing. After acceleration projectile sheds the casing and becomes really hard to find in any reasonable timeframe.

>They are launched into an area where they then become dormant (pretty much undetectable)

Unless there are some other space objects in this area they will be very much detectable. They may be detected only as space rocks but military vessels would definitely hit them with a laser just to be sure.

You need some big asteroids to hide them properly.

>Why do they all employ 19th century Napoleonic infantry tactics in space?

They lose communication if they stray to far from one another or don't have ships relaying commands due to the powerful ECM both sides use. The ships also have their armament in the bow of the ship so you need to keep that end pointed at the enemy.

>
for you

The destroyer is much smaller than the battleship, and can rotate much faster. It turns to face any incoming threats and shoots them down before they arrive.

This counts as point defense because it can only defend against attacks that are approaching the destroyer, or a ship the destroyer is in formation with. Essentially the entire ship is just one giant mobile CIWS to protect the giant mobile gun.

Some people might prefer to call this thing a "fighter" but fighters imply that it will be going on longer ranged missions away from the mothership. Fighters don't normally hold tight formation with the ships they are escorting. The destroyer has a much higher rotation speed than the battleship, but has roughly the same acceleration and endurance. Perhaps even less if it relies on the battleship as a mothership. In an emergency the Battleship might leave it's escorts behind as a screen as it escapes from danger. It's much more valuable.

The empire flagships were all prototypes for the next generation of mass produced battleship that was determined to be too expensive for mass production.

The Empire makes lots of prototypes like this because they have a much higher RnD budget than the Alliance. The fact that there are a bunch of Foppish admirals who all want fancy ships is just a bonus.

Realistically, missiles are better than guns in space. You get more velocity from a minute of pushing with a rocket than you can possibly hope to with a fraction of a second of magnetic acceleration. If you can make the railgun projectile impossible to destroy, you can do the same to the final stage of the missile.

Best design is probably a tube of frozen propellant (probably good old water) feeding into a fission engine (usually nuclear engines are problematic due to the difficulty of maintenance and refuelling, but for a missile you don't care), so you don't need to bother with jettisoning fuel tanks (the fuel is it's own tank; no need to worry about it subliming into space since it isn't going to exist for long enough) or armouring the thing (it's also effectively ablative armour). The propellant is melted then turned into steam by the engine and jetted out the back. When the propellant is used up, the engine blows up, the fragments forming an effective warhead of tiny, incredibly fast projectiles (much of them made of very dense, radioactive, molten metal which will punch through any armour, be almost impossible to deflect with energy weapons and fuck up basically anything they hit).

Well that too.
I just love it how in the show they managed to show with this sorta little things the difference between the two nations monetary situation.
Alliance would mass produce, standardize and spartanize things like hell while Imperials would be running in corridors with long red carpets, wood and bronze paneling and sit on fancy leather seats on a bridge that has corinthian pillars for no reason other than aesthetics.

They don't HAVE to be tubes. They just need to have the engines on the 'bottom' and everything built 'on top' of the engines. Tubes are just easy and cheap. Children of a Dead Earth demonstrates pretty handily why tubes and cylinder armor are actually the worst despite it being the default due more to programming limits than any real science.

Right now, the most devastating weapon in Children of a Dead Earth is a KKV missile launched by a kind of ok railgun. It has an insane range and accuracy and uses the insane range of a green laser as a range finder so the game's system doesn't default to the railgun range and put engagements too close.

At more than 100km out this thing launches missiles at a pretty good speed making them decent projectiles as they are, then they keep getting faster and can course adjust on the way in. Most laser point defense only manage to heat a few of them up before the rest in a salvo catch up and obliterate the intended target. After anywhere from 5 - 20 hits the target is obliterated, and there are still about a hundred shots in the sky that due to being missiles can re-target somewhat.

>Big armored railgun-blasters and small nimble missile frigates
I like this, but then it seems like you've got two classes of ships that aren't designed to fight each other. What happens if a commander decides not to use big ships, for example?
Also, what stops railguns from getting smaller?

>what stops railguns from getting smaller

The longer the barrel, the higher the velocity of the shot. The higher the velocity (and the heavier the shot), the more kinetic energy it has, thus more boom.

Range is both spinal weapons' biggest asset and biggest weakness.

On one side, yes, you can accelerate a tin can to make it punch like a nuke. On the other, spinal weapons are a an absolute BITCH to aim. You have to physically move millions or billions of tons of steel in order to line up with a target so far away it's barely a pixel on your radar, while both you and the target are presumably doing evasive maneuvers. That's pretty much in the realm of impossible.

Any projectile traveling at those ranges will need some sort of course correction capability if it's going to hit anything, and at that point you might as well chuck the giant gun and just go full missile bus route.

Well the imperial ships have alliance like corridors, its just that the characters that the show follows are officers that usually keep to the nicer furnished decks of the ship.

>assuming FTL weaponry
And assuming there isn't, everything you just said is bullshit.

Well true.
The decks we got to see in gaiden serials were downright ghetto tier when compared to average alliance corridors.
Then again, we never did see enlisted mens corridors on alliance ships if i remember right.

Not a single correct answer in this thread. All ranged weapons are usless considering any ship that travels close to or faster than the speed of light will encounter radiation, heat, and kinetic forces stronger than any possible weapon and be built to withstand them so the only means of combat is to directly board and take an enemy vessel.

>Any shop that travels close to or faster than the speed of light...
So, none of them. We good, boys, weapons are still relevant.

Spinal mount is foolish. Too few firing options. If the anti-missile weaponry is too good, as lasers will be with missile speed so low, then far better to get an old style broadside firing volleys. Solid-slug railguns at a medium to short distance would be the premier in such an environment. As any point defense laser could be used on shells at longer ranges to melt and/or deflect, as light does have some actual mass; ala light sails theory.

Armor should be thick and good at radiating heat buildup to allow for attempted offensive laser use. It would also explain the lack of turrets, as armor on them becomes a problem in a low gravity environment as the torque from turning large amounts of mass would shift the entire ship small amounts. Also drones would still be used as a point defense system against lasers. Small heavily armored drones on close formation and/or tethers to deflect/absorb laser fire.

Spinal mounts would be better used for the few heavily armored nuclear torpedoes that also could be used at closer ranges. While closing keep the armored nose pointed at the enemy, and launch a few torpedoes before turning to deliver a broadside of railgun. First one to twitch and fire would get the chance for first damage, but also would be likely to take more damage from the return volley. What with Newtonian physics carrying the enemies constantly towards one another.

>far better to get an old style broadside firing volleys

I suppose you are aware that in space, you can have a full broadside worthy arsenal of weapons in the front of your ship because you can give zero fucks about hull shape.

Firing to the side will also have hilarious consequences, so I think it is not advisable.

Yep. Coilgun boosted semi-maneuverable missiles are where it's at for non-nuclear weapons. Next to lasers ofc - CoaDE lasers are rather underpowered due to design choices based on on extant tech over scientific limits.

I dunno, so long as you had the batteries in line with the center of mass, you'd be alright, surely?

> than any real science.

What?

Realistically, warships would have very small crews, around a dozen for every size and class. What can be automated should be automated.

Also, a family-like crew setup could potentially decrease the chance (and/or the success rates) of mutiny and higher-level rebellion.

Railguns will never achieve relavistic speeds. Friction. It would burn the round to dust as it travelled down the barrel. Gravimetrics will be the only to launch such things.

If you have gravity control of any kinds, firing any weapon at ranges longer then point fucking blank is pointless. Perfect turning and complete control of inertia means all shots miss. Not even mentioning any projection of gravity.

This guy is right Also, there's the fact that space is all orbits, so mines aren't that amazing unless you're willing to go full Kessler on a planet

You'd want to use missiles in situations where the light lag makes mass drivers inaccurate.
Missiles are able to self-correct, thereby increasing their ability to hit their targets at long range.

Misiles are not something you can't simply take out, they can be armored too like a ship(and if they are armored even better; more mass for the impact, don't worry for the deltaV they only need to make an interception course) and don't have to worry about taking care about disgusting organical humans demanding a special 9G acceleration limit or a living space.

So if you were to say that your giant 1TW laser can destroy missiles on a proportion of 100 to 1 I could simply use the resources of an entire planet to build 1000 missiles, in terms of scaling up the number of missiles I don't think there is really a limit and you don't even need special equipment to operate them; a few transistor and a IR receptor of any kind would probably do the job since we have been using them since the Vietnam era.

A broadside also means that if your armor is thick, you have to cover more of yourself with it.

Long and pointy is still better even for missile ships, because they can point armor at the enemy, and then just drop missiles out the sides like a fighter jet, and let them accelerate once clear of the bay doors. Another option if your missiles are smart enough, is to just drop all your missiles at once, but program them to not attack right away. They'll just sit there in whatever orbit you left them, and now the enemy has no reason to attack you. He'll be too worried about the missiles, which are now fully autonomous and capable of avenging you if the enemy attacks, or being recovered if the enemy is suitably impressed by this show of force and backs down. One reason people might want to nerf missiles in space combat, is that they tend to reduce battles to missile counting contests. Do you have more missiles than my point defense can handle? Do I want to test that? Entire battles might as well be fully automated dick measuring contests between defense contractors.

Either way, the only time a space warship should ever be firing broadside, is if it's in close quarters battle, and can't chose the direction the enemy will be approaching from. Or if there is more than one enemy that will be threatening it at the same time. In both cases these are jobs for secondary batteries. Big guns should be facing forward, and missiles should soft launch.

You can however intercept a missile with another missile, and when it comes to kinetic energy missiles, an anti-missile requires less delta-v than the missile it will intercept. The attacking missile needs to be traveling as fast as possible, the defending missile just needs to get in the path of the attacking missile.

Now, there are ways around this, mainly give the attacking missile some sort of really hard to intercept sub-munition, but this reduces lethality. A missile that explodes into a bag of sand could be intercepted by missiles that release sheets of Whipple shield. Most of the sand will be destroyed along with the sheets, and what little remains will be much less of a threat than the missile would have been in a single impact.

Another solution is say fuck kinetic energy weapons, and focus on bomb pumped lasers or Casaba howitzers. These will be much more killy, and much harder to intercept, because they can go off at longer range, and might even be disguised as other kinds of missiles. These are likely to be much more expensive weapons however.

>if you were to say that your giant 1TW laser can destroy missiles on a proportion of 100 to 1

A regular 100-300 MW laser can do that. The Newtonian benefits of missiles are cancelled out under realistic accelerations by the distances of space. (You can shoot from a planet weeks away? Well, if it takes half an hour to kill a missile and the danger zone they have to cross is several days of nonstop laseing wide, few of them are crossing.)

To be fair, you hit an important point: missiles use existing drive tech, so if you can into space, your missile R&D costs are free. Lasers aren't really advanced or expensive, but they are on a separate part of the tech tree.

So missiles are theoretically long ranged but practically short-ranged, but that range (inside a single planetary orbit band) also covers 95% of practical combat. And they're an all-or-nothing shot that can only be expended a few times.

In toto: missiles are a fleet-in-being for poor people, pacifists, and mid-tier powers. Laser arrays are the tool of major military powers.

>They know for a fact it's coming but by the time you know, how the fuck do you stop that in time?
The answer is maneuver in any way whatsoever, which will cause the shot to miss by a massive margin. Which is why a large, low rate of fire weapon is horribly ineffective against a target that is actually able to maneuver at any range where the target has time to react to detecting a launch or where generalized evasion will cause an aimed shot to miss.

At long ranges you essentially need to either use missiles with significant maneuvering ability or weapons that can saturate the area where your target will probably be by the time the shots arrive there with enough shots to make a hit against an evading target statistically likely.

that may mean rapid fire guns, multiple rapid laser pulses, grapeshot, kinetic energy missiles with bursting charges, nuclear shaped charges, continuous-wave lasers being swept about in patterns etc.

The only time a massive spinal railgun shooting a single solid projectile would actually be effective is at attacking sitting duck targets like space stations.

>Another solution is say fuck kinetic energy weapons, and focus on bomb pumped lasers or Casaba howitzers

Get both! A casaba howitzer is a nuclear shaped charge *jet* - high power, short range, easily dispersed.
What's the other major kind of shaped charge? A projectile. Middling power and penetration but harder to stop with fancy armors, and doesn't disperse by itself.

Nuclear EFPs FTW. Going by the toughsf calcs, the minimum size (before risking the shot being evaporated by a nuke) is about 20 tons of tungsten. That's a big gun.

Busters?

I was thinking more along the lines of missiles being carried in cargo freighters where at the very least they can get close enough for a crippling attack on a laser relay.

To define it under fundamental levels, we can say that any laser that has to travel beyond 10 seconds is completely ineffective. So you need frontiline relays that redirect the energy when the target is under 1 second light, destroying one critical point or several relays in the laser network means that you have extended your safe zone , either permanently or for a while(other relays can cover the loss of cover by simply advancing their orbits but this can take weeks or months in higher orbits)

In a more interesting way, this is also very dependent on space territory, the problem is that territory in space must be a completly weird subject, sure; you own up to the point of maximum altitude where you are still orbiting your celestial body; but what about horseshoe orbits, lagrange points and trojans? You can stick your missile bases or laser relays in such orbits and put your response times from months to days or hours.

Why are you just assuming the giant fucking mass driver is going to have a slow rate of fire? If it's a big enough coil gun with an efficient enough cooling system and power source, it could be spraying projectiles like a fire hose, and adjusting the dispersion of each one by making minor adjustments to the magnetic fields. At any moment there could be multiple projectiles inside the barrel of the gun at the same time, each being accelerated by different sets of magnets.

I think a big problem is that we instinctively reach for the word railgun when we talk about mass drivers, when they are seriously limited. Coilguns on the other hand have lots of room for advancement. Most kinetic energy weapons in sci-fi are coilguns, even if the author comes up with a fancy name, or calls them a raillgun by accident.

>Why are you just assuming the giant fucking mass driver is going to have a slow rate of fire?
Because of the specific terminology used in the post I quoted.

>Smaller ships still have a purpose. They are agile and can simply avoid the shot of a railgun that takes a relatively long time to charge, aim and fire.

>A regular 100-300 MW laser can do tha

yes, but they can do it at "close" distances like 100 km or such before refraction start fucking their energy delivery, and missiles can accelerate to insane speeds(missiles can easily become relativistic kill vehicles too) and close the gap in seconds by simply using low mass/high thrust relationships, as stated is not like the missiles has a limit on the number of Gs you can stick on it.

Casabas aren't exactly that complicated, sure its a shaped nuclear bomb, but if you have the expertise for the design and production of nuclear bombs you are at maybe a decade or so of getting a casaba-howitzer since you already know the concept and the whole idea has quite a theoretical foundation.

>If it's a big enough coil gun with an efficient enough cooling system and power source

That's a very-very big if.

For the missile discussion, I must add that information warfare should be a very big thing in space combat, and thus there must be range limitations (regarding time required to engage/fire/hit the enemy). You have to fire when you see the white of their eyes, so to speak, and not unload your firepower at shadows and illusions. And once you are there, it is wiser to fling two metric tons of superheated tungsten at your enemy rather than a missile that can be played.

>as stated is not like the missiles has a limit on the number of Gs you can stick on it

Delta-V OTOH is highly limited for missiles, and it scales geometrically as you armor the missile. So even with armored ICBM scale buses disgorging a couple hundred swarming KKVs apiece, you're still looking at a practical maximum range of several thousand km for missiles. Easy if you can hack, stealth, or diplomacy your way in. But if the enemy starts off the battle, or if they survive your alpha strike, their chances of victory get higher and higher as time goes on and yours fall like a rock.

But nobody's going to fucking use a raillgun, because anybody who can colonize space can also build much more efficient mass drivers. A coil-gun is built using the same kind of technology as a ship's engines, a bunch of fancy magnets that push things in one direction. The only difference is it pushes solid projectiles in a straight line.

Raillguns are weapons that planetary civilizations consider putting on their wet-naval vessels before they decided they don't provide much of an advantage over missiles or conventional guns. Coil-guns on the other hand are the space equivalent of a battleship's cannons.

Not really, if you are building interplanetary spacecraft that don't suck balls, you'll need those things for the engines.

The infowar part is a good point though. In the "No stealth in space" arguments, people forget that there is more to stealth than just hiding. It's true you can find out a lot about a ship by observing a drive plume, but if you load a bunch of missiles with different warheads, and make sure they all have the same mass, The enemy will have a hard time telling them apart from each other, esp if you program them to fly in sub-optimal patterns for the purposes of deception. And once the missiles are in the terminal phase, they can deploy decoys along with their warheads, and once they've gone ballistic, you might not even be able to tell a warhead from a balloon. And this is before you get into active jamming, or throwing up reflective Whipple shields so the enemy can't see what temperature your radiators are, which direction you are pointing, or which bay doors are open.

The enemy will always know where you are, and have a good idea what you are, but he won't be able to know what cards you have in your hand and what you've placed on the table. There is still plenty of room for poker in space combat, even without stealth.

In Children of a Dead Earth the ships are forced to use cylinder shape armor only mainly out of limits to the programming and game engine. Going off of real science you'd use different armor geometries and then turn your craft to the proper facing to begin any engagement.

As far as I read from the developer blog he actually designed the game around the idea of using cylinders instead of any other shape. Suposedly is not a coding limitation but an intentional limitation based around the idea of having as much sloped armor as possible while giving a very low cross section.

>But nobody's going to fucking use a raillgun, because anybody who can colonize space can also build much more efficient mass drivers. A coil-gun is built using the same kind of technology as a ship's engines, a bunch of fancy magnets that push things in one direction. The only difference is it pushes solid projectiles in a straight line.
I was responding to a post that talked very specifically about railguns and more specifically spinally mounted ones, even more specifically low rate of fire ones.

So the content of your post is totally irrelevant to me. It has no bearing on what I posted at all.

He said that in a blog post, but everything else in the game is optional so why limit that only?

The real reason is to fudge the calculations, which the system does. Angled armor is better, but cylinder armor is not the equivalent of being covered in angled armor, it is decidely the opposite of angled armor if you get hit directly. Cylinder armor is the equivlant of being covered in non angled armor and sometimes the enemy hits you at an angle if you're lucky. But being hit at an angle in CoaDE does the exact same thing to your armor tile as hitting it directly. Your armor, despite being touted as 'monolithic' is also very decidedly tiles in how the system handles it. Despite how realistic the game is it limits you and cuts you off from a lot of real world solutions.

Well, spinal mounted BFGs make more sense when they are rapid-fire coilguns with smart munitions. OP probably doesn't know enough about the different kinds of mass drivers and just meant some sort of electro-magnetic cannon.

You are correct, they make dramatically more sense with higher fire rates because they are much more likely to actually hit the target.

You want a really fun idea for spaceship weaponry that gives you lots of tools and options? Gravimetric Projection, ie Gravity Manipulation.

Ships use FTL drives that use that principle of distorting space in front of and behind the spaceship; those same drives can be weaponized and used for other purposes than travel. Artificial Gravity is a no-brainer. Creating a gravity well around the outside of the ship can drag missiles off-course, so that when point-defense blasts them, the debris misses the ship instead of continuing to come in at the same speed as when it was blown up. Smaller ship harrassing you? Just reach out and crush it like a can. Need them alive? Ramp the power back, and you've got a tractor beam to pull them in, while sending the message "no funny business, or we'll crumple you into dust."

The only real disadvantage would be range, but when a battleship is big enough and can generate enough gravity to rival that of a planet, not being able to reach out as far is less of an issue due to the fact your opponent's weapons can't touch you.

>FTL spaceships
Shadman.jpg

but in order to intercept 50 missiles you need 50 missiles. how much of your ship can you dedicate to countermeasures?

>but in order to intercept 50 missiles you need 50 missiles
False. A single missile may be able to defeat multiple missiles at once depending on warhead.

But since anti-missiles don't need to travel as far or fast, they can be smaller. So you could have an equal number of anti-missiles, but for half the mass of that many attack missiles.

>depending on the warhead
what do you mean? like using a nuke to divert their path?

I'm not sure what the fuck you mean by "to divert their path".

I mean either destroying them outright with a nuclear warhead, or damaging their sensors and electronics with radiation. Alternatively I mean using fragmentation warheads to throw an expanding cloud of tiny fragments at them.

Im talking about missiles that are basically just chunks of metal moving at speeds that make payload redundant.

>but in order to intercept 50 missiles you need 50 missiles.

The missile needs to be able to damage or destroy an armored ship, while the anti-missile just needs to damage or destroy the thin-skinned missile.

Rank slides need to be distinguishable from a distance. Serving in the space navy would be an absolute nightmare, you'd never be able to make out the rank of the guy approaching you until he was right in front of you.

Nah, today CoaDE gunships all about double tapered hulls and forward fire concentration, you don't need to turn broadside anymore.

what do you get if you blow up a solid chunk of metal travelling towards your ship at relativistic speeds?

I think 'missiles' would essentially just be suicide-drones. At the kind of ranges/speeds an interplanetary species' ships would fight and travel at, any missile you fired would need significant abilities to alter it's own course once fired. It'd have to have very advance onboard computing/AI.

I always imagined 'realistic' space combat as two massive motherships launching thousands of drone-missiles at each other from AU away, the drone-missiles simultaneously trying to neutralise the enemy drone-missiles and close with the enemy mothership, and whatever drones survive that melee between the two attempt to run a gauntlet of point defence to kill the enemy mothership.

>Solidstate weapons in space

Reminder that something solid fired in space keeps going until it hits something else. Responsible military complexes have projected energy weapons that peter-out at designated ranges.

In the time frame you're looking at (Technologically speaking, I mean), you're probably going to have insane weapons like gravity mines and nano bot clouds which will just tear a target ship to pieces.
Also, beam weapons will be extremely powerful by that point.
I can see close up ship encounters only happening when one side wants to capture the others crew or cargo or ship without destroying the ship completely

>responsible
The only rule of war is that you do whatever it takes to win. Note how the majority of weapons banned by the Geneva Convention are actually very inefficient compared to conventional weaponry.

Firstly a missile is inherently not a solid chunk of metal. By their nature a missile is a small scale spacecraft and subsequently a large fraction of its mass is going to be comprised of its engine and fuel, another portion will be sensors and guidance systems.

You will not be blowing up a solid chunk of metal, you'll be blowing up a missile. And what you get is a cloud of debris or plasma that won't hit a target. If it was the case that the missile could hit the target by turning into a cloud of plasma or fragments at the range at which other missiles could intercept it then the missile would have been designed to do that.

Terminal guidance is a thing that exists for a reason (because it's necessary to achieve a hit against a moving target).

A lot of the "will a target be pelted with missile fragments" issue depends on the specific course of the ships involved in the fight.

Most of the time, unless the missile is directly chasing or flying head on toward the target the debris of an intercepted missile won't go anywhere near the target ship, sometimes it may, but in either case an intercept is always better than a hit, even if you do get hit by bits of a missile and a missile turned into plasma by a nuclear explosion isn't going to do jack shit. Also the further away the intercept occurs the less likely a hit from debris would be, and with missile on missile intercepts that's probably far enough that it's a non-consideration.

You mean forcing the system into a rough approximation of sloped armor that isn't quite accurate?

>until it hits something

Reminder that this isn't likely to happen to be anything other than motes of dust and stray hydrogen atoms prior to the heat-death of the universe.

Yes, good, wanting everyone to have solidstate weapons that all fire everywhere in a battle and potentially heavily damage near and far celestial bodies on a miss, because obliterating your own potential resources is excellent for a space faring people to do! Hay we're a mining conglomerate, why did one of your roaming RFG's from that war three years ago just vaporize the moon we're extracting from, costing us billions AND killing some labor? We're allied with you morons! Hay, we're a bunch of colonists, why is one of your stupid bullshit weapons screaming toward our colony on planet Don't Kill Us From Orbit Please, didn't that war you had end five years ago? Please help! Hay, we're part of your own military, you were given orders to collect your roaming ordnance from the Sescelon Attack Front a two days ago and now we've detected a mass of extra-terminal force ballistics on our scanners heading toward our forward asteroid base which are all registered from YOUR ship, enjoy your court marshal.

>And what you get is a cloud of debris or plasma that won't hit a target. If it was the case that the missile could hit the target by turning into a cloud of plasma or fragments at the range at which other missiles could intercept it then the missile would have been designed to do that.

That's a good idea actually.

even tiny pieces of debris travelling at these kinds of speeds is going to do much more than "jack shit".

Say that after the fifth large scale battle in which hundreds or potentially thousands of ballistic rods are screaming through space in your own territories because it was a retreating battle, in all directions, just from a single fight of which there will be much more.

>undreds or potentially thousands of ballistic rods

The odds of them hitting anything meaningful are still infinitesimal.

And because of the difference in scale between interstellar and interplanetary space, if your battle was in a star system, the (presumably c-fractional) projectiles would exit the system within days or weeks of being fired (making it fairly easy to have failsafes to stop your guns firing on a trajectory that will intercept the orbit of one of your inhabited planets) and then takes centuries or millennia to reach another star system.

Even if your star empire is ridiculously dense and you've colonised every planet in hundreds of star systems all neighbouring each other, and fire off thousands of c-fractional projectiles in battle, the chances of one striking your planets are next to nil.

Space is really big.

Sorry to burst your bubble but T-Rex was a big ol bird with lips.