Let's talk about space battles

If war happens at a point where space minig and travel is a thing, I can't see us not try to shoot the other guy's supply lines.

Any escalation would quickly lead to a MAD scenario.

That's just modern war to some extend.

Yeah and space just exacerbates it. Infrastructure becomes more valuable and harder to defend.

You'd still have terrorism and civil unrest but it'd just be limited to planetside.

The thing is, how are you going to hit at those distances?

dodging doesn't work very well unless you have futuremagic propulsion that gives you ridiculous amounts of dV and it can't be mounted on missiles for whatever reason
even if the missiles only have like 10% of your dV, they can just keep firing salvos until you can't afford more maneuvering
if you have infinite dV futuremagic propulsion but it can be used for missiles then you are still fucked, because you won't run out of fuel but they will have vastly higher acceleration than you

There are only two types of ships. Dreadnoughts and Cruisers or Ships of Line. The only reason to have two is economics that's all.

No stealth -> no submarines -> no Destroyers. Corbettes may exist as orbital ships but that's it.

There's no advantage to having smaller ship in space in terms of speed. You will have the same speeds no matter what. Bigger = more fuel = more acceleration.

You don't have to actively dodge, maneuvering unpredictably + active defenses probably go a long way

Smaller ships, mostly fighters, probably wouldn't about speed but about maneuverability though. If they are a lot harder to shoot down and avoid than missiles, they might be viable.

Point defense is very important, but unpredictable maneuvering won't work at all against missiles unless you are spending enough dV that it can't catch up without running dry
It will always be tracking and making course adjustments as it closes in any case, and tryying to jump out of the way at the last minute doesn't really work because you can probably pull 4g acceleration max while it can probably pull 20-40g
countermeasures and jamming are probably somewhat doable depending on guidance, but your best bet is probably layered point defenses with countermissiles/spaceCIWS and all the lasers you can handle handle without melting yourself

>inb4 Quantum memeing
I always liked the idea that FTL is done by making a warp bubble around a ship ala Star Trek and allowing it to just zip around at relativistic speeds due to shunting their mass into alternate dimensions. But they never went all-in on that idea like the Trilogy of the Damned did, where being inside such a warp bubble made it impossible to interact with regular space and matter until you dropped your bubble. It was like having a second shield in a way.

Effectively, everyone sees everyone in space. But even when they can identify each other, their weapons are 90% useless on each other since no one is physically there. Maybe certain energy weapons could slowly whittle away at someone until their bubble popped, but they would just fly away at FTL speed before that happened. So ships would largely duke it out with drop-ships landing on the planets they were fighting over and using slower-than-light drone swarms to contest space and harry their landing troops.

You're an idiot. Read:

>Issac Arthur

Ah I see you are a man of culture

I wonder if ships won't be more defined in different ways than we conceive of, say, blue water navies nowadays.

For instance, an Orbital Guard force might use entirely different vessels depending on if they're intercepting ships coming down the gravity well towards them or if they're pursuing ships either up the well or on a non-intercepting trajectory. The former can rely on the two forces' high relative velocities to increase the effective of kinetic weapons and reduce the enemies chance to maneuver. The latter would require higher engine thrust to overtake its target, and perhaps emphasize directed energy weapons to make up for the much slower relative velocity.

Missiles have guidance systems.

It really depends on how hard you want your sci-fi to be. Go too hard and you just get mutually assured destruction where both ships fire guided nuclear missiles at each other and both get blown up.

ECM is a thing.

Is this picture from Homeworld? Those look like Hiigaran ships.

nukes are actually surprisingly shit tier in space by themselves
the trick is to just use the nuke as the propelling charge instead

It's a lot harder in space though
radar is absolute shit in space anyway, what you have to deal with is IR tracking and it's a lot more of a pain in the ass to defeat

It's also totally reliant on the weapon having an electronic vulnerability that you know about ahead of time and known how to exploit and the weapon having no anti-countermeasure features (like home-on-jam) whatsoever.

ECM works against an opponent that is 10 years behind you technologically that you've been doing a huge amount of espionage against, or an opponent using clones of weapons that other opponent made 30 years ago. It is literally useless versus a technologically equivalent enemy or an enemy you haven't encountered before.

It's not nearly that simple. There's this general tendency by people (Including many contributors to Project Rho, btw. I love that site but there's certainly the occasional questionable conclusion there) to oversimplify how "realistic" space battles should go based on some single aspect they're currently thinking about. It really depends a ton on your overall technological (and even political and economical) assumptions. Like, take just this missile thing:

Do missiles, as a rule, beat defenses? If so, perhaps you get your scenario. If not, maybe guided mines or lasers trump missiles and they're not so dominant, and you need to start thinking of ways to break their defenses before you can deliver the killing strike.

Can missiles always catch a ship? If they mount the same type of propulsion, it's almost a given (the missile can easily have a higher propellant mass ratio), but what if your typical method of propulsion is a humongous z-pinch fusion machine that costs a billion, and smaller and more affordable engines don't perform nearly as well? (not a particularly unreasonable scenario, many forms of nuclear drives don't scale down awfully well) Then maneuver and relative velocities may matter in a way resembling modern air combat a bit.

You get the biggest amount of ships that carry a gun powerful enough to destroy any ship they hit and an ai to assign targets for everyone.
Then it's about ambushes and surface-to-space artillery because open space battles are to expensive and open you up for piracy and rogue states.

I suppose we could also add logistic problems to the list then.

Like any period of combat, there is no single solution. Different sides will have different technologies, even if that difference is very slight, and will likely employ different tactics. If you have aliens in the mix, expect the differences to be huge.

Barring an absolutely huge difference in technology, stealth in space is generally not practical. You might be able to obscure your position a big or buy yourself some time before being detected, but your assumption should be that your enemy knows your position at almost all times. Like a chessboard. You don't win by surprising your enemy with a unit they don't know is there, you win by baiting and forcing them into a position where even with all of the battlefield info they still don't have a winning move.

I imagine that space fleets would have three distinct kinds of ships: main ships, skirmishers, and defenders. Main ships are the ones with the long range guns and act as hub of your fleet, carrying and protecting the resources the other ships need to do their jobs.

Defender ships just have the job of staying between the main ships and the enemy, shooting down anything that comes within range. Essentially acting as a second, mobile point defense system to give you extra ability to intercept enemy projectiles.

Skirmishers are likely to be torpedo corvettes, the smallest ship that can carry a handful of long range missiles and get somewhere fast enough to matter. Their job is to go out as far away from the main ship as possible and open up new directions of attack. Its a risky job, but a coordinated attack from multiple directions using skirmishers is much more likely to overwhelm enemy defensive capability, especially if you can attack from directions they don't have defenders deployed on.

Defenders and Skirmishers are relatively easy targets if they are alone or in small groups, but does going after them leave you exposed? Are you taking the bait by going after them?

Looks like Homeworld 2 to me

it is
i played the tiny fucking map with that skybox way too many times in MP

I liked the way space combat was described in the codices in Mass Effect. How it was actually depicted, on the other hand, was kind of lame.

Cataclysm was my first Homeworld game. Playing the others felt... odd, and I didn't like them for some reason. Also The Beast genuinely scared me as a kid.
WE WILL NOT BE BOUND!!!

WEEE
LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVVVVVVVEEEEE

The US military has anti missile lasers deployed RIGHT NOW that work through the atmospheric soup of naval combat, and is working on offensive directed energy weapons for aircraft, as well as naval railguns. It is highly likely that the US or a successor state would have near immunity to missiles in space combat, so we'd see a lasers, nukes, and dakka combo like the USAF ships in Stargate.

It's... it's gotten into the ore!!

Damm KZ2 had some rough edges but I loved it so much.

I always found the "Lost Fleet" by Jack Campnell to bring good stuff to the table for space combat.
Ships can fly 1/10 of light speed, warships even faster, but after 1/10 of lightspeed there is not much going on with knowing what is around you. A huge factor before a battle is also how the light of the ships travels over time, thus you might see someone enter a sector via a jump point but the image is already 7 hours old.
The combat in itself is the longer the range, the less usefull are the weapons. The space Blundebus used in the novels is just there for weakining a ships shields on longe range, mid range is missles/torpedos as they are guided and short range is energy weapons to cut throught shields and ships.

When you try to relate your space combat numbers to the scale of the solar system and realize your missiles could hit Venus from Earth in two hours and would take half the distance to accelerate

The missiles have a little chemical kick stage because a hot launch would be unfeasible with a 500 terawatt NSWR because it would immediately vaporize the launching ship. It's still not exactly cold, either. A tepid launch system, if you will.

Each one can project 11 800 subkiloton nuclear payloads at 2%c in an effort to penetrate enemy defenses, though due to the quirks of staging (particularly the inability to fit high isp engines on payloads small enough to carry sufficient numbers of) it requires careful planning of missile waves and combined arms to actually accomplish much with them against an equally matched opponent.

A typical missile cruiser can carry 52 of these missiles and thus lobs over 600 000 warheads, while only a few need to get through to cripple or kill a ship. The defender does have some compelling advantages though.

HELGHAN DID NOTHING WRONG

>But wouldn't that lead to ships moving in closer or sending out fighter swarms in an effort to stay hidden?

They would move pretty darn close because weapons in space actually have limited range. Funnily enough, lasers are the shortest ranged weapons because of diffraction and efficiency. Missiles have the longest range as far as theoretics go, but practically, they are good only at medium/short range. Powered projectile throwers (railguns/coilguns/particle weapons) have the longest effective range but they are dumb like fuck... that is not a disadvantage but is not a good thing either. You can have a projectile thrower that fires missiles, but you are kinda combing together positives and negatives there.

Fighters are "bleh" because they can't pack a punch and eat up too many resources. Tho, it is very likely that your ships will be built like early Bolos: enormous machines of war crewed by a single human. Essentially oversized fighters. There is little reason to have any bigger crew than a single "overseer" who commands the otherwise fully automated vessel.

We really don't know how Space battles, if we survive long enough to get there, will look like. We could discover any new thing than could make all our babblings there obsolete, or we will end using something than we thinks it's now imposible (how people tough at first than trains would kill people if they would surpass a determined speed).
That's why I go the Space opera route. Give me plasma arcs, orbital fighters/bombers, Planet wide Shields, wormholes,whatever makes a fun tale. For all we know we will end with space fighters with beam lances jousting each other to try to penetrate the Stasis field or black orb of the enemy capitals.

I remember reading about what were essentially large nets deployed behind a ship as it travelled, it was an Allister Reynolds book I think

>But wouldn't that lead to ships moving in closer or sending out fighter swarms in an effort to stay hidden?
No. Anything that involves using a militarily useful spacecraft propulsion system is inherently highly visible. Launching any kind of powered spacecraft, be it a fighter, drone or missile (which are all fundamentally the same thing) is highly likely to be noticed and would reveal the approximate position of the launching craft.

The only way you're going to hide anything is to convince the enemy that it is something other than what it actually is (and they're still going to know that a spacecraft is a spacecraft of one kind or another) or by employing your forces in intentionally deceptive ways to mislead the enemy as to what your intent is.

Remember also that a ship's exhaust plume, in combination with its apparent movement, will reveal the ship's mass, acceleration, propellant type and engine type, so it's not just a bright dot in the telescope.

>In the future, sensors and computer will be able to scan, process and analyze full 360° coverage instantly at infinite range every nanosecond
>But every other technology, from materials to propulsion, will stagnate to permit my masturbatory need for boring imaginary space altercations. Because that makes me mature and a realist, right?

>In the future, sensors and computer will be able to scan, process and analyze full 360° coverage instantly at infinite range every nanosecond

The video card in your computer can do this.

Wow, I didnt know Nvidia had cracked FTL Ansible tech. What a time to be alive.

How does one do a Homeworld/House of the Dying Sun-esque campaign where the players are fighter pilots without everything being combat based?

What you are describing is something your cellphone does over a 60 degree view every time you use its camera with any kind of autofocus or facial recognition enabled. The exact "fictional" sensor capability you described requires no new technology whatsoever, just the attachment of a set of powerful optical sensors to a set of mediocre electronics.

By the time space combat becomes a reality, humans will be completely obsolete in warfare. There will never be a manned space combat vessel, except in special cases such as personnel transport or strategic command vessels.

Most combat-oriented space vehicles will be very large, equipped with powerful lasers, and missiles which explode into clouds of hypervelocity debris to perforate targets.

Make them also noble-born and thus dealing with internecine politics of the ruling classes, as well as the general politics of the military they're in

Context is very important. You could realistically have space combat occur in any setting with late 1970s technology or better, but the exact nature of the combat obviously will vary depending on exactly what is available.

If you have a situation where a 1 man craft can carry an FTL drive and hyperspace to its destination anywhere in the galaxy in less than a day it will obviously look a lot different to one where manned satellites armed with autocannons and missiles are shooting each other in orbit in an alternate cold war.

The shocking truth is that due to unforseen developments space combat will precisely resemble naval combat from 1880-1905.

>when you sail your entire fleet from its home port in Epsilon Eridani to 61 Ursae Majoris the long way around on low-grade exotic matter without being able to refuel because the Solar Empire is cucking you hard but you think it'll be fine because your fleet is so big, but it turns out the Ursan Imperial navy is ready for you and it all goes to shit

>tfw the Ursan admiral pulls a one-in-a-million maneuver on you out of sheer dumb luck and manages to do literally nothing with it

Any Aurora player here?

Using their unique position to heavily tax space traffic was a dick move bordering on monopoly abuse. But otherwise, you're mostly right.

Tsushima and the times before it were magical!

Maybe they should have been allowed to make a living before that then.

Unless those vessels are remote controlled by humans on the nearby relevant ships they are protecting, I can't really see that happening. Combat AI might be possible but is a whole nother conjecture in itself.

Combat AI really is not conjecture. You can make an automated vehicle capable of autonomously launching weapons at certain things in particular circumstances with current technology and certain existent weapons already fit this description. This doesn't even reach into the realm of what people consider AI and people barely bat an eye about missiles flying around shirting bomblets on things at their own discretion.

So automated warships are certainly something you can build. The questionable particulars are the extent of their capabilities, how able they are to repair damage to themselves, and to what level of oversight they actually need.

You are right, but what I mostly meant was "combat AI that is reliable and field ready"
Automated identification could very well be a problem in Space. Knowing that something is there is easy, but knowing what it is is a lot harder.

>Any Aurora player here?
Yo!
(Need help?)

Quick counter-question: which Steam game is Steve working on right now, again?

>The questionable particulars are the extent of their capabilities, how able they are to repair damage to themselves, and to what level of oversight they actually need.

Neural networks will be more intelligent than people within the next 100 real years. They will be highly specialized and applied to all areas of science and management.

The strategic command layer of an AI fleet will disseminate orders across the entire system. Robots will repair and maintain the fleet, plot maneuvers, fire weapons, and make strategic and political decisions more accurately and more quickly than any human will be able to.

And I, for one, will welcome our new robotic overlords ... wait a minute ...
>within the next 100 real years
... welp.

Neural Networks will never be more intelligent than people exactly because of what you said - they are highly specialized. They are tools, like a hammer. As of our understanding, it's more than questionable if we could even devise a NN complex enough to deal with the real world scenarios that strategy and command necessitate. Even if we could, it's a huge questionmark if it would work properly and then you still have to feed it with enouh data to train it. Data that we don't even have.

>Automated identification could very well be a problem in Space.

It would certainly be a problem for humans, who operate mostly by guesswork and prejudice. AI, on the other hand, can make instantaneous decisions with the benefits of mathematical certainty and the extreme depth of perfect historical context.

If you can provide it with enough data to train it, maybe.
Instantaneous is questionable in any case. Not that it matters if it's a second or ten minutes at those distances, but still.

>Neural Networks will never be more intelligent than people exactly because of what you said - they are highly specialized.

To clarify my statement - high specialized versions will be used for industrial purposes (and in fact already are), but their applications will grow both in breadth and depth very quickly until the point where human labor becomes more or less obsolete for practical tasks.

>Instantaneous is questionable in any case.

It isn't questionable. Building a neural network is (well, used to be) a slow process. Running decision analysis through a neural network is much, much faster than making a decision with a normal human brain, and you can scale it to make decisions however quickly they need to be made.

Precessing power has diminishing returns, so you can't just scale it as big as you want. You'd also need command vessels that remote control the fighters to carry the banks for the Network, which reintroduces the problems that remote control bring.

>Precessing power has diminishing returns, so you can't just scale it as big as you want.

Scaling, in this context, refers to sacrificing decision accuracy for decision speed - but in either case, you will have more of both than you would with a human crew.

>You'd also need command vessels that remote control the fighters to carry the banks for the Network, which reintroduces the problems that remote control bring.

Nothing will be remote controlled. Every vessel will be independently intelligent, and space fighters will never become a thing (at least in the traditional sense of small agility-focused spacecraft).

The brains for the neural network will be organically created, either by nanobots or 3d printers, and are likely to be built into the structure of the ships themselves.

The only barrier to entry for AI-controlled fleets is human-brain-equivalency. Once that line is crossed (and it will be crossed within our lifetimes,) spacecraft will have an enormous number of mechanical limitations removed.

Unguided projectile weapons are only long range if you are accelerating them to something ridiculous like 0.01 c or something, and you are going to run into a lot of big material issues way before then
Lasers are very short range compared to missiles, but building a laser that can fry things at 10k km or something is far easier than building a railgun or coilgun with projectile speeds high enough to hit a non-stationary target at that distance especially if you are building it on an asteroid or something you can dump heat into for a few minutes, since the main problems with big fucking lasers are the aperture size you need and getting rid of massive amounts of heat in a hurry

The perfect compromise would seem to be the Honorverse's laser heads; AI guided missiles tipped with bomb pumped gamma ray 'lasers'

I don't know if you remember the old tabletop game called Star Cruiser. Set in the 2300AD RPG universe, it had the perfect tagline in a chapter title about what space combat would be like: "hide and seek with bazookas". He who spots first fires first and when you're firing missiles with fusion bomb pumped X-ray laser warheads, the one who fires first usually kills first. IIRC they specifically mention it would be like nuclear submarines hunting each other.

For another take, with less missiles and more lasers, check out Attack Vector Tactical.

X-ray laser heads. The ships themselves had graser guns.

Unguided projectile weapons are long range in a way that they don't stop for anyone. Missiles do.

I see you are unfamiliar with the Kzinti lesson.

I always liked how this was handled in Crest of the Stars, even if it was heavily based around some really soft science.
It was very similar to what you describe. Lasers were generally the weakest, cheapest weapons around, used at short distances and almost universally only for point defense.
Large scale energy guns, such as anti-proton ray guns were larger, more expensive, had a more decent range.
Conventional missiles were sparsely used all together, because they were replaced with so called "intelligent mines".
Heavy hitters took the form of massive coil guns - good for decent distance and almost always single-hit killers, but they were expensive, unwieldy, power-and-ammo hungry, and had the problem of being dumb-fire.
Finally, the most efficient war machines were aformentioned "smart mines" - essentially small A.I. piloted unmanned ships with manueverability, speed and other flight capacities exceeding those of most standard combat ships, incredibly flexible, capable of actually entering and leaving the local equivalent of hyperspace, and absolutely deadly as they used their anti-matter fuel also as a warhead. The obvious issue: manufacturing even one costed as much as a small personal transport ship, and they had to be deployed in swarms to get past most ships point defenses.

As for ship sizes, even the smallest were pretty damn big because they needed to house a shield generator and sufficient fire power to be worth it.

Pretty interesting setting and very fun space battles in that one: good mixture of feeling plausible, but still having quite a lot of tension and spectacle to them.

missiles don't stop either though

If your missile engines would vaporise the launching ship, why not just use that instead of a warhead?

you would have to be very close, and you would only have one chance to hit instead of a fuckton like with cluster munitions

Lasers should be on everything and I have no idea how missiles would get past them.

I really hope we at least get a brief period of 18th century naval battles in space. The thought of two giant star wars/40k warships slowly circling each other and firing broadsides point blank gets me fully erect. Maybe England would even be a superpower again.

Ideally by detonating outside or at the edge of lasers effective intercept range.

My setting for example, ASMs split into submunitions and decoys several thousand kilometers out from the target. And detonate standoff warheads not long after.

Actual 'has to hit the hull or get within a few hundred meters to work' missiles are, yes, basically worthless against warships. You might keep a few around to bip satellites and soft targets. Kinda like how you keep HE rounds on a tank, but definitely not to shoot other tanks.

Once finished with its acceleration burn, a missile can shed its hot parts and use cold gas jets to adjust its course and remain at background temperature, thus being basically invisible.

Wait, are you saying that the warheads blow up hundreds to thousands of kilometers away and still inflict damage?

step 1: make them as thinas possible with extremely sloped noises and fucking cover them with materials that will buy it a bit of time
step 2: launch a few thousand of them per salvo because they are still going to get popped in microseconds at close range and accelerate them as fast as possible so they can get through the close in deathbox before they all get melted
also using standoff warheads like nuke pumped lasers or nuclear shaped charge fuckery so that you can avoid the high intensity range as much as possible, and you could potentially knock out lasers with a fairly weak one of your own if you shine it through their lenses and it's not well protected against that

in the end it really depends what power of lasers are practical, and you can adjust the balance in favor of whatever weapons you prefer very easily by making a few assumptions about what sort of advanced materials are available

yes, take a look at third generation nuclear weapon memes
only problem is the fucking cold war ended and that killed most development on directional nuclear weapons

Yes. Casabas are theoretically good out to what, a thousand? and I figure a few hundred years of advancement on the concept should make that sort of thing viable out to considerably further. Call it somewhere in the range of 4-7Mm at a wild guess.

Missiles like that are the primary weapon of most warships in human space. Followed thereafter by big stonking smart-railguns, high energy lasers, and janky particle cannons, in descending order of precedence.

>Wait, are you saying that the warheads blow up hundreds to thousands of kilometers away and still inflict damage?

Yes. The expanding debris field will continue to travel at the same velocity the missile was originally traveling at.

If you can time it right, you can detonate the missile so that the debris cloud is the exact size of the target ship at the time they collide.

Because spaceships need to maximize thrust/weight, they will never be seriously armored. A cloud of hypervelocity fragmentation will turn the average spaceship into scrap metal.

So the main question is: What do you do against killer clouds headed your way. I'm guessing the shells/debris would probably not be magnetic metal, otherwise you could deflect it with magnetic fields.

1. Do what most of my Overwatch teammates are unable to do and move out of the way of the impending death and destruction

2. Use all those big planets and meteors as cover

Vs. laser missiles: have a bigger laser and shoot it down first, or use screening ships positioned at the front of the fleet (a la real-life destroyers) to shoot down munitions.

Vs. debris:make sure your ship is more agile than the enemy's missiles so you can dodge the field, or use some AoE energy weapon to vaporize the incoming particles

Realistically, dodge or die.

Setting mentioned above doesn't rely on hard physics, so ships armor actually would stop small-scale shrapnel like that pretty well. Might lose some sensors clusters or other externals, but it's not likely to penetrate. Still a better idea to just be somewhere else though.