What would a space warship using real non-fictional technology be armed with?

Mass drivers i.e. railguns or coilguns.
Variable payload is the advantage - solid slugs at high velocity, 'shrapnel' bombs for area denial, drones for close quarters (and peaceful missions). Reduce the heavy and volatile propellant required and no dangerous laser excitation matrix (think of the gas tanks the big flying lasers have today). Dual purpose to save weight.

Well we are talking about current day technology. Like some user said, you can't spam lasers or you will overheat your ship, since there is no air or other medium for heat exchange, plus the obvious lack of a powerful energy source. We don't even have fusion reactors yet.
Also focusing a laser that much over such distances would be quite hard to pull off.
You could probably only fry some antennas or other feeble equipment before the enemy ship has time to react and put up a flak shield to block your view or other counter measures.

You can detect missiles and projectiles if the range is long enough and just dodge or shoot them down. A fast enough railgun projectile might still work if you have the moment of surprise, which you probably won't have since it is rather hard to be stealthy in space.

>no way to intelligently dodge a laser or bullet traveling close to the speed of light since you can't detect it before it arrives.
Well the problem would be that ships could just start moving chaotically and most of shit would still miss at lightminutes away depending on how powerful the engines would be. That would greatly limit the long range exchanges. You could use smart missiles with built-in targeting systems but then there are counter measures etc. Then you can slap counter-counter measures on them and in effect you will probably get a fighter either way. Laser rays also spread out and become less effective at large distances.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle

You miiiight be able to do metamaterial cloaking in space, but it would be such a pain in the ass and limited to a pretty narrow field of view, basically you'd have a big block of cold,light-bending material in front of you bend incoming light around you. It would need to be transparent over a very broad range of frequencies though, and it might not be possible to make it efficient enough to avoid detection from a sufficiently powerful network of detectors.

Stealth really is pretty much impossible in space.

>the key common feature is the use of a massive impactor traveling at a significant fraction of light speed to strike the target
>a massive impactor
>traveling at a significant fraction of light speed

Current day technology user

A really shitty railgun then, or standard ICBMs.

But that is boring.

Project Orion.

we could literally be zooming around at thousands of miles per second if politicians weren't pussies.

For a relativistic weapon you just need to get the speed, the accelartion will only define how much distance you need.

So we actually can do such a thing but from something like making a ship hit Pluto from Earth.

>Project Orion
We aren't really sure that works yet, hasn't been tested. Doesn't really fulfill OP's criteria of 'non-fictional technology'

If we assume it's allowed, it would still take years to reach speeds anywhere close to a significant fraction of light speed. That's not usable in a space battle unless you are very very very good at predicting where an enemy will be years from now.

>If we assume it's allowed, it would still take years to reach speeds anywhere close to a significant fraction of light speed.
Not true, one version Dyson planned out accelerated at around 1 g for 10 days straight, ending up at about 3.3 percent of light speed. We could probably do much better with current tech. The big thing is getting that much shit into an orbit, which is pretty hard. SpaceX are to be praised for trying to lower launch costs,but it would still be a monumental effort to build one of these things on earth and then ship it up with rockets.

We're better off building it in space, although that's many years away from being doable,sadly.

I would expect simple orbital mechanics would be the main weapon. A missile could be launched on an elliptical orbit from a base around one of the ice giants or the Kupier belt into a target in the inner solar system. The small missile is going to have far more delta v for manoeuvres than any orbital warship you can make and will have picked up ~10km/s of velocity on it's fall towards the Sun. Not much you can do to protect yourself from that.

>1 g for 10 days straight, ending up at about 3.3 percent of light speed. We could probably do much better with current tech.
There is no rocket big enough to have 10 days of propellant, nor is there an vacuum engine that can fire at 1g for 10 days without failing.

>Dyson planned out accelerated at around 1 g for 10 days straight, ending up at about 3.3 percent of light speed
Still not really practicable as a weapon, unless you want to fuck up something stationary like a planetary base, asteroid, or something like that. Defintely useless for ship to ship combat.

It would be very very large, like 100 meters wide large, and weigh 400,000 tons. It's waaaaay beyond us right now, in terms of simple cost, if you magically put a bomb collar around everyone on earth's neck and said "make this happen", we could probably have it up there in 10-15 years though :D

You're not wrong. Honestly i just wanted a chance to sperg out about project orion, because it's the craziest idea i've ever seen and i love it.

>propellant
>vacuum engine
Project Orion is based on dropping nukes behind you to ride on the explosions.

It also has the benefit of very high propellant energy density. You'd need trillions of tons of chemical propellant to do something remotely similar to what you can do with well-designed nukes.

>But the nukes are only for frying crew with radiation

Wouldn't the ship be unusable for quite some time too?

It's all about venting the enemy ships. Put at many holes into the hull as possible.

a warship is unlikely to be pressurized, science fiction notwithstanding. for this very reason.

I don't think you could have a crew operating in space suits for a long period of time. They would go crazy. At least the crew quarters would need to be pressurized.
Also it's a huge pain in the ass to do work with space suit gloves.

Maybe you could pressurize the ship during regular operations and depressurize it when fighting is about to begin.

>Maybe you could pressurize the ship during regular operations and depressurize it when fighting is about to begin.
yeah, something like this i would imagine.

I'm gonna check that out, user.

OP specified real, not modern. We can extrapolate.

wouldn't be very big or have any armor. No crew whatsoever. No chance in hell that it would have a ballistic weapon or any kind of gun, that's just retarded.

also why would it be a giant warship? Even though this is a completely made up scenario, it would obviously be hit with some kind of projectile.

In space relative velocities can be *literally* astronomical. it would be a massive target for something small to seriously rip it in half moving in orbit in the opposite direction

the modern non-fictional technology it would use would be basically navy/airforce electronic warfare/communication technology plus basically just average satellites that would be used as weapons.

>all this railgun faggotry

Glorified cannons, a shit-tier line-of-sight weapon.

If you want to talk about launching a missile with a railgun-like mechanism, fine, but quit trying to confuse this Quake 2 bullshit with reality.

There will never be any ships that are similar to a navy. Instead autonomous craft will accelerate material to near the speed of light and directly into planets.

First off, the weapon itself. A nuclear explosion in space, will look pretty much like a Very Very Bright flashbulb going off. The effects are instantaneous or nearly so. There is no fireball. The gaseous remains of the weapon may be incandescent, but they are also expanding at about a thousand kilometers per second, so one frame after detonation they will have dissipated to the point of invisibility. Just a flash.

The effects on the ship itself, those are a bit more visible. If you're getting impulsive shock damage, you will by definition see hot gas boiling off from the surface. Again, the effect is instantaneous, but this time the vapor will expand at maybe one kilometer per second, so depending on the scale you might be able to see some of this action. But don't blink; it will be quick.

Next is spallation - shocks will bounce back and forth through the skin of the target, probably tearing chunks off both sides. Some of these may come off at mere hundreds of meters per second. And they will be hot, red- or maybe even white-hot depending on the material.

To envision the appearance of this part, a thought experiment. Or, heck, go ahead and actually perform it. Start with a big piece of sheet metal, covered in a fine layer of flour and glitter. Shine a spotlight on it, in an otherwise-dark room. Then whack the thing with a sledgehammer, hard enough for the recoil to knock the flour and glitter into the air.

The haze of brightly-lit flour is your vaporized hull material, and the bits of glitter are the spallation. Scale up the velocities as needed, and ignore the bit where air resistance and gravity brings everything to a halt.

(1/2)

Next, the exposed hull is going to be quite hot, probably close to the melting point. So, dull red even for aluminum, brilliant white for steel or titanium or most ceramics or composites. The seriously hot layer will only be a millimeter or so thick, so it can cool fairly quickly - a second or two for a thick metallic hull that can cool by internal conduction, possibly as long as a minute for something thin and/or insulating that has to cool by radiation.

After this, if the shock is strong enough, the hull is going to be materially deformed. For this, take the sledgehammer from your last thought experiment and give a whack to some tin cans. Depending on how hard you hit them, and whether they are full or empty, you can get effects ranging from mild denting at weak points, crushing and tearing, all the way to complete obliteration with bits of tin-can remnant and tin-can contents splattered across the landscape.

Again, this will be much faster in reality than in the thought experiment. And note that a spacecraft will have many weak points to be dented, fragile bits to be torn off, and they all get hit at once. If the hull is of isogrid construction, which is pretty common, you might see an intact triangular lattice with shallow dents in between. Bits of antenna and whatnot, tumbling away.

Finally, secondary effects. Part of your ship is likely to be pressurized, either habitat space or propellant tank. Coolant and drinking water and whatnot, as well. With serious damage, that stuff is going to vent to space. You can probably see this happening (air and water and some propellants will freeze into snow as they escape, BTW). You'll also see the reaction force try to tumble the spacecraft, and if the spacecraft's attitude control systems are working you'll see them try to fight back.

(2/3 sorry)

You might see fires, if reactive materials are escaping. But not convection flames, of course. Diffuse jets of flame, or possibly surface reactions. Maybe secondary explosions if concentrations of reactive gasses are building up in enclosed (more or less) spaces.

(so depending on the proximity of the detonation to the hull, the effect will be a good deal more dramatic than merely giving the crew a full-body sunburn. the lack of atmosphere for a pressure wave doesn't mean getting hit with a nuke in space isn't going to ruin your day)

cont'd

On impulsive shock damage:

A one kiloton nuclear detonation produces 4.19e12 joules of energy. One kilometer away from the detonation point defines a sphere with a surface area of about 12,600,000 square meters (the increase in surface area with the radius of the sphere is another way of stating the Inverse Square law). Dividing reveals that at this range the energy density is approximately 300 kilojoules per square meter. Under ideal conditions this would be enough energy to vaporize 25 grams or 10 cubic centimeters of aluminum (in reality it won't be this much due to conduction and other factors).

1e8 watts per square centimeter for about a microsecond will melt part of the surface of a sheet of aluminum. 1e9 W/cm2 for a microsecond will vaporize the surface, and 1e11 W/cm2 for a microsecond will cause enough vaporization to create impulsive shock damage (i.e., the surface layer of the material is vaporized at a rate exceeding the speed of sound). The one kiloton bomb at one kilometer only does about 3.3e7 W/cm2 for a microsecond.

One megaton at one kilometer will do 3.3e10 W/cm2, enough to vaporize but not quite enough for impulsive shock. At 100 meters our one meg bomb will do 3.3e12 W/cm2, or about 33 times more energy than is required for impulsive shock. The maximum range for impulsive shock is about 570 meters.

Luke Campbell wonders if 1e11 W/cm2 is a bit high as the minimum irradiation to create impulsive shock damage. With lasers in the visible light and infrared range, 1e9 W/cm2 to 1e10 W/cm2 is enough. But he allows that matters might be different for x-rays and gamma rays due to their extra penetration.

and finally, on the effects of impulsive shock on a spacecraft suffering a near detonation of a sizable nuclear warhead:

First, consider a uniform slab of material subject to uniform irradiation sufficient to cause an impulsive shock. A thin layer will be vaporized and a planar shock will propagate into the material. Assuming that the shock is not too intense (i.e., not enough heat is dumped into the slab to vaporize or melt it) there will be no material damage because of the planar symmetry. However, as the shock reaches the back side of the slab, it will be reflected. This will set up stresses on the rear surface, which tends to cause pieces of the rear surface to break off and fly away at velocities close to the shock wave velocity (somewhat reduced, of course, due to the binding energy of all those chemical bonds you need to break in order to spall off that piece). This spallation can cause significant problems to objects that don't have anything separating them from the hull. Modern combat vehicles take pains to protect against spallation for just this reason (using an inner layer of Kevlar or some such).

Now, if the material or irradiance is non-uniform, there will be stresses set up inside the hull material. If these exceed the strength of the material, the hull will deform or crack. This can cause crumpling, rupturing, denting (really big dents), or shattering depending on the material and the shock intensity.

(1/2(3?))

For a sufficiently intense shock, shock heating will melt or vaporize the hull material, with obvious catastrophic results. At higher intensities, the speed of radiation diffusion of the nuke x-rays can exceed the shock speed, and the x-rays will vaporize the hull before the shock can even start. Roughly speaking, any parts of the hull within the diameter of an atmospheric fireball will be subject to this effect.

In any event, visually you would see a bright flash from the surface material that is heated to incandescence. The flash would be sudden, only if the shock is so intense as to cause significant heating would you see any extra light for more than one frame of the animation (if the hull material is heated, you can show it glowing cherry red or yellow hot or what have you). The nuke itself would create a similar instant flash. There would probably be something of an afterglow from the vaporized remains of the nuke and delivery system, but it will be expanding in a spherical cloud so quickly I doubt you would be able to see it. Shocks in rigid materials tend to travel at something like 10 km/s, shock induced damage would likewise be immediate. Slower effects could occur as the air pressure inside blasts apart the weakened hull or blows out the shattered chunks, or as transient waves propagate through the ship's structure, or when structural elements are loaded so as to shatter normally rather than through the shock. Escaping air could cause faintly visible jets as moisture condenses/freezes out - these would form streamers shooting away from the spacecraft at close to the speed of sound in air - NO billowing clouds.

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php

great site, hours of interesting reading on this and many other topics

user 1: says nukes are only good for their radiation, not much else
user 2: goes to length backing exactly this up with tl;dr

Read it again...

spallation, deformation, hull vaporization, hull cracking or shattering, destruction of all external antenna, sensors, radiators, venting of air/reactants that can catch on fire...

The Halo universe does a good job with this. The human ships pretty much only use nuclear missiles to fight each other.

It depends on distance. You'll never get a nuke close enough to someone to do all that.

Basically auto piloted ships. They fly close enough to explode into a cloud of directional projectiles. Something that can't be dodged or shot with CIWS.

>"they are firing a nuke at us, sir"
>*belch* shoot this at them through the rail gun *hands gunny an empty beer can*
>"direct hit! nuke is neutralized! railgun heat core ejected, sir."

Yeah, I'm not seeing how that would do much.

>all these people implying that a space war would involve huge distances

unless you can accelerate a projectile to 75%c or more it can easily be deflected or dodged, unless you're shooting at a planet. even then it can be intercepted.

any space warfare we see in the near future probably won't involve ships firing at each other across a solar system.

We have a hard time detecting asteroids tens of miles across with huge telescopes studying the same part of the night sky for years. What makes you think it will be so easy to detect tiny ships and missiles over similar distance scales? And if that weren't enough of a challenge, these vessels and projectiles would likely be equipped with stealth technology and coated in a black, radar absorbant paint much like aircraft are today.

See
Yup! The team who made this game put more thought into what warfare in space would be like than NASA or the US military has.

Or the military/NASA didn't publish the results of their thought.

In any case, the game is fucking realistic(autistic) in all the right ways. Go play it, Children of a Dead Earth, to answer your question OP.

Releasing 100 tons of stainless ball bearing in low earth orbit for scorched (low) earth (orbit).

That's because NASA isn't interested in space war. Neither is the US military

>Shooting a massive projectile
>unclear on the concept of magrail
Lrn2railgun fgt pls

Air Force might be.

But they're also too busy shooting satellites up there for higher res porn for the Army.

>Casaba howitzers and bomb pumped x-ray lasers.

fpbp

>implying 100 tons is enough to seriously impact navigation
Earth orbit is huge and Kessler Syndrome is a meme.

Cyberwarfare devices and nukes/Kinetic rods

>Cyberwarfare devices

With proper computer systems/integration/design, cyberwarfare is an insignificant threat.

If the system is hardened, it's impossible to hack without sufficiently advanced technology.

You can't just magically hack computers through space.

>You can't just magically hack computers through space.

Yet.

If theres anything weve learned there will be breakthroughs in defense and offense. Its not magic if intel is right and you know the software and backdoor of the system intranet. A solution would be advanced analogue systems.

I can think of about 5 different ways to hack a computer without a physical connection to it, just off of the top of my head.

Not saying that any of them are feasable, or technically possible with current tech yet... but, still.

>people think kinetics won't be used

Which subjects should I take so that I can participate in this thread?

Physics II
Mechanical Engineering
Russian Language

this game looks great but i'm too fucking retarded to play it.

can a person who can only do basic arithmetic play this, or do you need algebraic skill?

what happens if i have a ham sandwich with extra mustard on the ISS? do the air filters filter out my ass particulates?

If you can play Kerbal, you can play ChoDE.

I'm pretty sure Russians love mustard and anyone who doesn't like mustard doesn't deserve to be an astronaut.

>If you can play Kerbal, you can play ChoDE.

OMG I LOVE KERBAL!

I've never tried Kerbal. I should have gotten it when it was like $20.

I play Space Engineers which is literally retarded, but hey. It has nice gfx.

>I've never tried Kerbal. I should have gotten it when it was like $20.

Third Buggiest game I have ever played.

Worth every penny. (Mods are awesome, Pic has Interstellar, Kerbal Engineer, Texture reducer pack, Infernal Robotics, and KSP attachments.)

>lasers could do significant damage

Kek. Damage to what, aside from maybe a poorly placed sensor?

It looks really great, I love it makes an effort to simulate real physics. Space Engineers looks beautiful but the rocketry is so retarded.

Literally put some ice in this machine here, ok now it spits out hydrogen here (if you have a hydrogen tank, otherwise ??? i guess it gets vented or something), ok now you can fire this thruster for a little while.

Everything is speedcapped at a ludicrous 144km/h too.

>Literally put some ice in this machine here, ok now it spits out hydrogen here

Using ice as an oxidizer, eh?

Not bad, probably boost your ISP depending on your secondary thruster.

Also no linear acceleration or centripedal gravity, just lame "generators" which makes shit fall in a bubble around it. Hydrogen thrusters are the only propellant thrusters in the game. Planets are the size of pebbles and there's no atmospheric re-entry. And so on.

If you're a poorfag you can do Orbiter Spaceflight Sim which is free and predates Kerbal. It is much less cartoony too.

Just get ChoDE though. Watch a gameplay video on youtube first so you know if it is something you might enjoy.

Kessler Sydrome is not a meme. It's a very real navigational hazard, especially if you spend hundreds of millions on a satellite.

Meme drive rockets

>Meme drive rockets

Language is a meme, son.

Space warfare becomes present day and scary relativistic kill vehicles if memedrive works. Exponentially so if superconducting memedrives are super effective.

Wouldn't ships built for space combat have a bunch of shut off this section buttons in it? In case of breaches? Or would everyone be in space suits 24/7 during combat situation to avoid dying of no oxygen?

depends on the mission.

>shut off sections
You mean bulkheads which are common on ships and submarines? Sure why not?

>wear spacesuits
probably a good idea, even if you're not yet wearing the helmet and gloves. Even if you're in shirtsleeves, space suits ought to be ready to be donned in a few minutes.

decompression isn't instant nor instantly fatal. You plan for it, if it happens you execute your plan. Then once the danger is less immediate you can go around patching holes.

...

I doubt there is an acutal reason to have people aboard.
Having backup systems is most likely much more efficient than repairing them, since in the end you save a bunch of space from pressurized interior, life support etc.
Ships would either be controlled from earth or completely autonomously.

>"""""realistic""""" space combat
>ships don't use propellant

huh? they do, user. You can even design the engine. Didn't you see that gauge telling you how much delta/v is left?

Scorched Earth space combat is the most boring of all.

It only gets interesting when you have a balkanized political system and a large civilian trade fleets. Simply killing every ship you see without even identifying friend or foe is autistic as shit.

Besides people will get angry if you orbit drone warships above their planet while they might accept a manned customs and patrol ship making a port call or multi-planet cruise.

Tense peaces that involve showing the flag are much more interesting.

What weapons could there be that couldn't get destroyed by lasers before impact?

Nukes could be

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

>KKV, nukes, flak weapons (shotgun KKV)
>dumb bullets
>better armored more lasery lasers
>laser hardened drones

Drones are weak to lasers in ChoDE only because weapon armor has many less options than hull armor and armored shutters don't exist to protect the weapons when not firing. That and vulnerable radiators, but radiators are actually the most laser resistant part of the ship.

How could bulets and flak get through steel plating?

10kg of osmium moving at +5 km/s or greater tends to put holes in most things.

Even one gram of semi-dense metal at 2 km/s will work enmasse.

Firing 10kg of osmium at 5km/hr doesn't sound very practical.

>Even one gram of semi-dense metal at 2 km/s will work enmasse.

Not so sure about that

>What weapons could there be that couldn't get destroyed by lasers before impact?

1) A missile that carries a kinetic projectile. It accelerates and, when it gets to just out of laser range, it releases the projectile towards the target.

2) A big swarm of missiles, most of which are decoys but 1/100 of which carries a nuke.

3) A two-part missile - when it gets to just out of laser range, the forward part opens and releases a giant cloud of fine particulate matter towards the target. The nuke flies right behind the particulate matter, which soaks up the laser fire.

What game is this searching chode only gives me retarted results...

>>What weapons could there be that couldn't get destroyed by lasers before impact?
>1) A missile

>2) A big swarm of missiles

>3) A two-part missile

Relevant.

rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/09/battle-of-spherical-war-cows-purple-v.html

km/s kilometers per second, no hour.

KE = 1/2mv^2
KE = 0.5 * 1/1000 * 2000^2
KE = 2,000 Joules, a bit less than a rifle round.
Not impressive by its own, but it is only one gram, so you're firing tens of thousands.

For the osmium it is 125,000,000 joules, which ought to be sufficient. But fire hundreds or more just to be sure.