If we had the public will and money for it, how plausible would space battle fleets be? Is our current tech enough?
If we had the public will and money for it, how plausible would space battle fleets be? Is our current tech enough?
If we had the public will and money for it, how plausible would space battle fleets be? Is our current tech enough?
just barely enough but it'll take a few decades of refinement before we can go star wars.
we need an independent colony on both mars and venus before we can have a space fleet.
I imagine real space battles would be AI drone swarms shooting kinetic kill vehicles at each other from well beyond earth's horizon. In other words it would be some boring ass shit
those double dubs do not lie...goddamn it why can't we go star wars?
they do. if you used kinetics you would fly backwards with equal force. you would need missile and lasers. i dont even think you could pull off plasma very well so no blasters.
>kinetics
no.
>muh lasers
Please
>is our current tech enough
not even close
>how plausible
entirely possible, but not very fun or useful. it would be all mind games. there would not be very many kinds of weapons.
lasers. you point it where you think the target will be in so many years, as they are lightyears away, and going some fraction of the speed of light. you judge their future position based upon your last measurements (extremely convoluted killchain involving hundreds of active sensor systems, radio telescopes, and so on)... you guess, using statistics, at the model of their craft. you think it's a newer one, meaning it's using the newer engines, meaning there's a good chance that last light you saw from them was about so long in time and about so many newtons of thrust in a random direction. they don't thrust often because that gives away position, this war is information. they just thrust often enough to never get hit. you know that your shot will likely be thousands of kilometers off course, and there is dispersion and so on, so you fire hundreds of times. twenty six years later your descendents learn that the five year period you spent fighting the enemy was actually against a bunch of cheap drones designed to imitate scout craft.
kinetics - small things going extra fast. pack a ton of them, you will need 100 million or more for every hit you expect to make.
drones - self explanatory, used for mind games, scouting, being annoying
things that will literally never happen: generation ship marines/landing parties, ships crashing into eachother, backwards time travel (there would be evidence in your light cone in the form of you having been melted by infinite energy)
basically this but instead of beyond horizon it is lightyears away
yes, kinetics.
>missiles
never, no. worthless trash. how do you expect to hit anything? you think nuclear bombs in future will have effective range of lightyears and travel at .999c? no.
>hay guise, what if comic books were real!?!?!
why are soience fanbois so low iq?
it is hope and longing for the rebirth of 1700's era of discovery and exploration.
imagine space pirates and space fleets fighting on our solar system.
sounds sci fi and yet people long for something like that.
>yet media addicted midwits long for something like that because its shown to them in tv, movies and comic books
>it is hope and longing for the rebirth of 1700's era of discovery and exploration
sounds like a cargo cult
Laser coupled particle beams would likely be the main form of long ranged combat where small and medium sized ships can cut into eachother and airless targets at AU ranges along with Gauss cannons for mid range attack and high endurance torpedoes that can pull off limited gravity slingshots to surprise the enemy if they don't hit or shepard them into unfavorable orbits
Positioning is the name of the game given the vast distances of space and the energy needed to change position in any meaningful way in a 3D battlefield. 1st law of motion is a b***h out in space so you can shoot solid shot into gravity wells to interdict a fleet in orbit as those shots will keep flying even if they miss.
LCPB weapons would make smaller, more manuverable ships with medium armor the better choice as they can take some damage while avoiding most fire, you'll have a few seconds to jank out of firing solution once you detect the guide beam "painting" you before the particle lance cuts into your ship.
You want the most delta V possible while getting good thrust, especially RCS since that helps you jank fast enough to avoid incoming fire. Plasma based RCS would probably do the job well in a nuclear powered ship
Scouting and long range detection are VITAL as if you detect an enemy in transit before they know your there, you can get the drop on them before they can shoot you. You can also detect an incoming attack and jank out of the way before they can hit you.
Heat management is also critical as it limits your crew and system endurance. The longer you take to heat up to unacceptable levels, the longer you can shoot and burn before needing to shut off systems to radiate. Hull radiators for normal operations would be good with perhaps a particle fountain along the hull spraying and recollecting coolant from spinally mounted weapons for extra endurance. Hull mounted turrets could be easily made to cool themselves. Also sunward battles would be faster than outward by the gas giants.
We had the technology in the 1960s. You use frickhueg armor plating and you use your ordnance (hydrogen bombs) as your propulsion.
Getting it into orbit is the fun part. You explode an H bomb under it, and it drops another H bomb right before it reaches its apex. That second bomb sends it up higher, it drops another bomb, etc. Fifty or sixty hydrogen bombs later, you've got something the size of an aircraft carrier in orbit.
>exploding an entire nuclear arsenal to send 1 (one) ship into orbit
This might be the most moronic idea I've heard all week.
Do you have a better idea of how to get a battleship that doesn't even exist yet into orbit after a hostile invading force already has multiple warships orbiting our planet and has already thrown enough of the asteroid belt at us to send most of humanity back to the middle ages?
Yes. Use those nukes to fire camoflaged casaba howitzers because at that point, they have void supremacy and are readying for orbital bombardment and/or an invasion. Any fleet assets on the ground would be easily destroyed piecemeal.
Getting a face full of relativistic slugs and kessler syndrome grapeshot to any capital ships and or troop transports would aid earth's defenders greatly.
90% of airplane losses in war are on the ground and it would be little different in space
>are readying for orbital bombardment and/or an invasion
That's already fair accompli, see "has already thrown enough of the asteroid belt at us to send most of humanity back to the middle ages."
To clarify, Earth is already occupied and the enemy holds hostages in the tens of thousands aboard their ships, including children.
What survives of the US government got all the sci-fi writers who survived together at Cheyenne Mountain. Bob Heinlein said screw the hostages and made the same suggestion you did, but Ursula LeGuin wanted to understand how they think. And maybe that wasn't the worst idea, because it turns out they're stupider than humans, too stupid to have built spaceships. And also they were insulted that we didn't fight them as soon as they showed up.
Direct funding into ground based defenses instead of blowing our nuclear stockpile on a expensive ship that would be blown up the second it reaches orbit?
>blown up the second it reaches orbit
It's built to withstand fifty hydrogen bombs explosions at point blank range before it even arrives in the battlespace. You should be more worried about the people who aren't inside of it when it launches than the people who are.
They made it to Dale Gribble's bomb shelter though, so it's okay.
I really need to read that book again, it's been over a decade.
Just build a specialized space station with bigger thrusters and navy style weapons. They'd be extremely expensive and difficult to maintain, as well as being only useful beyond low orbit since otherwise they'd just get fricked by anti-satellite missiles, but if everyone decided to do it for some reason then yeah it would probably be possible. Right now space beyond Earth's orbit has essentially zero value strategically (prospective value doesn't really count) and even if you had a "Terra Invicta" scenario with hostile alien space fleets it would probably be a better strategy to focus on strengthening Earthbound weapons since investing in spacefaring war vessels would be equivalent to the Sentinelese deciding to contest the US navy with their canoes. Maybe in a few decades this will have changed, but by then the technology for building large space vessels will have massively increased anyway.
so, if space war is going to be so boring, slow, and indecisive, what is to be done?
simple, slave, get to mining. hah, you think we'd have ai doing everything? no, that does not please lord emperor bezos. lord emperor bezos knows artificial superintelligence is either fake and gay or is the path to complete destruction.