What future space combat would really look like

http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?t=131056

by dikarel • 15 years ago

330 231 15 years ago

forums.spacebattles.com

j_baker4• 15 years ago

I admit to skimming this, but there are a couple of things I see wrong with this.

1. You can see a spaceship from the next solar system for sure. But it would take years for you to see it.

2. I doubt the future of combat will involve humans. I envision giant fleets of spaceships that are too big for humans to control. Thus, I forsee space combat as being driven by complex algorithms.

pavel_lishin4• 15 years ago

I imagine that the individual ships themselves will also be very small. In fact, if a fleet is big enough, the communications gap becomes a problem - space battles may end up looking like a fight between two ant colonies, with small independent ships working together as a swarm, without any central guidance.

j_baker4• 15 years ago

You never know. I'm sure you could have a more "distributed leadership". I'm sure this could be accomplished with a clever enough application of paxos.

Avshalom3• 15 years ago

As to 1: It would take years for the light to get there, it would also take several MORE years for the ship to actually get there. The important take away is distance can't be used to hide, there is no "Oh they won't notice us we're still outside the orbit of Pluto."

talmand7• 15 years ago

How can that be? Space is big, we cannot even properly comprehend how big it is. I'm talking just in our immediate vicinity. If I took, say, three of the world's largest ships, put them together to form one ship and then placed it in a random spot somewhere within the orbit of Pluto; how long would it take you to find it? Keep in mind I'm not talking within the orbital plane, I'm saying within the sphere of the solar system.

Unless someone is watching 100% of the sky for even the slightest miniscule changes, I imagine you could get mighty close (granted, close is Pluto) without being detected.

Isn't most of the information we have about newly discovered far away objects is how they interacted with other known far away objects?

But, of course, there's the given that if we've advanced far enough to engage in space combat then we've likely created technology to help in detection.

j_baker4• 15 years ago

Well, now we're getting into the theoretical issues. For instance, if we develop wormhole technology, the ship could very well be there before the enemy can see it.

Otherwise, I just don't see interstellar space warfare as being that practical if it takes years to launch an attack.

orenmazor• 15 years ago

I think Hamilton nailed it when he talked about kinetic weapons and 'wasps' (aka small bots that can move in ways a human occupied ship can't)

jermy• 15 years ago

Indeed - in this particular series (The Night's Dawn Trilogy) space warfare was conducted at very long range by kinetic drones, fired from spherical ships.

elmindreda• 15 years ago

My favourite space combat scene is the one on the way to Home in Protector.

pavel_lishin4• 15 years ago

I also enjoyed Niven/Pournelle's descriptions in Mote in God's Eye - to paraphrase, space combat is incredibly boring except for brief flashes of terror.

talmand7• 15 years ago

I really liked Lucas' treatment of space combat with capital ships in Episode III. You line up next to each other and start blasting, just like they did back in the good old days of pirates on wooden sailing ships. Of course this is incredibly stupid and immensely destructive to both ships but it makes for awesome explosions.

But I think doing this within range of a planet's gravity well isn't too intelligent. Lose power and down you go.

I always appreciated the space battles in the X-Wing series of computer games. That's the way I see it, large capital ships with single-man fighters buzzing around them. But since we have semi-automated drones with human pilots on the other side of the world with a satellite link, I would have to assume those single-man fighters would be unmanned.

But Niven/Pournelle's idea of space combat is most likely what we would get.

quanticle6• 15 years ago

This essay isn't all that realistic. I found this one [1] to have a far more realistic view of what space war would look like.

Tl;dr: it's much cheaper and much more effective to lob comets at your enemy's homeworld than it is to fight with ships.

[1] http://www.gwern.net/Colder%20Wars

makmanalp2• 15 years ago

Ender's game spoiler alert! Hope it doesn't ruin it for anyone else... (grumble.)

Anyway, how the heck does one lob a comet? If throwing one was so easy, why wouldn't they just throw it right back at you?

quanticle6• 15 years ago

Well, both gwern's essay and the essay linked by OP assume that both sides have ships capable of interstellar travel. In gwern's case the idea is to not bother with the ship; just bolt an interstellar drive to a comet and point it at the enemy's homeworld.

As for them throwing comets back at you, that is addressed in the essay. In short, there is nothing stopping them from throwing comets back. Space war will resemble the Cold War much more than any active engagement. Mutually assured destruction will be the overriding doctrine.

aaronblohowiak• 15 years ago

Do you really need a spoiler alert on a young-adult novel that has been out for 26 years?

patio112• 15 years ago

Physics. Attacker gets arbitrary mass (reactant, etc) and time to accelerate. Defender needs same mass/time to decelerate... after discovering the attack.

Note that you could literally prep an attack for millennia which would be discovered a matter of hours prior to ending a civilization.

Physics makes for sucky narratives. Good thing it also makes for a vast, dead, boring universe.

talmand7• 15 years ago

Spoils Ender's Game? Bummer. I recommend you read it anyway.

meric4• 15 years ago

I postered a comment on the essay, I'll repost it here:

You assume the interstellar species will be living on a planet. What if they hollowed out their planet of resources long ago and now live in a cloud of asteroids instead? Asteroids are hollowed out as giant fortresses in space, and a bio dome sphere thingy built inside. As they are living in an asteroid cloud, to prevent impact they would have to attach thrusters to each asteroid they live on to dodge other asteroids.

So the asteroid from kuiper belt attack won't work... but what if the asteroid was launched at close to speed of light? 1. That would take a very big amount of energy. 2. They would've had to carry the energy to the kuiper belt. 3. They would've been noticed and a fleet would've sent in to capture it before the asteroid was launched.

What about the nuclear bomb? Well they live deep in the asteroid, it'll protect at least against some nuclear hits. If one asteroid blows up there are still 499 others. Still it would be great to prevent the loss of sentient life... Also what happens if 500 nukes were launched at each asteroid? I've got no answer to that.

I do wonder if there could be a device that would force nuclear explosives to be triggered prematurely, lets say, 2km away. That would be sufficient to protect the asteroid.

quanticle6• 15 years ago

What about a shotgun approach? Take a comet, accelerate it up to a significant fraction of lightspeed (after all, you you have lightyears in which to do so), and trigger a bomb in the comet to blow it apart into a few smaller pieces, each traveling at a significant fraction of c. Rinse and repeat.

zeteo18• 15 years ago

The fighting methods in that essay still require ships (to sneak up into e.g. Kuiper's Belt). In any case, a big, dumb projectile can have its course changed with much less energy than required to fire it. The bigger it is, the earlier it will be detected; and the faster it goes, the smaller the angular deflection needed to miss its target.

pilom• 15 years ago

While it is true that it should be easy to deflect, it is only easy to deflect if you can detect it. The essay assumes that the projectiles would be pushed to a significant fraction of the speed of light. At that speed there is no time to launch any type of deflection.

quanticle6• 15 years ago

He addresses that in the next paragraph:

If that’s not bad enough, one could envision flinging appropriate small moons or large asteroids from other solar systems. Why not? Boosting a large body to fractional c velocities and aiming it at a far away planet isn’t inherently any more absurd than building a ship and boosting it to fractional c. The motion of stellar bodies is famously predictable out for many centuries. The body could guide itself: add some small motors, and it could even correct for small errors in prediction. It would be the ultimate fire-and-forget weapon of mass destruction.

So you don't have to sneak up at all. You just need to have a solar system with a Kuiper Belt, and you've got all the arsenal you need. In fact, launch attacks from remote solar systems is preferable, since it gives your bullets more time accelerate before becoming visible to the enemy. They may have enough enough energy to stop an asteroid traveling at .5c. Do they have enough energy to stop one traveling at .9c?

dhs• 15 years ago

The "bugs" in Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" make ample use of this idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7-PQIuWwLo

bitwize• 15 years ago

It seems you and Heinlein are of like mind; remember Mycroft's conclusion in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress that the best way to fight the Earthen forces was to "throw rocks at them"?

cpeterso• 15 years ago

This is why Carl Sagan argued against projects like Spaceguard that purported to defend against rogue comets or asteroids. He felt that the risk of a space collision was much smaller than the threat of humans turning the technology around to hurl asteroids at our enemies.

meric4• 15 years ago

"there's no stealth in space, but there most certainly is stealth in an atmosphere."

It would allow for ambushes, and fake-ambushes.

A lone-ship running from a fleet, carrying a local governor, running past an uninhabited planet, away from a chasing enemy fleet. The lone-ship passes right next to the planet and keeps going. The enemy fleet follows. When the fleet is passing next to the planet, will there be an ambush waiting? Will missiles hidden in the moon orbiting the planet emerge and fire in a cloud of <"thunder" replacement>?

The algorithm deems the chance of an ambush springing from the planet atmosphere as "possible", and the fleet retreats.

pavel_lishin4• 15 years ago

Unless you need to make a gravity-assisted course correction, why would you follow in the path of a ship? Ambushes aside, they can drop all sorts of things behind them that you don't want to run into.

meric4• 15 years ago

Well my point stands, ambushes can be held in atmosphere.

Let's say enemy fleet regularly uses the planet to make a "gravity-assisted course correction"...

Avshalom3• 15 years ago

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewarintro.php for all your back of the envelope needs.

gwern• 15 years ago

I think http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/ is by the same guy as OP, actually - the forum post made many points I recognized from Project Rho.

nyrath2• 15 years ago

Well, that turns out not to be the case. I'm the author of the Project Rho site, and I did not write the essay on the Spacebattles forum. But I agree with all the points the poster made, he just wrote the article more succinctly than I did in my website. ;)

yock2• 15 years ago

On the subject of privateers, why is the author so insistent on the danger of crashing ships into planets? What does the math look like when space craft like he describes hits the upper reaches of our atmosphere? At those speeds, could a space craft really penetrate far enough to cause terrestrial damage?

rw• 15 years ago

An example: Project Thor / "Rods from God": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

yock2• 15 years ago

The linked article seems to mention re-entry friction as a problem yet-to-be-solved:

The system would also have to cope with atmospheric heating from re-entry, which could melt the weapon.

Then there's the question of whether or not heat is truly the most immediate issue. NASA and USAF had to actually fly an airplace near and past the speed of sound to see how the properties of the atmosphere changed when compressed. Is it logical to hypothesize that similar changes may be encountered as speed continues to increase?

patio112• 15 years ago

A relativistic speeds, having airbags is not a free pass. Great, it hit your atmosphere and disintegrated. Now your atmosphere hits you.

johngalt• 15 years ago

The author underestimates guns while overestimating "kinetic missiles". Speed imparts a lot of energy, but it wont transmit all of that energy to the target. You'll have a <missile diameter> hole in the ship.

Your ships are closing at 1000km/s and your cloud of missiles have a 10km/s Delta? A cloud of slugs would be almost the same, and you could put up a lot more of them. Of course a hybrid approach is likely, with shrapnel filled missiles. Better to impact like a shotgun than a needle.

Edit: Also gets it wrong on point defense. If you have enough energy weapons to mount an effective defense you'd make yourself such a large/vulnerable target that you'd be impossible to miss. Once again putting a cloud of slugs in the path of an inbound missile would be easier and more effective. With the speeds/distances involved all of the missiles would be approaching from a very narrow cone, and a small deflection would mean a miss.

electromagnetic11• 15 years ago

Railguns are worthy of note, but would likely only be worthy of PD weapons. The problem with guns is that your target moves. With the exception of missiles, every fraction of the speed of light slower your weapon is, the bigger chance you take of missing. With a round fired at .1C over 300,000KM (1 light second) you need to account for about 11 seconds of lead on your target. That's 11 seconds that they don't change their course enough for you to miss. Compare this to a laser where it's 1 second of lead.

> With the speeds/distances involved all of the missiles would be approaching from a very narrow cone, and a small deflection would mean a miss.

Not necessarily. Unless space battle becomes solely a chasing game (which would favour the defender as if you know you're a runner the majority of your PD's will be aimed out your ass). A missile can sit for any amount of time after being dropped before firing. This means you can distribute a missile or approach from opposing angles. If your ship uses turrets for PD then you know it cant easily shoot two different angles at once. If you're fighting well within your missiles ranges (because fighting at maximum range gives too much time for PD's) then it'll be very easy to launch your missiles around your target in a flank attack.

jasonkester• 15 years ago

I think Banks' The Algabraist got it about right.

In fact, that whole book is crammed full of good "things we currently believe to be true about physics extrapolated as far as theoretically possible" ideas:

  "How do you navigate this thing?"
  "Point."
  "Point?"
  "Yes, point.  It's all about having enough power.
   Fiddling around with calculations about DeltaV is really
   just a sign that you don't have enough power."

arethuza• 15 years ago

"It's all about having enough power."

That really does sound like the name of a Culture GSV.

[Correction - No Culture ship would be quite so lacking in gravitas, so I suspect a more likely name would be "Fiddling around with calculations about DeltaV"].

jdowner• 15 years ago

I would say there is a good chance that a GSV would have no gravitas and that a GCU would have very little gravitas indeed.

saturn• 15 years ago

Let me second this recommendation that anyone with a genuine interest in this topic check out The Algebraist; it's a truly excellent book. I wouldn't say it's Hard SF but it's pretty firm and, IMO, a far more considered and imaginative vision of viable-ish space battle than the linked article manages.

I mean, the article hardly even mentions antimatter, aka the most potent energy store in the known physical universe, aka God's battery. Who's going to be frigging around with some stupid dirty fission reactor when the local Dyson Sphere is producing cheap (by military standards) AM by the kilo?

zmj• 15 years ago

What's the difference between a spaceship and a missile once you remove the human passengers and pilots?

Groxx• 15 years ago

A missile is likely to be more efficient and cheaper, by a massive margin. Otherwise, none.

nyrath2• 15 years ago

Not much. The main difference between a missile and a robot controlled spacecraft is that the latter has more propellant. The spacecraft presumably is intended to return while the missile is just has to arrive at the target. The spacecraft will have roughly 4x the propellant [1] propellant to enter mothership to target trajectory [2] propellant to slow to combat speed at target [3] propellant to enter home to mothership trajectory [4] propellant to slow to a stop at mothership. A missile only needs [1].

gerggerg3• 15 years ago

Why would space war ships be manned when we're already flying unmanned vehicles on earth? I think we've touched on a reality of intelligent species coexisting in the universe. Space war would consist of staying hidden and probably nothing else.

Plus, certainly people would be fighting over the planets or the technology (or maybe the amulet of Endor) so simply throwing comets and obliterating things wouldn't make much sense except maybe defensively or to help with a gennocide.

Terrestrial battles to take over usable land would probably continue to be the name of the game. Followed with setting up tonnes of drones and sensors for defense.

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

Speed of light delay could be critical in space battles, especially when you consider that it goes both ways (sensor readings -> brain : decision making -> control signal). The real question is how smart you can make computers, if you can't make them as smart as a human then you need to have a meat-brain somewhere in the middle of the battle. If you can make them that smart then that opens up a whole host of questions on sentience and ethics.

Edit: Keep in mind that your manned "ship" might still be thousands or millions of kilometers away from the enemy and controlling a vast array of computerized drones. But when weapons are zipping around at 10s, 100s, or even 1000s of km/s the scope of the battlefield changes dramatically. You can be remotely operating missiles that are farther away than the moon is from the Earth and still be in the thick of it.

gerggerg3• 15 years ago

I don't know if as smart as would be valuable against as low powered as. A computer would make decisions instantly, take much less resources, would die less easily, wouldn't get bored, wouldn't forget it's mission, would feel no sympathy, could travel farther, could stay in operation longer, could tactically self destruct without hesitation, would take no salary.

But that being said, I honestly can't think of a reason to ever have a space battle. You either want to blow up a planet or not. If so, you do it from an large distance with a humongous rock. If not, you land on the planet, or fly around their atmosphere and kill them the old fashioned way.

Maybe defensively you chase down an attacker to prevent future attacks? But then all you have is guided missiles and the speed of their ships. Not really a battle.

What I guess I'm saying is I can't ever see there being an attack position other than lets wait until there are no rocks in-between us and them.

zeteo18• 15 years ago

>Why would space war ships be manned when we're already flying unmanned vehicles on earth

Because the longest distance on Earth is only about 0.07 light-seconds.

rbanffy7• 15 years ago

And why do you think they would be remote controlled?

If you put a smart enough brain inside it, you could just upload a copy of the crew (assuming you can digitize and run human minds, of course, something that seems easier than interstellar travel). This way, the ship would not be limited by its crew. The crews responses would also only be limited by available processing speed. And, instead of lifeboats, you could transmit the crew states. In fact, you could do that regularly across the fleet for synchronization and backup purposes.

And, from the inside, it could look exactly like a Constitution class federation starship. People younger than me would prefer a Galaxy class. I, myself, am in doubt between the Constitution and the Heart of Gold. Or a big bridge like the original Battlestar Galactica. The computer could easily generate a lot of red-shirts for added drama during battles.

51Cards• 15 years ago

Still only part way through and though I don't entirely agree with all the conclusions the thought experiment is proving to be fun.

This however is my favourite point so far as I had never really thought about it this way when watching popularized SciFi.

Another thing about motion in space is that changing your ship’s orientation does nothing to your speed and vector unless it is accompanied by firing your main engine, because there is no friction. This means that all those space dogfights where one fighter gets behind the other and the other one has to try and shake it like in air combat are very unrealistic. There’s no comprehensible reason why the pursued pilot can’t just turn his fighter around and blast the bugger.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series has just been ruined for me. Wait, no, it still had Wilma Deering, so all is not lost.

TeMPOraL• 15 years ago

AFAIR they did that maneuver on Battlestar Galactica a few times. But still, it's a good point.

Qz• 15 years ago

Babylon 5 did this a lot as well.

philwelch5• 15 years ago

I don't think space combat is even going to happen. Any combatant with the necessary wealth and technology to develop any space-combat capability is going to have significant terrestrial interests and nuclear weapons already, at which point they're already subject to MAD and won't engage in direct combat anyway. At the very minimum, you would need economically and politically independent Moon/Mars colonies, and even they would be so dependent upon Earth trade that they would either not want to start a war or, even if they did, would have Earthbound allies who are significantly more vulnerable than they are, and no less essential to their survival.

The closest we'll ever get is probably the development of ASAT weapons, and even those aren't likely to see much use.

rbanffy7• 15 years ago

> Any combatant with the necessary wealth and technology to develop any space-combat capability is going to have significant terrestrial interests

Imagine a colony that long ago severed its ties with Earth (or whatever other terrestrial body they started from). Living off comets and asteroids seems entirely feasible and it's a much harder to attack/easier to defend set up.

philwelch5• 15 years ago

Complete economic isolation from the earth seems very unlikely, at the very least because it wouldn't actually benefit anyone.

dustingetz3• 15 years ago

my takeaway: there will be no space battles, because whichever side has more money will always have vastly superior weapons, and they will take what they want. violence will happen in key strategic plays, like political assassinations. it's not like today's earth-combat where we're all mostly equal and everyone has time to launch their nukes and we all die. this is all assuming that one side doesn't simply exterminate the other like a termite infestation.

Splines• 15 years ago

As mentioned in the post, David Weber's Honor Harrington series operates very much like this. I've read a few of them and enjoyed it. Nuances in space combat in his stories tend to be important.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Weber#Honor_Harrington_se...

Also, it's worth watching this scene from Mass Effect 2. It's amusing :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GqqDCe4Yrs

dalke6• 15 years ago

Assuming a ship of 500 m in length, and weighing 10,000,000 tons (100 times heavier than the largest aircraft carrier), the firing of a 20kg shell at 1.3% of the speed of light requires a momentum transfer of 0.008 m/s from the ship. Assuming constant acceleration, the firing requires a shell acceleration of 1.5E10 g, which is done in 130 microseconds.

A velocity change of 0.008 m/s in 130 microseconds means the ship itself has an average acceleration of about 60m/s/s or about 6 g. However, this assumes the entire ship is rigidly coupled to the firing system. If held together by normal structural forces, which propagate at best at multiples of the speed of sound, then no more than 1/2 meter of other structure can be involved. It's more likely the equipment itself will have 100s of g of stress.

The acceleration requires 1.5E14 Joules, or 35 kT of TNT, which is what the clip said.

ew3• 15 years ago

It was definitely an interesting read, however, I feel that fundamentally, for humans to reach the point where space combat is even feasible we will have solved so many more important problems that there won't be a need for fighting in the cosmos. Earth, in general, is at peace. We are largely struggling against terrorism, radical groups, and internal genocide rather than full scale, nation-on-nation wars.

No two democracies have gone to war, ever, and that's an important indicator of our future. Don't get me wrong, we have A TON of human rights, poverty, and equality problems, but things are rapidly improving directly proportional to our technical capabilities.

By the time we can even construct two ships capable of having a realistic fight in space we're more likely to send them exploring rather than duke it out. All current governments even capable of dreaming of getting in to space work together on the problem, sharing resources and knowledge.

To recap, we'll never go to war in space. I also doubt any other intelligent life with the capabilities to do so will need to attack us because they've solved any problems requiring them to do so.

Detrus• 15 years ago

We may still do it for sport.

philwelch5• 15 years ago

> No two democracies have gone to war, ever

That stirs up a whole new thing, detailed here: http://users.rcn.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm

ew3• 15 years ago

That was almost as good a read as the main post :)

scythe• 15 years ago

>No two democracies have gone to war, ever,

India and Pakistan?

amalcon7• 15 years ago

There are three fundamental problems I see here:

1) Why put humans on warships at all? Algorithms are probably better at it. Computers would obviously do the heavy lifting anyway (calculating burn times). An algorithm knows no fear, shows no mercy, and does not flee or surrender unless programmed to do so. The only thing left is target selection, and it doesn't seem worth bringing a human along just for that.

2) If you don't need to put humans on warships, then you quickly realize you don't need a warship at all. Just send a bunch of missiles from wherever the warship would have launched. It's harder to take them all out at once with a "mine" or something. You also get to build more missiles if you don't need to build the warship. Sure, you might attach a collective nuclear rocket "booster" to many missiles to build that initial velocity. There's no need for that rocket to be anything more than an engine temporarily attached to the missiles. It's also not really required to begin with.

3) If you're sending lots of missiles, there's no reason for them to be any larger than the smallest size permitted by design and manufacturing practicalities. For something that amounts to a liquid-fueled rocket, that smallest size is preposterously small. A liquid-fueled rocket can be fit into an object the size of a soda can with current technology. This makes the notion of point defense completely laughable: divert ten thousand missiles out of one hundred thousand, and you've reduced the incoming energy by 10%.

icefox• 15 years ago

On the same idea of not having humans I have been wondering when when we will see a war type video game where you play drones be it land air or sea rather than soldiers on the ground or flying a plane. The cost of sending humans is so high just around our little planet that I can't see how anyone would want to inject humans into any space attacking where the costs as mentioned in the article are so much higher.

modeless• 15 years ago

RTS games have the player directing an army of autonomous AI-controlled drones. In a game like Supreme Commander they don't even pretend to be people.

zeteo18• 15 years ago

> Why put humans on warships at all?

The whole idea of the article is to explore what's possible with current technology, and general-purpose AI is not part of that. Guided missiles are routinely defeated by counter-measures even when the flight only takes minutes.

amalcon7• 15 years ago

How would having humans a few light-seconds away from the missiles be able to help with that?

nl5• 15 years ago

You are thinking of a space ship as similar to an airplane, a tank or a ship.

In truth it is more analogous to a bullet or bomb - point it in the right direction and try and get it there as fast as possible.

dspeyer• 15 years ago

Are you sure about that? Last I knew, interceptors hardly ever succeeded against guided missiles unless the missiles actually had locater beacons on them. Defenses that work are to create decoy targets (against simple guidance systems like heat-seeking) or to spoof a cancel order on the control channel. Neither seems likely to hold against a really capable attacker.

evo_9• 15 years ago

I think they main reason the author 'puts' humans in ships is because of when the article was written - 2005. Simply put, drones are a new idea that hadn't really crossed many peoples minds until they started popping up in the military.

Beyond that I think it's a pretty well reasoned piece.

kevinalexbrown• 15 years ago

What if you launch a surprise attack by launching a missile at relativistic speeds?

rbanffy7• 15 years ago

Unless you are talking about yet to be invented explosives, at relativistic speeds you may as well launch a rock. The explosive power of your warhead will probably be irrelevant when compared to the kinetic energy of the projectile.

But, fairly enough, launching anything at relativistic speeds requires yet to be invented propulsion systems that will require energies much larger than any explosive we know today.

For maximum efficiency, you could launch a lump of antimatter at relativistic speeds. That should take care of the details.

JDulin2• 15 years ago

A fascinating read and good outline for what space battles require, but not a predication of what future space combat will look like. By limiting the discussion to only technology that we could build today, the exact scenarios in here will never play out.

Large scale space combat will play out only when humans can build these weapons cheaply, and have an incentive to build them at all. That is decades from now. By the time a human society decides to construct the ridiculously expensive space warships and defenses the author talks about, we will have much more advanced technology (that is probably a lot cheaper to.)

learc83• 15 years ago

Do any other hacker news readers check out spacebattles.com? I'm glad to see it on the front page, I've been a member there since '01

maeon3• 15 years ago

Information and stealth are the biggest assets in space war so maybe that is why we dont see aliens chit chatting all over. A species wins a war by making the enemy think it has won, while hiding out at a new home base to build up weapons.I see earth as an extension and continuation of that war. We don't know where our allies are, So that when they discover our position and interrogate us they won't find the rest of the hive. the winners of war will be the species that hides the best.

stcredzero7• 15 years ago

Against space piracy:

First, it requires that FTL ships be cheap enough that criminals can acquire them. This is another area in which the analogy between the age of sail and the space age breaks down. Sailing ships were skill-intensive but materially cheap. You had to have people with the right skills, but once you did all you needed was wood, rope, and cloth. But spacecraft are going to follow a post-industrial revolution paradigm of being materially expensive as well as skill-intensive. They are likely to require sophisticated, precision-manufactured components and expensive fuels like helium 3, fissionables, or antimatter. Imagine Captain Jack Sparrow commanding a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and you’ll get an idea of the kind of difference we’re talking about.

If technological trends continue, the degree of technology available to the average citizen and the average criminal will continue to increase. As an individual, I have access to more media distribution than Queen Elizabeth could even imagine. As an individual, I can build a device like a CNC machine or a 3D printer from off the shelf parts.

Skillfully crafted wood, rope, and cloth would seem like miracle items to someone from the stone age. A CNC laser cutter would represent miraculous technological savvy and princely embodied wealth to someone from the 1400's. The equivalent to an Orion ship might well be within the rech of rogue elements of the late 21st century.

That said, space piracy probably won't happen, or at least won't resemble piracy from old movies in the least, but the technology being out of reach won't be the reason why.

electromagnetic11• 15 years ago

Agreed. Piracy denotes the theft of goods or money. When you can print goods, money is worthless. Your soul resources become matter and energy, and most matter is easy to come by.

Piracy would likely extend solely to the theft of energy resources. Similarly, so would war but on a bigger scale.

Piracy of goods would only extend to things not easily replicable by the present technology, or not easily replicable on many colonies. Even then, you're looking more at the theft of raw materials or for material value. Piracy would likely resemble robbing armoured vans today than any kind of piracy we've seen before, but they'd likely be trying to get precious metals or power like uranium.

nl5• 15 years ago

most matter is easy to come by

Endless wars over oil, rare earth metals in Africa and the ever increasing price of iron ore would tend to indicate you might be wrong about that.

Just because a single 3D printer won't use much won't magically make resource constraints disappear.

ohyes3• 15 years ago

Space combat seems pointless to me.

What exactly would they be fighting over?

Presumably you want to reach space for resources, so asteroids, planets and moons with minerals, stuff like that. You might also want planets/asteroids/moons that are 'good' for colonization (easily terra formed or already life sustaining).

You probably wouldn't see many fights where you are firing at the resource itself. No one with the money to fire at earth, will actually fire at earth, because it is more valuable as an inhabitable planet. If each side can obliterate whatever is being fought over, you basically have an instant MAD scenario.

Similar with moons/asteroids. I'm not going to fire a massive kinetic weapon at a moon or asteroid (and blow it to pieces) if my objective is obtain that object to profit from it. More likely I'll pay people very well to infiltrate and sabotage it, repeatedly. I wouldn't even bother trying to invade.

Why not an invasion force? Well, you could send an invasion force, but that would be fairly pointless. It is easy to defend an entrenched position that your enemy does not want to shoot at (sabotaging just the defenses might be too obvious, and i think would have too high a possibility of failure). On top of this they can use massive force to repel you, and you cannot (you don't want to obliterate your objective). So an invasion fleet is probably not likely.

A far more likely scenario would be to simply drive your competitor out of business. If they keep getting sabotaged, it becomes unprofitable for them to operate (it becomes a 'cursed' outpost, wages go up, you have to make repairs). Then you can easily take their stuff (or buy it on the cheap when they are going out of business).

This gets you into interesting things, you would end up with extensive background and history checks, genetic tests to prove that you really are who you say you are, mental/psychological screening, mind-reading, brainwashing, complex hacking of the computers that do background checks, genetic 'doping' to make a person pass as someone else, brainwashing.

Your competitors will also likely try to assassinate you if they every figure out that you are the one ordering the destruction of their outposts (it should be easy to figure out, as there will be few entities with resources to profit from this).

talmand7• 15 years ago

What if the goal is to eliminate the planet-side species?

Plus I'm willing to bet you could obliterate the surface of the planet using kinetic weapons and still have plenty of resources left over.

troels• 15 years ago

Why would that ever be a goal?

dustingetz3• 15 years ago

i imagine each planet/unit of an inter-system civilization will not be self-sufficient. seige, baby. i think a study of earth's military tactics and goals will answer the questions raised by this post.

atarian• 15 years ago

You should definitely play EVE Online. This is totally the kind of stuff that goes on in the major corporations that players set up.

sliverstorm3• 15 years ago

You can argue this over in your head a lot, but it's really quite simple in my mind.

If we assume space travel becomes relatively easy (that is to say it is used for more than initial colonization) there will be interstellar commerce. If there is unprotected commerce, there will be pirates. Any time there are pirates, protection will develop. Let us call these peace-keepers the Navy.

If you engage in commerce and you have a powerful Navy, you can influence or even control commerce.

Do you see where I'm going? Most wars are about resources. Commerce is about resources. Anywhere you have commerce, you are liable to develop conflict.

weavejester8• 15 years ago

I think you're looking at this with a 20th century viewpoint. There doesn't seem like there'd be a lot of physical matter that an advanced civilisation might want to pirate. Perhaps some form of exotic matter, like a black hole, might fit the bill, but that would be particularly hard to steal because everyone could see where you were taking it.

brazzy• 15 years ago

Read TFA, it argues pretty convincingly that there will not be pirates because A) you can't hide in space and B) Any ship is a WMD, so governments will do anything to keep them out of the hands of criminals, and protection rackets would be a far more profitable use for them than raiding commerce.

ew3• 15 years ago

Unless we can effectively teleport, there won't be any interstellar commerce. Everything is too far away.

Interplanetary, maybe, but within our solar system.

JDulin2• 15 years ago

I think your argument is aiming at the right target, but is using the wrong ammo.

The essay outlines why piracy is not possible (or at least practical) for space commerce. However, it is very plausible that nations will fight over shipping routes and try to destroy each other's freighters and merchant ships. Like you said "Anywhere you have commerce, you are liable to develop conflict." This will be true, but probably only between political states.

zeteo18• 15 years ago

People have been making the argument that war makes no economic sense, and therefore won't happen, since at least 1898:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gotlib_Bloch#Research_and_a...

Sixteen years later, they had the first world war.

wisty• 15 years ago

It didn't really make much sense, either. Nor the next one.

stcredzero7• 15 years ago

You probably wouldn't see many fights where you are firing at the resource itself.

No, but if you can control travel to and from the resource, then you can park your forces there, and say, shut off the population's air supply. Better yet, threaten to do so, unless they all get onboard a shuttle.

Plenty of precedent for this tactic. It's been used by labor unions and informal groups of workers for nearly a couple of centuries now.

Maybe someone can weaponize psychological disorders or sociological pathologies this way? It's harder to make a group work well together than it is to make a group that is dysfunctional. Maybe this is already happening?

ohyes3• 15 years ago

Sure, but the important part is perfect visibility. You and your opponent know exactly where each other are at all times. If you blockade, you will be a sitting duck for surface to ship weapons. You have to maintain a high velocity to avoid this. The alternative then is to intercept their transports, and even if you do that, you still have to refuel somewhere. (It seems like it might be better sending unmanned missiles to 'intercept' the transports anyway). And the refueling platform or space ship or missile platform will probably be a sitting duck at some point.

I think this is quite likely, you could even engineer people who are simply annoying and send them to cause trouble within in a small mining colony. For example, a person who chews loudly, has bad breath and terrible BO would put a huge strain on a group if you had to share sparse quarters and limited oxygen.

Throw in a sociopath with a strong will to power and you've at least got an 8 part miniseries.

baddox2• 15 years ago

Why are you always supposing that ships would be firing at valuable planets, then debunking that? Just extend the idea of a nation's airspace to a planet's "spacespace." Establishing space supremacy around a planet would obviously be a useful military tactic. You can stop extraplanetary supplies and commerce (think the blockade from Star Wars) and eventually take over a valuable planet by starving them out (assuming that the planet relies on space travel for a significant part of its economy, which is pretty much te assumption of this whole debate). That planet in turn will want its own space fleet to protect its spacespace. When the two forces meet, you have space battles. It seems simple to me.

ohyes3• 15 years ago

Well, let's say I want to gather minerals from an asteroid.

My primary defense would probably be to paste a big honking weapon on the asteroid and shoot anyone who wants to take over my valuable mining facility.

If I put my defenses on something next to my planet, I'm an idiot. If he destroys my defenses, I want him to also have a high chance of destroying whatever he's attacking me for.

So I build a big weapon as well as commensurate defenses. It isn't unimaginable that the destruction created by future weapons in order to penetrate future defenses would be immense. High velocity and mass will be the only way to do this... mostly in order to prevent deflection/destruction. You have accelerated a projectile to significant fraction of the speed of light in order to get it through the target's point defenses (think missile defense shield). Anything that can penetrate the missile defense system will have extreme destructive force, without needing a warhead.

Generally the point of a blockade/siege is to starve out the opponent so that you can eventually take whatever they are squatting on. Your opponent has a big weapon that you don't want to shoot at (you aren't looking to destroy what you are fighting over). Your blockade would be a sitting duck unless you destroy the weapon, and you significantly reduce the value of the planet/asteroid if you destroy the weapon.

In addition he also has perfect visibility due to the empty nature of space... he can see and shoot at you whenever he wants. If you intercept his transports, he shoots at you. If you stop to refuel, he shoots at you. If you start taking out his less valuable assets, he shoots at you. He can shoot your other assets too. Your space armada has to refuel at a fixed point in space... likely visible to his weapon.

If there were a fight, it would likely be very short and involve both sides having their logistical assets completely annihilated... Which ultimately would defeat the purpose of attacking in the first place.

Tloewald• 15 years ago

It's an interesting topic for discussion, but the writer makes lots of "realistic" assumptions whil ignoring many others. Assuming this level of "realism" -- I.e. no unforeseen technologies -- we basically don't get enormously high delta-v for most kinds of useful ship, so the very high sustained accelerations (e.g. 4G) aren't going to happen. The discussion of perfect intelligence is good but fails to mention that most plausible spacecraft would be detectable at enormous ranges even with their engines OFF. Clearly almost everything will be automated and networked.

I think the writer starts out with the a priori assumption that there will be spaceships with a crew at one end and an engine at the other and works from there. I suspect you'll just have a swarm of networked drones. Why put so many eggs in one basket?

(We're already seeing this approach being experimented with on nuclear hunter killer subs, where firing at an enemy gives away your position, and giving your position away gets you killed -- the US Navy has been working on submarines tha launch drone firing platforms.)

cletus• 15 years ago

If you're interested in "realistic" (meaning: no FTL) space battles read Alastair Reynolds' Redemption Ark (and read Revelation Space and Chasm City before that).

It includes a chase between star systems that goes on for years and "close" (ie within a few light-seconds) combat that involves a lot of interpolation of enemy position, movement and actions.

Personally I still have serious doubts about the viability of any kind of prolonged manned presence in space. Its simply too expensive and the distances involved in interstellar travel are so vast that even perfect mass to energy transformation would make the process prohibitive in terms of cost and time.

But it's fun to muse about.

baddox2• 15 years ago

I assumed that most of the proposed space battles in question would be between human factions relatively close together (certainly within the Solar system).

brmj• 15 years ago

Here's a thought I've had in the past after encountering a document of this type: Stealth in space is trivial is what you are trying to keep hidden doesn't need to accelerate, support human life or do anything much that generates significant heat, especially if it can stay far away from what it is hiding from. Space is big and hard to hide things in, but it is full of all kinds of smallish debris in the vicinity of a solar system. If you have something of about the right size, orbit, albedo, radar reflectivity and temperature, it ought to be hard to distinguish it from a stray bit of rock or ice too small for anyone to have paid attention to it in the past.

Bearing this in mind, suppose that you built a small, camouflaged satellite which would just sit there at ambient temperature until it received instructions, upon which it would point itself at a given patch of sky, do the finest bits of the aiming using its own passive sensors and then fire a nuclear bomb-pumped x-ray laser at whatever has the misfortune to be there. With something like this, one could probably swat any reasonable craft out of the sky before it had time to respond. You could perhaps also use such things offensively by putting them on orbits that will take them within their effective range of whatever you want them to shoot, though they would stand out a bit more that way.

The only real countermeasure to these I can think of would be to move your spacecraft rapidly back and forth at all times, which is probably infeasible given the amount of reaction mass it would take.

I'm not sure what the implications of all of this are, but I suspect they would be interesting.

berntb• 15 years ago

Would it be feasible to use a nuclear device as a shotgun?

That is, most of the kinetic energy of the bomb is directed (like discussions for the bombs in the Orion project). The bomb would be optimised to send tungsten bullets off at X km/s.

Then put that as the payload of a missile.

Edit: Fragmentation bombs was discussed in the second page of the article. Hmm... this would need a very tight spread of the heavy pellets, which is probably not possible with a nuclear weapon?

Edit 2: Add a 2nd level of explosive drive to the fragments? They disperse a bit (to make them hard targets) but know where the target will be and when. More like submunitions, I guess.

Edit 3: Rail guns to send (small) kinetic missiles at a high initial speed? These could potentially run in stealth mode for quite some time, before doing final course corrections.

electromagnetic11• 15 years ago

The OPs problem here is that in the attempt to change the analogy from naval combat to aerial warfare is that he fails to grasp the medium again.

Space is big, space is empty. FTA this means everything is easily trackable, not only are thrusters visible from across the solar system (except perhaps if you're headed directly for someone, but the thrust required there would be insane), but even every object in the solar system is glowing in infrared energy and thats background objects, not to mention you've strapped nuclear power plants, life support and whatever other heat producing apparatus onto your ship to make it glow even brighter.

The problem with being visible from a distance means it favours those who can hide. Basically, it favours mines. It's simple strap a laser onto a small rock, bury capacitors inside it and have them charged by solar panels. Why? Because the aim is to one-shot your target somewhere important. The mine is disposable, if it one shots the target you might get lucky enough to use it twice. If not you'll have dozens of others waiting. You've got 3 targets: Power supply (nuclear reactor/capacitor bank/whatever), main engine (you cripple their thrust and they're a sitting duck) and control centre (heck, you're likely able to nail all habitable space in one shot as a space ship is more likely to have a vastly expanded cockpit rather than a whole ship of habitable space)

The other problem with space combat is heat. Before you'd even fire a missile or a bullet, you're going to be aiming infrared lasers on your targets from light minutes away. If a ship is habitated then you only need to get it to the point where the life support can't shift enough heat to keep the air temperature below 40C. In uncrewed ships you're talking hot enough to make processors malfunction, which isn't considerably hotter than people can tolerate. These might cope better as cooling can be dedicated to very small areas.

The problem with space is that objects can get very hot, very fast and unless you bring a lot of material to heat sink and dump, you've got problems.

Space will be a war predominated with mines and heat. There are currently about 25,000 objects in space. If only 1% of these are ship-killer mines, would you attack Earth? Well, you'd need more than 250 ships, assuming you're able to kill all the mines in a very short time before they can refire.

Want to attack a mining base in the asteroid field? Find the rock without the massive laser hiding in it! Furthermore, try to wage an effective assault when you're pulverizing everything within a million kilometers of you, and still have the weapons/energy/heat sink capability to fight your target that has a massive rock of shielding and heat sinking, versus your ship.

What about launching asteroids or comets at your target? Well 1 if it's viable to nudge an asteroid from hitting earth, then it's viable to nudge the asteroid your in so that it's missed.

saulrh• 15 years ago

Mines are just as detectable as anything else. Problem: how does your mine know when to go off? If it has sensors, it has electronics; if it has electronics, those electronics are running at something above 3 Kelvin; if you're running anywhere above 3 Kelvin, you can be seen against the cosmic background.

Also, asteroids are incredibly vulnerable, because they can't move. You don't even need to get into range; just boost up another rock and nudge it into a collision trajectory.

electromagnetic11• 15 years ago

I don't disagree, but remember the number of asteroids over 100km is around 200. The number of asteroids over 1km is between 700,000 and 1.7 million. That means the very big asteroids are between 0.0003% and 0.0001% of the objects in the asteroid belt. Given that the smallest known Aten asteroid is ~5m in diameter, then it's an easy conjecture that the asteroid belt is likely to have tens if not hundreds of million asteroids <1km in diameter.

They're going to have enough mass that blasting them is going to be impractical. It's going to be a waste attacking a mining asteroid if you're dumping hundreds of munitions at every nearby rock.

> If it has sensors, it has electronics; if it has electronics, those electronics are running at something above 3 Kelvin; if you're running anywhere above 3 Kelvin, you can be seen against the cosmic background.

This is very true, however given the variation in albedo's of asteroids and meteoroids then there's going to be a wide range of 'normal' temperatures for asteroids. With enough processing power you could assume that people would eventually start calculating asteroid albedo vs distance from sun vs apparent temperature. If you've got a light rock that's hot as all hell, then you might be best to shoot it just in case. Probably not likely for civilians at least, even the military might not want to be running too much processing power as they'd have greater heat sinking issues to worry about.

The real thing that will determine how hard or easy to find mines will be is human mining. How much dirt and debris are we going to be producing, or even purposefully producing. If we're mining bigger asteroids are we going to require ships to land, or simply dump payloads into orbit for ships to snag. If we're doing the latter, then we're talking about hundreds of objects running well above background levels. How much rock are we going to strip off an asteroid and leave nearby?

If piracy or warfare becomes real, then mining companies will likely want to limit the approach vectors for incoming ships. What better way than dumping copious amounts of junk in your orbit. Given that a cubic meter of silica weighs around 2500kg, then you're not likely to crash your ship into it at any speed. Put thousands of these in orbit, and people are only going to approach from the clear paths.

Again, all these rocks would be hotter than background, and you only have to mine 1% for it to be a solid defence. Making someone take 100 shots in 1-hit wins warfare is a very effective defence.

majmun• 15 years ago

I imagine, that this space warfare as described in article will only be preceding the real war. once this unmanned missiles are exhausted . if invading force has won. it will try to land on the resource that it is fought for, (planet, moon, asteroid, space station). and once they are landed it will be more classical warfare. (so don't worry there will still be blood). so this is very much like trench warfare.

All this is valid for current technology . and same species war (humans vs humans) , but war between aliens and humans will most likely be war between Von Neumann probes. if you lose you got terraformed or planetXformed. all will be very quick and precalculated. so if you are not prepared in advance for all possible situations. you will probably lose. (or not be able to terraform). pretty much all you can do to protect you r self from alien Von Neumann probes is find it first in space or early stages of development and try to reverse engineer it.

whyme• 15 years ago

hmmm... so the author is using today's understanding of technology to substantiate future outcomes. No can do - I say!

stcredzero7• 15 years ago

This whole thing about "stealth will be impossible, because everyone will have dispersed observation platforms," seems very handwavy to me. If detection is so easy across vast distances, then ultimately observation platforms shouldn't be able to survive unless they have stealth. Otherwise, no matter how cheap you can make your observation platform, you can make something else that will destroy it for much less.

I imagine space warfare to be a complex "cold war" of vast distances, with robot missile and detection ships tightly beaming waste heat and information in carefully chosen directions. There will be complex games of deception and counter-deception. It will be a matter of tricking the enemy into critical errors about what you know and don't know about the disposition of their forces.

The situation where everybody is using torchships, and everybody knows where everybody is at all times is similar to the Surface to Air Missile dominated era of aerial warfare of the 70's. There will be tremendous incentives to someone to develop workable stealth of some form.

MatthewPhillips3• 15 years ago

A destroyed observation platform is just as useful for defense as a working one :) I'll replace my cheap observation platforms after I've disposed of the threat that just gave itself away.

stcredzero7• 15 years ago

It will be a losing battle if the resource that destroyed your platform is cheaper than your platform. And while your're "disposing of the threat that just gave it self away," you're actually falling into my trap, for I've only sent that drone to get you to maneuver and give your other forces away, so my other disposable stealth drones can spin-up to high-energy missile mode and blow them up as well.

See, you can't just handwave stealth in space away. If you think you can, you just haven't thought it through quite enough.

doku• 15 years ago

Those monitoring platforms if they emit any signals they can be detected and destroyed. During the early days of Iraq war, Iraq had a GPS disruption device that floods the wavelength with their own GPS signals. The first thing US did was to send a missile that use disruptor's own signal to track it down and destroy it. Establishing enemy's fog of war would be first priority.

It is very unlikely battle's will occur in open space if both sides knows each other's capability. The side with slight disadvantage will seek to level the playing field by heading towards asteroid field or unmonitored planets.

Once they arrived at the planet, one strategy for the orbital battle field is to go into an extreme elliptical orbit. The more skilled pilot will be able to calculate the opponent's possible orbit and tries to outwit his opponent. As the pilot approach the perigee of the orbit, the cinematographic tense scene panes to the pilot's face as the ship slows to the escape velocity in the upper atmosphere. Only to escape tattered and draught, and approaching the enemy hidden by the planet horizon.

What future space combat would really look like

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