Ships of the size for just transport sounds reasonable but considering that space is devoide of matter, ship speed would be irrelivent. Nommater if it was an engine put on smaller craft or some sort of ultra battle platform, they should move at relativly the same speed. Giving that smaller craft would probably still have a manuverability (which could possibly make them viable for defence if anything) its speed (which is an advantage smaller craft have enjoyed in most space combat related entertainment) will be the same and with it constantly making twists and turns instead of basicly one strait direction, they would fall far behind larger ships in offence due to the objective in most offensive senarios are based on advancing forward making them almost useless. The only use i can currently think up of is just a pilotless long range missle platfrom so it doesnt nessicarily have to keep up with a fleet. Opinions?
Another thing, since there is no horizon in space, hiding would actually be easier. An attack can come from any direction and sensors would have to cover a MUCH wider area, so it would be easier to sneak in.
Space combat would very demoralising and stressful, maybe in more so in a fighter. Knowing that a lethal vacuum is at outside and knowing that if your ship is destroyed, you might die very far from home would be scary. it would be like being on a submarine but far worse. Likelihood of rescue would be remote.
It will NOT be easier to sneak in, unless you jump from behind a planet. Otherwise, it would be a matter of simply mounting enough cameras/detectors around the platform/base/whatev, as you will be easily seen from millions of kilometers away.
People are not going to detect things with their eyes you know.
I did NOT say they will detect things with their eyes. Covering a ship in cameras is stupid. I said that sensors all around a ship or defense platform would work but there is a much wider area to search so things CAN get past.
A space fighter has a much lower mass which means that if there egines can produce a higher degree of accelartion as well as a higher manuverablity. There for they can fly rings around a larger ship. Also being so small they are going to be very hard to at all. Offencevily a single fighter is useless but fighter should be used in huge numbers, think of swarm of bees one not so dangraous to the average human a hundered or a thousand can be quite dangorus to anyone and everyone. a million could probley kill a bear or possabliy even an elephant. Or as another example Army ants incedably dangorus. So yes a single fighter useless but fighter in theory would be bilt in the thousands and millions the cost of one captial ship would probaly make thoasands of strike carft.
Space is far from empty. chuaked full of metors the size of peas to ones as big as moons. Small Stirke carft would very hard to indentify expect it's pattern of movement and do you think so one would watching to seem if some of the astoirds the are acting correctly it the middle of a battle. and yes there would be a battle going on fighters problay won't be able to jump through hyperspace on there own nor would they need to active they attack an agrossor if they are defending a system
Space IS pretty much empty. The average density of the whole solar system is less than 0.00001 that of air. You have a false idea about things because you seem to have grown on science fiction stories and games. The truth is that there is very little condensed matter in space. If there was a lot of asteroids and all that crap you think there is, tell me - why are we capable of looking and seeing things (stars, galaxies, quazars etc.) BILLIONS of kilometers in every direction, unless we are looking on one of the other planets or the Sun?
Nobody will tell you "there is a nice star XYZ over there near the big bear, but we can't see it due to a cloud of whatever in the way".
As for "fighters would be hard to target" I say this : there are experimental technologies AS WE SPEAK that are capable of detecting and tracking gun bullets flying around. Tracking something 10000 times the size of a bullet in far future and pointing a laser at it will NOT be a problem, unless the fighter moves in an absolutely chaotic manner, which is impossible (NOTHING is instant - this was proven by Newton - which means that nothing will be able to change directions instantly).
You all tend to love the stereotype of fighter/frigate/cap ship space combat so much that you cannot see that in space, they in fact will ALL be easy targets, big or small.
The amount of destructive power we can mount in a tiny object or project over long distances is enormous RIGHT NOW and since humans always eagerly develop new destructive toys, shooting down anything in the far future will be far from hard in any case whatsoever.
No one said that you had to guard your ship with fully hardened armor with the latest in defense. You can just as easily stop weapons like lasers and missiles with a big chunk of spinning space rock. If you can lug around a mightly war ship then you can sure as hell lug around a massive piece of sacrificial space junk. Put a few weapons on it, and it simply can't be ignored. Heck, point it at a planet while you're at it. It's now a siege weapon to boot.
All it need is one missle to disable or destory a ship. Firepower outstripped armor. Modern combat is about "first look first kill". What this means is if you see your enemies first your chance of killing thenm without any losses are extreamly high.
Sorry but this just sounded absurd to me. Take your word for it? If you have worked with nuclear weapons as you claim then you would know that if the combined nuclear arsenal of US and Russia would be used the nuclear fallout from using those arsenals would contaminate every part of Earths food chain so that nothing would survive, not even bacteria.
It is not the just destructive power of nuclear weapons that are a threat to mankind but rather the mentioned nuclear contamination which would slowly destroy all life and contaminate Earth for centuries. But again, if you worked intimately with nuclear weapons you would know that right?
The fighter concept is taken from WWII, enuogh of them will cause a ship to sink. So the same concept is taken into account for space games. Make the armor strong enough, but keep hitting the one spot will put a hole in it.
The one button idea will sink a ship, but even warships stay afloat after a torpedo hit, so a space ship will have the same concept where it'll still linger and have that section sealed off. Do enough damage and all members of the crew will be dead aboard and the ship will remain a ghost ship / wreakage from the internal explosions.
When you design your game, you do what you want to do with the fighter / ship concept.
When you design a game, you want it to be FUN, ENTERTAINING and DEEP. I said what I believe interstellar combat will be about: propelling things at speeds near the speed of light towards enemy planets, obliterating them (if Einstein was right, and every experiment done proved that he indeed was, a 10-kilogram rock hitting a planet at 95% lightspeed would evaporate a large city). If anything else, the combat would be about launching high-speed one megaton tactical warheads from millions of kilometers away at anything the enemy might have been preparing for a fight.
In the past, people had to face and cut each other personally to win a fight.Since late XIXth Century, people can kill one another without really knowing they're there (howitzers), from kilometers away.Since 1940s, those ranges increased to 50 kilometers (dreadnaughts battleships had cannons of up to 410mm caliber(!) which could send a one-ton shell over up to 50 kilometers).Today, an American leutenant can fly a 6,25 meter long BGM-109 Tomahawk missile through an open (or closed) window in your house up to 2,500 kilometers away. Moreover, aircraft combat changed from WWI/II dogfights to blasting enemy fighters from 100 kilometers away with a single fire-and-forget AIM-120 AMRAAM.
But nobody would want to play a game like that, would he?And so space RTS games are made to be fun, not to try and prophet the future of space warfare.
Oh and as to the above poster's assumption, that a single torpedo wouldn't sink a battleship... that assumption is based on the fact that modern torpedos haven't really been used in larger scales over the past 30+ years. Today, a single torpedo impact could throw the biggest American aircraft carrier 5 meters up and blow it in half EASILY. And I'm not even talking about what those pesky gadgets like ASROC, SUBROCK or Tactical nuke warheaded tomahawks would do to such a carrier. All these things exist, work and could evaporate a carrier, not just sink it. They simply aren't kept in action due to lack of demand.
N3rull and orlando_5 make good points here that I also what to stress again. . . Space is mind bending big and empty – totally beyond the concept of any human to truly fathom since our frame of reference and total lifetime scope is VERY slowly moving across a very thin envelope of livable environment of this planet.
ALL pass sense of ship/craft/vehicle combat has to get thrown out the window (again assuming we are talking not breaking current understanding of physics and jumping straight into the full “magic” of science fiction)
Combat at extreme distances and Delta V’s. Acceleration = loss of mass and energy and becoming a beacon. No Acceleration = moving in an extremely perfectly predictable manner. Acceleration amount and time is limited (and will most likely stay inversely proportional). Size/volume does not equal mass. Mass is everything. Specific impulse is VERY important. Energy weapons can’t be effectively dodged. Dodging requires small physical size, low mass BUT requires VERY high and near constant acceleration for long periods (almost mutually exclusive). Etc etc . .
Be careful of unstated assumptions like in “A space fighter has a much lower mass which means that if there egines can produce a higher degree of accelartion as well as a higher manuverablity. “ it assumes quite allot.
Do not assume constants or smooth transitions in scale, power and tech . . know the dependencies and limitations.
If I HAD to pick a known and current mode of combat that might be close to a foreseeable space combat it would have to be Submarine combat. All about sensors, contacts, getting into position (envelope) and getting the first shot off. I see (conventional) armor being next to useless. Missiles useful only if they themselves have a standoff weapon. And most any hit deadly/fatal.
I know to most brought up with starwars . .that is boring and would not make a good game . . . others it might.
To accurately assess the utility of of smaller craft in space combat, you have to understand their value in modern combat. Modern aircraft carriers permit naval forces to project power at a distance from their own operational range, at far greater speed than the carrier itself can operate. That's because the amount of firepower you can pack on a single F-14 or F-18 is enough to sink a fleet of ships.
So, the question goes, why not simply fire the missiles and rockets from the ship itself, and use the greater displacement of warship to protect itself from return fire. Well, congratulations, you've walked back in time in naval history to the battleship era, when huge guns were mounted on highly armored craft and they would engage in titanic artillery slugfests, like the battle of Jutland.
In real warfare, the destructive power of weapons far exceeds our current technology to withstand that destruction. Put another way, the only defense is not being there. With aircraft, you can send smaller, faster, more agile and expendable units into the fray, without exposing your gigantic slow moving target to the enemy's counterbattery.
As others have pointed out in this thread, while in a zero-gravity environment, objects do not have weight, they still have mass, which means that larger vessels have more momentum to overcome, and thus must be much harder to maneuver in combat. While a small attack craft can be composed of little other than engines, weapons and control systems, a larger ship will have to devote considerable tonnage to berths, galleys, storage and long range propulsion. It's not difficult to imagine the utility of a ship whose sole purpose is to be flown into combat, whose long-term deployment is contingent on a carrier or tender.
A lot of big missiles wouldn't be the best plan, becuase if there is something wrong, the AI will not know how to respond, unless you've figured out how to build a sentient machine while I was away?
Insanely diffcult is something fighter jocks pride themselves on. How is moving slightly to avoid a kilometer long, megaton ship much harder then pulling up in a dive bomber in 1944? The entire appeal of a fighter is that it is manuverable and fast. Without that, you might as well get a couple of capital ships instead. And in the cold calculus of war, a squadron of maybe 12 men in $100,000 dollar bombers is a good trade for a Dreadnought with a crew of 10,000 that costs $100,000,000 dollars.
I have to agree, the bombers weapons were smaller then I expected, but the designers can't just make the bombers kill everything in a single hit.
To the arguement that the pilot of a bomber would be fried by radiation, every heard of a handy thing called shields? A capital ship's shields also preform the function, and the armor halts it to some extent. Any hit powerful enough to take down a bomber's shield is also probably strong enough to kill it as well, so no point in assuming that the shields are there for more then the blocking of radiation. And of course, you're also assuming that both sides are using weapons that emit radiation. Lasers don't unless you're detonating nukes inside your ship and harnessing them to make an X-ray laser. Anti-matter doesn't, auto-cannon and regular missiles don't, so unless you're fighting on a sun, where is your radiation coming from?
If someone develpoed an inertialless drive, like in the Starfire series, a dog fight would be perfectly feasable, becuase you wouldn't have to worry about your ships moving half way across the system before they could decelerate to engage the enemy.
Even if all the ship mounts is a large metal rod with an engine and no warhead, the speed imparted to the rod assuming the fighter was moving at ., the pure force would probably go right through the ship (and any reactor or weapon magazine they have).
People "developed" fighters/bombers because a huge battleship was unable to project its power accurately and effectively over more than a few dozen kilometers, while a bomber could bring doom a lot further away and more accurately. But understand, if you please, that this happened when the only weapon was a dumb BOMB - either dropped from an aircraft or fired of a warship's cannon. All in all, an old bomb and an arty shell is the same: it's a dumb "boom box" that will go poof when it hits something.So, back in those days, when a cannon could not project a shell accurately over miles and miles of land, a bomber could go there and drop it. Also, the ship could not see its target, because Earth is a] a globe and b] it has a variety of crap on its surface, while space is mostly empty - as soon as the light reflected from a ship near SyriusB star reaches Earth, our telescopes WILL notice it if they glance there.There is a new era right now - we have MISSILES. This is no longer a "throw it there" or "go and drop it there" choice to make, right now a missile can "go by itself and drop itself right where you want".
Also, if someone invented an inertialless drive (kek lol), then fighters would NOT be more effective - anti fighter missiles would in fact become sure-shots (they would be undodgeable) and anti-fighter laser turrets could turn without fear of breaking apart, meaning an even more accurate fire and quicker reactions.
As for the radiation, go back to school for a few classes in Physics. Radiation in space IS killer. We do not feel it on Earth or on the orbit because Earth is surrounded in a thingy called Magnetosphere, which is shielding us from most of the Sun's radiation:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagnetoshpereWithout it, anything on the sunny side of Earth would be toast in seconds.However, yes, shields. You are talking about shields as if they were something as standard as microwave ovens. Well, for you information, such shields do not exists and nobody has any idea how one could project a well shaped cocoon of energy to stop lasers and crap. We could project a powerful magnetic field like Earth projects its, this can be done (just place a big damn electromagnet on the ship), but then the whole ship would have to be made of things that are NOT affected by magnetic forces or otherwise it'll fall apart. A fully alluminium/carbon fibre ship. Well, there is a problem - magnetic sensitivity is required for microchips and other electronic systems to function, because magnetism and electricity are closely related forces in terms of physics. So this gets a little tricky - have a huge field to protect yourself from radiation and then another to protect yourself from it... and another for another..?
We have to concentrate on what CAN be done, what MIGHT be done, but let's not take things that are still fully science fiction for granted. Otherwise, any bullshlt is plausible.
Quoting Yamota, reply 9 Quoting Bigglesworth_XIII, reply 21 Nuclear warfare is frequently overestimated. It could damage cities, but it could not kill everything on Earth. Take my word for it; I've worked intimately with nuclear weapons and I know what they can and cannot do. Sorry but this just sounded absurd to me. Take your word for it? If you have worked with nuclear weapons as you claim then you would know that if the combined nuclear arsenal of US and Russia would be used the nuclear fallout from using those arsenals would contaminate every part of Earths food chain so that nothing would survive, not even bacteria.It is not the just destructive power of nuclear weapons that are a threat to mankind but rather the mentioned nuclear contamination which would slowly destroy all life and contaminate Earth for centuries. But again, if you worked intimately with nuclear weapons you would know that right?
Quoting Bigglesworth_XIII, reply 21
Nuclear warfare is frequently overestimated. It could damage cities, but it could not kill everything on Earth. Take my word for it; I've worked intimately with nuclear weapons and I know what they can and cannot do.
Sorry but this just sounded absurd to me. Take your word for it? If you have worked with nuclear weapons as you claim then you would know that if the combined nuclear arsenal of US and Russia would be used the nuclear fallout from using those arsenals would contaminate every part of Earths food chain so that nothing would survive, not even bacteria.It is not the just destructive power of nuclear weapons that are a threat to mankind but rather the mentioned nuclear contamination which would slowly destroy all life and contaminate Earth for centuries. But again, if you worked intimately with nuclear weapons you would know that right?
I assumed that no one would bother to argue. Despite what people on television told you during the cold war, we've never been in danger of going extinct from nuclear fallout. You could certainly do away with regions of high population density, but I'm afraid that exposing every individual human being with a lethal dose of radiation is something that would require more than “conventional” nuclear arms. As soon as the iron curtain falls, you can pass that along to the Soviets.
On the subject of space fighters, I think it’s fair to say that we can kill anything within a few light-seconds with a laser. Clearly you’re not going to be doing fly-bys. What, precise, is a space fighter supposed to do?
Extra Credit: Describe how a “space battle” would proceed between opposing forces separated by distances of light-seconds. Include space fighters in your description.
Oh, wait, mja5000's thing...No, anti-fighter missiles would not be undodgeable, as the fighters would have the same engines. But yes, the guns turning would be a killer.
If lasers are indeed that deadly hypothetically speaking against space fighters, first priority for the space fighters would probably be to use reflective armour. Good luck zapping something with a laser that is covered with mirrors. That just leaves the missiles to worry about.
edit: that is mirror-like, which reflects the correct spectrum of light to counter a laser. So not the typical mirror in your house
what I find funny is I'm sure people were saying the samething with airplanes and how they will be used. Space fighters WILL have a use, it's a given. Also this debate shouldn't even exist in the first place. We do not know how space combat will be in the future or what tech we will have. Depending on the tech space fighters could be useless, or one of the most effective fighting forces out there.
Interstellar space combat is so far ahead of current technology that assumptions are meaningless. Assumptions based on current warfare are also rediculous. Space combat is NOT modern warfare so you cannot assume anything. Arguments about range, firepower, armour and acceleration are pointless as we may learn to manipulate the fundemental forces other then electromagnetism which we can already do.
we can debate about fast or slow a ship goes in space all day, but the fact is who cares (and the odds of humans going interstellar are pretty much nil)
I just love how everyone says "yeah you're right, I also think XYZ", until one person throws in something opposite and a number of following people suddenly also agree to him.
Anyway, we did send people to the Moon, and 70% of the journey they spent inside the Earth's magnetosphere cloak. The moments they were out of it left reports of weird phenomena. It turned out that strange lights they were seeing were in fact particles piercing their brains and affecting how it perceived things.Some also have mild occurences of illnesses that might have been a souvenir from those flights.
Also, as for the cpu that works like a brain : human brain IS ALSO influenced by MAGNETISM. A number of experiments has been done on it and it is PROVEN that creating and shifting the strength and shape of a magnetic field enveloping a person's brain will cause anything between headache to hallucination, panic, confusion or moments of lack of consciousness.We don't want our ship's maneuvering control to "panic" because of our shields doing their work, do we?
N3rull is just proving my point. This debate is useless. Do you really think in the future we wouldn't have countered that effect? They already working on ways to shield the astronauts mission to mars.
Again, this debate is useless. We have no clue what tech will be when humans leave the earth to explore the galaxy. And saying the odds of humans exploring the galaxy is nil is extremely foolish. The only reason you say that is because we have a destructive tendecy. Who's to say that will end us or is even unqiue to human nature?
I mean you must obviously have visited the galaxy, you seem to know that no other race has gone through the same issuses the human race has. Oh wait you don't.
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