Hey guys
I found this article very interesting.
Anyway, why bother with ships at all? Just launch, say, thirty thousand unguided kinetic projectiles (read: large rocks) from one planet to the next and watch them play the cosmic equivalent of "space invaders". And lose. And get their atmosphere cooked.
Oh, and paint them pitch black so they can't see them untill they're on top of their atmosphere.
Fighters. Phah.
.... Point defense... lasers?
You can't shoot what you can't see, and making something hard to see in space is easy. By the time your non-visual sensors picked them up, they would already be falling towards the surface. Then try to pick all thirty thousand of them off. Especially since they are all basically rocks, and have no sensitive guidance systems or propulsion to blow up, it would take time to literally melt each of them, even if you had death-star grade lasers.
Fighters, spaceships, come on people, its not like fighting here on Earth! Hell, I know of a way to make the whole planet fall into the Sun, using nothing but large asteroids.
Interplanetary war is like a nuclear war, only every bozo with a spaceship can "nuke" something with impunity using nothing but space boulders. And the whole "space navy" concept would quickly fall to pieces when, in the first five minutes of the war, all launch facilities would get pounded into dust. Good luck eating space clams boys and girls.
Oh yeah... did I mention what kind of damage can a single black projectile the size of a tennis ball do to a spacestation or a ship? Well... let's just say it would really ruin the crew's day. And the best thing is - its undetectable. A perfect stealth bullet costing about a dollar to make, wrecking a billion dollars worth of space equipment.
Yeah. I can see them space wars really raging.
no its not. go read projectrho on cloack and stealth.
thank you lifekatana.
Additionally, lasers could become viable, as a "continuous" mode (basically overheat and burn the target) wouldn't be used, but instead a pulsed laser (this is more effective vs. armor).
Also, even though space is "dark" it is REALLY REALLY REALLY easy to see stuff. The SSME's could be spotted from PLUTO. (I think, it's somewhere around there).
Really? Tell me, then, how exactly would you spot a perfectly round object with zero albedo with a diameter of a tennis ball travelling at, say, 20 000 meters per second or even faster? You got zero light reflection, its mass is too small (not that we have directional mass detection anyway), its profile is too tiny for infrared detection and its round shape makes radar detection unreliable. Its speed means that you would need to detect it a long way off in order to dodge it by firing thrusters.
You assume I am talking about missiles. I am not. I am talking about simple projectiles. Bullets fired from a mass driver with a precalculated trajectory which would make it possible to hit a valuable space station in Mars orbit from the Moon.
Forget it. Space and war do not mix, unless you like not being able to have a single sattelite in orbit. Imagine what wars would look like if someone could shoot a sniper and hit the target on the other side of the world. Now imagine that sniper bullet having enough kinetic energy to completely wreck whatever it hits.
There is a reason why Saddam tried to develop a supergun and the US covert ops stopped the effort. You can't detect artillery shells. You can't dodge them and you can't intercept them. Missiles are easy if you got interceptor tech like lasers or interceptor missiles. Shells are a nightmare, the only thing that makes them sub-par to missiles is the range - a limitation which is removed in the context of outer space. Even missiles would mostly be dumb projectiles in space - you could design a missile to fire its thrusters only when its so close dodging and interception becomes impossible. You can't do that on Earth, it would fall down. You can do it in space.
Ships can evade the shots.
Your bullet would probably emit heat right?
Nope. Heat from what? The only heat detectable would be if it came at you with its illuminated side. That said, infrafred detection of an object the size of a tennis ball would not exactly be possible at ranges necessary to have time to fire up engines and dodge. Remember, we are not talking about huge boulders here. Tennis ball. Hell, you could do major damage with a ping pong ball size.
Trust me, you would know about it just as it rips through your hull. Micrometeorites are a major danger in orbital space, and those are the size of a few grains of dust, and nobody is actually trying to hit you with them.
tennis ball? those will burn up in the atmosphere...
No, those would be used to smash up spaceships, sattelites, and space stations. And without those you are at the mercy of those who park themselves in your orbit and drop boulders on your head. But as I said, the same thing would happen to the other side.
Not to mention that you can get "creative" and use non-reflective coating with an internal heat transferrence system designed to radiate infrared radiation through the radiator fins on the side which would be obscured by the bulk of the projectile itself. If you shape the projectile so that it scatters radar, like modern jet fighters do, you can make a large kinetic impact projectile designed to annihilate cities virtually undetectable until it is far too late to do anything about it.
The idea is to minimiye the radiation output of the object. This is the crux of any space stealth, as simply painting something matte black would render it virtually invisible to the naked eye. Its the radiation emission which enables us to detect something in space. And it is possible to design an object so that the little radiation it emits is emitted away from the potential observer, which is the same, from their point of view, as no emission at all.
Voila. Perfect stealth city killers. Who would need ships and fighters with that kind of stuff?
Or a better question, who would be crazy enough to wage wars in space? It's a whole different ballgame up there.
I forgot that it is completely and totally impossible to have a race that is internally peaceful and yet still be Xenophobic enough to slaughter everyone in their way. I guess I'm just way more pessimistic than you are regarding this situation.
Regarding the matte-black tennis ball unguided shell, how do you conceal the energy required to get it up to 20000 k/h? It will be traveling 15 times faster than the projectile, giving a vector of attack that one can expect a shell to come from.
Also, how do you make a rock the size of a tennisball perfectly round, matte black, and magnetic enough to be fired from your railgun or coil gun in under a dollar?
Xenophobia always has an internal component as well. There simply is no way to have so a homogenous society as to avoid internal differentiation. And a society with internal differences which nurtures external xenophobia is a society which will have internal xenophobia as well. Just like we do.
You can use orbital or moon-based mass drivers. You can also use the slingshot effect, making the initial energy requirement rather small, plus the initial vector would be moot. Mass drivers in general do not project energy as much as a, say, cannon would.
Well ok, not under a dollar. Let's say, a hundred bucks to have a machined iron ball painted matte black. Still a good deal if you wreck a multi billion dollar space station in one hit.
the biggest problem with trying to prevent heat radiating from the object is thermodynamics. Basically, delta-entropy >= 0. It can never be <0. Entropy is basically "heat" BTW.
So effectively, stealth in space like that, is going to be real hard. The other problem is that using a slingshot effect or an Oberth Maneuver (2 different things BTW) requires a lot of, well, "luck". You need everything lined up just right. A mass driver, railgun, or coilgun will be much easier to use.
The biggest problem with a projectile is that- beam weapons can travel MUCH faster, and missiles can be MUCH more accurate. Remember, in space combat, you are firing at where you opponent WILL be based on where they WERE. It's like leading a target in a gunfight in a dogfighting sim or an FPS game. Except on distances of millions of km and lightspeed lag involvement.
It is really difficult to get an iron ball (say, 100 kg, or around 220 lbs) to do city-killer levels of damage. Because no launching device will be perfectly efficient (and gravity slingshots&Oberth maneuvers won't give enough delta-v (which in this case is an increase)), you need more power to launch the weapon than the weapon does damage.
I actually was trying to make up a plausible&effective plasma weapon for an SF story I am working on. I wanted a plasma weapon because 1) plasma would be a cheap ammo type and 2) it would be something that would look cool (should I turn the book into a game) and something that would have LOTS of ammo for it. The problem I ran into is 1) plasma likes to equalize pressure with its surroundings. So I make the decision to use a plasma round that masses 1g and travels at 0.5c (50% lightspeed).
Sounds like a good idea doesn't it? For a game, I could just make the effect move slower (so it looks cool), and for the book, it allows me to get around plasma pressure equalization issues. The problem? 1g causes 1.39 TERAJOULES (re: nearly/slightly more than a ton of TNT!) of damage. This in itself is actually REALLY COOL, but not good because the weapon is supposed to take several shots to destroy an enemy. Where it starts getting worse is the fact that if the weapon is 99% efficient, it still takes more than 1.39 TJ to fire ONE SINGLE FREAKING SHOT!
A suggested velocity given by DoomBringer was 20,000 km/h. This works out to (1h=3600 s, 1km=1000m) 5555.56 m/s. Wow, we're really clocking now *in boring monotone*. The energy of a 100 kg mass of iron at (we'll say 5600 m/s for simplicity) is Ke=100kg times 0.5 times (5600^2). Which works out to Ke=1,568,000,000 J or about 1.6 gigajoules. A little less than a TLAM-C's 454 kg TNT charge. No city-killer there. We'll say 50% efficient railgun launcher, and we get a firing energy of nearly 3.2 GJ. If we say exactly 3.2 GJ firing energy, then we need to pump 3.2 FREAKING GIGAWATTS into the friggin' thing! That launcher, if in space, is going to show up FOR BILLIONS OF KM AROUND! There's simply no way to hide the thing.
Let's whip it up to oh, say, 20,000 METERS/s. Now we REALLY ARE clocking (literally. That's nearly 7% the speed of light (which is 21000 m/s for inquiring minds)). Now, even though we're going really fast, it is still hypervelocity, and not relativistic (yet). So, Ke is now= 2x10^10 J. This is, quite incidentally, the energy of an average lightning bolt (which is 48 tons TNT equivalent). Still not a city killer.
So let's REALLY up the ante and say we are going to shell this round out at 50% the speed of light. A new equation comes into play, for relativistic corrections, and now we have Ker= ((1/sqrt(1-P^2))-1)*M*9e16; where P=% speed of light (expressed decimally), M=mass (in kg), and 9e16=c squared. "sqrt"=square root.
Thus, we get a Ker=1.39x10^18 J. Which is a bit more than 239 Megatons. Now we have our citykilling 100kg iron slug. The only problem is, if we assume 50% efficiency for weapon launch, we need 2.78x10^18 J of energy to fire it. That energy for firing is nearly equivalent to 674 megatons of energy!
So, in reality ManSh00ter, to use a reasonably inexpensive slug as a city-killer weapon, you need what is sometimes termed an "R-Bomb", a weapon that moves at relativistic velocity. And that takes WAY too much energy to be effectively feasible from an economical standpoint (remember, you say that the weapon is cheap to employ).
21000 m/s?!
However, then every colonized planet would likely then have some sort of planetary defense system. As in launching their own kinetic weapons, such as missiles or large rocks, to intercept and destroy said 'siege' weapons.
Actually, this is where I could see a 'space navy' become viable. Having what would essentially be orbital colonies could be useful in detecting and destroying the siege weapons.
Pulse lazers are the only type I could find to be useful in combat. Of course with those, the amount of energy needed to maintain a continous pulse would be enormous, so I'd assume that maintaining a beam would be extremely short.
Actually that was my bad, I was using the 20000m/s that manshooter used, but I got my units mixed up on both the speed of the projectile and the speed of light which resulted in a drasticly overestimated speed. Traveling at 20km/second results in the projectile traveling 1500 times slower than the speed of light, giving plenty of time for reactionary maneuvers.
you guys should see this vid it will help you see what space battles would look like for fighters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TaIS8pb8V0 u have to continued to part 2 and part 3 and blah blah blah , link should be in related vids
Whiskey, you misunderstood - I wasn't proposing to have a mass driver fire a city-killer projectile. Mass driver projectiles are strictly for busting up space stations, sattelites and even ships if you know where they are going to be. With space stations and sattelites, who have regular orbital patterns, its easy. And you got to admit that a kilo of iron slamming into anything in space at speed in excess of 20 000 meters per second will do major damage, especially because it's all directed kinetic energy.
Beams do travel a lot faster, but they can easily be reflected or dissipated. I just don't see lasers as weapons in space. It's too easy to render them innefective.
For city killing I propose just slamming giant asteroids into planets. That should work. Or even better, why not just make a conventional nuke, design it for stealth and atmospheric entry, slap on a MIRV head and wave the poor bastards goodbye.
As for thermodynamics, I have already said that the best way to camouflage heat radiation is to have the radiator fins bleed the excess heat away on the "far" side of the projectile (obviously here I am not talking about a tennis ball sized one). You will NOT pick up any kind of radiation that way, as long as the fins are obscured by the projectile itself. In fact, you could theoretically have entire ships "cloaked" that way. The idea is simple - don't let the enemy see any kind of reflection or emission from your craft or projectile. In space, this would be perfectly doable. You could reduce the enemy's detection ability down to looking for blinking stars.
For small tennis sized projectiles I doubt you would need to camouflage their infrared radiation - they are too small to be picked up until its too late. Plus, there's nothing stopping you from firing thousands of little buggers, a sort of a interplanetary shotgun effect designed to wip out anything in its path. That way you don't have to be super-accurate; it would only take one hit for that spacestation to go to hell.
You assume the ability to detect a zero-albedo tennis ball with minimum infrared profile at long ranges, an assumption which I think is unfounded. There is also a way to retain the mass of a projectile while reducing its visual profile to a minimum, for example the projectile could be a flat disc or speartip shaped designed to fragment on impact for maximum damage.
in theory it works. In practice the idea of "radiating to somewhere the enemy doesn't see" doesn't work.
Here's why- 1st off, space's background temperature is about 3.5 KELVINS. Nearly absolute zero. Space itself on the other hand, HAS NO TEMPERATURE (it's a vacuum, duh). This has the side effect of making it an EXTREMELY good insulator. This makes it REAL hard to get rid of waste heat (which you WILL have, as a star will radiate enough energy to require your ship(s) to radiate excess heat). Also, to maintain optimum (meaning minimal) mass expenditure (remember, every gram counts for a spacecraft), you will be radiating heat in a 60 degree cone. It is REALLY hard to make that cone not point at an enemy.
I refer you to projectho.com if you do not wish to believe me. If you still don't believe "invisibility" stealth is impossible in space, then go to rec.arts.sf.science.com (I think it's all that. The link is on projectrho.com). Visual detection is useless in space because- range will be to great to "see" the target.
Beams also aren't just lasers. There are particle beams too. As for lasers- you can't stop a xraser (X-ray laser). You just can't. At 1 light-hour (7.5 AUs!), the beam will radiation kill a target. At 1 light second, all the way to 1 light minute, it is a ravening death beam. Xrasers are beyond current technology (in terms of non-disposable munitions, like bomb-pumped xrasers&grasers (gamma-ray laser)), but a laser beam is still feasible. A reflective or ablative surface will STILL be damaged, and will then be abruptly equipped with as much armor as a baby's behind.
Particle beams are much harder to defend against, but have less range. A charged beam would dissipate to uselessness on firing (thus, a beam that is neutral in net charge is optimal). A combined electron/proton beam is the best type of beam because- no space charge that can spot weld you&another ship together (so inconvenient), dissipation is reduced (but a little more than a straight charged beam), and it is also a bit harder to deflect than a 1-particle type beam. Note that a relativistic particle beam firing antimatter is dumb, since AM will add little damage bonus.
Giant asteroids can be difficult to work with, since they are probably well monitored. Try telephone poles instead, you'll get more precision/accuracy and target selection options (like, take out that bunker, instead of "blow up the area where the bunker is"). A nuke with MIRVs is also an excellent idea (in fact, a cobalt-seeded nuke is even better. It prevents life from regrowing easily); even better is an enhanced radiation (neutron) bomb. These will kill life, but leave infrastructure pretty intact (just let it cool off a couple weeks).
Well, ok - but I must default to my previous point about space combat being unfeasible. As you have pointed out with xrasers, I ask, what's the point of having combat ships when you can hit them with an unavoidable burst of lethal radiation and either fry their electronics or cook their crew. From so far away they would need a telescope to see their target.
Space combat just doesn't work. The forces available are too great, and the civilization is too fragile to survive even a minor space war. In other words, if we ever start building space combat ships, it will probably be the last thing we build.
That's pretty naive. There's a lot of ways you can have a conflict in space without bringing on the apocalypse. Think about Vietnam, or the war in Korea. Pretty much a "proxy war," yes? That could easily happen in space, maybe sparked by an incident on a moon base/colony or asteroid. Nobody would be particularly interested in ruining their own crop harvests by dropping an asteroid on the enemy country, now would they? Anything that's going to end civilization would affect the country pulling the trigger.
Another way combat-ships could go to space without provoking the end of civilization: the same way the U.S. and U.S.S.R. built fleets of nuclear-armed submarines, then hunted each other across the world, yet never came to war.
You are making a mistake by projecting our current geopolitical circumstances onto the technologically advanced societies of tomorrow. It is the same as thinking of the current globalization in terms of national politics of the twentieth century.
The equation is simple. Technology equals power. Not just power controlled by nations or organizations, but by individuals. Six hundred years ago, the most direct power an individual could have was limited by their own physical strength and whatever cold weapons they could wield.
Two hundred years ago, an individual had a much greater direct power in the form of a musket. He could project deadly force at range, with much less training and strength than an archer. A peasant could just as easily kill as a fighter who trained for decades.
Today, an individual has vast personal power at his disposal. Today, an individual can kill hundreds, if not thousands of people by pushing a button or squeezing a trigger.
Technology will continue to develop. We must develop with it. I am talking about stable societies, without social and cultural tensions we "enjoy" today. Because one day, inevitably, technology shall develop to the point where an individual shall have the power to destroy entire cities with a flick of a thumb. If at that time our race has not advanced sufficiently to produce stable societies, and even stable and responsible individuals who govern themselves instead of being governed, civilization will fail.
This is inevitable. There is no way around it, no social control can stop or prevent the abuse of technology. Only people, on a one by one basis, can do that. What is naive is thinking that technology can change but society can stay the same. It doesn't work that way, never has. Technology changes our world and the circumstances of our lives - it is only to be expected that the society should change with it. For good or ill, that we shall see.
well, considering it looks like no FTL right now, Earth is still going to be the biggest&most populous world, where most consumable resources (food, water, fuel, propellant) come from.
Teucrian brings up an excellent point on proxy wars, waged by "NGAs" (Non-Governmental Armies). In all reality, that is the most likely result of warfare between space powers.
Also, the xraser's main problem is actually making one you can fire multiple times without detonating a nuclear weapon (grasers have no such luck). It would take an extreme amount of engineering to make a xraser. And a xraser could still get whipped by a swarm of missiles, because if a missile is basically a ship's drive engine that is miniaturized and loaded with a deadly nuclear payload (conventional explosives, unless used for bursting charges on shrapnel warheads, are pretty useless, as anything traveling at 3 kips (km/s)+ will "pack its own weight in TNT energy equivalence").
As a side note, the US military is already deploying lasers to destroy things like cruise missiles, so the power required can't be as great as originally thought.
Also to every weapon in our history a counter-measure has been created. Any weapon deployed in space would eventually become obsolete. It is inevitable, otherwise we wouldn't bother creating newer and better weapons. Also nuclear weapons while newer than most, and probably among the most devastating we've seen, have only ever been deployed in war twice. Why? Because they aren't war winners unless you're the only one with them. If others have them and you use them, they're world enders due to retaliation. I believe the same would be true of any "Super weapon" deployed in space.
Fighters in space might be viable just for that reason, adaptation. While perhaps not with current technologies, if a fighter were made that could evade larger ship to ship weaponry, the obvious counters are A) better weapons and better fighters. Then, why bother bringing your larger ships in range of the enemy when a fighter/bomber swarm willl work?
Technological advancement is everything, only based on the technologies that would be deployed under such a scenario could you know the viablity of any weapon or tactic.
That said, I do not believe we will ever reach that point. There are too many people on this planet that care only for destroying their enemies or for "winning" even if that win is empty as we annihilate each other in nuclear, biological, or chemical war.
well, I could see a scenario where nukes aren't world-killers: in SPAAACE!!!
The main reason is, 1) chemical explosive (RDX, HMX, and a whole slew of others (RDX is used in C4)) weapons just do not add any bang for your buck in space. Your combatants are moving so fast that the relative velocity (ships=up to 20 km/s possibly, for interplanetary journeys. Maybe 25 km/s. Most of the time I would guess 10-15 km/s) is greater than 3 km/s. Why is this important? Because anything moving at more than 3 kips (km/s) relative velocity will have enough kinetic energy to equal an equal mass of TNT (or maybe a little more energy than =mass, depends on velocity). 3) kinetic warheads actually have to HIT you to do damage. Nukes don't.
And 4) nuclear weapons that explode as spheres are going to expand. A lot. And not be lethal beyond a couple hundred meters. If a nuke goes of 1km from your ship, pretty much all that will happen is you get a singed paintjob and some blind sensors on one side. 1m away, and you're dead. 5) Nukes can be made into "shaped charges", where the entire energy of the nuke is focused in 1 direction. This is useful for increasing the damage to an area (net nuclear yield is the same, just the concentration of energy/m^2 is greater), but a spherical-detonation will make it easier to hit something.
6) Enhanced radiation nukes will kill living stuff, but only heavily irradiate the ship. Very useful if you wish to recover it later.
And that's all I can think of for now.
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