Realistic spaceships, mecha, and other sci-fi goodies

[Foster]

Um... what about those 2 seconds of lightspeed-lag? Double that if using RADAR to determine the enemy-ship's course and attitude.

Your scenario is flawed.

The only flaw in spinal-snapshots is that time devoted to lining-up a shot is time usually better spent trying not to get hit yourself.
-For that, I PESA my spinal energy-weapons.

I mean, shit, cyclotronsand particle-accelerators are round. Energy-flow can be bent.

[Kadaeux]

Um... what about those 2 seconds of lightspeed-lag? Double that if using RADAR to determine the enemy-ship's course and attitude.

Your scenario is flawed.

The only flaw in snapshots is that time devoted to lining-up a shot is time usually better spent trying not to get hit yourself.

The 2 Seconds of Lightspeed Lag will still keep you informed of the enemy's rough orientation. It's the whole problem with spinal weapons. When using kinetic or energy weapons, you generally want to box in an area of space where the target is likely to be (vs projectile velocity in the case of kinetic weapons.)

Honestly, that is the whole problem with 100% Hard Scifi. Space Warfare would be beyond exceptionally hard. I won't say impossible. But I seriously doubt it'd be between "battle lines" of fleets. Most likely it would be a case of long-ranged sniping of relatively static installations. Asteroid bases. Colonies. Pubs.

Hell it is one area Mass Effect got hell as right too. If both sides are fighting "responsibly" then neither side would fire a single shot until it had a guaranteed hit lined up. (As Kinetic projectiles would just keep going.) Missiles would be next to useless as time goes on any computing makes it basically impossible for point defence to miss or fail.

Realistic Hard-Scifi Space Battles are. Well to put it bluntly, far from being "fun" it'd probably be 99 parts boredom 1 part action.

[Holeypaladin]

2 light seconds is still too far, due to the inability to hit. And that PESA lag is still 2 seconds. I can configure myself to hit you in a fraction of a second, you won't know what direction I'm pointing until that fraction of a second before you are hit. But it's still too easy to dodge... battles would take place within one light second. Or whatever range you can reasonably expect to hit your target.

Neutral particle beams are actually not energy weapons. They're projectiles. They fire particles, which are projectiles, and behave as projectiles, just travelling ludicrously fast. They don't disperse, as there's no reason for them to disperse (unlike the magnetic repulsion in charged particle beams), they just follow Newton's first law and go where you shoot them. They were part of the SDI research, actually. Plasma is a gas, yes, and generally needs some form of containment... a magnetic field of some sort can work.

Also, the relative speeds of the ships firing are insignificant. If the ships are travelling faster than the projectiles, it's impossible to hit, as you can just outmaneuver the projectile, easily. At that speed, you'd close to point blank range before your projectile got anywhere near hitting your target, effectively making it impossible not to kill you in the process. Ships aren't going to be travelling anywhere near the speed of their weapons, or the weapons would be completely ineffective.

The amount of missiles you can fire at once is still limited by your surface area, though. So it follows the exact same formula as the amount of PD turrets your opponent has... scaling linearly to match it.

But hard sci fi is boring, yes. That's why you reconcile it with some more advanced technology to make it more interesting, without blowing reason clear out of the water.

[Kadaeux]

*Snips*

No point in rehashing the same territory.

Also, the relative speeds of the ships firing are insignificant. If the ships are travelling faster than the projectiles, it's impossible to hit, as you can just outmaneuver the projectile, easily. At that speed, you'd close to point blank range before your projectile got anywhere near hitting your target, effectively making it impossible not to kill you in the process. Ships aren't going to be travelling anywhere near the speed of their weapons, or the weapons would be completely ineffective.

Sorry. But you cannot have passed science at school. The relative speed of the firing ship is 100% significant since ANY weapon fired by them will INHERIT that velocity on top its 'own' velocity.

If ship A is closing on Ship B at 10'000 kilometres per second and Ship B is closing on ship A at 10'000 kilometres per second relative velocity of the projectiles fired by both ships will be RIDICULOUSLY high.

The amount of missiles you can fire at once is still limited by your surface area, though. So it follows the exact same formula as the amount of PD turrets your opponent has... scaling linearly to match it.

The difference is you can launch a thousand missiles and have them programmed to loiter just a short distance from the ship until X amount of time has gone by after which your swarm of missiles can go after the enemy ship. (EDIT)

The amount of missiles you can fire at once is completely meaningless. The amount you can fire in TOTAL is the only meaningful number.

Lets use an example.

My ship can launch missiles 10 at a time, your ship can destroy 1 missile per second reliably to a range of 20 seconds.

If I launched a single such salvo at you you will have destroyed the Salvo so it was still 10 seconds away from killing you.

However I launch one salvo programmed to go for you in 6 seconds. I launch a second salvo 2 seconds later programmed to go after you in 4 seconds. I launch a third salvo 2 seconds after that programmed to go after you in 2. I then launch a fourth salvo 2 seconds after that programmed to go after you immediately.

At that single second ALL four salvos have gone active and after you in a salvo of 40 missiles.

At the 20 second mark you destroy 1.
At the 19 second mark you destroy 1.
At the 18 second mark.. (and so on) until
At the 1 second mark you destroy 1. You have destroyed a total of 20 missiles.
At the 0 second mark 20 more obliterate your ship.

Mind you this is a very conservative example.

[Holeypaladin]

The time required to build up velocities as high as you've mentioned... don't make any sense in a setting that has FTL. You're not going to warp into the outskirts of a system and then spend several DAYS accelerating towards your target... you're going to exit warp right outside the dang planet. No time for speed buildup, there.

The loitering missiles are a clever idea, but there's no saying your opponent might use similar tactics... such as with fighters rather than missiles. Even drone fighters, they needn't even be manned (though manned fighters are more fun to write about). And there's no saying the missiles can't be sniped by PD as they loiter, either.

[Kadaeux]

The time required to build up velocities as high as you've mentioned... don't make any sense in a setting that has FTL. You're not going to warp into the outskirts of a system and then spend several DAYS accelerating towards your target... you're going to exit warp right outside the dang planet. No time for speed buildup, there.

Depends entirely on the versus FTL.

Example, Peter F Hamilton wrote the Nights Dawn trilogy the Adamists (technology centric humans) starships are fully subject to newtonian physics in every way. There is no artificial gravity except under thrust or rotation, the ships are spheres, the weapons are predominantly.

The FTL of the Adamist ships was instant travel. If you FTLed 20 Lightyears you did so instantly. No time lag. However you would have to spend the time required with your drives to match the relative velocity of your desination using a lot of Delta-V.

The loitering missiles are a clever idea, but there's no saying your opponent might use similar tactics... such as with fighters rather than missiles. Even drone fighters, they needn't even be manned (though manned fighters are more fun to write about). And there's no saying the missiles can't be sniped by PD as they loiter, either.

Bluntly. It's more realistic to go with Peter F Hamilton's concept of "Combat Wasps" half drone fighter half missile.

- - - Updated - - -

ADDENDUM:

If you want a believable "hard" scifi without going 100% hard scifi. I think the best example is the early missions of "Nexus: The Jupiter Incident"

[Holeypaladin]

I think we've derailed this topic a lot... it's mostly meant as a way to help GMs and writers reconcile hard sci-fi with some soft sci-fi technologies. And also to provide a baseline for how things work.

Rather than saying "it's impossible because of X", you should be saying "It's not currently possible due to X, but if Y and Z are applied, it can work."

People like their spaceships, their mecha, their space fighters. What kind of offensive, defensive, propulsion etc. technologies are required to have them able to use their force fields, their phasors, their warp drives, their plasma guns, and maybe even their mecha? Obviously missiles vs PD will be part of combat, but it shouldn't be the ONLY aspect, because like you said, it's boring. So how can we make space combat involve energy weapons as well as missiles?

I'd prefer a more constructive conversation rather than an argument. It helps to think outside your predetermined notions of what is possible, and to think what might be possible and how to make it so. That is, after all, what sci fi is all about, as far as I'm concerned.

[Foster]

Well Holly got the rapidity in which a ship can rotate pretty good (as high as 10 revs/sec, at pace with a fighter doing a barrel-roll) since the ship is 'drifting' there is no feeling of getting slammed into the outside corners of a turn.

HOWEVER it is spinning on the center of gravity, locations far from the center will experiance considerable stress. This SHOULD be P-din's reason for compact ships, to reduce the impact of inertia on rotational values.

In short, lining-up a spinal will only detract 10% of how far a person can evade incoming unguided munitions. And there ARE countermeasures (dust).

[Kadaeux]

HOWEVER it is spinning on the center of gravity, locations far from the center will experiance considerable stress. This SHOULD be P-din's reason for compact ships, to reduce the impact of inertia on rotational values.

That is only a factor if the whole ship (assuming non-sphere or non-cube etc designs) rotates. Most harder (but still not 100% hard because it'd be boring) starship designs don't have the whole ship rotate, but only sections of the ship. Typically the crew sections.

[Holeypaladin]

Another reason to keep ships compact is because large targets are easier to hit. Since the range of space weapons is basically the range at which you can reasonably expect your shot to hit, you wouldn't have 100% accuracy at long range, so a smaller target is harder to hit.