I wanna talk about Space Battles. Space Warship designs, and tactics used in space.

I just recently watched the Ender's Game movie and I noticed a few cool things. During one of the space battle scenes, I noticed that Ender flanked the Buggers by maneuvering his DNs underneath an ice belt. Providing them with soft cover before blasting the Bugger ships. It's an excellent example of the Naval 3D warfare space is, compared to the modern day naval 2D warfare.
What other Space warfare tactics can we use? I'm not too well versed in Space warfare tactics.

What kind of stealth systems could ships have? The SSV Normandy had heat sinks which stored the heat that the ship produced, making it invisible to thermal based radars. That's about all that comes to mind for me.

Lastly, what determines a fight in space over all else? I read somewhere that Delta-V was the most important, but I want to hear your guys' opinions and thoughts on this.

Ender's game also had that tactic of huddling around the leader than unleashing the death ray; due to the 3D nature of space and drones making a ball of drones around a important spaceship the ship with the death ray thing managed to haul ass through all the bugs.

From what I can tell, it's range and stealth if you wanna be all "hard sci-fi" about it since space is vast, making detection hard as all hell. I believe a interstellar society would be very, very hard to exterminate just because of this; they could hide out in the outer ice belts and keep system hopping at sub-luminal speeds or hide out at a planemo or have a hidden underground moon base. Death stars also would have a hard time snuffing out space stations hidden in asteroid belts. There's lots of space and time to do stuff like this, and technology by that point likely will make drilling through rock and making a moon base as easy as making a mine is today. Space being the 3-dimensional void it is really does wonders when it comes to evasion. In a sense I believe hit and run attacks are a good idea in space combat; not to mention it leads to psychological warfare by instilling paranoia in the enemy which could result in a misfire on their part. How would they know when you will strike, if they can't detect you?

Yet at the same time it's kinda scary how easy killing of a entire race can be once you can glass worlds or terraform a world's atmosphere to make it uninhabitable. It seems in the interstellar world it's go to space or go to the intergalactic crypt.

On the offensive I am most worried about planetary settlements; someone could just toss a few rocks at a world they don't like and kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. Ship-ship combat would be dull, and paranoia inducing at the same time since you don't know if the enemy has a lock on you or not. For that reason you'd constantly need be on the move. Rail guns I used to think would be cool, but I imagine that you'd need a really high power kinetic to rapidly cover the needed distances while inflicting maximum damage. It should also take into account that the projectiles don't necessarily need to be dumb projectiles.

Of course being realistic about this is hard; for all I know particle beams and energy wave projectors [a weapon that unleashes a wave of deadly plasma basically, sorta like high tech shotgun for spaceships] may actually be very viable weapons for a interstellar civilization. Trying to imagine what weapons in ship combat will be like can be hard since I don't think it is even known what sort of weapon is the most practical. And i've seen people who think everything from "plasma is a waste of energy" or "particle beams take too much effort" or "kinetic weapons will be useless in space". No one really knows; so I believe that the answer will likely be "all of the above" more than anything else since technology is a strange, unpredictable thing.

In a sci-fi setting where asteroids are depicted way closer together than they really are [at least normally], I could see a spaceship shooting a asteroid into another asteroid to set off a chain-reaction of moving asteroids to catch a enemy off-guard, or hell maybe even have a probe drill into a asteroid and pilot that at the enemy. Hell, why not go all the way and make a warship out of a asteroid? That would be cool, as asteroids give natural armor and some quick resources.

Skyrte said

Lastly, what determines a fight in space over all else? I read somewhere that Delta-V was the most important, but I want to hear your guys' opinions and thoughts on this.

Probably the guy who scores the first hit.

In all honesty, the weapons that you'll be working with in space are going to be rather potent. Nuclear munitions (which will probably be fusion-based rather than fission-based), high-powered lasers, railguns and particle weapons all have potential for one-shot kill scenarios. Speed, distance and non-conventional defensive measures (measures that do not include tacking on heavy armor plating, since this will only increase your ship's mass) are your best bet.

I don't see generic sci-fi 'energy shields' coming into existence. Maybe plasma fields or powerful electromagnetic fields, but not the generic spacemagic fields found on the ships seen in Mass Effect or the Star Wars franchise. You might see a lot of different defensive tactics however, such as keeping a sizable difference between you and your enemy (which would, in turn, allow your vessel more time to evade incoming fire). If you're far away enough, you could evade light speed weaponry.

Fighters are out as well, since a missile pretty much outclasses a fighter in every conceivable way possible. Not only are they lighter (which translates to more Delta-V conservation), but they're going to be cheaper than a fighter, tipped with a powerful thermonuclear warhead that'll probably be sitting in the multi-megaton range and be fired by the drove to minimize the enemy vessel's ability to evade them and shoot them down with point defense weapons.

Bonus points if they come equipped with small integrated computers that enable the missile swarm to dynamically communicate with itself, allowing individual missiles to cut off the ship's route of escape, assault its flanks or distract the ship's point defense systems. There could even be dedicated missiles that act as mobile ECM jammers or 'dumby' missiles that fundamentally act as a distraction.

Directed energy weapons, like particle beams and lasers, will be the highest echelon for firing range. Particle beams, however, will have reduced range when compared to lasers, but their potential for raw destruction and mayhem outstrips lasers in that particular field, since you can't defend against such a weapon using conventional armor (and just by how particle beams work in general; they instantly heat up materials that they strike and make them explode). Charged particle beams can be defeated by electromagnetic fields, but neutralized particle beams are not effected by such forces.

Depending on the settings, a particle beam could act as an 'ion weapon', disabling an enemy ship's electronic systems. If the ship is crewed, the sheet amount of radiation given off by the impact will instantly kill organic creatures.

Lasers could be defeated through the utilization of superconductive armor plating or through the use of sand casters, which would fire dense, reflective particles to disrupt laser beams and particle beams.

Railguns will probably fire smart munitions, since a shell will need to calculate a ship's trajectory and speed in order to score a hit on a nigh-constant basis. They may also pack nuclear explosive charges, and may come equipped with on-board thrusters for trajectory and direction alterations.

Stealth is incredibly difficult to pull off in space. As space lacks an atmosphere (and thus particles to bleed heat into), masking your heat signature is rather difficult. Just one second of thrust from a fusion rocket or modern rocket will have you light up on every sensors within several million (if not billion) miles. You could use heat sinks, but hiding yourself for extended periods of time is probably out of the question.

I'm probably missing a lot of info, but this is my two cents using my own knowledge.

three-dimensional is a bit of a misnomer. All space travel is orbital (all of it). You're either in a stable orbit around a planet, or you're taking a hyberbolic orbit to launch out for Mars (during which travel you orbit the sun), etc etc etc. The star-wars-esque giant dogfight battles look *awesome* and they're way more fun to imagine and write, but that's not really.... how....

Alright, let's say the Drej are attacking Earth, and we want to fly up and play defense. To approach the planet, the Drej will have to enter a stable earth orbit; to do that, they'll do a hard burn to decelerate and then pass *extremely* close to the planet to bleed off excess energy via atmospheric friction, resembling a Molniya orbit There is a brief (as in, minutes-long) window during which an intercept is possible, but the speed and energy of the Drej ship is ridiculously high compared to what we can achieve -- think, trying to chase down a jet fighter on foot -- if you were in the right place at the right time, you might have a chance to squeeze off a shot or two, but you're not getting into a firefight.



So let's assume they make their pass and settle into a deep orbit around earth. Why deep? It's by far the most advantageous -- you maintain a high amount of potential energy, which is much more sustainable than kinetic (kinetic energy is decayed by friction). That's not to say that they don't have kinetic energy, too -- they certainly can and probably would, since interplanetary or interstellar travel requires a tremendous amount of energy. They're screaming around our planet at high speed and at great distance. To fight them we have to reach their orbit; meanwhile the Drej can throw a coke bottle out the window and it'll strike us with the force of a meteor.



But let's say that despite that monumental (insurmountable?) disadvantage, we're still somehow able to elevate some forces up and fight the Drej in space. We reach their orbit and... oh, wait, did we? They've calculated our trajectory, and used a short fuel burn to change their orbit. Now they're in a different orbital plane from our intercepting force, which limits us to precisely two opportunities for engagement per rotation about the earth -- and then, only if the timing is perfect, and the Drej pass these intersections at the same time we do (assuming that our orbital paths cross at all, which, they may not do)



But hey, humans are smart. Let's say we out-math the Drej. We manage to manipulate our orbits faster than they can avoid us and, closing in from behind, our interceptor gets into a firing position. WIN! He fires and.... well, shit, suddenly he's plummeting back to earth! What just happened -- well, Newton's Second Law. See if you fired a bullet in space the natural thinking is 'you go backwards,' but that's not entirely accurate. You're carrying energy, kinetic and potential, which is what defines your orbit. When you fired from that orbit, you traded energy with your bullet; it goes faster and you go slower. Unfortunately in this case, that means the bullet's trajectory becomes LESS eccentric (more circular), and your orbit becomes MORE eccentric (a flatter oval). That means you fall screaming to earth, while the bullet sails wildly off into space, and the Drej just keep on orbiting!



So, long story short, there's a reason it takes a few billion dollars' worth of manpower and computing equipment to rendezvous a shuttle with the ISS.

ASTA said
Stealth is incredibly difficult to pull off in space. As space lacks an atmosphere (and thus particles to bleed heat into), masking your heat signature is rather difficult. Just one second of thrust from a fusion rocket or modern rocket will have you light up on every sensors within several million (if not billion) miles.

I guess I was thinking more evasion that stealth in space.

Really taking advantage of the vast size of space will help immensely in any situation be it evading alien exterminators bent on wiping your entire species out or simply trying to get the first hit on the enemy.

What's so great about the size of space is that even lasers/their big bro the particle beam become ineffective after a certain range since than the enemy would need to be able to predict your movements. However if the ship targeted keeps changing direction that is going to get tricky.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php

^Good starting point for hard sci-fi.

Onboard a ship trying to accelerate, 'down' is usually going to be towards the rear of the ship. Making the USS Enterprise a case of Space is not an oceon, stop using naval terminology in something that is more akin to dogfightiong a pair of X-15s and F-104s in ballistic traectories

After that, it really depends on whether you want Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein-style hardness, or some Trek-Warsie-Whovian fandom-aspects.

The vast size of space = Long engagement distances = It'll take several seconds for that keel-burning laser to reach you = plenty of time to do random jinking and hope they fry their own heatsinks first.

BTW: In Ender's Game... that ice-belt trick was mostly because in the book, back in battle-school, they used to work with battle-cubes ['stars']... the way you describe it sounds more like the primitive 'over tha top' tactic the old Salamander commander used. In the book, Ender's tactics got... a bit more !physics... (like deploying wires/becoming trapeeze-artists to change trajectories by using the orbital-masses of their own ships, aerobraking, and shooting the sun's corona for an epic air-gravity-assist, early-on, he learned to 'land' on a cube, but soon found it better to just vault from cube to cube at exponential velocities... a 'toon consisted of 40 students...)

In short, the way Ender fought in the book was less 'cover' and more 'Trapeeze-artists in a pitch-black tent with machine-guns, flashlights, and meatshields'.
-VERY FEW of his 'battles' lasted longer than three minutes and had the tempo of room-clearing/CQB.
*Which is why the admirals loved him. Because he and a bunch of launchies could outright murder their well-seasoned and best tacticians in about the time it took to finish reading this post.

---

Anyways, the ultimate deciding factor is how long you've got before you:
1. Loss of sensors (Cannot 'see') / Out of ammunition/laser-coolant (cannot shoot) / out of propellant (cannot 'move')
2. Start flying a predictable trajectory (Now easy to hit)
3. Deploy radiators (loss of armor-protection)
4. Loss of radiators/Saturation of heat-sink (there is one final way to dispose of heat... venting... but once you lose stuff to vent... well.. you'll either fry or decide you can afford to vent something else)
Damage-control teams can work miracles over time, but once you reach stage 4, life aboard the ship is usually pretty hostile to those guys.

Nuclear reactor meltdowns are unlikely, you can nearly always scram the reactor. Or eject it, followed by pulverizing it to sub-critical masses.
-But you may be so hard-up, that you're venting breathing-air to maintain a habitable crew-temprature. And if you've ejected the core, it's pretty much game-over until someone loans you a new one.

If you want to into ground battles, we tried to build a moon base defended by Davy Crocket tactical nukes and Claymore mines.

Realistically speaking, space warfare is not a matter of stealth in the traditional sense of "invisibility", and combat would not be done in the traditional sense of ballistics-based warfare. The rule of thumb is nothing can travel faster than light.

Ergo, from an admittedly primitive point of view, space combat would likely be more on a planetary scale. Missiles would be countered long before they could reach their targets by this point so it would be more like spies with suit case explosives. The idea of large fleets doing battle would become, frankly, antiquated, in an era where a planet loaded with self-defense platforms and satellites would be more than capable of evaporating fleets of thousands of war ships.

Wars would be fought in the dark by diplomats, politicians, assassins, and sabotage. Embargos would become the new method by which to exclude a member of the community. Speaking of community, there would only be a very shrewd sense of it. By the time messages would get to and from the Earth, years will have passed, decades, possible even centuries. Dreams of empire would be fantastical at best. Even defeating the speed of light for data and messages, there would be no way to enforce threats unless you could defeat the light speed barrier with ships as well. At which point, you've hit the event horizon that keeps "hard" sci-fi where it is, and begin to move into the soft sci-fi realm.

There's not much else to say about it.

Brovo said
Realistically speaking, space warfare is not a matter of stealth in the traditional sense of "invisibility", and combat would not be done in the traditional sense of ballistics-based warfare. The rule of thumb is nothing can travel faster than light.Ergo, from an admittedly primitive point of view, space combat would likely be more on a planetary scale. Missiles would be countered long before they could reach their targets by this point so it would be more like spies with suit case explosives. The idea of large fleets doing battle would become, frankly, antiquated, in an era where a planet loaded with self-defense platforms and satellites would be more than capable of evaporating fleets of thousands of war ships.Wars would be fought in the dark by diplomats, politicians, assassins, and sabotage. Embargos would become the new method by which to exclude a member of the community. Speaking of community, there would only be a very shrewd sense of it. By the time messages would get to and from the Earth, years will have passed, decades, possible even centuries. Dreams of empire would be fantastical at best. Even defeating the speed of light for data and messages, there would be no way to enforce threats unless you could defeat the light speed barrier with ships as well. At which point, you've hit the event horizon that keeps "hard" sci-fi where it is, and begin to move into the soft sci-fi realm.There's not much else to say about it.

Not necessarily. Planet-to-orbit is a massive energy barrier (I mean you've seen how much rocket it takes to put a shuttle into LEO). Planet-to-interstellar missiles would have to be... I mean.... we're talking *enormous* amounts of power required. The more logical process would be to send tools of production into space -- something like a construction drone, sent out into the asteroid belt to convert space rocks into materials, materials into space stations, stations into shipyards, etc. So what's the advantage of doing something like that, well, A, it dramatically reduces how much mass you need to carry off your planet, which is a big deal. But secondly, it opens the door for space travel as a means of power-projection. Think 'carrier battlegroups' in naval theory.... Carriers are essentially portable airfields, and massive ships like these would function as portable planets. You'd park it in orbit around a sun, and you'd immediately enjoy vast physical advantages over any planet-bound (or planet-orbiting) forces in the system -- primarily, firing weapons from a ship will always consume less energy than firing weapons from a planet, because of gravitational considerations.

So, if you can BUILD such a ship -- which only a select few could, on account of (again) physical barriers to access and the costs involved -- you could very conceivably use them to build an empire. For reference the British built a global empire in an era of sailboats and carrier pigeons... these things are certainly possible, for the men who can pull it off.

mdk said
Not necessarily. Planet-to-orbit is a massive energy barrier (I mean you've seen how much rocket it takes to put a shuttle into LEO). Planet-to-interstellar missiles would have to be... I mean.... we're talking *enormous* amounts of power required. The more logical process would be to send tools of production into space -- something like a construction drone, sent out into the asteroid belt to convert space rocks into materials, materials into space stations, stations into shipyards, etc. So what's the advantage of doing something like that, well, A, it dramatically reduces how much mass you need to carry off your planet, which is a big deal. But secondly, it opens the door for space travel as a means of power-projection. Think 'carrier battlegroups' in naval theory.... Carriers are essentially portable airfields, and massive ships like these would function as portable planets. You'd park it in orbit around a sun, and you'd immediately enjoy vast physical advantages over any planet-bound (or planet-orbiting) forces in the system -- primarily, firing weapons from a ship will always consume less energy than firing weapons from a planet, because of gravitational considerations. So, if you can BUILD such a ship -- which only a select few could, on account of (again) physical barriers to access and the costs involved -- you could very conceivably use them to build an empire. For reference the British built a global empire in an era of sailboats and carrier pigeons... these things are certainly possible, for the men who can pull it off.

Except that there are two key differences between a space empire in space and the British empire which was not in space.

#1: The time disparity isn't even remotely comparable. Even at light speed the closest solar system is Proxima Centauri, that's still 4.2 years away at the speed of light. None of the closest ten solar systems are even remotely acceptable candidates for life. (At least, life as we know it, and which would be useful for anything from Earth.) This is at light speed. Getting there by modern propulsion would take around... 72,000 years. Even at 1/10th light speed, which isn't anywhere near achievable for humanity at the moment, it would take us 42 years to get to the closest system, which isn't remotely inhabitable.

Maintaining an empire when it would take decades, or even centuries, to just send and receive orders, would be insanely prohibitive to the maintenance of any sort of long range space fleet. Leave alone the fact that during the reign of the British Empire, technology moved slowly. If technology continues to change and upgrade at the rapid pace it is now, even 10-20 years from now the targeting computers used on those war ships would be antiquated toys put into calculators for small children. And yes, for space combat, at the sheer range that it would go on at, you would need targeting computers, human beings wouldn't cut it.

#2: Then there's the fact that despite the higher cost of firing defensively from a planet against an offensive fleet, planets have two advantages that fleets do not have.

#1: Fleets would be easy to see coming from (literally) decades away. Especially since you can't hide heat in space, one of the coldest damned places we know, because even if you can disguise ships with heat retaining alloys, you certainly can't do that for your engines, which have to expunge heat emissions. Unless you invent an engine or method of propulsion not driven by heat, in which case, by then, technology in general will have evolved to the point of being able to monitor the entirety of the night's sky through networked satellites.

#2: Planets don't realistically run out of ammo. Ships certainly do. At least, ships would far, far sooner than planets would. Because push comes to shove, you could fire giant rocks into space to intercept incoming missiles using advanced targeting computers and it would do the job.

This is not mentioning that it would still be cheaper to mass produce cheap interception methods to ballistics weaponry and arm them on satellites/fire them into space manually, than it would be to mass produce war fleets capable of laying siege to an entire planet. Especially if you use those same construction ships/drones to just... Drag the asteroids back to the planet and build even more satellites and ammunition in orbit... Instead of wasting a significant portion of it on hulls, engines, fuel, etc.

Traditional fleet combat, or ballistics weaponry, when put to the sheer scale of space, is irrelevant nonsense. Wars would be fought on a planetary scale, because fighting over the sheer amount of distance in space would be insane and impractical. Especially since there's quite literally vast emptiness between you and the incoming fleet, so it's not like you can't see them coming.

Now if you can break the light speed barrier with ships, then fleet combat comes back into play, because you can't see them coming... But if you break the light speed barrier, you just broke the back of one of the key principles of hard sci-fi, and moved into soft sci-fi. Something far more malleable.

EDIT

Though I suppose I should quickly expand on something I said before: "From my primitive point of view." What the future holds is likely so far beyond my comprehension as to make it outright alien to me. With the way technology and society is marching on, who could have imagined instantaneous communication available to everyone across the entire planet for just 10 dollars a month? Or access to the entire world's vast collection of public knowledge in over twenty different languages, all accessible in your pocket? Such things must be like magic to men of a hundred years ago. A hundred years from now, the technology we will have will be like magic to a very likely dead me. Leave alone two hundred or three hundred years from now.

All I can do is contemplate the future and all its potential wonders. I will never know it.

Brovo said planets don't run out of ammo

Oh, sure they do. How many rockets exist on Earth which are capable of reaching a high-earth orbit? I don't have a number for you, but long story short it's $Finite. I sort of went over some of the advantages of attacking a planet from space in my first post -- these things matter. Could somebody just build more? I mean, yeah, you COULD -- but wouldn't the productive advantage go to the militarized, industrial-type capitals, and not to the spacefaring settler types? And they wouldn't even have to build as much stuff. Your delivery system, for an orbiting ship striking a planet, might weigh 1000 pounds, while the delivery system for planet-to-space would have to be in excess of -- well, an awful lot. Physics favor the aggressors, in a big and meaningful way. That's perfect imperial stomping grounds.

On the communications/light barrier business -- look, I don't know how (or if) someone's gonna overcome that, I'm just saying, Ghengis Khan managed, Alexander managed, Caesar took Gaul, you know..... shit happens, great people can accomplish great things even if there are obstacles. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

On phone so short response.

1: Near future tech would allow space elevators. Superior to launch pads in saving fuel. Getting resources into orbit for construction drones. Etc.

2: Caesar didn't die of old age before reaching Gaul and Gaul didn't have 42+ years to prepare for his arrival.

Brovo said
On phone so short response.1: Near future tech would allow space elevators. Superior to launch pads in saving fuel. Getting resources into orbit for construction drones. Etc.2: Caesar didn't die of old age before reaching Gaul and Gaul didn't have 42+ years to prepare for his arrival.

1. Gravity doesn't stop at the atmosphere

2. You're right, nobody's ever overcome a challenge and everything is set in stone. :obnoxious:

1: Vast majority of fuel is used escaping atmosphere. Fuel usage in orbit is negligible in comparison. Plus more efficient propulsion methods available in the future, etc.

2: Please reread my posts before you say silly things in a condescending tone. Like that whole spiel about not knowing what the future really holds. It makes you look bad. :3

1. a. Majority used for reaching LEO is used in atmosphere, yes, on account of drag -- which is a factor that will dramatically reduce the effectiveness of space elevators (a constant burn is required to maintain the anchor point's orbit). But pretend that's all irrelevant; an interstellar vehicle will *always* have more energy than any terrestrial unit. We're talking meteors against boulders here.

b. History is littered with the corpses of men who thought a strategic advantage was 'negligible.'

c. There is no foreseeable zero-mass propulsion system rooted in real science.

2. Smile again. You don't have any idea what you're talking about.

Alright. One more time, just for you. 42 years.

Years.

Any kind of orbital advantage a fleet would have is irrelevant on the sheer face of the fact that they will never reach orbit before being shot at with enough ordinance to annihilate them before they got anywhere near the system. Why? Because Isaac Newton is the deadliest motherfucker in space. Thats why. Plain and simple the offensive advantage of a fleet in orbit is literally irrelevant unless facing a civilization that has literally no way to stop you. Then your advantage is irrelevant by the nature of simply being massively technologically superior anyway.

Space is not comparable to planetary tactics. You can see through space... Forever. And it takes forever to fly through space. And there is no maximum range in space. And so on.

mdk said
1. a. Majority used for reaching LEO is used in atmosphere, yes, on account of drag -- which is a factor that will dramatically reduce the effectiveness of space elevators (a constant burn is required to maintain the anchor point's orbit). But pretend that's all irrelevant; an interstellar vehicle will *always* have more energy than any terrestrial unit. We're talking meteors against boulders here. b. History is littered with the corpses of men who thought a strategic advantage was 'negligible.'c. There is no foreseeable zero-mass propulsion system rooted in real science. 2. Smile again. You don't have any idea what you're talking about.

1: Incorrect. A space Elevator doesn't require a constant burn to maintain the anchor points orbit. Just a suitable asteroid and actual knowledge of orbital mechanics so that it is placed in an adequate orbit. Such a system done correctly would still be expensive, but eminently feasible. A handful of ion drives and low power reactors and you might need to make orbital corrections once every couple of years.

2: Given your obvious failure to understand the basic concepts of a Space Elevator's mechanics you are hardly the one to be saying other people have no idea what they're talking about.

Skyrte said
I wanna talk about Space Battles. Space Warship designs, and tactics used in space.

I just recently watched the Ender's Game movie and I noticed a few cool things. During one of the space battle scenes, I noticed that Ender flanked the Buggers by maneuvering his DNs underneath an ice belt. Providing them with soft cover before blasting the Bugger ships. It's an excellent example of the Naval 3D warfare space is, compared to the modern day naval 2D warfare.
What other Space warfare tactics can we use? I'm not too well versed in Space warfare tactics.

What kind of stealth systems could ships have? The SSV Normandy had heat sinks which stored the heat that the ship produced, making it invisible to thermal based radars. That's about all that comes to mind for me.

Lastly, what determines a fight in space over all else? I read somewhere that Delta-V was the most important, but I want to hear your guys' opinions and thoughts on this.

Stealth is impossible in space. Not difficult. Not challenging. Not an engineering problem. Impossible.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php

Skip straight to "there ain't no stealth in space, do not pass Alpha Centauri, do not collect 200 Spacebucks." :p

Kadaeux said
1: Incorrect. A space Elevator doesn't require a constant burn to maintain the anchor points orbit. Just a suitable asteroid and actual knowledge of orbital mechanics so that it is placed in an adequate orbit. Such a system done correctly would still be expensive, but eminently feasible. A handful of ion drives and low power reactors and you might need to make orbital corrections once every couple of years.2: Given your obvious failure to understand the basic concepts of a Space Elevator's mechanics you are hardly the one to be saying other people have no idea what they're talking about.

All orbits degrade, Kad, especially the ones subjected to drag as your lift vector still passes through atmosphere, and the normal force from raising weapons and materials into orbit along I'm just assuming we're going with carbon nanorods. All forces acting along the elevator's vector will degrade the orbit of the anchor, for which your only option is to counterburn. Just saying. It's irrelevant to the conversation though, because we're talk-- wait. *I'm* talking about the energy advantage of an interstellar fleet over terrestrial forces.

Let's see what Bobo is talking about.

Brovo said
Alright. One more time, just for you. Any kind of orbital advantage a fleet would have is irrelevant on the sheer face of the fact that they will never reach orbit before being shot at with enough ordinance to annihilate them before they got anywhere near the system. Why? Because Isaac Newton is the deadliest motherfucker in space. Thats why. Plain and simple the offensive advantage of a fleet in orbit is literally irrelevant unless facing a civilization that has literally no way to stop you. Then your advantage is irrelevant by the nature of simply being massively technologically superior anyway.Space is not comparable to planetary tactics. You can see through space... Forever. And it takes forever to fly through space. And there is no maximum range in space. And so on.

......Newton. Isaac...... what are you even...

Okay. So what I think you're saying is 'they can see you coming and shoot straight at you for 40 years, and 40 years' worth of bullets will annihilate your puny warships.' Like throwing landmines on a train track, the train just loses. Right? That's what we're going for here?

Completely wrong. Interstellar travel is, itself, an exercise of several orbital patterns. To start, we put the satellite into an elliptical orbit about the earth, then at perigee, you burn hard and go to a hyperbolic pattern, essentially taking your high kinetic state at perigee and then adding enough thrust to reach escape velocity. Once you're on path, you cut engines, and now you're trading kinetic energy for potential -- to a point. Eventually when you're far enough distant from the earth (outside its gravitational influence -- which is technically never, but the gray line is there when...), you're now a body orbiting the sun; your energy state at present defines what sort of orbit you have (because you just came from earth, you're likely in a highly eccentric solar orbit). Eventually you reach the plane you want and accelerate again to put your drone into a more stable, predictable solar orbit -- at this point you're a high-energy body way the fuck out in space, acting in the sun's sphere of influence and ignoring the piss out of the planets. From here, planets have to work ludicrously hard to reach you -- for instance, you know how rare an event it is to see Haley's Comet? Once every 75 years, it's visible from earth -- that's your window. You've got one night or whatever to put something in its orbital plane (the microseconds will matter, for the mission control people, but let's just say one night) or else earth moves away on its revolution, and Haley's moves away on its revolution, and you have to burn impossible amounts of fuel to reach that orbital plane again. All the bodies are in motion, I guess, is the take-away here, and they're in motion along defined paths, That's orbits we can all understand.

Now. To comprehend an interstellar orbit, you have to scale up what you're learning about solar orbits. Bodies can move from planet to planet, and in transit they operate in the sun's gravitational influence. When you're interstellar, you're talking galactic sphere. Let's take the example of an attack on Alpha Centauri Bb, a small planet cluster. To get there, first we build our ship in a solar orbit near Jupiter (proximity to asteroids, and a whim). Once ready, we burn to enter a parabolic orbit about Jupiter. From there we build up energy and escape Jupiter to Sol; approaching Sol we do a hard burn to gain a specific (but very high) amount of energy to put us on the one, exact, specific, tiny line that will escape Sol, revolve about the center of the Milky Way, and allow us to (with more calculated burns) set our energy level to intercept Alpha's sphere of influence and ride their gravity down. I'd take eccentric elliptical orbit here, with the goal of reaching aphelion and burning out again, to set a stable non-eccentric orbit about Alpha Centauri.

That was a lot of steps, yes? At *no point* during that process could an observer on Alpha Bb discern what my next orbit would be. He could guess, and for every guess he has to field a warhead and a missile (at tremendous cost), years in advance, trying to place it into an orbit he thinks I might select for interception.

But wait, there's more. Is your head bleeding yet? He doesn't even necessarily have **any physical chance whatsoever of intercepting me**. If I've done my job right, I've calculated the period of his planet, and I know which eccentric options are available for him to reach an orbit around Alpha. I can pull up which planes he can access and I can avoid them at will. To even have a chance, he needs someone flying his intercept-missile who's equipped to react to my orbital plays. That means a ship, like mine, with microthrust for maneuverability and large engines for hard burns; and he'd have to be at work in the instant I started my journey, because my orbital manipulations are building up all *kinds* of energy. He'd have to take similar steps to build up his energy (I'll spare us all a breakdown of how hard that would be), and he'd have to pick the planes just right, or he might need more than 75 years to get a second window to get on my orbit.

Or you know, you could just throw rocks up there like 'eh, what the fuck, we got rocks right, raaar,' and see what happens.

Now that's just physics. I haven't even scratched the surface of the strategic value of all this, and believe me, I've got experts lining up waiting to explain how to use a pure offensive military force for empirical domination (starting with Douchelle, then some Billy Mitchell, Arthur Harris....... You want that, I'll break that out, just say the word, and make sure you do it really dismissively, like I don't even belong in a conversation with you, and end it with a smirk. Go on, I know you want to. Make sure you go wiki this first so you can still respond snarkily -- you don't have to be the whole pirate, just being a parrot should do well enough.