So there are defense systems mounted on the space rocks too now? Or are the ships escorting the space rocks?
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Asuras No spoken words, only napalm and guns
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Asuras said
So there are defense systems mounted on the space rocks too now? Or are the ships escorting the space rocks?
Defence systems don't need to be.
Point defence weapons aren't going to scratch an asteroid of sufficient size to be used as a projectile. And your enemies heaviest weapons (assuming hard-scifi) will have to spend a lot of time bombarding each rock in turn, or be composed of some sort of warhead to drill into the asteroid to blow it up from within.
Add in that someone conducting a proper bombardment using rocks won't be picking snowballs or dirt rocks but nickel-iron rich asteroids and stopping them is even harder.
Whereas if you just deployed missiles your enemies entire arsenal could easily destroy them before they reached the target world.
Asuras No spoken words, only napalm and guns
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I see. Still, I question the intelligence of using iron-rich asteroids for weapons, as opposed to building other things. A million asteroids filled with iron would be quite wasteful, I think.
Asuras said
I see. Still, I question the intelligence of using iron-rich asteroids for weapons, as opposed to building other things. A million asteroids filled with iron would be quite wasteful, I think.
100% Hard Scifi is terribly boring and prevents any real space war from ever happening. So waging a war at all isn't a mark of intelligence to begin with :p
Asuras No spoken words, only napalm and guns
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Fair enough. Agreed. :P
In the end I believe interplanetary weaponry will be the only method of "space war". Weapons capable of firing or transporting projectiles or explosives to their destination far too fast or instantly for anything to intercept it; i.e. "warping" them. A planet is the biggest spaceship out there, if you think about it, capable of handling far more weapons on it than any fleet even of similar size.
A wormhole at the end of the barrel, essentially.
In the end I believe interplanetary weaponry will be the only method of "space war". Weapons capable of firing or transporting projectiles or explosives to their destination far too fast or instantly for anything to intercept it; i.e. "warping" them. A planet is the biggest spaceship out there, if you think about it, capable of handling far more weapons on it than any fleet even of similar size.
A wormhole at the end of the barrel, essentially.
Asuras said
Fair enough. Agreed. :PIn the end I believe interplanetary weaponry will be the only method of "space war". Weapons capable of firing or transporting projectiles or explosives to their destination far too fast or instantly for anything to intercept it; i.e. "warping" them. A planet is the biggest spaceship out there, if you think about it, capable of handling far more weapons on it than any fleet even of similar size.A wormhole at the end of the barrel, essentially.
It's gravity that becomes your weakness, and atmosphere. If you could find a small planetoid with ludicrously high rotation speeds, you could use it as a cannon to slingshot items or weapons into space, but even that's harder than simply dropping a rock out of the sky and guiding it towards the ground.
Brovo said
Or you know. Equal and opposite reaction. Whatever material you make the laser gun out of that can sustain that heat at its most potent and concentrated (the gun barrel) you just... Coat your ships in. And now enemy lasers are useless.
Huh, well I guess swords, maces and war hammers became useless when suits of plate mail fashioned from the same materials these weapons were created from started appearing on the field, right?
Aa spinal weapon
I'm going to let you figure out the tactical flaws in fielding a spinal-mounted DEW in a three-dimensional environment.
Go back to school and learn how lasers REALLY work.
The irony is crushing.
spaceweapon threads get inexplicably abrasive on RPG. It's almost a social phenomenon.
mdk said
spaceweapon threads get inexplicably abrasive on RPG. It's almost a social phenomenon.
Ha!
But it sure does make for good entertainment!
:3
mdk said It seems to all add up to a very aggressive kind of warfare, and it seems (to me) like the kind of environment that only really supports one top-dog. Less like WW2-era dogfighting, more like modern BVR.
Oh definitely. If you can get a fleet into an enemy system you could do some very serious damage and they couldn't stop you generally, because the amount of force necessary to counter-attack would be far greater than to attack.
On the flip side, you could see an enemy fleet approaching from many years away. As well, the faster the assault fleet travels, the slower you can fire counter-measures in comparison before the counter-measures would be impossible to see coming. (If the attack fleet was moving in at 0.8 light speed and counter-measures came at them at 0.2 light speed, the ships would be hit before they could see the counter-measures coming.)
Also, until we get past the light speed barrier, empire is a bit out of the question still. You can't hold an empire together if by the time your communications reach someone, you'd be talking to their grand children.
That aside, yeah, an aggressor in an otherwise equal conflict would probably win. Hard.
ASTA said Huh, well I guess swords, maces and war hammers became useless when suits of plate mail fashioned from the same materials these weapons were created from started appearing on the field, right?
Swords, maces, and war hammers are physical materials that, when used with applied force (energy) can cause damage to other materials made of similar or same materials. A laser is pure energy. Whatever material you have that can contain and fire the laser can also stop that very same laser, by virtue of the fact that your space gun has to be able to contain and then fire that energy. Whereas, say, a mace, does not have to contain any energy. It merely has to transfer it from point A to point B.
Also, the vast majority of medieval soldiers did not have plate mail. They had, at best, chain mail. If it was a plate mail dominated battlefield, you would have seen a hell of a lot more spears and crossbows than there already were, rather than maces and swords.
ASTA said I'm going to let you figure out the tactical flaws in fielding a spinal-mounted DEW in a three-dimensional environment.
I think that was the point...
Kadaeux said A: No, a ship mounting lasers for ANYTHING except point defence is NOT going to mount them in fully traversable turrets. It's going to mount it as a spinal weapon where they can get the most surface-area for the laser (Necessary, as your laser gets more powerful the size of the laser PROJECTOR increases with it.)
He was arguing about the impracticality of laser weapons as offensive weapons. I think the fact that you would have to spinal mount it to get the most power out of it only really goes to support that argument.
ASTA said The irony is crushing.
Like Russian space tech?
mdk said
spaceweapon threads get inexplicably abrasive on RPG. It's almost a social phenomenon.
Sci-fi fans are some of the most hardcore on the planet. Just look at the Star Wars and Star Trek fan bases and how utterly rabid and obsessive they can be. Why is this? I honestly have no clue.
ASTA said
Ha!But it sure does make for good entertainment! :3
That it does.
I have a reply typed up, but what material are you proposing could be used to 'stop' a laser beam? What 'part' of the laser are you going to use to achieve this effect?
Skyswimsky nou
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Gravity Lances!
ASTA said
I have a reply typed up, but what material are you proposing could be used to 'stop' a laser beam? What 'part' of the laser are you going to use to achieve this effect?
... The same material used to build-up, contain, and fire the energy the laser uses. Again, laser = pure energy. Presumable, you made your firing apparatus out of a physical material of some sort, lets say, it's made out of Unobtanium. If Unobtanium can contain and propel the energy at its maximum potential speed towards a target for the entire duration of firing, than that very same Unobtanium can be used to stop and dissipate that very same laser as it reaches its destination, especially seeing as how, even if it does manage to reach its target, the amount of energy that it had at firing point will be lesser than the energy it has upon striking a target, due to energy dissipating into the area around it as it travels from firing point to impact point.
That's about as clear as I can make it. Whatever material you would use to contain and fire the laser, which is pure energy, would be the same material you could use to completely stop that very same laser.
Also, yes, I'm aware a laser moves at the speed of light, but even an inter-system engagement at light speed would take minutes for projectiles and such to go from point A to point B. It takes 7-8 minutes for light from the Sun to reach the Earth. Every second the laser took to reach its target, it would be losing energy to its surrounding area. Most space engagements however would occur at ranges vastly greater than even this, due to the fact that there is no such thing as a maximum sight range in space. (Save this: That even light will dissipate into virtual nothingness after it travels beyond a certain threshold. Thus why seeing the most distant stars requires a telescope to detect finer and finer details of light. It's part of why the universe is cycling down into decay: Because the universe is always expanding, but the amount of energy within the universe is not, energy is spreading further out. Like butter over too much toast.)
Skyswimsky said
Gravity Lances!
Hmm...
EDIT
@ASTA: To better clarify what I mean by energy dissipation, since you might think I'm meaning momentum, when I'm not. A laser is a heated beam of light, and the heat is where it gets the majority (if not entirety) of its destructive power, no? Heat dissipates in space, however. What better example to use of this than the moon orbiting the Earth, which has no atmosphere to stop the heat of the sun, and of course the sun, which is immensely stupidly hot.
The average temperature of the sunny side of the moon? 100 Celsius. The average temperature of the surface of the sun? 5,500 degrees celcius. Ish. (Depending on whether you would call the Photosphere or Chromosphere the true "surface" of the sun, seeing as how it is a giant ball of hydrogen and plasma.)
Thus, we can calculate just how much heat energy reaches the surface of the moon by taking the temperature of the sunny side of the moon and dividing it by the approximate surface temperature of the sun.
1.8%. Well. That's pretty terrible. Perfect for maintaining life on Earth, granted, when you factor in our atmosphere that retains heat, and geothermal production of heat that filters up through the crust to the surface of the planet, and so on... But... Yeah. Your space laser is going to be pretty pitiful by the time it hits anyone unless you can quite literally see the enemy with your naked eye.
"A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The term "laser" originated as an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation"." Wikipedia the free internet Encyclopedia - original text from
Gould, R. Gordon (1959). "The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". In Franken, P.A. and Sands, R.H. (Eds.). The Ann Arbor Conference on Optical Pumping, the University of Michigan, 15 June through 18 June 1959. p. 128. OCLC 02460155.
"laser". Reference.com. Retrieved May 15, 2008.
The usual energy carriers in lasers are photons of a specific electromagnetic frequency. Now photons lose energy only on one way and that is by impacting something. The problem with laser is the quality of what you use to create it, our current technology allows us only to create highly dispersed lasers which hit a rather large area with to little of photons to in astronomical terms be anything except a nice way to measure distances accurately/. To put it simply humanity has made great progress in capturing light but just a few steps in emitting focused beams of it.
But if techniques and technologies which allow much focused laser emissions would (read will be at some time in the future) lasers would be one of the beast space weapons - due to the fact that the energy loss of a laser is next to nothing and all the energy is transferred to whatever is hit while also being only slightly influenced by gravity and traveling at light speed. As we stand today lasers are manly used as latest military anti-ballistic systems, mine-clearing systems and so on. A practical space laser for combat cloud probably be build to cover a few thousands or ten thousands of kilometers but we will sooner see a pusher laser for anti-space impact defense then actual military space based lasers - we just don't have a need to put military grade lasers in space.
As for the energy dispersion - the Sun's heat doesn't disperse because most of the space outside of the outer layers of it's gas cover is empty - there is simply no particles to carry the heat. Since direct heat transfer is dependent on particles being there that means that if there is no particles there is no heat transfer. Instead of using direct heat transfer the Sun relies on electromagnetic radiation to carry heat to the distant worlds. Do note that magnetosphere of planets, atmospheres and reflectivity of their surfaces also effects the amount of energy coming from the Sun as well as the distance (due to the dispersion of particles from the Sun). But even on Pluto, almost 50 AJs from the Sun's surface around 1 W of energy falls on the surface of this world. On Earth which is 50 times closer this is over 1000 times more - around 1300 W per each meter. So the Sun doesn't give us energy by directly transferring heat but by carrying it with mostly photons.
So your points are or wrong or wrongly explained why they are valid.
Railguns are also good weapons - since they are electromagnetically accelerated projectiles there is no usual reaction to firing non-self propelled projectiles. They will also travel straight - the gravity of most worlds is just not enough to stop something traveling at Mach 6 or faster today while considering by the time we have space based railguns for long-range engagements their projectiles would probably achieve speed of few dozens of Mach more then enough escape gravity of most areas in space. In the quite realistic weapons of humanity in Halo their standard shipboard MAC cannon fire 600 t projectiles at 30 km/s (with the highest speed being 4% speed of light with 3000 t projectiles in the orbital MAC stations).
Missiles equipped with advanced guiding systems to evade getting hit with countermeasures, baits and limited AI would be also deadly weapons - they would be more like a really smart suicide robot then just a missile.
But in all space battles there would be one crucial part - your computer systems which would calculate enemy ships positions in the future (and tell where you need to fire to hit them when your attack reaches them) as well as the maximal cone in which the enemy ship cloud maneuver (until unknowingly far inertia free engines are developed maneuvering a ship out of a barrage or railgun projectiles will take hours) and so on. In the end who has the best computer system and knows his enemy's capabilities the best wins AKA in the end it all comes to how good a brain (computer) and how much information about your enemy you have.
Gould, R. Gordon (1959). "The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". In Franken, P.A. and Sands, R.H. (Eds.). The Ann Arbor Conference on Optical Pumping, the University of Michigan, 15 June through 18 June 1959. p. 128. OCLC 02460155.
"laser". Reference.com. Retrieved May 15, 2008.
The usual energy carriers in lasers are photons of a specific electromagnetic frequency. Now photons lose energy only on one way and that is by impacting something. The problem with laser is the quality of what you use to create it, our current technology allows us only to create highly dispersed lasers which hit a rather large area with to little of photons to in astronomical terms be anything except a nice way to measure distances accurately/. To put it simply humanity has made great progress in capturing light but just a few steps in emitting focused beams of it.
But if techniques and technologies which allow much focused laser emissions would (read will be at some time in the future) lasers would be one of the beast space weapons - due to the fact that the energy loss of a laser is next to nothing and all the energy is transferred to whatever is hit while also being only slightly influenced by gravity and traveling at light speed. As we stand today lasers are manly used as latest military anti-ballistic systems, mine-clearing systems and so on. A practical space laser for combat cloud probably be build to cover a few thousands or ten thousands of kilometers but we will sooner see a pusher laser for anti-space impact defense then actual military space based lasers - we just don't have a need to put military grade lasers in space.
As for the energy dispersion - the Sun's heat doesn't disperse because most of the space outside of the outer layers of it's gas cover is empty - there is simply no particles to carry the heat. Since direct heat transfer is dependent on particles being there that means that if there is no particles there is no heat transfer. Instead of using direct heat transfer the Sun relies on electromagnetic radiation to carry heat to the distant worlds. Do note that magnetosphere of planets, atmospheres and reflectivity of their surfaces also effects the amount of energy coming from the Sun as well as the distance (due to the dispersion of particles from the Sun). But even on Pluto, almost 50 AJs from the Sun's surface around 1 W of energy falls on the surface of this world. On Earth which is 50 times closer this is over 1000 times more - around 1300 W per each meter. So the Sun doesn't give us energy by directly transferring heat but by carrying it with mostly photons.
So your points are or wrong or wrongly explained why they are valid.
Railguns are also good weapons - since they are electromagnetically accelerated projectiles there is no usual reaction to firing non-self propelled projectiles. They will also travel straight - the gravity of most worlds is just not enough to stop something traveling at Mach 6 or faster today while considering by the time we have space based railguns for long-range engagements their projectiles would probably achieve speed of few dozens of Mach more then enough escape gravity of most areas in space. In the quite realistic weapons of humanity in Halo their standard shipboard MAC cannon fire 600 t projectiles at 30 km/s (with the highest speed being 4% speed of light with 3000 t projectiles in the orbital MAC stations).
Missiles equipped with advanced guiding systems to evade getting hit with countermeasures, baits and limited AI would be also deadly weapons - they would be more like a really smart suicide robot then just a missile.
But in all space battles there would be one crucial part - your computer systems which would calculate enemy ships positions in the future (and tell where you need to fire to hit them when your attack reaches them) as well as the maximal cone in which the enemy ship cloud maneuver (until unknowingly far inertia free engines are developed maneuvering a ship out of a barrage or railgun projectiles will take hours) and so on. In the end who has the best computer system and knows his enemy's capabilities the best wins AKA in the end it all comes to how good a brain (computer) and how much information about your enemy you have.
To better clarify what I mean by energy dissipation, since you might think I'm meaning momentum, when I'm not. A laser is a heated beam of light, and the heat is where it gets the majority (if not entirety) of its destructive power, no? Heat dissipates in space, however. What better example to use of this than the moon orbiting the Earth, which has no atmosphere to stop the heat of the sun, and of course the sun, which is immensely stupidly hot.
What are you even talking about? This makes literally zero sense. And your math is awful. You should calculate how much energy is released by the moon's shadow on the sun and compare that to what the moon recieves.
So Boerd said
What are you even talking about? This makes literally zero sense. And your math is awful. You should calculate how much energy is released by the moon's shadow on the sun and compare that to what the moon recieves.
A shadow is an area where direct light from a light source cannot reach due to obstruction by an object.
shadowbending
EDIT: Wait this isn't spam. Sorry for the one worder.
EDIT: Wait this isn't spam. Sorry for the one worder.
Herzinth said
shadowbending
Magic...
Or in Sci-Fi space terms...
Psionics/biotics :p
Whelp, now that I'm here I'll probably just participate now.
give me a day and I'll respond to everything.
gamer5 said *Snips ignorance about lasers*
Yeah i'm not even going to both educating you on the fact that lasers lose intensity over distance in a vacuum.
Railguns are also good weapons - since they are electromagnetically accelerated projectiles there is no usual reaction to firing non-self propelled projectiles. They will also travel straight - the gravity of most worlds is just not enough to stop something traveling at Mach 6 or faster today while considering by the time we have space based railguns for long-range engagements their projectiles would probably achieve speed of few dozens of Mach more then enough escape gravity of most areas in space. In the quite realistic weapons of humanity in Halo their standard shipboard MAC cannon fire 600 t projectiles at 30 km/s (with the highest speed being 4% speed of light with 3000 t projectiles in the orbital MAC stations).
Railguns are in fact the single most viable weapon in space short of weaponising asteroids.
Missiles equipped with advanced guiding systems to evade getting hit with countermeasures, baits and limited AI would be also deadly weapons - they would be more like a really smart suicide robot then just a missile.But in all space battles there would be one crucial part - your computer systems which would calculate enemy ships positions in the future (and tell where you need to fire to hit them when your attack reaches them) as well as the maximal cone in which the enemy ship cloud maneuver (until unknowingly far inertia free engines are developed maneuvering a ship out of a barrage or railgun projectiles will take hours) and so on. In the end who has the best computer system and knows his enemy's capabilities the best wins AKA in the end it all comes to how good a brain (computer) and how much information about your enemy you have.
If your enemy has railgun point defence and adequate sensors missiles become literally useless weapons in space. Not just slightly useless but completely because their point defence can shoot down more missiles than you can launch and STILL have ammo to hole your ship with.
ASTA said I'm going to let you figure out the tactical flaws in fielding a spinal-mounted DEW in a three-dimensional environment.
If you haven't built your ship like a handicapped engineer who's idea of good design comes from popular science fiction your ship is able to rotate about all axis as fast as a turret could AND present a much larger weapon to the target. The same applies to railguns.
In short. There are no tactical flaws in fielding a spinal mount DEW or KEW unless you have SEVERELY fucked up in your starship design.
The irony is crushing.
Says the uneducated fool who thinks that a spinal weapon in space is in any way a bad thing.
You knew what I meant. The circle on the Sun's surface drawn by creating an equally proportioned cone whose tip is in the center of the Sun, and then applying the ratio of the moon's diameter over the length of a side of this cone (radius of sun plus distance between moon and sun). Then solve for x by multplying by the ratio by the sun's diameter and then squaring and multiplying that by pi.
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