The only reason the US didn't send human back to the Moon is because there's no point. None of the technology needed to exploit it are ready, like a Reusable heavy launch rocket. Any scientific research is more valuable if done cheaply and even then, some missions are worth more than the composition of our moon.
China barely caught back with what Russia could do at it's peak.
Russia is regressing.
The most capable active Chinese launch vehicle is the Long March 5, with up to 25,000 kilograms to LEO, 5,100 kilograms of direct-to-GEO capability and 14,000 kilograms to GTO. The most prolific Long March launch vehicle is the Long March 2 in the 2C configuration, which is limited to 3450 kilograms to LEO and 1250 kilograms to GTO. The 2F is in a similar ballpark. By these measurements, corroborated by other estimates, China's space program is not putting very much tonnage into orbit.
Anyone have any resources on what space warfare would be like on a strategic level? Everything I've found only focuses either on individual battles or surface-to-orbit combat. For example, I'm curious about how can a front line be drawn if everything is in constant motion? Or what will logistics chains look like considering how important propellant is (assuming no magic fusion drives)? pic semi-related
i dont think hacking will be a thing, other than very rare and hard to find exploits millitary communication systems are very secure these days.
as for EW that will be very important. for example imagine getting a small drone right between the enemy spacecraft and their ground station, thats the only place (due to directional antennas) that you can jam their direct comm links
>as for EW that will be very important. for example imagine getting a small drone right between the enemy spacecraft and their ground station, thats the only place (due to directional antennas) that you can jam their direct comm links
Would using lasers to try to burn out the enemy's sensors count as EW?
yes
i would imagine stealth will be big, minimize your EM emissions. big cone shaped spacecraft will point their nose at the enemy to minimize the cross section presented to the enemy, the nose might also be actively cooled to reduce how much radiation it emits (we're talking against enemy infra red telescopes that will be the main military sensor type like radar is on earth's surface)
if you know you are detected you might want to just blast lasers at all enemy sensors to fuck with their tracking. or you might want to do both have disposable drones shooting lasers at sensors fucking with the signal/noise ratios of the enemy sensors while your actual spacecraft try to sneak by or atleast not be accurately tracked.
1 month ago
Anonymous
You aren't likely to know where all the sensors are, and stealth in space is not really feasible.
1 month ago
Anonymous
i mean you'll know where the big ones are like how you know where all the massive NORAD radars are now.a tiny cool drone nearby with a telescope might still get a fix on you while you dont know its there or your computer filters it assuming its an asteroid/debris
its hard to predict what will be effective, we'll only kind of know that once we'll start having actual factories and refineries in orbit so we'll know the economic angle. like looking 100 years into the future 100 years ago if you said there will be intercontinental nukes and cruise missiles people would expect that soldiers with rifles wouldnt be a thing but they still are because of the economics and logtistics of war. maybe making swarms of drones to track the enemy is the way to go, maybe big central telescopes, maybe both
1 month ago
Anonymous
You don't need large telescopes though; an assortment of 10 or 20 telescope satellites as large as the Kepler telescope would be good enough to monitor the entire sky, and any space faring civilization could pump them out in the hundreds, maybe thousands, and distribute them all over the solar system. As for analyzing the data, today's GPU cores are probably enough if you consider computer graphics to be anywhere similar.
Unless they make some break through in FTL or in handling heat/entropy, I don't see this changing any time soon.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Why there are so many telescopes in Chile?
1 month ago
Anonymous
High altitude in the Andes (less atmosphere), calm air currents, and they're western-aligned/developed enough for the yuros to feel safe building multimillion dollar telescopes there. I live in PA and there's always an annoying shimmer in my telescope from the jetstream when looking at bright objects.
1 month ago
Anonymous
High altitude in the Andes (less atmosphere), calm air currents, and they're western-aligned/developed enough for the yuros to feel safe building multimillion dollar telescopes there. I live in PA and there's always an annoying shimmer in my telescope from the jetstream when looking at bright objects.
and astronomy is very popular there, though it might be a case of chicken and egg
1 month ago
Anonymous
Southern Hemisphere as well. Not many developed AND mountainous AND dry regions to choose from
1 month ago
Anonymous
i mean you'll know where the big ones are like how you know where all the massive NORAD radars are now.a tiny cool drone nearby with a telescope might still get a fix on you while you dont know its there or your computer filters it assuming its an asteroid/debris
its hard to predict what will be effective, we'll only kind of know that once we'll start having actual factories and refineries in orbit so we'll know the economic angle. like looking 100 years into the future 100 years ago if you said there will be intercontinental nukes and cruise missiles people would expect that soldiers with rifles wouldnt be a thing but they still are because of the economics and logtistics of war. maybe making swarms of drones to track the enemy is the way to go, maybe big central telescopes, maybe both
https://i.imgur.com/Rtx4IKs.png
You don't need large telescopes though; an assortment of 10 or 20 telescope satellites as large as the Kepler telescope would be good enough to monitor the entire sky, and any space faring civilization could pump them out in the hundreds, maybe thousands, and distribute them all over the solar system. As for analyzing the data, today's GPU cores are probably enough if you consider computer graphics to be anywhere similar.
Unless they make some break through in FTL or in handling heat/entropy, I don't see this changing any time soon.
>Stealth
Sorry but I must:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--Strategic_Combat_Sensors--There_Ain't_No_Stealth_In_Space
The closest they got to "stealth" without breaking physics is the "Hydrogen steamer"
And it's basically a ship made at 90% of hydrogen which it use continuously to cool itself at 3°K, it would take months to go anywhere because any burn of interesting power would reveal it's trajectory and tell everyone where to look more closely.
It would require technology of incredible perfection for its stealth and its likely that if sensor are held to the same standard, the enemy will not only detect it but would also see it being built in the enemy shipyard.
1 month ago
Anonymous
no stealth in space only applies to settings where the solar system is colonized to the point where every nation has sensors in every orbit all the way to Neptune. As it stands now you can stick a large sail covered in RAM and Vantablack and cooled to 3 Kelvin between yourself and the Earth (think military grade JWST sunshield) and radiate your excess heat in a 90 degree cone in the opposite direction. All of this is already possible with modern day technology
1 month ago
Anonymous
Any setting where you can build Interplanetary spaceship will be able to build more than enough sensors to make "stealth" irrelevant.
You are begging your enemy to be stupid and go cheap when it won't take meaningful efforts or fuel to send sensor systems package around and protect themselves from the most basic form of camouflage.
Sorry but you are going to need to create a verrrrrrry specific setting to ever get anything that look like stealth. Even hiding as a cargoship isn't going to work more than once after which they kill all trade-ship coming from non-trusted faction.
Plus you'd need a really large actively-cooled surface (no mere sail) to hide your spaceship thruster plume, getting rid of any heat you might be imparting to it if the ship itself isn't actively cooled in that direction (else this is like trying to hide a lamp behind a paper wall)
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--Strategic_Combat_Sensors--There_Ain't_No_Stealth_In_Space--Why_Not?_Let_me_count_the_ways--Well_I'll_just_beam_my_heat_the_other_way!
1 month ago
Anonymous
gay I read that entire essay twice a month ago. It didn't manage to convince me then, it doesn't now. It assumes the sensor array and the stealth ship exist in a vacuum (heh) and not at the heart of a power struggle between two spacefaring empires. A dozen railgun slugs or space torpedoes will always outrun a delicate sensor platform, which means that once you destroy hostile satellites in a given area you can keep denying your enemy eyes in that region of space unless they dedicate a fleet of point defense craft to escort duty. You can also jam or blind satellites with laser and EWAR platforms. There's a lot you can do to limit your enemy's capability to the point where a stealth ship can get through
gold isnt that useful, its a good concoctor but other than being a coating its not good for much.
something like 16psyche contains a fuckton of gold but also more useful stuff like platinum,nickel. the worth of minerals on it in current prices is more than all the money on earth right now
I just checked and gold is selling for more than platinum right now. It didn't mention nickel but I have the feeling it will probably be lower as well.
On that basis, why aren't we trying to get the gold out of the ocean? Surely that's going to be easier and cheaper than sending rockets into space to intercept asteroids?
1 month ago
Anonymous
gold isnt that useful, its a good concoctor but other than being a coating its not good for much.
something like 16psyche contains a fuckton of gold but also more useful stuff like platinum,nickel. the worth of minerals on it in current prices is more than all the money on earth right now
iridium and osmium has better economics than gold or platinum
there's like 7000 kg of Iridium mined a year (yes, kg, not ton)
it's practically non-existent on Earth. The "ore" is platinum metal and asteroids that have already fallen down
the supply already cannot keep up with demand
>Surely that's going to be easier
not necessarily, I mean think about this:
the difference between normal atmosphere and vacuum of space is 1 bar
the difference between normal atmosphere and ocean floor is 100-1000 bar
Corrosion resistant electrical contacts. Basically every bond wire between a silicon die and its packaging.
1 month ago
Anonymous
true but its not a use which greatly benefits from massive amounts of it. the amounts of gold used in those contacts are very very miniscule and the cost of said gold is probably trivial compared to other stuff used to make said electronics
>Did you know that there is potentially at LEAST 45 thousand tons of gold in the world's oceans? And it could be as much as 1.5 million tons!
I just checked and gold is selling for more than platinum right now. It didn't mention nickel but I have the feeling it will probably be lower as well.
On that basis, why aren't we trying to get the gold out of the ocean? Surely that's going to be easier and cheaper than sending rockets into space to intercept asteroids?
>On that basis, why aren't we trying to get the gold out of the ocean? Surely that's going to be easier and cheaper than sending rockets into space to intercept asteroids?
Should you even ask?
First reason is that we are barely TESTING how to mine ore underwater.
Second we will have ecological regulation in action, think offshore platform but worse.
If we can get a machine to eat asteroid and use it as propellant this is the first step to economical exploitation of space.
Alternatively we build magnetic accelerator on the Moon and don't turn her into a harsh mistress but a gentle friend with benefit.
>strategic level
Time.
Where your forces are, how long it takes them to take somewhere and how fast the enemy is going to realize where you're going. Do a sneaky gravity assist that puts you in position to fortify before next window or several moth flight time and you've won.
Read expanse or other semi-realistic space sci-fi. They deal with travel times, randevouz and intersections a lot. Sometimes all you can do is just watch enemy escape 100m out of your fuel range.
But essentially it would be like navy - ports, deployments, important shipping lanes and choking points with giant emptyness all around.
As long as most of humanity is living on Earth, I don't think there's any chance of there ever being a protracted war in space.
In the space theater of a hypothetical WW3, the only option the two sides would have would be to throw everything they have in space at each other on day one of the war, after which one side would have lost substantially all of their presence in space. Whichever side still has some ships left would have obtained total orbital dominance for the duration of the war, as they would be able to prevent the losing side of the opening battle from launching any new ships.
America can launch a minimum viable orbital gunboat (8 Mk 41 VLS cells, a HELIOS laser and a 30mm CIWS gun) in one go as a Starship variant, no orbital assembly required. Nobody else can match that in the immediate future.
When they get it right, whether that's this upcoming test flight or later, they already have half a dozen more ships and four more boosters ready to go. It's not going to be a static cadence of once every two years like SLS, once they start flying they have the infrastructure to start flying rapidly. I don't know why this doesn't seem to be common knowledge, there's a guy who rents a cessna and flies over monthly and posts the footage. So yeah, once they stop exploding, the US will have that capability.
>Does a platform that has so far had only one launch test, which was unsuccessful,
It was a success though? And they're now ready for the next one, just had a successful hot fire test. I don't understand why all these years after Falcon 9 foreigners still somehow can't comprehend hardware rich development. Ie, NORMAL development in every single industry except for old space rockets. >count as the US having that capability?
At this point? Yes. Though if you really want to wait 9 months sure, nothing wrong with that.
Though in all seriousness, Starship will initially get used for Starlink while they keep iterating. It'll be years before government does serious launch on it.
alot will depend on the fairing size they end up on in regards to gvmnt payloads
1 month ago
Anonymous
If the Government is willing to pay for it, they can easily put an oversized diameter fairing on an expendable second stage Starship. It'll be a fractional portion of the actual expenditure for a mass produced rocket that goes along with whatever's going up in the end.
We can't answer that question without a proper setting.
You want Planet versus Planet I guess?
IMO there's good reason to think we may never have conventional warship, everything will be spam of missiles bus or giant lasers.
Every infrastructure is so fragile that any attack on homeworld will considered genocidal. Start a Kessler effect and you erase your enemies space-capabilities for decades, long enough for you to take total control.
Else, the website you want is this one, kind of a congregator to make SF harder
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php#id--No_Shipping_Lanes_In_Space
For your question specifically, you'll want to know this:
- There's no "route" as orbital mechanic goes
- "Intercepting" midway can only be done shooting everything in one single flyby, it's incredibly costly in propellant, your enemy will see you try month ago, and once done, you need to come back home on a ridiculously inefficient trajectory
- therefore, the only place that matter are planet/moons orbit. Europa would make a great place to refuel (ice => propellant) and bunker.
-...unless asteroid turn out easier to exploit.
The setting for pic (Children of a Death Earth), any warship use tons of drop tanks to reach their target quickly which is the only form of surprise you can have.
Then it need to be refueled by tankers who may or may not come as fast.
Thank you for the detailed breakdown. Would such orbits around a planet/moon mainly focus on the equatorial orbits due to easy access from the surface, or would the entire volume around the planet/moon need to be secure before it can be used for propellant loading?
>Thank you for the detailed breakdown. Would such orbits around a planet/moon mainly focus on the equatorial orbits due to easy access from the surface, or would the entire volume around the planet/moon need to be secure before it can be used for propellant loading?
Depend of how low the gravity is and propellant would likely come from dedicated tankers ships coming to you.
But as I said, the infrastructure will likely be the most important and we may not even have "warship" at all, instead using mass-produced missiles/lasers to destroy anything before it can even threaten stuff within the orbit, meaning the only way to take the orbit might be to snipe the laser or overwhelm the missiles.
For economical purpose we are likely to use equatorial orbit because it is easier to go anywhere in the solar system and put geostationary satellite.
This also stand for most of the megastructure infrastructure concept for access to space like magnetic runway, launch loop, elevators, rings, space tether...etc.
If the gravity is asteroid level of weak it's just a matter of grabbing the spaceship with robotic arms/winch.
Now if you don't want a genocidal war and all side are polite enough to not destroy spaceship/station ruining it for century then...
...then it become the good type of bloody war.
Forbidding most weapons would open the road for actual boarding.
Faction want control of a station?
Then they need to land human who cannot (yet) be electronically hacked, so they can hack -physically- their way to the system that let them kill everyone on-board if they don't comply with the new narrative.
Station/Spaceship can still shoot at each other but only to disable their (fragile) systems until the mission cannot be fulfilled.
Yes it's almost like a god damn video game but so far that's still logical in my head.
>we may not even have "warship" at all, instead using mass-produced missiles/lasers to destroy anything before it can even threaten stuff within the orbit
So like what military planners thought naval warfare was going to turn into before CIWS was refined enough to matter? Makes sense given the vastness of space and the amount of energy to takes fight in it. Do you think such missile/laser platforms will be concentrated as to less the chance of being overwhelmed, or spread out to reduce the impact of one of the platforms being taken out (and the advantage of covering a larger volume)? I feel the later might be more likely.
>Now if you don't want a genocidal war...
Why does this come up so often in space war discussion? Is it because most scifi fans aren't well versed in warfare and just see it as two sides fighting until one is completely annihilated? Or does space warfare tend to genocidal levels due to the ridiculous amount of energy needed to just move around in space?
it's because the Kzinti lesson forever looms over every sci-fi setting with travel times measured in days. It's trivially easy for a terrorist with the space equivalent of a cargo truck to obliterate a city, a military would be able to do the same with continents
>So like what military planners thought naval warfare was going to turn into before CIWS was refined enough to matter?
I would not extend the comparison to Earth because the conditions/logistic are completely different.
Target selection would also depend if you want genocidal war or not.
>Do you think such missile/laser platforms will be concentrated as to less the chance of being overwhelmed, or spread out to reduce the impact of one of the platforms being taken out (and the advantage of covering a larger volume)?
That depend of what you mean by "spread".
You only need to keep them apart so their destruction don't endanger the rest, and to make a distributed system so even if the enemy hit he can only get a few.
For missiles, it should be easy as hell.
For lasers, the system generating the beam is unlikely to be small/cheap. You may need to have a few powerful source and many system to redirect the beams.
Laser however have no problem of range (deltaV) so you only need direct line of sight.
>does space warfare tend to genocidal levels due to the ridiculous amount of energy needed to just move around in space?
More or less.
As the other anon said, any interplanetary travel involve speed where the kinetic energy of metal is equivalent to nuke, and a Kessler effect could destroy the planetary infrastructures. Not counting how a Fusion-drive is functionally no different from a particles beam weapon.
Avoiding cascade failure will likely shape how are positioned critical infrastructure.
Wild guess: putting dock near Lagrange points instead of orbits, debris are less likely to come back.
Many will tell you planet are extremely defensible, but if the gravity is high and you lost all access to space this is just a fancy tomb. Small airless moon are more defensible for me.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Seems like defense would be stronger than offense in space given the distances and travel times involved. The attacks would be telegraphed months or days in advance depending on the drives available, and the defender has the advantage of not needing to expend valuable propellant to engage.
1 month ago
Anonymous
That still depend of many variables.
Some place are more easily defensible than other.
Earth isn't as survivable once a faction become able to move a "asteroid for mining", the asteroid itself is turned into propellant and become the defender until it is no longer possible to stop it.
Basically, all side need to be chessmaster who planned for every contingency decades ago.
French are already working on anti-sattelite high-manuverability space weapons, check out YODA and it's successor programs.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>yoda
why are European space forces so cringe?
you would think they would try even harder not to be seen as LARPers when they are a glorified remotely operated satelite traffic police, but they double down.
LEO is already incredibly strategically significant due to informational networks and earth observation, I expect energy generation to commence there in the near future along with the increase in human habitation. Making sure the good guys are in control up there in the same manner as international waters and not filthy chinks is going to be critical for humanity.
.. anyways
It's vibrations. Vibrations limit launch weights.
It's why the starship is the max with current metals and it's 50 years ahead of everyone else.
The falcon is so well made it can minimize the vibrations and land. Flacon heavy was delayed then modified to death with them. The soviets big rocket kept shredding itself due to vibrating
There is so much force required to accelerate things to roughly 30,000 kms vibrations build up bad.
In order to get enough mass up for space wars you'd need a non rocket way of lifting it. It's impossible to get a 400,000 kgs up at the moment at once. The tensile strengths aren't even close.
Fuck this site. "Well relativist super carriers around the moons lL points could be countered with APCS but you could have stealth diamond ships derp a derp "
Who ever can get the most mass up the fastest going the fastest wins. That's your space war.
Fucking Chinese Indian and Russians
>in order to get enough mass up for space wars you'd need a non rocket way of lifting it
this is a wrong assumption
if you launch only 1 Starship per day (Falcon 9s launch every 3 days or so right now), you get 55,000,000 kgs of mass into LEO each year. That's in reusable mode.
in expendable mode you can get up to 91,000 tons and also get something in order of 800 000 m3 of pressurized volume as a bonus
in other words, you could get something the size of a Nimitz-class supercarrier up there in less than a year (assembly required)
dumdum, with the advent of asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing you don't need atmospheric launches, you make the ships in space in the first place
That's not going to happen without some absolutely gigantic launches from Earth to put metal refineries/mills into space, along with the means to ship said materials wherever they're needed and then shipyards to actually make use of them. Without those large scale industrial seed-launches from Earth, in-space industry is a pipe dream.
.. anyways
It's vibrations. Vibrations limit launch weights.
It's why the starship is the max with current metals and it's 50 years ahead of everyone else.
The falcon is so well made it can minimize the vibrations and land. Flacon heavy was delayed then modified to death with them. The soviets big rocket kept shredding itself due to vibrating
There is so much force required to accelerate things to roughly 30,000 kms vibrations build up bad.
In order to get enough mass up for space wars you'd need a non rocket way of lifting it. It's impossible to get a 400,000 kgs up at the moment at once. The tensile strengths aren't even close.
Fuck this site. "Well relativist super carriers around the moons lL points could be countered with APCS but you could have stealth diamond ships derp a derp "
Who ever can get the most mass up the fastest going the fastest wins. That's your space war.
Fucking Chinese Indian and Russians
>I want a single person to explain the current limiting factor to mass lifting above starship level.
Mass, it's always have been mass. Square-cube laws at work.
This is no longer the cold war, vibration can be addressed and the payload send out there are well protected against vibration and it doesn't even add that much mass.
You can obviously still use chemical above "Starship", it's clear we've not even reached the limit of reusable.
But eventually the mass does get too high for chemical propulsion, you will never produce enough thrust to reach orbit without going nuclear, then keeping up you have less and less payload per structural mass.
That's why every SF setting that pretend to be hard need a reliable Surface-to-Orbit service actually suited to the scale of their operations. Not have SPACEPORT launch a shuttle per week with 80% of the launcher discarded, when AIRPORT launch planes every 2 minutes.
Not counting "For Mankind" as hard by the way, it's a typical case of "we'll take realistic looking design but we don't care how they work". Got damn Sea Dragon have those "micro thruster" because some dumbass can't read a paper diagram.
I'm kinda retarded, so correct if I am wrong. Since space warfare on a tactical and strategic level is constrained by astrodynamics, inherent hyper lethality and rocket equations, would it make sense for space wars to be closer to LoGH in number rather than the Expanse? You're going to be visible to everyone in the solar system and your every movement is already calculated in months anyway, so might as well go big and inject thousands of warships and missiles into hostile orbits.
No, I mean in terms of number. Instead of dozens, you have hundreds or even thousands of ships in a fleet engaging equally numerous opponent being a regular occurrence.
That's more difficult to say than you seem to think.
Let's say you can have 10 battleships or 100 frigates, both armed with missiles
same overall firepower in terms of missiles and anti-missiles, same price tag for the whole lot
At glance, 100 frigates make more sense. less eggs in one basket (assuming each ship will probably instantly blow up if hit)
On the other hand, if a battleship can in fact take 10 hits (system redundancy, armor, hypothetical shields), then it becomes a question of how hard is hitting 1 ship 10 times compared to hitting 10 ships once and how difficult is repairing damaged ship vs. building a new ship. That might change the equation.
Probably not enough. There's a reason why wet navy no longer has anything like battleships these days (Kirov class aside)
Now the most important thing to consider:
Big "battleship" can have a bigger reactor and power a big fucking laser with bigger range that can destroy missiles before they can do any harm. Ballistic projectiles are relatively easy to evade. Missiles can be shot down, have their sensors fried or jammed. But you cannot react and evade a laser beam. In space you are not limited by horizon (=visual range) either.
Now, laser beam won't do that much harm to your actual metal hull. Most damage will be to your sensors and maybe things like radiators. Which in turn will make you very vulnerable to missiles.
Lasers are constrained by the sheer wattage they require to be combat-relevant, beam dispersion at range — which makes their effective range quite short — and a host of other technical factors that make them most relevant and effective as a point defense weapon against missiles. Once things end up in close orbital passes, lasers start to be in a position to carve up critical systems and hulls with gusto, but before that, they're a means to force the opposing force to use saturation attacks to whittle down or destroy a target.
What about something like chemical lasers, or (I forget if this has an official name) having an array of lasers that all focus on 1 point to get around thermal bloom/beam dispersion?
Space combat isn't normally my forte so I'm not actually sure if these would fix any of those problems, I've just seen the concepts thrown around a couple of times
1 month ago
Anonymous
Beam dispersion is a fundamental property of lasers; it's a bit of a permanent design limitation. Chemical lasers are ultimately worse in every sense than fiber lasers, which are proving to be much more scalable than anyone expected.
1 month ago
Anonymous
arent fiber lasers technically amplifiers since they are usually pumped by other lasers?
also isnt a flexible lasing medium bad for aiming it vs something like a ruby laser? you'll have to collimate/align the beam coming out of the fiber to steer t around.
1 month ago
Anonymous
They're fiber amplified, yeah. The limiting factor is the brightness of the laser diode... which it turns out you can just gang multiple diodes together and use entanglement to make them all work together like one massive laser diode.
1 month ago
Anonymous
not sure what you mean by entanglement
i get the basic idea instead of bouncing light between two mirrors in a lasing medium its sending the light down a very long and narrow lasing medium and since it has a long ass surface area you can easily cool it while its bouncing inside and making stimulated emissions.
my point is that it will get out of the fiber at an angle and not straight out which makes aiming it at something difficult.
they do seem ideal for laser cutters and such, short range uses but for long range aiming you'd need optics even more complicated than current long range lasers
1 month ago
Anonymous
Lasers are magical because all of the photons they emit have identical properties. Entangling the diodes lets multiple laser diodes emit identical light.
1 month ago
Anonymous
arent fiber lasers technically amplifiers since they are usually pumped by other lasers?
also isnt a flexible lasing medium bad for aiming it vs something like a ruby laser? you'll have to collimate/align the beam coming out of the fiber to steer t around.
https://i.imgur.com/94cfCzG.jpg
not sure what you mean by entanglement
i get the basic idea instead of bouncing light between two mirrors in a lasing medium its sending the light down a very long and narrow lasing medium and since it has a long ass surface area you can easily cool it while its bouncing inside and making stimulated emissions.
my point is that it will get out of the fiber at an angle and not straight out which makes aiming it at something difficult.
they do seem ideal for laser cutters and such, short range uses but for long range aiming you'd need optics even more complicated than current long range lasers
Lasers are magical because all of the photons they emit have identical properties. Entangling the diodes lets multiple laser diodes emit identical light.
Optical phase conjugation and plasmonic metamaterials >Problems solved
Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It's a Romanticist Space Opera, with larger than life heroes and great men on either side fighting for something greater than themselves.
>would it make sense for space wars to be closer to LoGH in number rather than the Expanse?
I'd argue that yes number is going to matter more than hoping any survive.
You might even be able to arrange battle lines if laser don't rule over incredible distance.
Space ship are most vulnerable when doing burns, so they would likely shed most of their speed out of weapon range then close in slower.
LoGH and Expanse are several orders of magnitude different in scale
it's like comparing tribal warfare and WWII
If that's what stop you, we can also talk about Expanse magic engine, pseudo-stealth and relativistic projectile.
>LoGH
What's that?
Imagine napoleonic line battle, with river fording even.
Now imagine it in space, with one space-river even.
No. China doesn't have space force. They are barely able to send some shit to LEO.
This is level of technological advancement in so called West when Russia or China are able to start manned Moon missions.
The only reason the US didn't send human back to the Moon is because there's no point. None of the technology needed to exploit it are ready, like a Reusable heavy launch rocket. Any scientific research is more valuable if done cheaply and even then, some missions are worth more than the composition of our moon.
China barely caught back with what Russia could do at it's peak.
Russia is regressing.
>They are barely able to send some shit to LEO.
you're a fucking retard.
The most capable active Chinese launch vehicle is the Long March 5, with up to 25,000 kilograms to LEO, 5,100 kilograms of direct-to-GEO capability and 14,000 kilograms to GTO. The most prolific Long March launch vehicle is the Long March 2 in the 2C configuration, which is limited to 3450 kilograms to LEO and 1250 kilograms to GTO. The 2F is in a similar ballpark. By these measurements, corroborated by other estimates, China's space program is not putting very much tonnage into orbit.
Anyone have any resources on what space warfare would be like on a strategic level? Everything I've found only focuses either on individual battles or surface-to-orbit combat. For example, I'm curious about how can a front line be drawn if everything is in constant motion? Or what will logistics chains look like considering how important propellant is (assuming no magic fusion drives)? pic semi-related
>any supply units use ion or the new quantum drive
>supply drops planned MONTHS in advance
>drones, ALL THE DRONES
Wouldn't that lead to a prevalence of hacking or electronic warfare to disrupt those lines?
Good point. Still makes space warfare hard to figure out.
i dont think hacking will be a thing, other than very rare and hard to find exploits millitary communication systems are very secure these days.
as for EW that will be very important. for example imagine getting a small drone right between the enemy spacecraft and their ground station, thats the only place (due to directional antennas) that you can jam their direct comm links
>as for EW that will be very important. for example imagine getting a small drone right between the enemy spacecraft and their ground station, thats the only place (due to directional antennas) that you can jam their direct comm links
Would using lasers to try to burn out the enemy's sensors count as EW?
yes
i would imagine stealth will be big, minimize your EM emissions. big cone shaped spacecraft will point their nose at the enemy to minimize the cross section presented to the enemy, the nose might also be actively cooled to reduce how much radiation it emits (we're talking against enemy infra red telescopes that will be the main military sensor type like radar is on earth's surface)
if you know you are detected you might want to just blast lasers at all enemy sensors to fuck with their tracking. or you might want to do both have disposable drones shooting lasers at sensors fucking with the signal/noise ratios of the enemy sensors while your actual spacecraft try to sneak by or atleast not be accurately tracked.
You aren't likely to know where all the sensors are, and stealth in space is not really feasible.
i mean you'll know where the big ones are like how you know where all the massive NORAD radars are now.a tiny cool drone nearby with a telescope might still get a fix on you while you dont know its there or your computer filters it assuming its an asteroid/debris
its hard to predict what will be effective, we'll only kind of know that once we'll start having actual factories and refineries in orbit so we'll know the economic angle. like looking 100 years into the future 100 years ago if you said there will be intercontinental nukes and cruise missiles people would expect that soldiers with rifles wouldnt be a thing but they still are because of the economics and logtistics of war. maybe making swarms of drones to track the enemy is the way to go, maybe big central telescopes, maybe both
You don't need large telescopes though; an assortment of 10 or 20 telescope satellites as large as the Kepler telescope would be good enough to monitor the entire sky, and any space faring civilization could pump them out in the hundreds, maybe thousands, and distribute them all over the solar system. As for analyzing the data, today's GPU cores are probably enough if you consider computer graphics to be anywhere similar.
Unless they make some break through in FTL or in handling heat/entropy, I don't see this changing any time soon.
Why there are so many telescopes in Chile?
High altitude in the Andes (less atmosphere), calm air currents, and they're western-aligned/developed enough for the yuros to feel safe building multimillion dollar telescopes there. I live in PA and there's always an annoying shimmer in my telescope from the jetstream when looking at bright objects.
and astronomy is very popular there, though it might be a case of chicken and egg
Southern Hemisphere as well. Not many developed AND mountainous AND dry regions to choose from
>Stealth
Sorry but I must:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--Strategic_Combat_Sensors--There_Ain't_No_Stealth_In_Space
The closest they got to "stealth" without breaking physics is the "Hydrogen steamer"
And it's basically a ship made at 90% of hydrogen which it use continuously to cool itself at 3°K, it would take months to go anywhere because any burn of interesting power would reveal it's trajectory and tell everyone where to look more closely.
It would require technology of incredible perfection for its stealth and its likely that if sensor are held to the same standard, the enemy will not only detect it but would also see it being built in the enemy shipyard.
no stealth in space only applies to settings where the solar system is colonized to the point where every nation has sensors in every orbit all the way to Neptune. As it stands now you can stick a large sail covered in RAM and Vantablack and cooled to 3 Kelvin between yourself and the Earth (think military grade JWST sunshield) and radiate your excess heat in a 90 degree cone in the opposite direction. All of this is already possible with modern day technology
Any setting where you can build Interplanetary spaceship will be able to build more than enough sensors to make "stealth" irrelevant.
You are begging your enemy to be stupid and go cheap when it won't take meaningful efforts or fuel to send sensor systems package around and protect themselves from the most basic form of camouflage.
Sorry but you are going to need to create a verrrrrrry specific setting to ever get anything that look like stealth. Even hiding as a cargoship isn't going to work more than once after which they kill all trade-ship coming from non-trusted faction.
Plus you'd need a really large actively-cooled surface (no mere sail) to hide your spaceship thruster plume, getting rid of any heat you might be imparting to it if the ship itself isn't actively cooled in that direction (else this is like trying to hide a lamp behind a paper wall)
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--Strategic_Combat_Sensors--There_Ain't_No_Stealth_In_Space--Why_Not?_Let_me_count_the_ways--Well_I'll_just_beam_my_heat_the_other_way!
gay I read that entire essay twice a month ago. It didn't manage to convince me then, it doesn't now. It assumes the sensor array and the stealth ship exist in a vacuum (heh) and not at the heart of a power struggle between two spacefaring empires. A dozen railgun slugs or space torpedoes will always outrun a delicate sensor platform, which means that once you destroy hostile satellites in a given area you can keep denying your enemy eyes in that region of space unless they dedicate a fleet of point defense craft to escort duty. You can also jam or blind satellites with laser and EWAR platforms. There's a lot you can do to limit your enemy's capability to the point where a stealth ship can get through
ion propulsion will never be used on anything other than long range probes, its too energy intensive for too little thrust
the obvious choice for rocketry is NTRs, a high efficiency NTR for regular thrust and high thrust chemical rocketry for combat.
Which artist has the highest efficiency NTR?
I prefer the nakadashi drives. Their breeder reactor design has more uses.
inanimate TF into orgasm powered FTL drive
Isn't that from the Expanse?
Expanse doesn't have FTL on ships, you might be thinking of BSG which had crazy chicks in goo baths as FTL computers
Only the toasters did that
>Picrel
Sam-Hybrid jumped Galactica directly at least once
Fuck I forgot about Sam.
Understandable, he was always a side character and his hybrid arc was deep into the last season after entire schools of sharks had been jumped
>the last season after entire schools of sharks had been jumped
The writers strike really fucked that show.
>a high efficiency NTR
Jesus, I don't even want to know what that looks like!
like a gas core
or if we're lucky to be in the zubrinpunk timeline we'll all be flying around with salt water rockets
I should play Terra Invicta again, it's the one game I know of where you can beat up Ayys with Zubrin drive powered MAURAUDER armed space battleships
marauder is a meme
that's what the big plasma coilgun wants you to think, helion energy is definitely not a front company
atmospheric analogies will never work
there's no reason for space combat besides denying LEO assets until there's actually resource operations beyond Earth
literally 99.999999999999999...% of resources are outside LEO
100% of resource gathering operations are on Earth right now, that may change in the future, but currently there is no production beyond LEO
no one is taking the stuff so the first to grab is gets maximum profits
Did you know that there is potentially at LEAST 45 thousand tons of gold in the world's oceans? And it could be as much as 1.5 million tons!
gold isnt that useful, its a good concoctor but other than being a coating its not good for much.
something like 16psyche contains a fuckton of gold but also more useful stuff like platinum,nickel. the worth of minerals on it in current prices is more than all the money on earth right now
I just checked and gold is selling for more than platinum right now. It didn't mention nickel but I have the feeling it will probably be lower as well.
On that basis, why aren't we trying to get the gold out of the ocean? Surely that's going to be easier and cheaper than sending rockets into space to intercept asteroids?
iridium and osmium has better economics than gold or platinum
there's like 7000 kg of Iridium mined a year (yes, kg, not ton)
it's practically non-existent on Earth. The "ore" is platinum metal and asteroids that have already fallen down
the supply already cannot keep up with demand
>Surely that's going to be easier
not necessarily, I mean think about this:
the difference between normal atmosphere and vacuum of space is 1 bar
the difference between normal atmosphere and ocean floor is 100-1000 bar
>gold isnt that useful,
Bruh?
name 1 use for gold
Corrosion resistant electrical contacts. Basically every bond wire between a silicon die and its packaging.
true but its not a use which greatly benefits from massive amounts of it. the amounts of gold used in those contacts are very very miniscule and the cost of said gold is probably trivial compared to other stuff used to make said electronics
Monies????????
Buying guns, land, and whores
>Did you know that there is potentially at LEAST 45 thousand tons of gold in the world's oceans? And it could be as much as 1.5 million tons!
>On that basis, why aren't we trying to get the gold out of the ocean? Surely that's going to be easier and cheaper than sending rockets into space to intercept asteroids?
Should you even ask?
First reason is that we are barely TESTING how to mine ore underwater.
Second we will have ecological regulation in action, think offshore platform but worse.
If we can get a machine to eat asteroid and use it as propellant this is the first step to economical exploitation of space.
Alternatively we build magnetic accelerator on the Moon and don't turn her into a harsh mistress but a gentle friend with benefit.
>strategic level
Time.
Where your forces are, how long it takes them to take somewhere and how fast the enemy is going to realize where you're going. Do a sneaky gravity assist that puts you in position to fortify before next window or several moth flight time and you've won.
Read expanse or other semi-realistic space sci-fi. They deal with travel times, randevouz and intersections a lot. Sometimes all you can do is just watch enemy escape 100m out of your fuel range.
But essentially it would be like navy - ports, deployments, important shipping lanes and choking points with giant emptyness all around.
As long as most of humanity is living on Earth, I don't think there's any chance of there ever being a protracted war in space.
In the space theater of a hypothetical WW3, the only option the two sides would have would be to throw everything they have in space at each other on day one of the war, after which one side would have lost substantially all of their presence in space. Whichever side still has some ships left would have obtained total orbital dominance for the duration of the war, as they would be able to prevent the losing side of the opening battle from launching any new ships.
America can launch a minimum viable orbital gunboat (8 Mk 41 VLS cells, a HELIOS laser and a 30mm CIWS gun) in one go as a Starship variant, no orbital assembly required. Nobody else can match that in the immediate future.
>Starship
Does a platform that has so far had only one launch test, which was unsuccessful, count as the US having that capability?
When they get it right, whether that's this upcoming test flight or later, they already have half a dozen more ships and four more boosters ready to go. It's not going to be a static cadence of once every two years like SLS, once they start flying they have the infrastructure to start flying rapidly. I don't know why this doesn't seem to be common knowledge, there's a guy who rents a cessna and flies over monthly and posts the footage. So yeah, once they stop exploding, the US will have that capability.
>Does a platform that has so far had only one launch test, which was unsuccessful,
It was a success though? And they're now ready for the next one, just had a successful hot fire test. I don't understand why all these years after Falcon 9 foreigners still somehow can't comprehend hardware rich development. Ie, NORMAL development in every single industry except for old space rockets.
>count as the US having that capability?
At this point? Yes. Though if you really want to wait 9 months sure, nothing wrong with that.
Though in all seriousness, Starship will initially get used for Starlink while they keep iterating. It'll be years before government does serious launch on it.
alot will depend on the fairing size they end up on in regards to gvmnt payloads
If the Government is willing to pay for it, they can easily put an oversized diameter fairing on an expendable second stage Starship. It'll be a fractional portion of the actual expenditure for a mass produced rocket that goes along with whatever's going up in the end.
We can't answer that question without a proper setting.
You want Planet versus Planet I guess?
IMO there's good reason to think we may never have conventional warship, everything will be spam of missiles bus or giant lasers.
Every infrastructure is so fragile that any attack on homeworld will considered genocidal. Start a Kessler effect and you erase your enemies space-capabilities for decades, long enough for you to take total control.
Else, the website you want is this one, kind of a congregator to make SF harder
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php#id--No_Shipping_Lanes_In_Space
For your question specifically, you'll want to know this:
- There's no "route" as orbital mechanic goes
- "Intercepting" midway can only be done shooting everything in one single flyby, it's incredibly costly in propellant, your enemy will see you try month ago, and once done, you need to come back home on a ridiculously inefficient trajectory
- therefore, the only place that matter are planet/moons orbit. Europa would make a great place to refuel (ice => propellant) and bunker.
-...unless asteroid turn out easier to exploit.
The setting for pic (Children of a Death Earth), any warship use tons of drop tanks to reach their target quickly which is the only form of surprise you can have.
Then it need to be refueled by tankers who may or may not come as fast.
Thank you for the detailed breakdown. Would such orbits around a planet/moon mainly focus on the equatorial orbits due to easy access from the surface, or would the entire volume around the planet/moon need to be secure before it can be used for propellant loading?
>Thank you for the detailed breakdown. Would such orbits around a planet/moon mainly focus on the equatorial orbits due to easy access from the surface, or would the entire volume around the planet/moon need to be secure before it can be used for propellant loading?
Depend of how low the gravity is and propellant would likely come from dedicated tankers ships coming to you.
But as I said, the infrastructure will likely be the most important and we may not even have "warship" at all, instead using mass-produced missiles/lasers to destroy anything before it can even threaten stuff within the orbit, meaning the only way to take the orbit might be to snipe the laser or overwhelm the missiles.
For economical purpose we are likely to use equatorial orbit because it is easier to go anywhere in the solar system and put geostationary satellite.
This also stand for most of the megastructure infrastructure concept for access to space like magnetic runway, launch loop, elevators, rings, space tether...etc.
If the gravity is asteroid level of weak it's just a matter of grabbing the spaceship with robotic arms/winch.
Now if you don't want a genocidal war and all side are polite enough to not destroy spaceship/station ruining it for century then...
...then it become the good type of bloody war.
Forbidding most weapons would open the road for actual boarding.
Faction want control of a station?
Then they need to land human who cannot (yet) be electronically hacked, so they can hack -physically- their way to the system that let them kill everyone on-board if they don't comply with the new narrative.
Station/Spaceship can still shoot at each other but only to disable their (fragile) systems until the mission cannot be fulfilled.
Yes it's almost like a god damn video game but so far that's still logical in my head.
>we may not even have "warship" at all, instead using mass-produced missiles/lasers to destroy anything before it can even threaten stuff within the orbit
So like what military planners thought naval warfare was going to turn into before CIWS was refined enough to matter? Makes sense given the vastness of space and the amount of energy to takes fight in it. Do you think such missile/laser platforms will be concentrated as to less the chance of being overwhelmed, or spread out to reduce the impact of one of the platforms being taken out (and the advantage of covering a larger volume)? I feel the later might be more likely.
>Now if you don't want a genocidal war...
Why does this come up so often in space war discussion? Is it because most scifi fans aren't well versed in warfare and just see it as two sides fighting until one is completely annihilated? Or does space warfare tend to genocidal levels due to the ridiculous amount of energy needed to just move around in space?
it's because the Kzinti lesson forever looms over every sci-fi setting with travel times measured in days. It's trivially easy for a terrorist with the space equivalent of a cargo truck to obliterate a city, a military would be able to do the same with continents
Posting some space barbarian
>So like what military planners thought naval warfare was going to turn into before CIWS was refined enough to matter?
I would not extend the comparison to Earth because the conditions/logistic are completely different.
Target selection would also depend if you want genocidal war or not.
>Do you think such missile/laser platforms will be concentrated as to less the chance of being overwhelmed, or spread out to reduce the impact of one of the platforms being taken out (and the advantage of covering a larger volume)?
That depend of what you mean by "spread".
You only need to keep them apart so their destruction don't endanger the rest, and to make a distributed system so even if the enemy hit he can only get a few.
For missiles, it should be easy as hell.
For lasers, the system generating the beam is unlikely to be small/cheap. You may need to have a few powerful source and many system to redirect the beams.
Laser however have no problem of range (deltaV) so you only need direct line of sight.
>does space warfare tend to genocidal levels due to the ridiculous amount of energy needed to just move around in space?
More or less.
As the other anon said, any interplanetary travel involve speed where the kinetic energy of metal is equivalent to nuke, and a Kessler effect could destroy the planetary infrastructures. Not counting how a Fusion-drive is functionally no different from a particles beam weapon.
Avoiding cascade failure will likely shape how are positioned critical infrastructure.
Wild guess: putting dock near Lagrange points instead of orbits, debris are less likely to come back.
Many will tell you planet are extremely defensible, but if the gravity is high and you lost all access to space this is just a fancy tomb. Small airless moon are more defensible for me.
Seems like defense would be stronger than offense in space given the distances and travel times involved. The attacks would be telegraphed months or days in advance depending on the drives available, and the defender has the advantage of not needing to expend valuable propellant to engage.
That still depend of many variables.
Some place are more easily defensible than other.
Earth isn't as survivable once a faction become able to move a "asteroid for mining", the asteroid itself is turned into propellant and become the defender until it is no longer possible to stop it.
Basically, all side need to be chessmaster who planned for every contingency decades ago.
>threat
Yeah, falling debris is a grave threat.
space warfare will never be a thing
>implying humans won't fight over anything
Retard.
exactly, meaning we won't last long enough for space warfare to become a thing
maybe you wont with all those cheetos you're eating but the rest of us will
we will definitely see spacecraft fire at each other in our lifetime (probably not this decade tho)
no
yes
I'm not that old, you're probably of my age, or bit younger. We will see.
French are already working on anti-sattelite high-manuverability space weapons, check out YODA and it's successor programs.
>yoda
why are European space forces so cringe?
you would think they would try even harder not to be seen as LARPers when they are a glorified remotely operated satelite traffic police, but they double down.
LEO is already incredibly strategically significant due to informational networks and earth observation, I expect energy generation to commence there in the near future along with the increase in human habitation. Making sure the good guys are in control up there in the same manner as international waters and not filthy chinks is going to be critical for humanity.
They are most implessive.
>Implying that mankind can get past Van Allen belt
But just like muh hecking Star Warserinos!
people will still believe earth is flat and the moon landing was a hoax when humans walk on mars, it's not a credible position worth engaging.
Just where were these cute bald eagle and rabbit characters from?
north korean children's cartoon iirc
It’s a Chinese patriotic cartoon about the Korean War.
Ah Yed the 10000000000000000000000000000000 Year Dragon Hammer CCPSS, the most Powerful StarShip in the Solar System
Crewed by the PLAASGF. Also brown anime girls are best girls.
Chyna is a meme. They'll never amount to anything.
>Chyna is a meme
No, she's a wrestler from the 90s and early 00s responsible for getting me into musclegirls.
Weird thread
For starters
To get into space you go usually 200 kms then sideways really really fast.
You don't go up.
Now that that's out of the way
I want a single person to explain the current limiting factor to mass lifting above starship level.
What is the single biggest issue
If one person tells me I'll be stunned
This is the most basic and prime problem above everything
Just one person please so I know you aren't all bullshit artist
.. anyways
It's vibrations. Vibrations limit launch weights.
It's why the starship is the max with current metals and it's 50 years ahead of everyone else.
The falcon is so well made it can minimize the vibrations and land. Flacon heavy was delayed then modified to death with them. The soviets big rocket kept shredding itself due to vibrating
There is so much force required to accelerate things to roughly 30,000 kms vibrations build up bad.
In order to get enough mass up for space wars you'd need a non rocket way of lifting it. It's impossible to get a 400,000 kgs up at the moment at once. The tensile strengths aren't even close.
Fuck this site. "Well relativist super carriers around the moons lL points could be countered with APCS but you could have stealth diamond ships derp a derp "
Who ever can get the most mass up the fastest going the fastest wins. That's your space war.
Fucking Chinese Indian and Russians
>in order to get enough mass up for space wars you'd need a non rocket way of lifting it
this is a wrong assumption
if you launch only 1 Starship per day (Falcon 9s launch every 3 days or so right now), you get 55,000,000 kgs of mass into LEO each year. That's in reusable mode.
in expendable mode you can get up to 91,000 tons and also get something in order of 800 000 m3 of pressurized volume as a bonus
in other words, you could get something the size of a Nimitz-class supercarrier up there in less than a year (assembly required)
dumdum, with the advent of asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing you don't need atmospheric launches, you make the ships in space in the first place
That's not going to happen without some absolutely gigantic launches from Earth to put metal refineries/mills into space, along with the means to ship said materials wherever they're needed and then shipyards to actually make use of them. Without those large scale industrial seed-launches from Earth, in-space industry is a pipe dream.
>I want a single person to explain the current limiting factor to mass lifting above starship level.
Mass, it's always have been mass. Square-cube laws at work.
This is no longer the cold war, vibration can be addressed and the payload send out there are well protected against vibration and it doesn't even add that much mass.
You can obviously still use chemical above "Starship", it's clear we've not even reached the limit of reusable.
But eventually the mass does get too high for chemical propulsion, you will never produce enough thrust to reach orbit without going nuclear, then keeping up you have less and less payload per structural mass.
That's why every SF setting that pretend to be hard need a reliable Surface-to-Orbit service actually suited to the scale of their operations. Not have SPACEPORT launch a shuttle per week with 80% of the launcher discarded, when AIRPORT launch planes every 2 minutes.
Not counting "For Mankind" as hard by the way, it's a typical case of "we'll take realistic looking design but we don't care how they work". Got damn Sea Dragon have those "micro thruster" because some dumbass can't read a paper diagram.
Sweet, another hard sci-fi PrepHole thread.
I'm kinda retarded, so correct if I am wrong. Since space warfare on a tactical and strategic level is constrained by astrodynamics, inherent hyper lethality and rocket equations, would it make sense for space wars to be closer to LoGH in number rather than the Expanse? You're going to be visible to everyone in the solar system and your every movement is already calculated in months anyway, so might as well go big and inject thousands of warships and missiles into hostile orbits.
LoGH and Expanse are several orders of magnitude different in scale
it's like comparing tribal warfare and WWII
No, I mean in terms of number. Instead of dozens, you have hundreds or even thousands of ships in a fleet engaging equally numerous opponent being a regular occurrence.
That's more difficult to say than you seem to think.
Let's say you can have 10 battleships or 100 frigates, both armed with missiles
same overall firepower in terms of missiles and anti-missiles, same price tag for the whole lot
At glance, 100 frigates make more sense. less eggs in one basket (assuming each ship will probably instantly blow up if hit)
On the other hand, if a battleship can in fact take 10 hits (system redundancy, armor, hypothetical shields), then it becomes a question of how hard is hitting 1 ship 10 times compared to hitting 10 ships once and how difficult is repairing damaged ship vs. building a new ship. That might change the equation.
Probably not enough. There's a reason why wet navy no longer has anything like battleships these days (Kirov class aside)
Now the most important thing to consider:
Big "battleship" can have a bigger reactor and power a big fucking laser with bigger range that can destroy missiles before they can do any harm. Ballistic projectiles are relatively easy to evade. Missiles can be shot down, have their sensors fried or jammed. But you cannot react and evade a laser beam. In space you are not limited by horizon (=visual range) either.
Now, laser beam won't do that much harm to your actual metal hull. Most damage will be to your sensors and maybe things like radiators. Which in turn will make you very vulnerable to missiles.
Lasers are constrained by the sheer wattage they require to be combat-relevant, beam dispersion at range — which makes their effective range quite short — and a host of other technical factors that make them most relevant and effective as a point defense weapon against missiles. Once things end up in close orbital passes, lasers start to be in a position to carve up critical systems and hulls with gusto, but before that, they're a means to force the opposing force to use saturation attacks to whittle down or destroy a target.
What about something like chemical lasers, or (I forget if this has an official name) having an array of lasers that all focus on 1 point to get around thermal bloom/beam dispersion?
Space combat isn't normally my forte so I'm not actually sure if these would fix any of those problems, I've just seen the concepts thrown around a couple of times
Beam dispersion is a fundamental property of lasers; it's a bit of a permanent design limitation. Chemical lasers are ultimately worse in every sense than fiber lasers, which are proving to be much more scalable than anyone expected.
arent fiber lasers technically amplifiers since they are usually pumped by other lasers?
also isnt a flexible lasing medium bad for aiming it vs something like a ruby laser? you'll have to collimate/align the beam coming out of the fiber to steer t around.
They're fiber amplified, yeah. The limiting factor is the brightness of the laser diode... which it turns out you can just gang multiple diodes together and use entanglement to make them all work together like one massive laser diode.
not sure what you mean by entanglement
i get the basic idea instead of bouncing light between two mirrors in a lasing medium its sending the light down a very long and narrow lasing medium and since it has a long ass surface area you can easily cool it while its bouncing inside and making stimulated emissions.
my point is that it will get out of the fiber at an angle and not straight out which makes aiming it at something difficult.
they do seem ideal for laser cutters and such, short range uses but for long range aiming you'd need optics even more complicated than current long range lasers
Lasers are magical because all of the photons they emit have identical properties. Entangling the diodes lets multiple laser diodes emit identical light.
Optical phase conjugation and plasmonic metamaterials
>Problems solved
>LoGH
What's that?
Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It's a Romanticist Space Opera, with larger than life heroes and great men on either side fighting for something greater than themselves.
>would it make sense for space wars to be closer to LoGH in number rather than the Expanse?
I'd argue that yes number is going to matter more than hoping any survive.
You might even be able to arrange battle lines if laser don't rule over incredible distance.
Space ship are most vulnerable when doing burns, so they would likely shed most of their speed out of weapon range then close in slower.
If that's what stop you, we can also talk about Expanse magic engine, pseudo-stealth and relativistic projectile.
Imagine napoleonic line battle, with river fording even.
Now imagine it in space, with one space-river even.
Only if spacefish are a thing
>a threat
Anything is a threat if it's used smartly.
So no, china's space force isn't a threat.
And now, I'm going to bed
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/references/space-programs/