The year is 2223, and the Martian government wants to “liberate” the Moon from Earth’s authority.
What would interplanetary warfare even look like? The ships are so fricking fragile looking and yet battles would take place thousands of kilometers apart?
Worse, there is no stealth in space, so every move can be planned beforehand.
What would infantry combat even look like when your enemy can just blast your position with a an orbital cannon?
Drones, many drones.
>What would infantry combat even look like when your enemy can just blast your position with an orbital canon?
Massive underground complexes sporadically built in advance below or around vital areas. Defenders use them for quick surprise attacks on the surface to then duck back into, attackers seal off and flush out the enemies. Weapons, armor, and tactics evolve to reflect this doctrine, where most combat will happen in bunkers, tight corridors, cave systems, and other such subterranean territories. At least that’s one idea I’ve had for sci fi/future ground warfare.
Space combat would probably just be guided missile exchanges, point defense, and an emphasis on manouver ability, idk, haven’t looked too much into the spaceship part of space warfare
If you can have an orbital cannon mounted on a ship, there would probably be an even more powerful anti-ship weapon on the surface.
You'll need complete domination of the skies and local system I think.
Only thing I can see from this aside from some form of light sci fi energy beam is a suborbital missile, meanwhile with an orbital canon you can use a larger variety of systems, since de-orbiting is almost always easier then going to orbital/suborbital trajectory from the ground, plus after the first wave of missiles the launch pads/silos will be priority target for the orbital cannons.
I doubt any civilization with interplanetary habitations would also not have figured out underground green houses and nutrient dense ration stuffs, nor any civilization with the industrial capacity for a planetary invasion have not the industrial capacity for enough underground food stores/replenishment for extended/indefinite time underground for the whole garrison. As for the protection provided, you could use a bunch of nifty tricks like placing them under vital spots an invader would rather not nuke into submission like population centers or critical infrastructure, future material advancements allowing closer to the surface strongholds being able to withstand harsher bombardment, and the fact that a facility with properly concealed entrances and exits would effectively be impossible to find from orbit alone.
The problem with interplanetary warfare is that so many conceptual WMDs that are off the table due to mutually assured destruction become viable options once the endless vastness of space comes into play.
>nrbital kinetic bombardements
>biological and chemical warfare
>nuclear first strikes
Naval warfare in space changes drastically due to the scale of warfare and the lack of earth curvature blocking line of sight detection systems. Additionally, the difference in tactics between a situation where ships are FTL-capable versus not are astronomical(pun intended). Without FTL all space travel would be heavily dependent on gravity assist and all communications would necessarily be directional-radio or laser based to both conserve energy and to limit emission exposure. At any given time there would be extremely limited conical highways connecting points of interest where ships could be located. Freight would be entirely constrained to optimal trajectories and assist windows while only military or high priority traffic would be willing to expend the extra fuel to operate in sub-optimal trajectories.
>hypersonic tungsten powder canisters
>massive electromagnetic chaff fields
>drones, so many drones
Subterranean structures would be pointless unless they are built so deep they cannot be touched with seismic attacks and so well stocked that they can remain isolated for the years it would take for reinforcements to break the siege so the defenders can tunnel back to the surface. Without being detected and annihilated
>What would interplanetary warfare even look like?
Nuclear Missiles, and lots of them, travelling at significant fractions of the speed of light
Also lazers, but only for protecting from the missiles
>Nuclear Missiles,
>travelling at significant fractions of the speed of light
That's a redundancy. A piece of regular matter traveling at significant fractional light speed will hit with the energy of a small nuke.
Nukes in space suck, no atmosphere
They would still do a lot more damage than conventional explosives.
The heat and radiation produced by the explosion would be transferred into the ship hull, vaporizing some of it and possibly melting vital ship components/ crew into slag.
>Nuclear Missiles, and lots of them, travelling at significant fractions of the speed of light
Department of redundancy department called, they said any object moving at a fraction of the speed of light is a nuclear weapon. You don't really need to accelerate a nuclear bomb to a fraction of lightspeed when a rock will initiate fusion on contact all by itself.
We have no way of knowing until interplanetary settlements exist. I would imagine orbital bombardment and "you wouldn't fricking dare" type threats and negotiations much more than actual ground forces moving.
I have always wondered how interplanetary wars would work. For the most part, a governing body would likely be able to engage in this sort of warfare if they have single stage vehicles capable of carrying large payloads of material (Tanks, Watercraft, Aircraft, Construction equipment of all sorts, Infantry and Personnel) at the least one way(land to space/space to land). Warfare in space is probably unlikely, and only attempted as a last resort, given how quickly spacecraft would be able to compromise in battle.
Drones with explosive payloads would do little in a vacuum, but penetrating spacecraft and detonating as air is rushing out of the craft could do damage, but is impractical given that the effort of guiding itself close enough to a large vessel would likely pose a problem.
I imagine that it would be similar to naval warfare of the last millennium, where one army could use an abandoned ship as a projectile by steering it towards an opponents ship and hopefully blowing its remaining munitions near an enemy ship. But instead of explosives, the spacecraft rams itself into an enemy ship. The main goal to cause such rapid depressurization that neither ship remains intact. This could be fairly easier with AI capable of navigating abandoned spacecraft into others. But I also imagine there'd be several smaller drone ships that act as a forcefield against incoming spacecraft.
An interplanetary war would probably look fairly similar to modern warfare. Land, Air, Sea, and Cyber warfare. Defending forces first would rely on ICBMs intercepting spacecraft, if that fails, the attacking forces begin to contest for air superiority and make room for ground infantry to secure area for an operating base. If an attacker cannot secure resources for local manufacturing they could possibly bring down their own equipment, assuming they don't have a steady supply in tow.
As anons have already stated, it would likely be missile and drone hell.
It's also worth to note that if a battle were to occur in space, a ship being violently ripped open from rapid depressurization could cause other ships in nearby to incur damage as well. Millions of aluminum shards being propelled at hundreds of km/h peppering nearby hulls causing a chain reaction if there's no preparation for such an event(assuming it can even be avoided). Space warfare in general is just not worth the risk. Most spacecraft would also be very weary of heat as there's no way to fully radiate it away in space, so having extremely maneuverable spacecraft wouldn't be a good idea either. I'm no aeronautical engineer, but I imagine having several thrusters on every side of a ship intended to be used in a star wars like battle would accrue massive amounts of heat very quickly.
All of this is conjecture, but looking at future tech from a modern lens without any/much Hollywood bullshit added, is still pretty intriguing
>a ship being violently ripped open from rapid depressurization could cause other ships in nearby to incur damage as well.
In most hard scifi literature, combat vessels keep crew space to a minimum and generally depressurize them to near vacuum during action for this very reason.
>but I imagine having several thrusters on every side of a ship intended to be used in a star wars like battle would accrue massive amounts of heat very quickly.
You can use cold gas thrusters anon, they work pretty well even if they're not very efficient and have a limited fuel capacity. The other option is to keep the thrusters very well separated from anything that needs to stay cool, say on a long boom 40-50 meters away from the crew compartment.
The nature of space travel means your flight path can't change significantly. You need to plan where you want to go and pretty much follow that one path. Interception involves putting a hunk of metal in the path. Relativity means the hunk of metal is "stationary" and the ship moving at 10 kmps experiences the hit as though it was shot with an object traveling at 10 kmps.
All you have to do to defend against anything incoming is have hunks of metal pre-positioned in orbit with a shit ton of delta-v (maneuvering fuel) and it just needs to keep itself in the path of the incoming projectile.
>pushes away your scrap metal with lasers
Your move.
You go with the most logical and cheapest options. Literally just hurl a rock at a place, ships would be so simple they would literally just be rockets to go fast. Guns would be a on a pivot, and there would be a lot of signange and signalling due to delays in coms
I don't thin it would be missile and drone hell cos drones are too expensive in space. We have yet to get a drone to work in space. Drones work on earth utilising air friction and more. Space doesn't have that so each drone will have to have little rockets. So why have lots drones when missles would do the same thing
While it's true that the lack of an atmosphere does attenuate blast damage, shaped charges would still be effective. Especially nuclear shaped charges, as was investigated by project Casaba-Howitzer in the 1960s.
AI is going to control everything by then. It's quite unlikely that a space warship will ever have humans aboard.
People are far too mindbroken by sci fi depictions of AI for it to ever be likely that any military would put any military asset under direct AI control.
Far more likely is that you will have AI piloted drones taking commands from human officers, or crewed ships where the weapons/ piloting is technically under AI control but requires permission from the human crew.
People also don't have a positive view of nuclear weapons, but those still happened. If there's any kind of advantage to be had from using AI, then it's going to be done.
It's not quite the same degree of unwarranted histrionic pants wetting terror people have regarding AI.
Just look at how much people are shitting themselves over Chat GPT and tell me these same people have the emotional fortitude to ever trust AI to operate independently.
And you'll notice nukes haven't been used much either.
>haven't been used much
But they have been used, and plenty enough if you happened to be a resident of either place.
They haven't been used, no, but they were extensively tested and stockpiled. The worst-case scenario discussed with nuclear proliferation was literally ending all life on Earth. Realistically, the worst thing that you could do with AI is give it control of the nuclear stockpiles, which already exist and are currently being managed by humans, so that'd just be a variation of the existing doomsday scenario.
It's impossible for killer robots to be more themreatening than the sword of Damocles we already have.
>No stealth in space
Love that reddit post gaining so much popularity, room temp IQs out themselves instantly by quoting it.
explain
Radar is still the main method of detection in real time for spacecraft. Iirc theres good evidence for sats in LEO that are stealthy due to a failed launch at one point. And even when you consider IR tracking and AI detection, how do you tell the difference between a stealthy spacecraft and a bit of space rock. Sure when you burn everyone will see that, but there's no reason why a spacecraft needs to be blazing hot constantly if it's not crewed and is more of a recon craft. Would be the easiest thing to have a radar stealthy design yeet itself towards an enemy orbital installation, coast at minimum power for a long time, turn on and then fire off loads of missiles before it does a gtfo burn and goes dark again
This raises a bunch of questions
>How do you hide the initial burn from detection?
>How do you keep a craft packed with electronics and sensors as cool as an asteroid?
How do you deal with pervasive full system recon sats?
Why would a spacefaring civ with good enough sensors to make stealth a consideration ignore a new "rock" appearing out of nowhere?
What you describing is camouflage, not stealth, and it would only work on a civilisation dumb enough to believe rocks can spawn out of nowhere. Stealth in space is an open question but this isn't the solution.
As an aside, the whole "stealth in space is impossible" thing is a lie to children. It's meant to stop up the 99% who want to write sci fi but dont want to learn from embarrassing themselves(much) by telling them that it's impossible before they make their moronic stealth concept integral to their plot.
There is tons of clutter in space already. Something like 500,000 pieces of debris > 5cm in size. If you got a sporadic detection, was that a satellite that passed over your sensor or just debris? It is very hard to tell even at Earth-scale distances. At the Earth-Moon or Earth-Mars scale it gets very very difficult. Telescope and passive RF sensitivity falls off as 1/r^2, and radar as 1/r^4. Add coatings which reduce albedo and RCS, boom, you’re nigh invisible.
This is obviously an issue, but because of that it WON'T be an issue! Obviously one of the first things an armed spacecraft is going to do is clear all the orbits or debris using laser interception for this exact reason. Then ANYTHING not showing a transponder will be assumed to either be debris or enemy missiles, and destroyed on sight. Remember we have fricking PAPERCLIPS tracked in real time in earth orbit, given sufficient time and interest it's realistically possible to establish a zone of total surveillance around earth.
Now, that DOES just devolve into modern stealth technology, where the goal is to go fast enough so that by the time you're detected it's too late to intercept.
Luckily, anything sufficiently massive to cause trouble can't really do that since it either moves very slowly in a roundabout transit or very obviously on a direct one.
The exception is ball bearings fired out of a coilgun. Traveling at relativistic speed, being nigh undetectable from even close range, hitting with extreme force, and explicitly NOT being capable of surface bombardment, they're the #1 weapon of choice for orbital combat, which will start when a cloud of tiny bullets comes out of nowhere and hits all the sensor equipment in orbit simultaneously and then continues for weeks or months as warships launch and slowly close distance while maintaining suppression/interception using their guns until they're close enough to directly attack surface targets.
Yeah because space rocks often change their orbit in any tactically meaningful way. Doesnt depend on engines, if you move outside of predetermined and calculated orbit, you are alive and a threat. But it is true that detection can be quite hard. I dont think you can detect things the size of comm. or spy satellite without corner reflectors (and without flat surfaces and solar panels, so RTG powered only) from further distance than GSO. But the biggest clue will be radioemissions, because you cannot strap AI on everything. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/967/does-voyager-1-do-anything-to-be-more-observable
>there's no reason why a spacecraft needs to be blazing hot constantly
Launch will always be highly noticeable and things in space can actually get quite hot, especially closer to the sun. Case in point: The sunward side of the ISS can get above 100C, which is part of why it has 10 enormous radiators.
>>how do you tell the difference between a stealthy spacecraft and a bit of space rock
Random bits of space rock don't tend to put themselves into transfer orbits.
>blast your position with a an orbital cannon
Doesn't even need to be in orbit. Planets can't maneuver. You can hit any spot on Earth from any spot on Mars and vice versa with perfect precision.
There would be little incentive for two space faring civilizations to wage war. The economics of war require your potential reward to outweigh your potential risks.
If you are capable of waging interplanetary war you are not resource constrained and there are easier and cheaper ways to achieve any objective you could have rather than war.
If you are an African tier country that still believes in naked aggression, you aren't space faring.
wouldn't this just imply that non-planetary civilizations will automatically be in charge?
Depends on what you mean by "in charge", but generally, yes.
The higher you are on the tech tree the less incentive there is for war. It's cheaper to buy or sell whatever it is you need. Even with your worst enemy.
This doesn't mean there won't be terrible weapons that would unravel your mind to behold. Those would definitely exist, but only as a deterrent.
To advanced nations capable of planetary destruction there is simply nothing worth the cost of all-out war. More likely they'd see exactly what we see today. Advanced civilizations pulling the puppet strings of less developed nations to achieve strategic objectives.
Economic warfare is far more likely, and that can theoretically escalate near to what we'd call conventional warfare.
I imagine an extremely gigantic issue will be dealing with interplanetary bombardment, akin to ICBMs but with no hope of retaliation. MAD would have to be swiftly enforced otherwise one planet could easily nuke another and there's nothing they could do to stop it. That requires either no independent planets, proliferation of interplanetary weapons, or robust orbital interception capabilities. Probably all three.
watch The Expanse
it does a fairly decent job of depicting realistic space combat
The Expanse combat has fairly realistic physics, but the tactics don't translate to real life because all their ships have effectively infinite fuel and the crews have unrealistically high G-force tolerance due to magic future drugs.
Expanse has decent physics until it doesnt. That jovian gravity assist sequence in season 2 looked cool but would have taken literally years to do irl.
tbf the show makers themselves warned before hand this is not accurate and done for plot reasons
The book Red Rising and the rest of the series does a really good job at imagining this concept, both in space and attacking and landing on other planets from space. Very gory too.
orbital defense would probably depend on the atmosphere density - if its low then launching earth 2 space missiles or even shooting cannons at spaceships would be easier than it is on earth, otherwise it would probably be armed satellites for first line of defense
space combat itself would probably be like submarine combat, but with tons of EO sensors/radar instead of sonar
ground based combat on mars or moon would probably be a bit closer to deserts of kharak, but with tons of point defense/CIWS
im not sure about drones in space due to interferences from the sun
That looks awesome, where is it from?
lrn2searchengine noob
>there is no stealth in space
Why is there no stealth in space?
At very long ranges, do you think radar works? I don't think so. I think you have to use telescopes to find your targets. That means stealth is a thing.
Is being far away stealth?
There are several ways to very easily detect spacecraft anon. First is your chosen propulsion's plume, which will be bright enough to be picked up be telescopes incredibly quickly. More or less the only option here is doing your burn out of site behind an object like a moon or an in-atmosphere burn, but that second option is both marginal and demanding on spacecraft design / reaction mass. From your plume alone, it's possible to calculate velocity, trajectory, mass and size. That's before we even consider IR sensors; burning and then shutting your drive down will accomplish little: keeping just a small crew module running at room temperature with a tiny generator for power is enough to contrast your ship sharply against vacuum on any good IR scope.
Radio telescopes would pick you up almost effortlessly. Voyager 1 is currently about 15(?) billion miles from earth but can be picked up by the Green Bank telescope in about 1 second.
With these methods, it would be pretty easy for any serious military space power to surveil the solar system. One scope with say a 100 degree exposure could probably do the whole system in about 4 hours.
>Propulsion plume
There are so many ways to mask that signature you'd have to be actually moronic to not be able to think of any. I'll give you a meme one tho, just use an Orion drive, one charge. You've detected my burn but which way did I go moron?
Both voyager spacecraft are technically outside the solar system and amateur astronomers can still find them. Sure, if the scale of warfare is large enough, then it'll be difficult to track every single warship accurately, but due to the vast scale of space each side will have plenty of time to consider all the information. There might be telescope denial attacks to slow down the enemy's decision making though. Depends on how many telescopes each side has and how much energy they can dedicate to long range laser attacks.
Bullshit, they aren't optically detecting anything at that range. You're probably talking about radio astronomy and the amateurs picking up radio emissions from the satellites
Maybe it was a poor example, but I wanted to demonstrate that detection is still doable even at unimaginably far distances. If hobbyists with free time could do it, then a dedicated military arm could too.
Yeah a military could also not specifically radiate microwaves at earth at regular intervals hoping ground terminals pick it up
There can be stealth true, but it's more difficult to accomplish and gives less of an advantage, and more of the vehicle's functionality has to be sacrificed to accomplish it. A stealth aircraft can still move, and even attack while retaining almost all of it's stealth, and is passively extremely stealthy.
A stealth spacecraft will lose it's stealth the instant it attacks or maneuvers, and must utilize active energy intensive systems to retain it's stealth for any significant period of time.
how 2 stealth in space
>super cool exterior to background temperature
>use standard stealth angles
>cover exterior in a vanta black material to absorb sunlight instead of reflecting it off
>use internal liquid hydrogen heatsinks instead of radiators
>install a solar thermal pulsed engine
boom stealth
a solar thermal pulsed engine
elaborate on that, how does it work, what does it do?
If it uses propellant it can be detected.
it still has propellant but the idea is to reduce the range the ship can be detected when it burns. a solar thermal pulsed engine works by taking sunlight into a furnace with a tungsten heating element, cold hydrogen is pumped into the furnace causing the pressure to increase. a shutter then releases the hydrogen at a high velocity of 9km/s beating cold gas thrusters by a wide margin. by using a very large curved nozzle the hydrogen exiting the nozzle will be relatively far colder and since it's curved you reduce visibility of the engines "hot spot" as the propellant exits. as far as stealth goes if a telescope was scanning an area in the sky for 100 seconds, a stealth ship equipped with this kind of engine would only be detectable roughly within 800km. keep in mind a stealth ship only has to burn long enough to begin it's insertion.
I don't think it's that easy.
On the background of literally nothing, I feel like detecting ANY heat is a dead giveaway. But I'm no rocket scientist.
months, years of waiting and nothing happnening. then in an instant you either get hit by a relativistic projectile or perhaps your automatic laser system can repel it. really no place for any human component
The most realistic space combat sim out there
https://store.steampowered.com/app/476530/Children_of_a_Dead_Earth/
>no stealth in space
>implying sensors are both 100% comprehensive for thousands of light minutes and 100% foolproof from any countermeasure
Anything capable of useful maneuvering on the scale of thousands of light-minutes is going to be about as subtle as a nuke going off when its engine fires.
Sensors bros... it's over... stealth won...
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2019-09/countermeasures.pdf
The warhead described in that is barely maneuvering at all. The scenario is irrelevant to this discussion.
Active radar is useless at this range anyway.
>realities of real space weapons that US is building right fricking now is irrelevant for space warfare
>stealth doesn't exist
>suddenly from nowhere thousand nuclear warheads appear near your planner
>ACK!
>(many such cases)
>one tiny ass nuke on a ballistic trajectory
>interplanetary spacecraft capable of useful maneuvering on the scale of thousands of light-minutes
Which one is being discussed here?
>"M-missiles don't count!"
>immediately got bored by nuclear pumped laser-tipped stealth missiles
ngmi in space war
>destruction of planetary bases by nuclear bombardment doesn't count for space warfare because... because...
Because why?
Noisy sky results in exhaust plume pollution which persists for hundreds of years and infests all orbits.
Isaac Arthur has made a video on the topic:
He also have other realistic space war related videos.
>Noooo! Tell him stealth doesn't exist!!!! Nooo!
>ACK!
What makes drones so cost effective on Earth wouldn't work in Space at all.
If one wants to make drones work they'll need rocket fuel and a mini rocket engine which is really expensive. It'll make drones cost so much more to the point of having a drone army is cost ineffective and you might as well use missiles
Depends on what you want the drone to do.
If it's just recon, cubesats are pretty cheap to make/ deploy these days, you could launch almost 100 of them on a single falcon 9 rideshare.
If you want something capable of delivering an explosive (to either a sattelite or ship) you would either need RCS thrusters and enough delta v for it to rendevous with it's target or use an ion propulsion system if you're not in a rush.
Something like the x-37B could be used to either de orbit or capture a satellite if you wanted to minimize debris and I imagine will have cheaper alternatives in the years to come let alone the next century.
Also once lunar/ asteroid mining becomes a thing I imagine somebody will set up a munitions factory making getting explosives to orbit far cheaper.
Space battles, like all battles really, are determined both tactically and strategically by the ability to maneuver.
In space there is nothing to push or pull against, so maneuver comes at an extreme premium.
You can only maneuver by throwing part of your spacecraft out the back.
It's very normal for a spacecraft to be over 90% propellant by weight, and much of the remaining weight of the craft will be engine and plumbing and of course a structure to hold all that propellant.
If you want to maneuver more efficiently, aka throwing less of your spaceship out of the back for the same change in velocity, you need to put proportionally more energy into the propellant by ejecting it at a higher velocity.
However the more energy you put into each unit of propellant, as a rough rule of thumb, the heavier your propulsion system becomes per unit of thrust.
So in space you can either accelerate quickly, or you can accelerate efficiently.
This can lead to some counter Intuitive situations, a craft that accelerates at 1 G, the same as a fighter jet, intuitively seems a lot faster than a craft that accelerates 0.01G like a snail.
However in practice a typical chemical propulsion system with 1G acceleration might get to Mars in a few months, a hypothetical constant 0.01G acceleration system could get there in 15 days, slowing down half the way.
So when thinking about the dynamics of space warfare, it's important to remember these first principles, this battle between the tortoise and the hare.
Long ranged but sluggish or short ranged and agile; maybe things are not so different from the aircraft carrier after all...
First side to divert a big fricking rock from the asteroid belt into the opposing planets orbit wins
>Worse, there is no stealth in space, so every move can be planned beforehand.
stop repeating this moronic platitude.
>giant numbers and letters painted on each section and pod
I guess it makes some sense so you can say "Number 3 pod has a leak on the starboard side"
Drones and AI will rule everything including all conduct of war. Humanity will be too inert to be anything other than pod people by then
>What would infantry combat even look like when your enemy can just blast your position with a an orbital cannon?
Not only could future cities of a space faring empire be built to be resilient against nuclear strikes (bunkers, blast door shelters, materials used, evacuation plans) but also have massive counter strike capabilities as well with lasers, drones, hypervelocity projectiles and nukes (if you can launch a planetary invasion, then the defending planet should be able to manufacture things like nukes to a high degree as well). Due to this, the PK% would be so high that even an invading fleet with a metric frick ton of orbital bombardment capabilities wouldn't be enough. Ground invasion would be a necessity. You might not even be able to park your ships in orbit for long but instead would have to do high delta V burns to drop near the planet and then escape away just as fast due to the enemies counter space capabilities (they have an entire planet to build and hide shit, you have an aluminum cylinder). So dropping large waves of ground forces to secure enough territory planetside to render the enemies only anti space weapons be over the horizon, thus making defending against them easier to manage, would allow for longer stays by the ships to the point where the ships would be able to dominate the gravity well. But that would all be necessitated by ground invasion.
This also implies that the defenders space fleet would be entirely knocked out as well. The reality is is that there is a lot of places to not only hide but also a lot of places to camp out even overtly, but due to distances involved would make interdiction impractical by the invading force. Giving the defenders the ability to wage guerrilla space war via Fabian style hit and run against them.
The whole idea of just "nuke them from orbit" is the same as saying "just flatten their cities, then they'll stop resisting".
About stealth. If you have to turn an engine on to put it in orbit, then your enemy know where it is. Now they can work out its orbit and mostly forget about it, assign a sat/telescope to keep watch over an area and if that thing ever lights its engines again they'll know. If there are civilian craft then Q-ships are possible, but you are gonna have to sacrifice a lot. They will need to be as near to civilian vessels as possible. And once their cover is blown it's gone for good. This could be pretty successful for done networks around the home world, disguise everything as civy sats, at the very worst you've made your enemy afraid of every sat.
Any interplanetary space battles will be between sides with near perfect data on the enemy's speed, trajectory and deltaV.
Any fun engines are likely to mean an abundance of power, so lasers become the dominant weapon. Each side will probably have an optimal engagement range based around lasers. The lasers will frick things up faster the closer you are, but if your enemy has the same advantage, then you probably want to stay some distance away, you dont want to die either. This means cooling, both active and passive, to deal with the enemy lasers. Battle becomes a literal 'can you take the heat" but it probably isn't very interesting unless you ramp the number of combat vessels. Two sides turn a flashlight on eachother from thousands of Km away have a staredown.
If we're still stuck with chemical rockets then Missiles and kinetics are the core, probably with laser blinders (if not just weaker laser weps). We're back in the age of sail here. Want to go to Mars? Wait for an orbital transfer window (which your enemy know about too) and then set off on your 150-250 day journey. Want to come home? You have two options, a multiyear flight around the Sun, or waiting at Mars until the xfer window is open again, your enemy wont allow that (unless you destroy them). People are unlikely to tolerate this, so drones drones drones.
What if they do their burn on the other side of a planet
If your enemy only has one observation point then this could work, but you're in an interplanetary war, they presumably have sats out around the place.
Also most rocket engines are either high-efficiency low thrust or high-thrust low efficiency. So if you're doing an interplanetary burn with a engine most likely to get you to an enemy planet then your burn wont be complete by the time you come around the planet.
On a tactical engagement level this sort of thing could work. With a ship swinging behind a planet then starting a burn to change their trajectory. Though if they have Sat support again it's probably fruitless.
If you can somehow deal with your opponents sats then this sort of option becomes more possible.
There are dozens of ways to be misleading about a bright thrust burn. And the more routine space travel gets, the more innocent thrust burns cloud the sky.
Railguns and coilguns can accelerate payloads at several kilometers/second without any visible plume or heat. Escape velocity from the Earth is only 11km/s. You could launch a relatively large payload from anywhere in the solar system and get it darkly to anywhere else without any rocket plumes.
The thrust burn/plume shows the mass of the craft. Your Q-ship must have the mass and appearance of a Civ ship. This limits your design options. Again this isn't impossible, just limited. For example, you wont be able to have a large armor plate to deal with lasers, so you are basically unarmored.
Also you make a gun to fire something. Sat watches the gun recoil back some amount. Or hell, doesn't even see the gun fire, but sees the orbit has changed over the next hour. It concludes that gun must of fired, it now provides a list of masses and velocities (and times) the gun could of fired to give its current orbit. Now another Sat starts a scan of the sky, focused on the part the first Sat indicates, should only take a couple hours by star occlusion to find your object (worst case scenario)
Heck if we're bored just have a couple dozen (if we're at war why not launch a couple hundred?) sats doing constant sky scans and I dont even need to watch the gun fire.
You cant hide, you can only disguise.
>No stealth in space
Stealth no, deception in the form of making your warship look like a cargo hauler with responders that gives it a station of origin that allows it to come up within a few tens of kilometers to enemy warships without being suspicious...Yar Har.
>closing to dozens of kilometers
>in space
First, no. Second, why?
Ship boarding
One thing people are missing is that even IRL plans for fusion engines are pretty low thrust. You can get from earth to Jupiter in a month with a fusion engine, but you are NOT getting an easy 1 gee burn.
Fusion engines will probably fire for several days to speed up and slow down ships IRL. In that regard, militaries of various factions would see these long arcs of light across the sky as an enemy fleet departs, or arrives, at their location.
Even the Z-Pinch Fusion Drive, with a specific impulse (efficiency) of 1 MILLION SECONDS has thrust of about 1,000 kilonewtons, or the same thrust as a SINGLE Merlin 1 engine on a Falcon 9. Imagine pushing a 10,000 ton interplanetary warship with that. It would take days to reach top speed, and the crew would effectively be in Zero G the whole flight.
The Expanse gets this wrong - they give their engines way too much thrust, and make them way too efficient. Even super-efficient fusion engines would not reach The Expanse-levels of performance
>Fusion designs are low thrusts
>My brother in Christ doesn't know about spin polarization enhanced D-T fusion drives
Literal Expanse tier torch drive but real. Pretty much a VISTA tier inertial confinement fusion (ICF) drive but it doesn't suck ass.
Source:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php
>ctrl+f benefits of spin polarization
Also explosive decompression (beyond the decompression being a problem) in space is not really a threat. You dont get sucked out like in movies unless the hole is massive enough that your missing an entire wall.
Current spacesuits cant be put on quickly without suffering, most use low atmos high oxygen mixtures, so you need some prep time to adjust before wearing them. Putting them on fast will suck (though you would survive). So before battle there could be an adjustment period to get everyone suited up, which will help if you lose pressure, but if you lose significant amounts (aka cant be quickly patched up) then you're probably just screwed.
So is forcing everyone into (currently) very bulky awkward suits after several hours of breathing exercises to transition to low atmos when they could be focused on the upcoming battle/war/etc seem worth it? Especially when if you need them you'll probably be dead already.
Really the only argument is that it might reduce fire risk, but are the upsides worth all the downsides?
A stray piece of shrapnel could hit the propellant tanks and then bam, you’re ship is flying out of the solar system at 1% the speed of light with no way of coming home
>So is forcing everyone into (currently) very bulky awkward suits after several hours of breathing exercises to transition to low atmos when they could be focused on the upcoming battle/war/etc seem worth it? Especially when if you need them you'll probably be dead already.
literally just breathe to avoid the bends. Humans need enough minimum pressure for water not to sublimate and enough oxygen partial pressure to be conscious. Carbon dioxide buildup is what the body detects as a choking response and is why CO2 must be scrubbed. All other gasses are basically inert and don't matter.
Better spacesuits already exist to the point where it may not be a hindrance to wear them longterm. And the oxygen problem is simple, combat respirators. Don't try to maximize efficiency or capacity, you're INSIDE the ship, you don't realistically need more than a few minutes of air storage on your person, so you can easily use full pressure.
The very first thing you need to look at is the way orbital transfers work and how much thrust is required to move shit around the solar system, OP
Ships simply won't have the reaction mass / fuel to make lots of maneuvers. They'll have enough to transfer to mars, maybe enough to make it back to earth, and maybe 10% extra to maneuver for emergencies. So maneuver / evasion is going to be practically nonexistant unless some radically new thrust technology is developed. Orbital defenses and picket craft will be much stronger than assault craft. Picket craft will also have a lot more reaction mass to maneuver since they aren't going anywhere and they have a close resupply. It's going to be engagements at massive ranges where the defender has a nearly insurmountable advantage.
>The year is 2223
That's so far out in the future that the question is useless to ask. That's like asking a person in 1800 what air combat would look like today. They'd imagine bigger hot air balloons with people shooting muskets at each other from the gondolas, and the concept of jet fighters firing computer-guided seeker missiles wouldn't make any sense to them. Like, the reality is so far from what our ancestors would imagine that even if you explained it in detail to them, they wouldn't be able to understand what you were describing.
It's quite likely that by 2223, there will be a completely different understanding of the basic laws of physics that produces outcomes that even current day sci-fi hasn't really contemplated.
A more accurate analogy would be like asking someone in the early 1900s what air combat would be like. Since at the time they already had aircraft and powered flight as a whole. While they would still be dealing with a lot of variables that could vary wildly. They would still have a general impression on what it would be like. That's where we are with space combat. We know how spacecraft work in space, we understand orbital mechanics and we understand how certain weapon systems work in a vacuum. Predicting space to space combat for the year 2223 would have a lot of variables that would vary wildly, most of the variables would be known which would enable us to paint, albeit basic and simple pictures, but pictures none the less that would fairly accurately represent what space combat would be like.
Drones blasting each other from impossible distances, with a nanosecond difference in computing determining who comes out on top in the exchange.
>all these smartypants itt
alright explain how we're gonna get into space and make it feasible to fight over it to begin with
>uhh were gonna find a way to go faster than light
yeah whatever
>all these smartypants itt
Thank you
>alright explain how we're gonna get into space and make it feasible to fight over it to begin with
Unless field propulsion becomes a thing, then we're gonna get into space with rockets. While there can definitely be improvement in regards to better fuels and designs that are safer, it's still going to be an operation of strapping monkeys to seats and blasting them off via riding a perpetual explosion into orbit. Promising slight alternatives in the form of a TRIGA NTR rocket that can give much higher ISP and thrust without running the reactor at flying Chernobyl temperatures, but still. As for making it "feasible" which I take it to mean giving a reason too in the first place to fight a war. That would come from economics at first and population and gravity well supremacy later. Economics in the form of manufacturing in zero g which enables you to do wacky shit that is impossible to do on Earth, giving you direct competition that can best Earth based manufacturing. Starting with the small like microchips to the large like super alloys. This will inevitably call for demand for materials from space as it would be cheaper to get raw materials from the Moon than from the Earth which would drive even more people and business to space to the point where a large % of a nations manufacturing can be based entirely in space... Along with its population. Fighting over territory, people, money, and gravity wells will always be legitimate reasons for war in space (gravity well since it makes it easier to kill the enemy like how throwing a rock at somebody while on a hill makes it easier).
>uhh were gonna find a way to go faster than light
special reference frames being possible and folding space don't have to necessarily bend to modern physics. There are theories that enable FTL without breaking causality.
>alright explain how we're gonna get into space and make it feasible to fight over it to begin with
Have you not been paying attention to the remarkable increase in launch cadence over the last few years?
We are breaking records for upmass volume and launches every single year.
There are currently no less than 10 different space stations in development for the next decade, new space startups are being created every day, countries that never dreamed of having a space program a few years ago are building launch facilities, the cost of kg to orbit has nosedived and is expected to reach $20/kg in the next few years.
>faster than light
Not needed to explore the solar system.
Shit would play out over vast distances. CIWS/PDC range would be something like within 05km against enemy ships and for shooting down enemy missiles/torpedos. Railgun (or coil guns or light gas guns) ranges would probably be something up ~100km max distances only as ships could probably move out of the way of tungsten slugs at longer distances though this depends on the advancements of spectrometry devices and RADAR/LIDAR as well as propulsion systems that would be used in such a future war. Beyond the ~100km ranges is probably when guided missiles/torpedos would be most useful since their thrust-to-weight ratio would make them very fast and capable of target locking and likely outrunnung a ship though individually less reliably destructive than a railgun shot due to future CIWS systems using advanced AI calibration for defense. Most combat would very likely take place at the latter range regardless with ships defending themselves from incoming missles with point defense guns or possibly lasers of some kind. There would be a lot of constant movement and maneuvering, hard-G changes in direction of thrust, and such. For that reason I suspect there would be a lot of drones involved as mobile firing platforms and crewed ships would likely only have as many humans on them as is absolutely necessary. More likely manned ships would stay even further back and focus on command and control aspects of the battlespace.
There would probably be smaller vessals for interdiction and policing against piracy and stuff that might see closer action on occasion. And I suppose shuttles or breeching/landing pods used for Marines in very specific circumstances would be the exceptions to minimally crewed war vessals in space.
>hard G maneuvering
My man, you're travelling at orbital speeds at best, and interplanetary speeds at worst towards the enemy fleet. A 100 km distance doesn't seem too far if you can close that distance within a few seconds and the idea that you can just drastically alter your direction of movement at those speeds to dodge shit, unless you're getting shot at from something very VERY far away, then I just don't see that happening at all.
spinal railguns are dumb
Spinal particle accelerators/laser arrays/missiles are the current meta, non-macron ballistics are a meme
Honor based mech duels outside of city centers. As mankind becomes an interplanetary species, MAD takes a new form when anybody can just start chucking rocks and eradicate a planet.
It’s a neat idea. Asteroids being thrown at colonies is the new
>MUH NOOKS!!!!
Is the book series/show The Expanse the most realistic depiction we have in media so far? Obviously it still isn't fully realistic, but has there been anything closer written about space warfare in a hypothetical future a few hundred years down the road? The very nature of that means you have to make assumptions about technological advances anyway with regards to stuff like materials science, propulsion advancement, and such, no?
the moon is a harsh mistress
Sort of. It takes a LOT of liberties with the efficiency and power of fusion engines, but it is pretty realistic, yeah. That kind of goes out the window when the stuff with the aliens comes up, especially the FTL
>Is the book series/show The Expanse the most realistic depiction we have in media so far?
In media as a whole? No
As a space opera TV show? Yeah
The biggest issue with the realism of the Expanse (Barring the funky alien shit) is the ridiculous efficiency of the epstein drives which could never happen IRL, you could theoretically get hyper efficient fusion drives but the ships would still realistically be like 90% propellant tanks and would also need massive radiators to deal with the waste heat, also some pretty beefy radiation shielding to prevent the crew from getting toasted by x rays.
But it's certainly better than most sci fi shows which rely on FTL, anti gravity, artificial gravity, inertial dampeners, etc.
I always wanted to write a Sci-fi story set in a future where a coalition led by Earth and another led by Mars are vying for control over the Jovian moon of Ganymede.
Ganymede has no central government and consists of disjointed groups of nomadic peoples. A glowie from the Earth-led coalition is sent to Ganymede to help the locals fend off an attempt by the Mars-coalition to take control it for use as “living space” (Ganymede has low radiation and would make for a great colony).
I also had another story idea set 100 years after the prior one where, although the Earth-coalition won the prior conflict, their Glowie Operative mentioned earlier would lead a second resistance, this time agaijst occupying Earther forces, which ensures Ganymede is independent. A government led by the Saturnian moon of Titan swoops in and ends up subjugating Ganymede.
While this is happening, Earth and Mars are at each others throats but then a coalition led by Titan decides to cut off the supply of fusion fuel to the entire solar system (Helium-3), which cripples both Earth and Mars’ fleets. Earth and Mars put their differences aside to stop Titan from controlling the entire solar system.
A subplot to the first story would be the Earther Glowie falling in love with a Ganyemedeian Rebel girl, and deciding to betray his own government after she is abducted by the Earth-coalition military (the Earthers never cared about Ganyemede’s people, they just wanted to stop Mars from controlling it).
I wish I could write shit but I’m a stupid college dropout with no writing experience. I also might end up joining the Marines in a few months once/if my waiver comes through.
You don't have to have any specific education to write bro. Just start writing it. You don't have to set a time table for when you complete it and you can edit it as many times as you want to improve it. If you want to write a story and have an idea you like, just go for it. You don't even have to share it if you don't want to. But practice is the best teacher and maybe you'll end up with something you're proud of and can then get feedback and expand more story from there. Just do it as a hobby to begin with. If you join the Marines you'll still have a lot of downtime during peacetime after your training bro.
Put engines on asteroid belts
Aim it at earth's capitals
>asteroid belt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt
yeh bro we're going to travel all the way to bumfrick nowhere in the solarsystem (between Jupiter and Mars) and colonize some giant asteroid moving at 11-15km/s. We'll construct engines large enough to fit several Burj Khalifas, simply turn it on, hope it's strong enough to break orbit, and watch as it slowboats on over to planet Earf, maybe Beijing in 20 year's time.
1) Mars is right in edge of Asteroid belt, dumbass.
2) Earth's escape velocity is 11.8 km/s. Mars is only 5 km/s.
3) Asteroid trajectory manipulation can be done with as little as 1/100th the energy required with just simple rocket collision to the Asteroid at an angle. No need to actually brute force Asteroid redirection by installing 1000 fusion power engines
>Mars is right in edge of Asteroid belt, dumbass.
If you want to be pedantic, sure. The Asteroid Belt is closer to Mars than that of Jupiter.
>Earth's escape velocity is 11.8 km/s. Mars is only 5 km/s.
K? where did I have an issue with this?
>Asteroid trajectory manipulation can be done with as little as 1/100th the energy required with just simple rocket collision to the Asteroid at an angle.
>with just simple rocket collision to the Asteroid at an angle.
No shit?
Which is why I was illustrating the absurdity of 'engines on asteroids'. I never said there wasn't a better alternative; I implied that.
God damn fricking morons jumping the gun trying to one-up anons.
>If you want to be pedantic, sure. The Asteroid Belt is closer to Mars than that of Jupiter.
Mars is actually in the edge of asteroid belt, such that asteroids from the outer edge enter mars orbit
You god damn Black person
>you're a Black person
This is what you have been reduced to.
bro why are you getting flustered about absurdity in a thread about a hypothetical far future interplanetary total war scenario
I think you're underestimating just how massive even the smaller asteroids of the belt are.
Why spend so much time and effort accelerating a mountain when you could much more easily and cheaply hit somebody with a nuke?
>dealing with a shitton of heat in space
good luck
realistic interplanetary warface is "I lob shit at extremely fast speed at your planets until you submit". On the upside resources are effectively unlimited if interplanetary travel becomes affordable so wars over resources are kinda pointless, it'll all be fun stuff like philosophical and political differences
>wars over resources are kinda pointless
Nice fantasy commie. Pussy money and territory will always be fought over. Whether we're flinging rocks at each other or flinging nukes.
the real redpill is realizing any monkey with a rocket engine can throw a rock really fast at earth cities and theres nothing anyone can do about it. space warfare will likely mark the end of civilization.
Yeah, just like nukes, machine guns and TNT? Join the fricking club you disgusting belter.
You'd probably want to knock out all advanced sensors in a solar system with low-observable unmanned "missiles" whose flight paths are established before they enter the system. That way they wouldn't have to expend much delta-v once in-system, helping them stay undetected.
I honestly don't know what it'd look like from there. Large missile destroyers entering the system to start taking out strategic infrastructure, small sensor craft being deployed throughout the system, who knows
Let's say a Martian fleet is heading to blockade Earth or some similar situation. Couldn't you send one missile out and have it release a large cloud of dust in the path of the Martian fleet. When they'd pass through it going who knows how fast it'd tear their ships to shreds
Lasers would neutralize this. The big issue is the Martian fleet would be visible as soon as they started decelerating at Earth
Dust isn't harmful. You're just scuffing the outer hull finish. Micrometeoroites are a meme, they are too small to have any energy or penetration and too thinly spread to have any aggregate effects.
Maybe not dust but anything larger is dangerous.
This is a 1.2cm aluminium sphere weighing 1.7g
lasers can zap shit that small combined with dust shields on the front of the spacecraft negating the danger of dust altogether.
>lasers
Only if you can detect them fast enough
>shields
Will have to be MUCH more substantial than you'd think if you're dealing with intentionally launched projectiles and not just random space debris. For one, the energy will be much higher, and two there isn't going to be ONE ball bearing, there's going to be THOUSANDS of them.
The best design for a shield is a huge rotating nose cone. It also blocks/deflects lasers. Directly facing the enemy isn't so difficult when you consider the extreme distances involved. Flanking meta will be YUGE though, as will coordinating multiple shots to intersect an orbit from different directions at once by precisely controlling angle and speed. Then there's the idea of screening vessels and laser networks to counter that... Pretty interesting end result.
>sustained high energy signatures are detected in orbit of Mars, but no drive plumes are detected
>several weeks later the orbital debris network begins picking up signatures of anomalous debris clouds
>there are millions of individual clouds, each composed of millions of microscopic pellets, all travelling at relativistic speed, on highly diversified orbits
>ships in orbit, assisted by ground systems, fire all their lasers into a network of supercomputer controlled reflector satellites, where they're distributed across orbits to minimize damage to sensitive equipment
>initially damage is minimal, but the attack continues for days, orbital defenses are straining to keep up, reinforcements are bottlenecked
>as the defense grid reaches saturation, larger projectiles are detected as they suddenly activate thrusters and begin altering their ballistic trajectories to evade interception
Insurgency/espionage. Realistically open warfare will be either impossible or cripplingly expensive/dangerous, akin to modern nuclear war. And there won't be any "independent colonies" 200 years from now, they'll be lucky to exist at all, and without constant support from earth they'll be like antarctic bases that die of starvation in less than a year.
As for stealth, that's a yes and a no. Conventional stealth frick no, that doesn't even work NOW on earth, but signature minimization will be extremely common and important since the weapons are so long range and strategic stealth by attacking and destroying sensor/relay platforms will still work, can't detect shit if you telescope gets blown up.
Are there any good science fiction books that tackle this subject with as little physics hand-waving as possible?
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
The expanse books are pretty damn good. The tv show is comfy up until season 3 after which it drops the ball
Up to and including season 3 rather*
>What would infantry combat even look like when your enemy can just blast your position with a an orbital cannon?
That assumes a scorched earth (or moon/mars/etc) strategy, space colonies would be worth a lot more functional than as glowing craters.
Ship to ship combat would be conducted a great distances and done through use of drones, missiles and maybe high velocity computer controlled cannons/ lasers if they happened to cross orbits.
But even these ships would be much more valuable captured their crews taken hostage.
Most combat would be anti satellite warfare most likely done via capturing and or de orbiting strategically important satellites via robotic drone.
Occasional boarding actions/ capturing of bases/ stations would happen but probably no human operator would step foot in such a place until after the enemy defenses had been cleared or it had surrendered.
It'll look like submarine warfare except that you can't really hide in space barring someone handing over enough commies and /misc/troons to the Greys for an early FTL drive.
I think that any space war would be so costly that they would be over before anyone learns anything. You'd have one every in every 50-100 years, with the losing side always having 90% or more casualties in their deployed forces and the winner having less than 10%, each war having different approaches to wars fought in the past, each being just as chaotic as before. Then it'd just be a ground war where one side can do deployments and bombardments from orbit. And since deployments from orbit would still be so much more expensive, every war would either be settled in a treaty or with nukes.
>Realistic interplanetary warfare: what would it look like?
Probably long range sniping, if we're not talking rocket-powered nukes.
1- You can already shoot a gun in space.
The oxidizer is already in the gunpowder so you don't need oxygen for it to work.
2- A projectile will not slow down in the void of space. It can keep going on,untl in encouters something.
3- We're already quite good at calculating orbits and the movements of celestial objects, so we can shoot a projectiles at where the ennemy's planet will be by the time the projectile travels there.
So basically how I see it in my head, it's a game of Galactic Sniper, wich each side shooting at the other over very long distances and time periods..
Each shot takes 10 000 years or more to reach its target. By the time it reaches the target, and they fire back at you, you're already 5 apocalypses and 6 civilizationnal resets in and you forgot why your ancestors shot at some space Black folk tens of thousands of years ago.
So basically a game of "Galactic AlzheimerSniper" if you will.
By 2223? Absolutely no one would have any clue for that. It's like predicting modern, post industrial merc warfare based on Napoleon. Only the very basics can be applied.
I'd imagine that by then, industrial antimatter production has been in full effect for a long time, someone has figured out a particle EMP like weapon, humans are cybernetic and bioengineered beyond belief and these inner system space governments are a drop in the bucket compared to the mass cloned station colonies from the Mercury antimatter production facility (And the many stations around the sun that do the same) to the colony stations setting up in the Oort cloud.
If drones and missles, then drones and missles. Laser point defenses and particle beams. But if computers are out of it because of that one specific EMP like weapon? Who knows. Might get a space dog fight with vacuum tube computers or single bit quantum computers that can take the power fluctuation. Either way the morons harping on about doomsday weapons being the end all be all of warfare keep on forgetting that nukes exist already and we have only used them in international dick waving.
>Day 400 of the Martian special operations on the Moon
>Still haven taken New Armstrong
just watch legend of galatic heroes, similar to that but with more nations and factions instead 3 countries
accept nothing less
your last best hope