Would the king of space warfare be missiles, lasers, railguns, coilguns, or particle beams?
Would the king of space warfare be missiles, lasers, railguns, coilguns, or particle beams?
Would the king of space warfare be missiles, lasers, railguns, coilguns, or particle beams?
particle beams in the very long run, simply because it would be the hardest to defend against
but the first weapons we will see in space will likely be missiles for offense and lasers for defense
rail gun viability will depend entirely on how much delta-V you can stick inside a railgun shell compared to a missile
>rail gun viability will depend entirely on how much delta-V you can stick inside a railgun shell compared to a missile
I feel like railguns would be a bad match for "smart" munitions with lots of complex and somewhat delicate components. You are putting a gorillion volts through something to accelerate it (at least) ten times faster than any cannon is capable of.
I feel for sheer power alone, a railgun will outshine a missile, since the projectile can only get faster due to the frictionless nature of space and it's not like you can jam a frickhueg piece of metal, so a railgun hit will destroy a ship if it hits, whilst you might need dozens or hundreds of missiles to do the same.
this makes no sense
how is a railgun shell accelerating after it leaves the gun?
a missile can accelerate for the entire duration of the flight and will significantly outspeed a railgun shell. you can even fire a missile out of a railgun! a missile doesn't have to use its guidance, it can go in blind like a railgun shell and use pure kinetic energy if you like.
a dumb projectile could be deflected off-course without needing to destroy it by ablation
a laser can impart a velocity change on the target with a much lower energy cost compared to destroying it by ablating the surface and the expanding gas will nudge the projectile into a new course
a missile with a very high delta-V could offset this with the occasional counter-burn
but a solid chunk of metal could be swung off course easily unless it had its own thrusters in it (ie. a missile)
this only gets more pronounced at longer ranges since small changes have greater effect
You're limited by the vast distances of space and recoil. A large railgun round will show up on radar and the enemy will have a chance to dodge it. The solution is to make a smaller, faster shot and the logical conclusion of this is the Macron Gun. Basically throwing dust sized graphene capsules at relativistic speeds.
Like a giant space shotgun?
More like a relativistic CIWS. The idea is to accelerate each speck of dust to as close to lightspeed as possible. Hard to say how much damage each speck will do since you could fill them with deuterium for mini-fusion explosions.
>The solution is to make a smaller, faster shot and the logical conclusion of this is the Macron Gun. Basically throwing dust sized graphene capsules at relativistic speeds.
This is a distinction without a difference imo. The point of a rail gun is that you're hispeed enough that the projectile can be very small. Like yeah get a grain of sand to .7c and it's going to blow any spaceship a new butthole.
With that said, a linear motor with adjustable power (i.e. accelerating larger bodies to slower speeds) would be useful for other purposes besides ship-ship action.
>get faster
You can only get smarter from here, at least
Can't you shoot a missile/smart munition out of a railgun to make it go fast? Like a discarding sabot and after it leaves the barrel the missile boosters turn on for even more speed and it can guide itself to the target. With the distances involved, I think speed and precision will be king.
depending on how fast computer technology advances, you probably could put a guidance system
but conventional wisdom says that the sheer stress of being propelled out of a cannon would limit what kinds of guidance systems you could stuff inside a railgun shell
a missile is accelerated to its top speed gently and over a long period of time, its why we use rockets to get into space in the first place
We already have guided artillery and bullets.
a 155mm shell would be a spudgun compared to the forces a rail gun would need to be accelerated to
theres a reason guided shells are a much newer development compared to missiles
and we dont know how well computer technology would advance compared to railgun technology, and making a railgun shell precise would be a top priority for them
but we can assume that whatever hardened navigation system is put inside a gun that accelerates its shell within the barrel wouldnt be as good as one that can accelerate gently because it would have less space and fewer components to work with
I think you underestimate how resistant to g-forces electronics can be, as well as what the g-forces acting on a railgun shell would be. It's all solid state. Just wires and solid fuel.
These kinds of g-force can rip wires from sockets and cause chips to crack under their own weight.
Humans can take 50G against their back without injury, and we're just made of squishy blood vessels. Some copper wire encased inside tungsten isn't gonna go anywheren even at 5000G.
>encased inside tungsten
bad idea
tungsten is very heavy, so when its accelerated to hypersonic speeds its going to feel crushing weight and destroy anything on it
when it comes to surviving extreme G-forces, lighter and smaller is the biggest priority
electronics capable of surviving being accelerated to extreme speeds would need to be extremely tiny and encased in foam
certainly much smaller and less capable that what could be fit inside a missile
>tungsten is very heavy, so when its accelerated to hypersonic speeds its going to feel crushing weight
Anything will. Tungsten is more likely to resist deformation than something like aluminium, thus it's the better option for resisting g-forces.
to resist crushing g-forces, you want to be extremely light
tungsten is literally the worst possible candidate to do so, because its extremely dense
>to resist crushing g-forces, you want to be extremely light
That's not how it works, Scotty. A tissue will crumple and deform from any kind of g-forces. A ball made of tungsten will not.
>That's not how it works, Scotty.
that was the actual challenge in the original VT fuse
the main issue was that the heavy vacuum tubes were subjected to so much force when fired it didnt matter what they were made from
and the solution was to make it as small and light as possible to reduce the G-forces acting on it and then encasing the whole thing in wax to dampen it further
any futuristic equivalent fired from a mass driver would require the same approach
the smallest, lightest possible circuit board encased in an extremely low-density foam-like substance to dampen the forces
the only tungsten you would see would be part of the penetrator rather than the electronics
Vacuum tubes are brittle because they use a brittle substance, which is formed in a non-loadbearing shape. Solid state electronics have no moving parts and you can make them into almost any kind of shape. What's important is the resistance to deformation, things like compressive and tensile strength, plus elastic limit.
The compressive strength of aluminium, one of the lightest metals, is 280 MPa. The compressive strength of tungsten is 3500 MPa. I know for a fact that the heavier, denser material is more resistant to g-forces here. This is why we make bridges out of concrete and not paper mache. Weight of the material is not relevant, it's load bearing properties are.
The human body is surprisingly durable compared to circuitry. Drop a hammer on a motherboard and that motherboard is Done. Do the same with a human and that human is merely pissed. It's even more pronounced with electric forces with your garden variety static shock easily overvolting a CPU.
Drop a human off a skyscraper and they'll die on impact, but a g-shock watch will not. Electronics that are built for it will always be more resistant to G-forces than humans.
That's a function of the square cube law, not something inherent to the materials. A 200lb human is easier to dropproof than 200lbs of precision machinery.
this is not really a concern
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
Sprint isn't even close. Sprint operated at a measly 100G. A modern railgun is in excess of 3800G.
Can't go faster than light and if you get it even close to that fast it will explode when it hits any dust because the energies involved will cause fission/fusion. They do this in particle accelerators already. Gold atoms going near the speed of light hitting each other tears even the protons and neutrons apart.
Right, if you hey the particles going fast enough they will have plenty of energy to tear apart a ship. But lasers can also destroy them, so IDK, maybe some sort of small munition that is also resistant to lasers.
They'd be difficult to pick up on radar and wouldn't radiate significant heat so actually targetting the Macrons would be difficult.
Said water could also be used to combat lasers by running the water under the armored plates. You could then vent the steam onto the path of the laser to difract it.
Honestly, I figure most ships will end up in water encapsuled living areas at the very least anyway just for temperature and radiation. Water is pretty heavy, though, so packing lots of water either means having a big, sluggish ship or a big expensive ship.
The inside of a railgun is subjected to extreme magnetic fields. Hardening a guidance system to survive that sort of launch would be hard.
Systems that are designed to survive the electromagnetic flux of a high yield thermonuclear weapon are not particularly exotic.
Yeah but every cubic inch of shell spent on shielding is robbing you of mass. That kind of equipment is bulky, and a railgun round wants to be as dense as you can get it.
You don't want a railgun to be as dense as you can get it because it will over-penetrate pretty much any conceivable target. Pre-impact fragmentation that distributes the energy of the projectile across as much surface area as possible will substantially increase the damage done against most targets.
>a railgun round wants to be as dense as you can get it
It doesn't matter in the vacuum on space with no air resistance to slow it down tbh. It could have the density of sponge and it will still do just as much damage when it hits its target.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu-metal
>material is soft, malleable, and when used as magnetic shielding needs to be formed in thin airgapped sheets
lmao no that shit would not survive. the sheets would buckle and once in contact their shielding ability is nil
It's just an example of shielding. Nobody knows what future material science will yield.
And personally I'm of the opinion that it wouldn't actually be necessary, since railgun magnetic fields are supposed to be extremely tight around the armatures and they stay behind the head of the projectile, which is where you'd put the sensors.
>The effectiveness of mu-metal shielding decreases with the alloy's permeability, which drops off at both low field strengths and, due to saturation, at high field strengths.
>Because mu-metal saturates at such low fields, sometimes the outer layer in such multilayer shields is made of ordinary steel. Its higher saturation value allows it to handle stronger magnetic fields, reducing them to a lower level that can be shielded effectively by the inner mu-metal layers.
It's not only unsuitable, it's actually worse than plain steel for the purpose at hand. Anon, you are moronic.
>rail gun viability will depend entirely on how much delta-V you can stick inside a railgun shell compared to a missile
Railguns will never ever be viable beyond distances of couple of kilometers in space.
A rocket engine starting from rest in the vacuum of space with no atmospheric drag will get to the target faster unless you can reach speeds of like... several tens of thousands of meters per second with your railgun.
>unless you can reach speeds of like... several tens of thousands of meters per second with your railgun.
That is the idea of what a "military grade" space rail gun would do, yes. Remember that the gun in question is also unencumbered by an atmosphere, or gravity.
Missiles fired from railguns.
railgun missiles are more viable.
None are the best compared to the rest. Lasers beat missiles, but lose power over range compared to railguns. Particle beams also lose power over range and can be deflected with magnetic fields. Coilguns would suck the most since they lack speed. You'd want a combination of railguns, missiles and lasers.
this
I now understand why we have a space force. God bless this great country.
>Particle beams also lose power over range and can be deflected with magnetic fields.
That's what beam neutralizers are for.
Theoretically, you could recharge a neutralized beam fired at you, making it vulnerable to deflection again. Given particle beams almost exclusively shoot at near-c speeds, I don't know if you could react in time or slow it down, mind you.
>. Given particle beams almost exclusively shoot at near-c speeds,
depends on the particle and the type of accelerator used
we would see linear accelerators, a rail gun but for atoms, first
more complex coiled accelerators could get them up to a faster speed but in a more complex system
a slow, heavy particle would not even get close to C and wouldnt be particularly damaging
while a singular hydrogen ion (read: a proton) fired out of a highly coiled accelerator would rip through steel with ease
this does give a lot of room for interpretation, depending on the relative tech levels of the people involved
with LINACs firing giant ions, they might be seen as a niche weapon most ships wouldnt even have due to how little range it would have
but with coiled accelerators firing hydrogen atoms so fast that they dont have time to spread before it hits the target, there might not be a point to using any other weapon unless it was too costly energy wise to fire
Plasma wakefield accelerators are probably the baseline technology needed to make a particle beam weapon viable, since they can achieve relativistic velocities with relatively short accelerators.
If we're talking spaceships, then size is not a hinderence. Also, DARPA was making NPBs and testing them in orbit back in 1984. Recently the US was planning on doing another orbital particle beam test, but the project was shelved. The official reason was that the tech still isn't something that can be made practical, even with a large budget. Personally I wonder if it was actually shelved and they're just keeping the orbital anti missile satellites a secret.
The size of the system needed to supply the capabilities being asked for is a big scaling factor in viability. If you need a huge linear (or circular) particle accelerator, everything becomes a lot more complicated—and expensive—very quickly. The DoD's pockets are deep, but not endless, and a particle beam weapon in orbit does not offer enough capability to offset its costs with currently developed technologies.
The main sci-fi defense against neutral paricle beams (NPBs) that I've heard of is shields. Either layers of plasma contained in a magnetic field, or just a regular layer of metal spaced from the hull, which makes the particle beam disperse like a water jet hitting a chainlink fence.
>lose power over range compared to railguns
not in the vacuum of space
They do, from diffraction.
This is pedantic, but it's not really power loss, just reduced power/m^2.
But the concentration of energy is the whole point of weaponizing lasers. Let's take the sun and for example. It's a nice day out, it's warm but you can walk around without frying.
Now, let's take a lens about 1m^s and concentrate that square meter of sunlight down into a point less than a cm across. Can you enjoy your sunny day in a more concentrated fashion? No, because you're probably going to get a nasty burn if you hold your hand in that focused point. The concentration of energy makes a huge difference to what it can do to objects.
It's the same thing with a laser, if you point a modern weaponized laser, like the one the brits just tested, at the moon you get a circle a mile wide, so all that energy now spreads out over a mile and it's barely visible.
Good god man, if you're the product of the modern education system we're all fricked.
>this moron doesn't know that Huygen's Principle still applies to coherent waves and thus they diffract at the aperture causing the beam to spread out over distance.
Go back to your textbook or you're failing your next exam.
she'll never fail me cause I'm licking her pussy
Mount a powerful single use beam weapon on a missile.
Why don't we just stop with the half measures and create a rocket propelled casaba howitzer?
Useful, but a lot less damaging than just ramming the missile into the target at 20 km/s.
Given that we would've reached a point where making laser missiles became cheap and easy enough to be practical in the first place why wouldn't we just let the laser fire to depletion and still allowing the missile to actually be a missile? What are we gonna do tell the missile to come back when it reaches 50% fuel reserve so we can recharge the laser?
>inb4 wtf did you just fricking say about the missile
you just described a laser drone which would be pretty useful, tbh.
A single use laser has no way of returning. It's a bomb or nuke pumped laser, like the US "Star Wars" program. You detonate a nuclear charge to produce an high power laser. The "why" would obviously be that it's much harder to intercept but also has greater range than a laser on the ship itself.
Don't care. Want my nuclear fission pumped x-ray lasers.
Then you can lead with laser heads to take out sensors and point defences before following up with KKVs or Kinetic Penetrators.
Missiles, especially RKKV's and projectile weapons will reign supreme, macron guns would require some sort of legit energy sheilds to truly protect against.
masers
tasers
shit on a stick
>autonomous drones that are essentially just fission reactors attached to an engine, giant heatsink, and a fat laser
>fly them in swarms to counteract the energy loss at a distance
>dump giant amounts of energy into anything and everything
Arent lasers = partical beams?
Particle beams are streams of ionised gas or plasma that are propelled with magnetic fields. Lasers are just concentrated light.
lasers are totally massless, so they are still faster
and if you thought lasers had too much spread, then particle weapons will have it much worse because they have a charge, and so will spread out pretty much the moment they leave the barrel because of so many like-charge particles repelling each other in close proximity
another issue relating to charge is that you can deflect them with a magnetic field
the advantage they have over lasers is, well, that they have mass
so they can impart a lot of energy into their target instead of just heating them up like a laser
if you can get a hydrogen atom up to relativistic speeds and then fire it in a massive stream at your target it would slice through virtually anything short of meter-thick steel with ease and release x-rays or gamma rays in the process, sterilizing anyone caught in the immediate vicinity
electrons are even smaller than atoms and so could be fired at even higher speeds
>sterilizing anyone caught in the immediate vicinity
I think that's a severe understatement for what would happen. It would be best if you had several tons of water between you and the impact point in this case.
laser of sufficient power become positronic annihilators anyway
>laser
>defeated by mirror
stfu
You don't even need a mirror. Just some white pigment that doesn't darken when it burns.
There's no such thing as a perfectly reflective surface. Even the best mirrors reflect only ~99.98% of light striking their surface, and the actual reflective surface is incredibly thin. So, the question becomes "can 0.02% of your laser's output melt 1nm of foil?" and the answer can easily be yes.
Lasers also produce heat at the emission source. I'll start out by saying that laser light does not have a temperature. So asking how hot the beam is is meaningless. Maybe you would ask how powerful the beam is. Or maybe you would ask how much waste heat is produced by the laser device.
Referring to the waste heat of operating a laser, the best fiber lasers today produce about 10% more heat than power that goes into the laser beam. For example, a 1000 watt fiber laser may produce about 1100 watts of heat and 1000 watts of laser beam and so consumes a total of 2100 watts.
A laser pointer might be 10% efficient, so let's say a 10 mW laser pointer consumes about 100 mW of electricity and produces 90 mW of heat and 10 mW of laser power.
Now let's consider pointing a 100 kW laser at a target. Due to diffraction, the best case is that about 60 kW of power will be in the main lobe. If the target is large enough, that 60 kW will fall on the target, but due to the beam shape and jitter, perhaps only 35 kW will be intense enough to heat up the target. If the target is painted white, initially only about 3 kW of heat is deposited on the target. As the white paint begins to char, it will get darker and absorb more heat. Eventually about 20 to 30 kW of heat will be "produced" on target. If the target is close enough, the intensity may be high enough to form a plasma right at the surface of the target. In that case, 50 kW of heat might be produced almost instantaneously, even if the target is a shiny mirror.
Meanwhile, you're dealing with dissipating 90kW of heat from your laser. You gain advantages from being knowing that's coming and designing a cooling system around the source beforehand. I'm reaching the limits of my technical understanding on the matter, but I hope you can appreciate the point I'm making. Lasers have some drawbacks.
>Meanwhile, you're dealing with dissipating 90kW of heat from your laser. You gain advantages from being knowing that's coming and designing a cooling system around the source beforehand.
Yes, that's the point. Consider the difference between the heat of a car's engine versus the heat of a gasoline bomb being thrown into the cabin.
Consider the difference between what a tank barrel endures as it fires a shell and what another tank's armor endures as it receives this shell. Now imagine that the tank receiving the shell automatically nullifies 97% of shell's energy because the armor was painted white. Think about how much bigger tank barrels would need to be in order to fire shells that can overcome this handicap, and you'll start to understand the problems of using lasers against hardened targets.
>Now imagine that the tank receiving the shell automatically nullifies 97% of shell's energy because the armor was painted white
the white paint will do absolutely nothing to stop a laser
you could coat an entire tank in chrome and it would not stop a laser
the reflective surface is microns thick and will be vaporized in a millisecond even if its 99.9% reflective if its facing any kind of kilowatt laser
the cloud of vaporized paint will offer more resistance to the laser than the actual coating, but anything that moves will quickly shed that cloud of material
reflective coatings would have about as much of an effect on a powerful kilowatt laser as adding a thin steel of hardened armor on top of your tank to stop a kinetic projectile
its going to do very little
Okay, then imagine the conventional tank is painted all black and the laser tank is firing from point black range. How powerful does it need to be still and how fast is the laser going to do its job? Are we still sure it wouldn't be better to use kinetic shells?
We've been assuming too many things are going for the laser in up to this point. All of the assumptions I made earlier were really trying to hand it to the laser in terms of range. Space is so utterly impossible to hide in that a typical spaceship's laser would always be out of ideal range. Things like white paint and reflective coats will become as effective as a hardened sheet of steel would be against a .22lr bullet fired from 1000m away.
Lasers are for things that come to you and are inherently lightly armored. Like missiles.
Sounds like we need to revive nuclear pumped lasers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
>missile with nuclear bomb and a disposable laser device that uses the nuclear blast to power itself to produce an X-ray laser beam capable of destroying targets thousands of kilometers away from the blast itself
Bear in mind that the source can shed that heat by radiating it out into space. Meanwhile the target has a hot spot on their outer skin which can cause buckling of skin panels (thermal expansion) or if the amount of energy absorbed is sufficient, ablation of the material.
For ship-to-ship combat, lasers would be poor performers because of a completely different reason than thermal efficiency or lack thereof: ablative shielding and defensive maneuvers. If the target has been covered with a material that has a high albedo and low conductivity, the laser will simply cause ablation of the shielding, with the outgassing shield material further reducing the amount of energy reaching the target. The target could maneuver to present a fresh side of shielding whenever there's a risk of burn through.
Hella good for point defence, though.
It's not a bad idea but EFPs only get about 2 km/s while objects in Low Earth Orbit are already at about 7 km/s. It's a good terminal phase concept but it's still going to end up comparatively close to the target.
FUNNELS
here is your answer
Lasers have the advantage that they don’t apply force to your vessel from firing; any ordinary munition would have an opposite force pushing you backwards when firing, which would cost fuel to counteract
Missiles wouldn't.
To be safely fired missiles would need to be de-coupled from your vessel. Depending on arrangement you could do this without causing any major net force I suppose
Oh, and lasers are also being powered by a renewable fuel source, you could theoretically use them indefinitely without resupply, unless we account for things like repairs
Lasers just seem like a no brainer to me, near instant delivery on target, heat is a more serious weapon in space due to the lack of air cooling, no atmosphere to distort or weaken your beam, no clear warning that it’s coming before it does, there are just too many advantages to ignore
The one downside I see for lasers is being unable to fire around the curve of the body you’re orbiting. Missiles would be ideal at long distances, though theoretically I could see releasing small laser bearing probes to get a line of sight to be an equally effective, albeit more expensive solution
>heat is a more serious weapon in space due to the lack of air cooling
Due to thermodynamics a laser will always dump more energy into your ship than your target. Using them in hopes of overheating your enemy will never work, you'll cook yourself first unless you have a ship multiple times the hostile's mass, at which point you'd win the dV race anyway
>Due to thermodynamics a laser will always dump more energy into your ship than your target.
Lasers also have spread, so a lot of that energy will be wasted anyway. When people talk about like alien civilizations using lasers to communicate they're referring to extremely tight extremely high power ones that are only barely detectable if you have telescopes pointed in their direction, the inverse square law is a real b***h.
Lasers would ideally make holes and stuff in the target, not just warm it up, that's a bit like saying a bullet harms the shooter as much as the target because they both absorb the same amount of kinetic energy.
It will be a missile that contains a bunch of kill vehicles
https://missiledefenseadvocacy.org/defense-systems/multiple-kill-vehicle-mkv/
Particle beams and dust guns would be shooting grams or milligrams. Even at relativistic speeds, that's basically nothing in a ship that likely weighs thousands of tons. The CIWS turrets in Expanse are actually recoilless, you can see a little thruster on the back of them to counteract their own recoil. Lasers are really inefficient at high power levels, so you'd be weighed down in a shitload of radiators that are easy targets and slow you down. Laser optics also tend to be more fragile than magnetics used by accelerators.
>Lasers are really inefficient at high power levels, so you'd be weighed down in a shitload of radiators that are easy targets and slow you down
Lasers would be the king for point defence on bodies without atmosphere. Just dump the heat into the moon/asteroid you're sitting on.
Which is great for a moon or asteroid but for a ship you run into cooling issues.
potential solution:
make the problem the solution to a different problem
getting power in space would be tough
use heat to create power
use dual-hull ship designs with a layer of water in between, connected to heat distribution from all tech, weapons, on the ship. Put safety measures in the interior hull and use a smart system to automatically manage water flow, seal-offs, etc.
protects against radiation, builds power for the entire ship to use, and acts as a heat sink for everything
when you think about it, all a nuclear reactor is doing is heating water up... same concept
>when you think about it, all a nuclear reactor is doing is heating water up... same concept
For the nuclear reactor to generate power, the heat needs to go somewhere. Eventually you need to radiate the heat away anyway.
>protects against radiation, builds power for the entire ship to use, and acts as a heat sink for everything
This also leads to the entire ship becoming a radiator, which may not be a good thing. I don't have the exact formula on hand but to efficiently radiate heat you need to have the radiator at a very high temperature and doing that for an entire ship (presumably made out of some strong metal) is going to be pretty hard. Also, the liquid will transfer heat into the crew space anyway. That may be the real problem, actually isolating your hypothetical radiator/heat sink combo from the crew space.
>I don't have the exact formula on hand but to efficiently radiate heat you need to have the radiator at a very high temperature
It's several thousand degrees, so using water as a coolant is out of the picture.
>The CIWS turrets in Expanse are actually recoilless, you can see a little thruster on the back of them to counteract their own recoil
That isn't recoilless, that's recoil managed.
They have the disadvantage that the heat needs to go somewhere. I mean if we're talking about realistic space warfare, getting rid of waste heat is going to be a massive issue. You can do stuff like dumping the heat into water or propellant tanks you have on board but that has limits and depending on the scenario might be infeasible due to upmass constraints.
How is Terra Invicta? I heard a lot of noise about it last year but haven't heard much since. Was it just a marketing campaign? Has much progress been made in development?
>How is Terra Invicta?
It's like HoI4, Children of a Dead Earth and EU4 had a baby.
The economic simulation of the world is relatively advanced but you don't actually have that much control over it. It feels like trying to drive a car by blowing on the steering wheel sometimes, which I suppose is realistic. Overall the Earth geopolitics portion of the game is just a stepping stone to building a space based economy and gets overshadowed in every regard by building a mercury dyson swarm for science and antimatter and nanofactories in earth orbit for cash. You basically just want to secure the developed countries for yourself, avoid nuclear war and have your armies be big enough to respond to alien invasions.
The game really shines in its space combat system, which is as realistic as humanely possible. You can tell it was made by a fellow /k/ autist because hit points translate directly to gigajoules of energy armor can withstand, lasers get weaker with distance and so on. It's really in-depth.
>It feels like trying to drive a car by blowing on the steering wheel
Holy shit I'm stealing that. What a great analogy.
>or propellant tanks you have on board but that has limits and depending on the scenario might be infeasible due to upmass constraints.
>ships haul tons of water just to evaporate it into space using the waste heat
Kino.
I suppose you could vent it as propulsion in some way (if you could transfer the heat + hold the pressure) or you could capture it, cool it back down with radiators then reuse it (fresh boiled water mmm) but yeah the main way you would realistically do it (especially in a military) would be jettisoning it. Which, well, I hope I don't have to explain to you how hard getting liquid water is in space if you don't have access to either asteroid belt mining tech or a lot of rockets. It's infeasible in any near future scenario simply because of how much water you'd need to send up then carry around to make it work.
Doing the same to propellants may be feasible but I'm not too knowledge on liquid rocketry so I couldn't tell you how hypergolics/the tank for such would handle such massive energy input.
>but yeah the main way you would realistically do it (especially in a military) would be jettisoning it.
To clarify, the main cooling effect comes from enthalpy of evaporation. The phase transition from liquid to gas sucks up a lot of heat.
Biggest issue with the game imo is there is a lot of minor QOL shit they need sorted like in endgame not being able to upgrade stations all at once and having to click through menu for the better part of an hour to set it all up. That and it just fricking drags on and on in endgame stuff. I get it's supposed to be a improved longwar mod but Jesus it shouldn't take me a literal month's worth of time to finish a campaign due to getting XCOM'D 6 attempts in a row when I should just be able to force things through
Check out The Expanse and Children of Dead Earth for the answer.
>nuclear missiles for offense and long range defense
>railguns/coilguns for devastating close-in combat
>literally whatever you want for CIWS, lasers and gatling guns both work. Realistically both would be used for different threats
Also Terra Invicta, I almost forgot
Right now meta is disruptors on cruisers and. Battleships
swarmer missile destroyers and corvettes should the main force, gigacannon on X-slot but honestly don’t bother with too many battleships to begin with, same with archaeotech weaponry
Missiles, mostly. You can fire them onto an intercept course and have them drift for hours or even days, only occasionally making correction burns as they get closer and track the target's maneuvers. You could even loop shots around planets if the target is trying to hide.
Fire millions of tiny tungsten balls travelling at 7km/s in the direction of your enemy trade routes.
nah
>Implying you can't fire them aligned one after another so they impact the second and third layers one after another
You can, but penetration of the shielding and primary hull is not automatically equivalent to a spacecraft or mission kill, and the interval to achieve that kind of shot placement is vanishingly short.
I'm gonna see them on sensors. Gonna opposite vector burn for five seconds and dodge them.
we will go full circle and have massive broadside battles. After firing each other both ships get sent to the nearest star by counterforce
Brilliant pebbles. Launch missiles with warheads package full of ball bearing. Set them off short of the target and create an ever expanding cloud of shrapnel that becomes impossible to avoid and shreds the target. Also works as a good orbital denial weapon long term.
I don't know. But the prince of space warfare would protect us from krankor, that I do know.
The kind is mind control. Turning enemy combatants into drones for The Hive. After that, genetic manipulation. Turning drones into shit eaters. Welcome to your life.
Low visibility drones carrying a weaponized nanotech grey goo payload.
But if you're stuck with 80s tech pic related is the best you can do
I sear to God if a homie armed a space raft with the Iowa's turrets I would lose my shit. I am not sure if it's more moronic than based .
It's a last ditch attempt to defeat the alien mothership, a hastily cobbled together Orion battleship kicked into orbit on nuclear explosions - iirc they had nuke pumped lasers too.
Footfall is really over the top, at one point the aliens have a base in Iowa so the US government asks the Soviets to nuke them, pinky promise there won't be any retaliation
Worked great here tho
?t=64
I unironically love this movie
>low observable
>space
Found the moron.
Missiles, specifically long range, non-explosive missiles. Space warfare is never done in direct line of sight. We will have long-range sensors that can detect other craft from thousands of kilometers away, and AI targeting computers which perform billions of calculations before firing a missile that will track and intercept a target with nearly perfect accuracy. The missiles themselves penetrate the outer shell of the ship, causing catastrophic depressurization.
The only other guns we have on the ships are these things we call "pluggers". They're hooked up to a separate computer called a defense matrix that tracks incoming projectiles and space debris, predicting a path and firing a small "plug" to knock the object off course.
Why non explosive? You’re risking a miss that throws the entire fight at the last second. A warhead would turn the missile into an undodgeable cone of shrapnel that would shred the target.
For a few different reasons that I know of
1. it's dangerous to keep lots of explosive materials on a space craft.
2. the computers are very accurate. They don't usually miss their target. Most spacecraft cannot make on-the-fly course adjustments due to the speed they are traveling at, whereas the AI can predict exactly where they will be within a very small margin of error before launching up to 100 guided slugs at a time. The slugs are also guided to their target and can make course adjustments mid-flight.
3. the defense computers are also very accurate and don't usually miss. A class 11 defense matrix AI installed onto a laser defense grid will shoot down 100% of targets equipped with explosive warheads. By using rocket propelled solid rounds, lasers become mostly ineffective. That's why they use plugs, which are basically just solid rounds with a greater surface area, to intercept the slugs and knock them off course of the main target.
one thing to keep in mind is that the missiles being fired are a bit larger than a baseball and are usually made with depleted uranium. You don't need a very large hole to cause catastrophic decompression.
>You don't need a very large hole to cause catastrophic decompression.
I suspect a crew expecting combat would suit up and depressurise the interior.
Is it just "us" versus one other enemy? Conventional firearms and coilguns after they figure out how to prevent barrel wear.
Is there some kind of "international" community, alien or otherwise, that might object to the fact that objects in space will literally never stop moving until they hit something, turning every shot, even potentially ones that hit, into threats to literally everything behind the target? Missiles with self-detonation safeties and lasers that unfocus and eventually spread out into something ineffectual too far past the target.
The king of space warfare would be your mom, with her light-bending gravity well.
pretty easy to answer.
Railguns have great range and do ok damage but have garbage tracking.
Blasters have amazing damage, good tracking but shit range.
Autocannons have decent dps, decent range and awesome tracking.
Artillery has good damage, good range and absolutely shit tracking.
Pulse lasers have decent range, good damage and okayish tracking
Beam lasers have good range, decent damage and shit tier tracking.
>t. knower
Nuclear weapons mounted to an FTL drive
giant swords
>lasers
Nothing personal, kid.
if we are talking realistic, using weapons that actually exist and aren't magical make believe sci fi, then probably missiles, I doubt coil guns, laser or railguns would be effective in the ranges that space battles would probably be fought at (think 10,000km+).
Particle beams don't exist and there's no known way to make them exist, lsaers will diffuse out over a certain distance, coil guns and railguns will miss if the target is doing any kind of basic maneuvering.
A railgun slug will travel at 9000km/s in the vacuum of space you double Black person, now try moving a moving spaceship out of its calculated trajectory, space ships will not be agile, the limits of vacuum travel do not allow for videogame agility.
existing railguns move at 8k kilometers per HOUR dumbass, sure your magical sci fi railgun with magical materials that don't exist might go that fast, but at that point you might as well be saying "yeah and I have this gun that shoots magic bullets so you are dead" for all the good it does.
NTA but there's a reason I keep introducing Macron Guns.
Existing railguns are also in atmo.
Railguns require the projectile to be physically touching the rail. I dont care how smooth the rails are, 10+ kms is going to make for some explosive friction.
>A railgun slug will travel at 9000km/s in the vacuum of space
How the frick are you accelerating the slug to 9000km/s within the length of the gun barrel you fricking moron?
Using the current railgun technology that accelerates the slug to 2.4 km/s in the span of about 10 meters, you'd need a railgun 3.7 km long (assuming constant acceleration for the entire length of the barrel, which is moronic) to fire something at 9000km/s.
replace the gunpowder with a nuclear bomb
Where do you use gunpowder in a railgun? Are you drunk?
We have successfully weaponized manholes. What a time to be alive.
THE ONE TRUE ANSWER
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casaba-Howitzer
Now we just need to find a way to machine a gun chambered to withstand the pressure generated by 5 kiloton nuke vaporizing a kilogram of tungsten, and we can truly make a space gun.
How thick walls are we talking about here? 50 meters?
Do you think using lead instead of tungsten for the projectile would be better for the rifling and barrel life?
>bro every railgun is gonna hit 0.03c
cool story senpai
>Particle beams don't exist and there's no known way to make them exist
Particle beams exist. We call them vacuum tubes and particle accelerators but they do create beams of high speed particles.
Everyone wants to sling iron, no one wants to sling literal asteroids? Just use the Buenos Aires method.
>muh space laser magic
>muh high velocity space pellets
Always go with the coolest solution.
I threw up a bit.
Is that a sonic boom at 0:15?
Drones. Millions of cheap drones that will work as homing minefields. No beamkino for you, only misery.
Drones are a terrible idea in space. They're hugely vulnerable to lasers, and there's no such thing as a 'cheap' drone in space, at least with the technology we have in the near future. Each drone has fixed costs that you can't cut; propulsion and RCS for one. Then you need to shield them from ambient radiation, which adds mass and volume, which means you have to scale up the thrust and RCS, which adds cost, then you need even more shielding for them to have any hope of surviving laser fire for more than a tenth of a second, etc, etc.
Basically the same reason that space carriers and fighters suck.
Whoever manages to invent the first meson beam weapon will become the ruler of space.
The first guy in orbit with armed craft and the will to use them rules space.
None.
Space warfare will not involve detonating enemy ships. Why?
Because debris fields in space are a Very Bad Thing. Even a loose fleck of paint can become deadly at high enough speeds, the kind of speeds you'd be moving at for interplanetary travel. Nobody is going to be stupid enough to create giant debris fields that will be dangerous to _everybody's_ ships for god only knows how long depending on where the kabooming happened.
The only way space combat becomes a viable option is if you develop protection from the debris. And honestly, if you have protection from the debris, you have protection from the weapons that could create the debris in the first place. So, again, it isn't happening.
98iq post
Post counter argument or stfu.
space is very large
whipple shields already exist
weapons that would not struggle to penetrate a whipple shield, likewise, already exist
the mere risk of serious and prolonged downsides has never stopped humanity before
you should try having fewer opinions
>
(You)
>space is very large
So is the ocean. And like the ocean there will be shipping lanes and strategic points of interest. Any combat will take place in those areas, thus contaminating the important parts of it.
>whipple shields already exist
Spaced armor... that protects against very small rocks... at orbital velocities.
It will do nothing against the 3 pound skillet from the mess traveling at velocities twice that. Nor will it stop the adjustable wrench from the tool locker, or the 50 pound chunk of enemy armor.
>weapons that would not struggle to penetrate a whipple shield, likewise, already exist
Yes, a .50bmg from Mars should do the trick nicely.
>the mere risk of serious and prolonged downsides has never stopped humanity before
Except it isn't a risk. It's a known consequence that won't have just have downsides for "the other guy". It will have downsides for the folks that make it happen too. It's a "nobody wins" situation; not a "most people lose but I come out okay" situation.
>you should try having fewer opinions
You should try applying some critical thinking skills.
>THIS will be the development that ends warfare!
- every inventor for the last 250 years
>I just learned about kessler syndrome today from some e celeb and I'm going to make it everyone else's problem!
Shut up
>Worried about collateral damage
>Not realizing that every war ever had some measure of collateral damage
>"b-but space is different!"
and 20 seconds after the first orbital accident, someone will invent orbital clean up
space debris is essentially just metal asteroids, so you could de-orbit them with a laser, which most hypothetical space ships would have to stop space pebbles from cracking their (space)wind shield
more outlandish proposals include orbiting adhesive spheres to slowly absorb all the debris or firing space nets into orbit to entangle and clump debris together
>after the first
Space collisions have been happening for years. Some Chink or Russian satellite had a collision a few years ago and sprayed a few thousand high-velocity everywhere. We have some ideas for cleaning up space debris, but as of now there’s not a good way to get rid of it
>Because debris fields in space are a Very Bad Thing.
Do you understand how big space is? Of course you don't. Nobody does.
Debris fields are not an issue if you are not currently in orbit around some planet.
minefields
Missiles, it would be similar to modern air combat in that it is fought at extremely large distances.
Only instead of the horizon obscuring the view it would be the earth/ other planetary body occasionally obscuring the target.
The other options only make sense for close range combat which would likely never happen except maybe (Very very) briefly for two space craft orbiting the same body
>it would be similar to modern air combat in that it is fought at extremely large distances.
unlike in air-to-air combat, the extreme distances combined with the lack of a horizon would mean that the defender would have a good idea of an attack from the moment its launched rather than from the moment it meets their picket
so it would look close to how modern warships fight
the enemy has a good idea of how many projectiles enemy point-defense can defeat while the defender has a good idea of how many projectiles they are up against
so its going to be a battle of positioning to ensure that you can engage the enemy with a greater salvo than their defenses can stop
and particle beams would have a major advantage in that you would need a strong magnetic field or a screen of similiar-charged particles to deflect them
so an enemy with potent interception capabilities against missiles would be vulnerable to a particle cannon
>this thread
Everything mentioned. Then, once you figure it out.
Tapping into the antimatter grid
Throw big space rock at other ship
*goes around your rock*
okay now what
No it will be dumbass conventional chemical explosive mines, like always. Lame but true
Standard artillery shells in service around the world are rated to 20,000 Gs.
Missiles. Effectively unlimited range, carries (nuclear) payload, can maneuver.
Lasers have hard range and power limits. Range is determined by aperture diameter and wavelength and generally much shorter than one might think. Power limit is determined primarily by the platform's ability to deal with wasteheat. For these two reasons, lasers are much less effective at intercepting missiles than one might think at first glance, too. A laser needs to be large to have appreciable range, and one cannot simultaneously fire many large lasers without frying everyone on board.
Particle beams are somewhat more effective than lasers at dealing damage but pay for this with less effective range. Have otherwise the same disadvantages.
Rail and coilguns have significant time on target. If the projectiles maneuver, see missiles. If they don't, very limited effective range, but very high destructive potential.
With missiles being the best, one will of course need a means to intercept them on the way, and not when they're within doubledigit km of the target. Here, a smaller, maneuvering platform with a single laser- or preferably particle beam could shine. Hopeless against a starship, but a decent interceptor.
Which means the missiles need escorts to deal with interceptors.
And that's why fighters in space are not, in fact, a bad idea.
Relativistic space rocks.
Because if you got the FTL tech why not strap that on a rock?
MAD logic scales up. It doesn't matter if the doomsday weapon is a nuke, or a zoomy roidy boi.
Yeah, it is MAD. Due to that status, it is THE king of space warfare just that you're making it worse for everyone.
Mind you, that doesn't mean you're wrong that it would be "the king of space warfare", I suppose.
Do not waste the emperor's time citizen sit in the blue chair and await reeducation
Oh good, I'm not the only one who remembers that.
Picrel for the newfriends.
None of the above. It'll be giant frick off axes wielded by giant frick off human shaped mecha piloted by spunky teenagers.
Is there any possibility of a massive network of mirrors concentrating sunlight to create a focal point of heat like in the OG Gundam
one of those rare situations where the protagonists get the wacky superweapon
Kek, the answer is loosely yes, but it would be nothing like that. The way to weaponise a star is with a solar pumped laser, or "stellaser". You use 2 orbiting mirrors to focus the incoherent light of the star back through its own atmosphere, which is essentially plasma and thus acts as a lasing medium. You then use a third mirror to direct the output at what you want to sterilise. The output of such a laser is strong enough to render nearby star systems uninhabitable, if you want to do that. You could also use to to make a stellar highway, where space ships with solar sails ride the light beam.
>one of those rare situations where the protagonists get the wacky superweapon
Zeon had one too, dueling solar cannons.
?si=1AUUVplZ_ChBj4D-&t=161
you will never convince me this wasn't gihren hearing about the Federation's solar weapon and going "uhhh well I'm gonna make a BIGGER SOLAR WEAPON!"
None of the above. I've got two words for you:
BALL
BEARINGS
>infinite range
>extremely high energy
>indirect
>undetectable
>unstoppable
>deniable
>cheap
>fast
>energy efficient
They defeat maneuver, armor, counter missiles, laser interception, EW, basically everything aside from hiding inside an asteroid. And they scale from handheld pistols to relativistic deathrays, and anywhere from single pellets to space claymores.
This thing stopped it
Yeah, it stopped ONE ball bearing.
How about a dozen of them in a line?
Or better yet how about a meter wide shotgun spread of them. Say goodbye to you radiators, solar panels, antennas, etc...
The second ball bearing guns come out all spaceships will have to turn into featureless solid steel spheres, becoming it's own worse enemy.
It just hits the first ball bearing and they both shatter
>18cm of steel
>viable for spacecraft with current or near-term launch and propulsion capabilities
Space grapeshot. Defending your space home from space ruffians has never been so simple.
Schlock Mercenary, for all the author's faults, fleshed out space combat quite well.
AI battle cores counter-tactic'ing the opponent AI's counter-tactic counter tactics, drone sensor-missile swarm fleets, relativistic interactions,
If we ignore the really sci-fi stuff like matter teleportation and gravitic manipulation Schlock is one of the best studies for realistic future-space-capable combat.
TV/movie "man the helm!" "initiate attack pattern Delta!" is just easy to digest stuff for the birds.
Real space combat of a presumably future-tier fusion powered blahblahblah is both exceedingly boring and exceedingly complicated at the same time.
Missiles, but missiles that detonate extremely far from their target. Without atmosphere to slow the slug, EFPs can be launched from extremely long distance as soon as a probability to hit threshold is reached. Gives you a projectile with the velocity of a railgun (or more, if it's a nuclear charge) without the drawbacks of needing to be close to your opponent.
Gravity canon since spaceships have 0 resistance to gravity because they're made for space and don't weigh anything
railguns
>why?
because i like them
also i imagine a full broadside railgun volley would be kino to see
>ctrl+f Halo
>no results
Halo has one of the better takes on space combat. Including shit like your AI handling targeting and point defense for swarms of missiles and a central mounted rail gun.
Why would the UEG need this much firepower to suppress poor colonists?
Because it looks frickin' rad
Because it looks frickin' rad
>Colonists can create hidden nuclear labs and build ICBM's in complete secret
Probably because of that.
it looks frickin rad, bro
It looks frickin' sick
Lasers because they have the fastest speed.
Space battles will be done at much larger distances than anything else.
Also you will be able to easily see anything coming to your ship way before it lands.
.45 ACP, unironically
I'm working on a semi-hard scifi project at the moment and you lads are giving me some great ideas so thanks.
To contribute what I can from my own background.
>Lasers are fantastic but have limited range. Not because of travel times but because of beam divergence spreading the energy over a wider area the further it travels. Massive lasers therefore do have at least some purpose since a larger aperture minimizes Huygen's Principle diffraction and therefore keeps the beam divergence lower over distance.
>Missiles will always be faster and more maneuverable than ships, so they are going to be the primary threat for almost all fights and defeating them by electronic countermeasures, CWIS style systems, or your own interceptors becomes a priority for any ship. BSG's gigantic flak batteries are silly but the principle does somewhat hold for dealing with missile swarms. The Expanse probably handles missiles best with its own point defence systems.
>Particle weapons, railguns, etc all have a limit of travel time, even at ludicrous speeds they still give an opponent warning to get out of the way. Dust guns are probably the best use since they don't require something like plasma and could also be really good at combating missiles.
Really almost all space combat should be small-ish stealthy vessels waiting for the enemy to make a mistake and show themselves for a clean shot. That means everyone needs to run minimal life support and systems and emit minimal energy until it's time to strike whereupon you power up as fast as you can and unload while you have the element of surprise.
>Particle weapons, railguns, etc all have a limit of travel time
particle weapons could be propelled to near-C levels because individual atoms are much lighter than whole projectiles
at a certain speed, relativity takes over and they literally dont have time to spread
it would be the second fastest weapon behind only lasers themselves, but with far stronger effect
I've done some stuff with matter interferometry and after doing to checking, it looks like people (specifically the CIA because of COURSE it was) worked on matter wave coherency. Specifically they wanted to be able to precisely pump energy into parts of the atmosphere by controlling where two coherent beams interfered with each other in order to manipulate weather.
This spirals into stuff like Tesla Howitzers but before I get distracted by EM scalar waves yes, you can make coherent matter waves, Lockheed Martin has a patent for doing it.
So a low entropy, coherent phase particle beam produced by this would spread out even less and thus have even more effect at range because you can keep its impact point concentrated to burn through whatever ablative armour a ship tries to use to protect itself from dust gun or particle weapon attacks.
If you want to have a look, here's the patent number for it: US9,502.202B2
Interesting, but this system would be better at cutting through interference than projecting energy long distances. For lasers in space a lot of the dispersion is due to tiny imperfections in the lens. It seems that degree of perfection just isn't possible for mortal hands.
>relativity takes over and they literally dont have time to spread
That's not how it works.
>That's not how it works.
if using truly light particles like electrons, then you could propel them up to really close to C
at that point, the beam stops spreading because from the electrons point of view less time has passed relative to slower moving objects
so the repulsion will seem to have less effect compared to us, when to the electrons its repelling just fine
That's not how it works.
Check out atomic rockets and toughSF if you want some worldbuilding and science info. I'm pretty sure I've spent over 50 hours on that fricking website.
can we seriously discuss lasers, masers, grasers, xray lasers
i thought theyd be coherent enough for long range use in space
It's not a coherency thing, it's an efficiency thing. Lasers need cooling and power. Power supplies also need cooling. Cooling means radiators and that's a factor of surface area, not ship volume.
Long story short, as you scale up lasers you need a bigger ship to support it with the ship scaling up far faster than the output of the laser. In short, lasers are good when their small but when they get big they become a massive pain in the ass to run.
but we already have lasers that can shoot drones and missiles down. and with time the tech would improve.
And so would armor.
The problem is that space is insulating so you can't just air cool the laser. There is no air to cool it down with. If you want to get rid of heat it's either pack disposable coolant to discard or radiated into the black as Infrared. This isn't a matter of tech, it's a physical limitation of the universe.
>use heat from laser to boil water
>boiling water spins turbine creating electricity
>use electricity to power laser
>go to step 1
>Can't cool steam fast enough to turn it back into water
>Pressure in steam vessel rises to dangerous levels
>Have to vent steam to avoid an explosion
>Runs out of water
>Target is cooling armor with water.
>Resulting steam is being used to refract laser.
>Target is entirely unharmed after hours of laser attack.
I hope you aren't trying to power the laser entirely through it's own waste steam.
You could power progressively smaller and smaller lasers with the waste heat of the larger ones.
>aliens discover you've figured out the first kardashev type 3 tech, being able to absorb all energy coming out of an emitter without any losses
>you're using this to boil fricking water instead of powering transdimensional destabilators
>they shake their heads (plural, per alien) and leave the solar system until you figure out precisely what the frick you're doing
great plan actually anon
Or just use smaller lasers to begin with as a secondary weapon. The cooling problem is a bootstrap issue, keep the lasers small and the problems won't snowball.
You guys don't understand efficiency. If you heat water to 99C and it doesn't boil, your efficiency is 0%.
That assumes that you want to actually boil water with the waste heat instead of just radiating it like a reasonable person.
Semi-circles are the key to victory.
I think U shaped ambushes are the best.
It's amazing how LOGH tactics are seemingly so simple yet so hard to follow at the same time. I find myself rewinding during space battles to see if I missed something that led to victory.
>fleet A charges forward
>fleet B reverses
>XO goes "its a trap!" and the CO says "dare you question muh authority!"
>CO of fleet B says "now, counter attack!"
>fleet B moves forward again
>fleet A gets wrecked
>"where did they come from?!"
It's utterly bizarre.
In the movies at least, they are modeled after actual Roman Phalanx movements. ie: Strong armor and weapons forward, extremely vulnerable from the sides and rear.
Kircheis or whatever his name was in the Red Ship was basically the cavalry, frequently flanking and attacking enemies from the rear.
There's also the fact that comms during battle are so jammed they have to use courier shuttles to deliver orders. When people said it's Napoleonic warfare in space, they meant it.
psychic worms
In the near future:
Long range missiles
Short range gatling guns
In the future perhaps rail guns to accelerate missiles first. Also it would be nice to instantly blow up a target, but causing structural damage like small holes are already fricking problematic in space.
Light propulsed intergalactic nuclear missiles