Space combat

[Thaluikhain]

I'm not a physicist, but I can't see ramming doing much damage, if any at all. It works in cars, ships and submarines because the resistance stops the vehicle moving back. That doesn't happen in space.

Ramming is going to do extreme amounts of damage, if you can do it, because things will be travelled at extreme speeds.

Things aren't going to bounce cleanly off each other under most circumstances. If the thing is really rigid, maybe, but most of the time, the part at the back will be going forwards very fast when the part at the front hits something and decides it wants to go backwards very fast. All sorts of things are likely to break and tear in the middle.

An airplane has much less resistance behind it due to air than a submarine has, due to water.

But imagine a pair of 747s flying head on into each other as fast as they can. Then increase their speed by 10, 100, 1000 times.

...

On the other hand, by the time you get close enough to ram, the enemy has seen you coming for ages, and if weapons are involved, they'd have been used long before then.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

I'm not a physicist, but I can't see ramming doing much damage, if any at all. It works in cars, ships and submarines because the resistance stops the vehicle moving back. That doesn't happen in space.

Ramming is going to do extreme amounts of damage, if you can do it, because things will be travelled at extreme speeds.

Things aren't going to bounce cleanly off each other under most circumstances. If the thing is really rigid, maybe, but most of the time, the part at the back will be going forwards very fast when the part at the front hits something and decides it wants to go backwards very fast. All sorts of things are likely to break and tear in the middle.

An airplane has much less resistance behind it due to air than a submarine has, due to water.

But imagine a pair of 747s flying head on into each other as fast as they can. Then increase their speed by 10, 100, 1000 times.

...

On the other hand, by the time you get close enough to ram, the enemy has seen you coming for ages, and if weapons are involved, they'd have been used long before then.

Yes but in space there's nothing at all to stop it moving back. I could see a small amount of surface damage to the hull, but mostly I would think the larger object would just push the smaller one out of the way. Even air resistance is pretty significant.

 

[Andrew_C]

Just accelerate a few micrometeorites up to near-relativistic speed, slam them into your enemies planets & watch them (the planets, that is) disintegrate.

 

[LtWigglesworth]

I'm not a physicist, but I can't see ramming doing much damage, if any at all. It works in cars, ships and submarines because the resistance stops the vehicle moving back. That doesn't happen in space.

Ramming is going to do extreme amounts of damage, if you can do it, because things will be travelled at extreme speeds.

Things aren't going to bounce cleanly off each other under most circumstances. If the thing is really rigid, maybe, but most of the time, the part at the back will be going forwards very fast when the part at the front hits something and decides it wants to go backwards very fast. All sorts of things are likely to break and tear in the middle.

An airplane has much less resistance behind it due to air than a submarine has, due to water.

But imagine a pair of 747s flying head on into each other as fast as they can. Then increase their speed by 10, 100, 1000 times.

...

On the other hand, by the time you get close enough to ram, the enemy has seen you coming for ages, and if weapons are involved, they'd have been used long before then.

Yes but in space there's nothing at all to stop it moving back. I could see a small amount of surface damage to the hull, but mostly I would think the larger object would just push the smaller one out of the way. Even air resistance is pretty significant.

But by your logic, a kinetic slug would do nothing but move backwards.

If you hit something you lose momentum. so for a 20 ton starship travelling at 20 kilometers a second, hitting a 5 ton starship travelling at 20 kilometers a second it will slow down to a two starhip mess travelling at 12 kilometers a second. But it will give out about 640 GJ of energy. That's the same as a 150 kiloton nuclear warhead. Ramming will do stuff.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Yes but in space there's nothing at all to stop it moving back. I could see a small amount of surface damage to the hull, but mostly I would think the larger object would just push the smaller one out of the way. Even air resistance is pretty significant.

The momentum of the two objects is going to be significant.

Also, NASA has already done this, they wanted to look inside a comet, so they blew a big chunk out of one by flying something into one at high speed.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html

So, it would appear to work.

For that matter, the moon is covered in craters. So is Phobos, which is a moon of Mars and is tiny.

...

IIRC, some astrologer tried to sue NASA over this, cause they were mucking up the heavens or something.

 

[rcs619]

Yes but in space there's nothing at all to stop it moving back. I could see a small amount of surface damage to the hull, but mostly I would think the larger object would just push the smaller one out of the way. Even air resistance is pretty significant.

I don't think you're taking the insane speeds of spaceflight and space combat into account. This isn't like two cars bumping into each other. If you fire a railgun slug at a starship at 40% the speed of light (~120,000km/s ) it isn't going to bounce off. It is going to impact, transfer an absolutely insane amount of kinetic energy onto a single point, and absolutely shred whatever it touches. That's partly why kinetic weapons are so ideal for vacuum combat. With no friction or air resistance, you can accelerate them to however fast your technology allows, and when you start flinging objects, even relatively small objects, at a percentage of light-speed, there's just no amount of armor that is going to let you shrug of a hit. It's going to pierce, rip a chunk out of your ship and kill some of your crew (and that's assuming you have advanced enough shields/armor to absorb enough of the impact to avoid having your ship outright destroyed by it).

In low-speed collisions, yes, things bounce off of each other (think two cars sliding into each other on an icy road). But you're talking about things moving at a fraction of light-speed. I mean, they estimated that the comet that killed the dinosaurs was only moving at 30 km/s when it hit (granted, it was a few kilometers wide). You see tiny, fast-moving objects doing massive damage to larger ones all the time in nature. A railgun slug hitting a starship is no different than an asteroid striking a planet in anything besides scale. It's gonna wreck stuff

 

[Leemaster777]

Clearly, the future of space combat is Grappler Ships.


I eagerly await the day we discover hot alien catgirls.

 

[Disaster Button]

Whilst I'm not sure how space combat would be exactly, I imagine that it would have some kind of policy, or would be designed, to avoid shots missing and then continuing until they strike some planet somewhere. So maybe guided weapons.

And since I mentioned Battlestar Galactica, that remake show actually handles space combat pretty realistically for the most part.

I just don't get one thing throught the entire series.
If the raptors could carry enough nuclear missiles to blow the whole cylon colony apart, why weren't they employed against the dozens of base stars they encountered?

Captcha: chicken soup. Yep i may need one, bowel infection is killing me.

Probably because they only had a limited number of nukes. But since everyone saw the assault on the Colony as the last mission due to the damage to Galatica, they decided "frak it" and strapped every last nuke they had to the raptors since they wouldn't need them again.

 

[Admiral Stukov]

Babylon 5. That is all.

Also, are there any works of science fiction which cover space combat "realistically"?

Again, Babylon 5, at least all the human tech. The show's writers cooperated with actual scientists to get it as believable as possible.
The Omega Destroyer, one of the coolest ships ever.

Spoiler: Starfury fighter, spoilered for huge image

 

[Da Orky Man]

I'm not a physicist, but I can't see ramming doing much damage, if any at all. It works in cars, ships and submarines because the resistance stops the vehicle moving back. That doesn't happen in space.

Ramming is going to do extreme amounts of damage, if you can do it, because things will be travelled at extreme speeds.

Things aren't going to bounce cleanly off each other under most circumstances. If the thing is really rigid, maybe, but most of the time, the part at the back will be going forwards very fast when the part at the front hits something and decides it wants to go backwards very fast. All sorts of things are likely to break and tear in the middle.

An airplane has much less resistance behind it due to air than a submarine has, due to water.

But imagine a pair of 747s flying head on into each other as fast as they can. Then increase their speed by 10, 100, 1000 times.

...

On the other hand, by the time you get close enough to ram, the enemy has seen you coming for ages, and if weapons are involved, they'd have been used long before then.

Yes but in space there's nothing at all to stop it moving back. I could see a small amount of surface damage to the hull, but mostly I would think the larger object would just push the smaller one out of the way. Even air resistance is pretty significant.

But by your logic, a kinetic slug would do nothing but move backwards.

If you hit something you lose momentum. so for a 20 ton starship travelling at 20 kilometers a second, hitting a 5 ton starship travelling at 20 kilometers a second it will slow down to a two starhip mess travelling at 12 kilometers a second. But it will give out about 640 GJ of energy. That's the same as a 150 kiloton nuclear warhead. Ramming will do stuff.

Given combat distances of tens of thousands of kilometers, ramming will be roughly as useful as ramming today, which is to say, worse than useless. This is because, while your engines are desperately trying to close with the enemy, all they have to do is loose a couple of rocks, and dodge, leaving you to slam into the rocks at a ridiculous spped, wiping your spacecraft out.

And don't think the other guy gets off. Blood, do you know what physics actually is? Air doesn't prevent bullets from bouncing back; it's a relation ship between angle of impact, strength of material and velocity of impact. A railgun slug travelling at any decent speed will go straight through any reasonable armour. As depressing as it is, most modern combat consists of one-hit kills. therefore, point-defence and such will be more important than armour.

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

It's a good read.

 

[smartalec]

The setup in Iain Banks' Culture novels: space combat is handled at vast distances, computed by AI, and over in a second or less, with almost no human input.

 

[uttaku]

surely you could manage space stealth ships if you used drones instead of manned craft?
This would eliminate the 296k that the ships would otherwise be giving off and assuming you know the location of the enemy station/planet/death star you could launch them with an initially powerful thrust and then coast on the momentum. Any residual heat/slight heat given off from processes/very minor manovering would be dealt with via a half decent heat sink.

As i see it the main issue with stealth in space is that its only going to work up till the very 1st shot, after wwhich the heat given off from the laser/propellent/rocket engine would give you away, and given the large distances that space combat would occur at te enemy will have time to fire back, probably ensuring the destrcution of both sides.

Therefore I would argue that the most viable tactic would be to locate the enemies core worlds and just launch massive waves of drones/nukes/asteriods at them in the hope of overwhelming their defences and destroying their main base of operations.
Going further down this route an effectinve deterent to enemy actions would be to let it be know that you have deposited around the area numerous caches of automated stealth drones that would activate at random intervals if your home worlds where destroyed...

 

[LtWigglesworth]

I'm not a physicist, but I can't see ramming doing much damage, if any at all. It works in cars, ships and submarines because the resistance stops the vehicle moving back. That doesn't happen in space.

Ramming is going to do extreme amounts of damage, if you can do it, because things will be travelled at extreme speeds.

Things aren't going to bounce cleanly off each other under most circumstances. If the thing is really rigid, maybe, but most of the time, the part at the back will be going forwards very fast when the part at the front hits something and decides it wants to go backwards very fast. All sorts of things are likely to break and tear in the middle.

An airplane has much less resistance behind it due to air than a submarine has, due to water.

But imagine a pair of 747s flying head on into each other as fast as they can. Then increase their speed by 10, 100, 1000 times.

...

On the other hand, by the time you get close enough to ram, the enemy has seen you coming for ages, and if weapons are involved, they'd have been used long before then.

Yes but in space there's nothing at all to stop it moving back. I could see a small amount of surface damage to the hull, but mostly I would think the larger object would just push the smaller one out of the way. Even air resistance is pretty significant.

But by your logic, a kinetic slug would do nothing but move backwards.

If you hit something you lose momentum. so for a 20 ton starship travelling at 20 kilometers a second, hitting a 5 ton starship travelling at 20 kilometers a second it will slow down to a two starhip mess travelling at 12 kilometers a second. But it will give out about 640 GJ of energy. That's the same as a 150 kiloton nuclear warhead. Ramming will do stuff.

Given combat distances of tens of thousands of kilometers, ramming will be roughly as useful as ramming today, which is to say, worse than useless. This is because, while your engines are desperately trying to close with the enemy, all they have to do is loose a couple of rocks, and dodge, leaving you to slam into the rocks at a ridiculous spped, wiping your spacecraft out.

And don't think the other guy gets off. Blood, do you know what physics actually is? Air doesn't prevent bullets from bouncing back; it's a relation ship between angle of impact, strength of material and velocity of impact. A railgun slug travelling at any decent speed will go straight through any reasonable armour. As depressing as it is, most modern combat consists of one-hit kills. therefore, point-defence and such will be more important than armour.

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

It's a good read.

Yeah, I've read it, and I'm fully aware that in tactical terms ramming will be as useful as a chocolate kettle. I was just trying to give blood an appreciation of basic physics regarding collisions at high speed.

 

[Zantos]

I think there'd be a fair amount of focus alongside the missiles and rail guns for small squads to attempt to sabotage the enemy ship from inside, a la Thunderhawk ram. Anyone who played Battlefront 2 knows that grenades in a ships control room are very, very effective.