What will actual ship to ship space combat be like?

saving fuel for guidance decreases the top speed of the missile, which exacerbates the long distances involved in space

the lack of an effective horizon or stealth means the defender will see the missile from a very far distance and ready any sort of point defence far in advance of impact
a missile will now need to balance its fuel economy between speed, guidance, and evasion of point defence in a manner not seen on earth
a missile that saves its fuel budget to track evasive maneuvers done by the target and to avoid counter measures will now have far less fuel to accelerate itself

This might actually be a good excuse to have space fighters, although they'd obviously not have actual human pilots in them. A drone fighter that can do most of the acceleration to the target, then release a bunch of missiles which can focus on evading the point defense, all while allowing the manned command vessels to stand off at a comfortable distance and lob railgun shots at eachother. Of course then you'd need drone interceptors to shoot down the enemy's drone fighters and it becomes the Drone Wars.

Probably dildos in space shooting at each other. Won't be like your animes.

This is how it will actually work.
>Drone mother ship launches smaller drones at a distant target or suspected target area.
>Once drones close to target, they start firing a variety of missiles and rail weapons from different angles to saturate the target area and negate the ability for the target to maneuver or perform successful point defense.
>Jamming and dazzling also performed by drones and missiles as they close to effective range.
>Drones will also perform point defense against missiles and drones launched by the enemy.

>lasers can strike with literally no warning and melt important things
Lasers are pretty much the worst possible weapon for space combat because they create extreme amounts of heat that have to be dissipated with vulnerable radiators, while the enemy can easily render them ineffectual by armoring their craft with absorbent, reflective or ablative material and rolling their craft when hit to deny a constant focal point.
The only thing that they could potentially be good for is destroying missiles and even then they probably won't be very effective at that compared to kinetic kill devices or other missiles.

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> This might actually be a good excuse to have space fighters
No, there will never be space fighters.

literally the only other weapon worth using are missiles, since they can be made very light for their velocity and are recoil less

any sort of kinetic weapon would be useless in space for the purpose of being dead weight, since ammunition has relatively heavy weight
and armor is dead weight, so no targets in space would have any sort of appreciable armor, even ablative or reflective armor

lasers dickhead, didn't you watch the movie?

This is a truism which assumes the fighter is like the ones you see in star wars and BSG, etc. The "fighter" I'm picturing is essentially a large missile with some point defenses of its own, which carries a payload of smaller anti-ship missiles. Like a SLAM that can also engage and destroy other SLAMs. Heck you could even stick with the open cycle nuclear propulsion, although you'd need some hydrogen or something as well for propellant given the lack of atmosphere.

What advantages does putting all your missiles in once place where they can be destroyed with a single hit have vs firing missiles separately? If you really need point defense just throw a couple middles that are all point defense in with your missile cloud.

See the expanse on syfy

>ships at impossible distances firing automated missiles at each other well out of line of sight and it taking hours for either side to see what’s about to hit them

>since they can be made very light
Any laser capable of melting metal over a meaningful distance in space is not going to be even remotely light, bud. The cooling and energy source alone would be ginormously large and massively heavy.

>so no targets in space would have any sort of appreciable armor, even ablative or reflective armor
Even a small amount of armor would render much, much, much, much heavier laser weapons obsolete, so if anything all targets would have armor.

Lasers cost practically no resources for a fusion-powered ship to vomit at another ship, where conventional munitions take up room, have to be restocked, and they take up room.

> Lasers cost practically no resources for a fusion-powered ship
Even fission powered ships can shoot lasers as fast as they can dump the waste heat.

Space ship to ship combat would probably be very similiar to cold war era sub to sub encounters.

Or, two ships "parked" at a distance from eachother while onboard computer nerd try desperately to remotely disable or compromise ship systems and comunications before the other one until one ship is rendered helpless, then either force surrender or attack life support systems.

You seem to be under the impress that lasers will be used to melt enemy ships, instead of the much more efficient method of heating a target so rapidly it literally explodes a small portion of it and damages it with mechanical force. Heat dispersion with any known material will not stop this damage.

Room is much less of a concern if you build the things in space and don't need to escape an atmosphere and/or gravity well with them.

I don't think you understand how lasers actually work, friend. To be able to maintain a useful focal diameter at 'space combat' ranges, a weaponized laser would have to be extremely large and long. Furthermore, to generate enough heat to damage enemy ships or missiles at these distances, it would need an extreme amount of cooling, which would take up huge amounts of space and weight.
Lastly, you also need huge amounts of heavy, bulky capacitors to shunt enough power to the laser when you need it.

There's nothing light or small about laser weapons.

we can't know how (yet) but we know where. china's recent activity confirms.

near term: capture the lagrange points vs deny the lagrange points
long term: fight for the moon

platforms and tactics unknowable. unless earth consolidates beforehand i think this phase will be the great filter.

Plus with kinetic weapons most of the weight is in the ammunition, so the more you shoot the lighter you get, whereas with a laser the weight is constant since it's all in the weapon itself and its support systems.

Ya’ll niggas don’t realize that missiles will not work due to it being an uncontained explosion (which doesn’t work in space). Lasers need to be fucking massive to do any large amount of cutting into thick metal. The only weapons that would work in space are railguns. With space Newton’s third law of motion does not exist so a large mass hitting an object in space will send that object careening in a similar direction the large mass was traveling. Unless the object was traveling at speeds high enough towards the large mass that when they collide it only slows down the object.

>instead of the much more efficient method of heating a target so rapidly it literally explodes a small portion
A) Absorbent, reflective and ablative armors would all SIGNIFICANTLY reduce the ability of a weaponized laser to cause explosive heating. Ablative armor in particular would make this sort of weapon totally useless.
B) Causing explosive heating cross a large distance would require an extremely fine focus and generate huge amounts of heat, meaning that your laser, capcitors and cooling system would have to be even bigger and heavier.
C) Virtually all of the energy from the explosion would be wasted due to the lack of pressure in space. There really isn't a less efficient way to use a laser in space, other than maybe using it as a lance or something.

Not a good idea bro.

>ship to ship space combat
We'll never know, because it's pure fiction.

So was mechanized warfare when it was first conceived.

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> Ya’ll niggas don’t realize that missiles will not work due to it being an uncontained explosion (which doesn’t work in space).
Imagine being this retarded.

> Let’s assume technology is advanced enough to have spaceships battling
> let’s also assume that lasers haven’t advanced at all from early 21st century designs

recommend me some good books by Wells

No missiles, since modern anti missile tech is already at the point of making missiles much less effective (wind breaker, for example).
It would be a ship dropping single shot laser pods.
>Can't dissipate heat effectively using the ship itself
>Just drop the laser cannon into space, let it fire once or twice, and then melt itself with excess heat
Either this, or if someone figures out how to launch (tiny) projectiles at sufficient speeds to make them unavoidable at certain ranges.

just use bomb-pumped lasers at that point, and stick them on the end of missiles to get them just outside the envelope of the enemy's point defense

he wrote a "short history of the world" type book. written before the institutional capture. well written, almost fun. freely available online.

he got the future spot on, so why not get his take on the past?

It wouldn't feel very much like combat, more like some kinda board game where you use lasers and missiles to heard each others ships onto vectors where you want them to be so that one of your missiles and lasers can actually hit. This could go on for weeks, months, or even years depending on how far away the ships are when they're given permission to engage. In order to just get it over with, they'll likely end up trying to close distance until their missiles are known to be likely to not run out of propellant before getting close enough to hit the target, as estimated by thousands of simulations. But on a long enough timeline, there will still be the occasional ship in orbit around Jupiter that manages to destroy a ship around Mars, with a missile launched a year and a half ago. Missiles won't necessarily work exactly like what's used against aircraft today, for example, some might shoot lasers, some might carry a nuclear shaped charge, others might just be carriers for a ton of little mines. The mines might be a bit more like little recoilless rifles. Missile complexity depends on budget and available resources.

One thing I can say with certainty is that everyone will know exactly where everyone's ships, missiles, and mines are at all times. Shells and flak may be easier to hide, but anything self propelled can be detected and, until it does another burn, have it's course calculated. Exact orientation is harder to determine, and it can only be calculated when something will have to change course in order to do something that it may or may not choose to do.

The War in the Air

A new weapon being developed for land warfare has nothing to do with the pure fantasy of solar system colonization and the even bigger pipedream of militaries fighting in deep space.

To play the devil's advocate, some people theorise that you could use disposable heat sink material wash off the heat and then dump it out of the craft once its maxed out. But then you're limiting the maximum amount of shots you can make as well as carrying a absolutely inane amount of heat sink material.

>let’s also assume that lasers haven’t advanced at all from early 21st century designs
It's a question of basic physics, friend. If you posses technology to build a laser that can produce adequate focus and heat to damage a very distant metal object in space, without being too large, too heavy, too hot or too energy inefficient... then you can make the laser obsolete by applying the whatever material you're using to cool the weapon to the outside of your ship. More so, you can also apply that energy/heat/weight efficiency to rail weapons, missile engines etc. and make lasers look like toys.

My idea is it's gonna be fought at super long rangecause there's infinite line of sight/radar/whatever range.
Therefore, manouver does not matter because yu will realistically almost always face the enemy at a very tiny angle. Ships would look ike really elongated pyramids, with the nose pointing towards the enemy. Since you can't get flanked, you slope your armor to a point. If the enemy uses missiles, they would have to come from the front really fast or you'd hit them with anti-missile stuff and they can't hit you from the side cause they'd be coming at you from straight ahead at high speed. If they manouvered to make a circle, they'd have to slow down and you would get them with AA/AM.

You play Children of a Dead Earth? Like that.

>saving fuel for guidance decreases the top speed of the missile, which exacerbates the long distances involved in space

no it doesn’t once it stops accelerating it’s topped out newton third law and because of the low friction in space the deceleration will be a nominal effect at best

> It's a question of basic physics, friend. If you posses technology to contain an explosion to propel a metallic slug to damage a very distant metal object in space, without being too large, too heavy, too hot or too energy inefficient... then you can make the chemically propelled metallic slug obsolete by applying the whatever material you're using to contain the explosion to the outside of your ship.

You need Oxygen for combustion. And last I heard there is no oxygen in space. So if you were to launch a missile at a ship you better pray it hits the ships airlock cause otherwise it’s a dud.

all fuel not used for acceleration to maximum speed is mass that slows you down, since the extra weight saved for guidance is dead weight that resists its initial acceleration

He means that if you use fuel on course corrections, then that fuel can't be used for boosting, which is brainlet as fuck the amount of fuel needed for course correction would be minuscule.

This thread is full of unimaginative fuck boys.
>hur dur big black balls and drones
No wonder the future looks like shit,

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Weak bait mate.

How insanely braindead would you have to be to think that anyone is talking about chemically propelled ballistics?

Yeah, wright is crazy. He'll never make a flying machine! Man, that telephone, right? Never gonna happen. Radio? Ha.

you don’t need to melt the metal you just need to melt the crew, how do you think you get rid of all that heat in space

Yes, lets just ignore the numerous times that predictions of the future were way off course because muh mars .

you have no concept of scale or industrial process. we're eating the seed corn in our gravity well. humans can't have space opera. we got the low hanging fruit. yay.

ass effect had a semi-sensible view of it, before it went and jumped the space shark. shuffle around taking potshots hoping to score a lucky hit, assuming the other guy doesn't just decide to fuck off.

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look up a glycerin molecule and figure out where the oxygen is comming from

>Crew
>Space combat
Jesus....

>how do you think you get rid of all that heat in space
Attach a cooling system to the hull plates and dissipate the heat across the system then radiate it it off.
How do you think that the guys firing the laser are going to get rid of the astronomically higher heat generation of the laser? Like I've been saying, lasers are not ever going to be good weapons in space unless you work out how to break physics and don't tell your enemy.

The argument that lasers won’t work because the heat dispersion systems will also work in defense is the same argument that the materials needed to propel bullets from firearms will also be able to protect you from bullets. Technically true but it didn’t stop bullets from becoming the dominant method of killing people.

remember that the ISS surface area is 1/5 radiator and that radiation is the slowest form of heat transmission by along shot. no crew is good but remember if you want to send any command to a far away ship it’s about a minute per AU

blanket fire of small projectiles will be a thing.
Overwhelming a target with fire will be a thing
optics tie in with recognition software currently - so ship detection will be like the scifi movies or better
counter measure ships/drones will be in heavy use.
overwhelming your enemies with superior numbers of threat vectors will be the primary threat

space war will be scary AF

Last i checked, force equals mass times acceleration. Lob a large rock at any ship and it will be blown to bits.

Railguns, are you stupid?

>The argument that lasers won’t work because the heat dispersion systems will also work in defense is the same argument that the materials needed to propel bullets from firearms will also be able to protect you from bullets.

That comparison is completely wrong and you really need to stop talking out your ass about things you don't understand.

Here's an accurate gun analogy for space based lasers:
>You create a new .22 cal rifle.
>It's got great terminal ballistics... for a 22.
>....But time you fire the rifle a 20mm around fires directly at your chest from a secondary barrel.
>You can theoretically overcome this issue by putting 2'' steel shield between you and the gun, but this isn't really practical to move around with and it's going to break pretty quickly.
>Meanwhile the other guy can put on a soft vest and make your gun useless.
That's space lasers.

>remember that the ISS surface area is 1/5 radiator and that radiation is the slowest form of heat transmission by along shot.
No matter how much heat the system has to dissipate, it will still be astronomically less heat than the ship firing the laser has to dissipate, so the target ship will always win without question.

>no crew is good but remember if you want to send any command to a far away ship it’s about a minute per AU
There's no conceivable reason why warships wouldn't be autonomous. There is no strategy that a human captain could come up with that would trump the fact that humans require prohibitive amounts of space and weight on ships and can't handle g forces.
If you were fighting crewed ships all you would need to do is have your robot lob missiles or projectiles at the extremely small and predictable area that the ship could maneuver to without killing the crew with gs and watch it go boom.

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>What will actual ship to ship space combat be like?

-Both sides prefer long-range engagements
-Short range fights are extremely brutal and quick to conclude
-Fleet combat ships are called "wallers" as in "ships of the wall". Walls of battle instead of line of battle (ie. line of battle on 3D map)
-Ballistic stealth approach is very dangerous to side attempting it if they are not actually as stealthy as they think they are
-Always should assume the enemy has seeded the whole system with passive sensor platforms

>missiles dont have enough delta-V to both guide itself and perform evasive maneuvers
>lasers also lose coherence at long distance

Main weapons are missiles with bomb pumped laser/gamma-ray/x-ray warheads; Multi-drive missile design allows for up to tens of millions of kilometers of engagement envelope while being able of maneuvers at the end of run; Doesn't actually have to hit the target with the missile, attack is success as long as missile is capable of turning itself towards target

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the larger a rock, the more fuel is needed to accelerate it to proper speed
a larger rock is also easier to detect and therefore easier to intercept
the fuel needed to accelerate a rock to speed has itself weight, which also needs to be lifted and attached to the rock, which will need fuel

it is also more difficult to direct a rock off its present course if its heavy, making it much harder to direct should your target decide to change course, which means yet more fuel you have to carry which is yet more weight

the alternative would be an incredibly small rock which is hard to detect and easier to accelerate
but this can be stopped by things like a whipple shield

Google self oxidizing

probably like the 1 submarine battle in history. blindly firing torpedo's and hoping for a hit.

>-Fleet combat ships are called "wallers" as in "ships of the wall". Walls of battle instead of line of battle (ie. line of battle on 3D map)

logh in rl soon

honorverse.fandom.com/wiki/Ship_of_the_Wall

That's cool, didn't know someone else did the whole line of battle but in 3d

youtube.com/watch?v=ZG-NvzAAJhw was what I was referencing

I don't think you understand how big space is. At the ranges the space combat would likely take place, if you're off by even a thousandth of a degree in any direction you're going to miss the other guy by like 300 miles or some shit

You pray that your ship doesn't get hit

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Holy shit. Fucking metal. SPACE COMBAT WHEN!

This.

>ships will be bispacial meaning they can float in liquids and transverse space
>ships will need the ability to land on planets

Hopefully NOW

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Wall formations in logh are pretty stupid, honestly. Realistically, the first wall battle would be over in one salvo with 100% casualties on one side, if not both, since the whole thing is just a shooting gallery where nobody should realistically be able to miss and nobody can really maneuver.

Also, when you think about it to defeat a wall all you really need to do is make ships with engines in the center of the hull at right angles to the frontal cannons, while maintaining the smale cylinder shape. That way you could travel perpendicular to the wall and maneuver a much higher speeds, while also being able to circle and flank the wall while not taking your guns off it.
Then every battle you could hit the gas and rapidly encircle the enemy outside firing range and force him to break his wall up.

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this, but now on amazon

just watch the expanse, nobody else has thought it through as well

Ramming.

dumping expanse battle gifs

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first was point defense cannons used offensively, second was torps, this one is rail guns

these three make up the standard weapons of Sol system in the 2300s

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They don't try to hide the casualty rates in LOTGH.

Most battles have a casualty rate of over 80% on both sides

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more PDCs

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and more PDCs because they're pretty af

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>Realistically, the first wall battle would be over in one salvo with 100% casualties on one side, if not both, since the whole thing is just a shooting gallery where nobody should realistically be able to miss and nobody can really maneuver.

They've got intense electronic countermeasures that ruin accuracy at even relatively close ranges. That and the reason most of the fleets are arranged the way they are is because they're liable to lose communications if they're too diffuse, the flagships are usually the only ones that can send commands to other detachments and even then they are often forced to send shuttles because its not completely reliable.

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If the writings of a communist are down your alley...
The War of the Worlds is a critique of imperialism and The Time Machine one of class society, but both are good reads.

Using 2mm-5mm sized projectiles in a rail gun weapon would be fine since you could accelerate them to an appreciable percentage of light speed would give them huge energy and allow you to carry a very large amount of projectiles

One thing I really love about that show is that the rail guns go through the ships like butter and the close combat is all about spraying random patterns of holes through the enemy, hoping to hit as many vital systems as possible.
So refreshing compared to typical space stuff where a hit means either a catastrophic explosion or 10% down on the deflector shield.

should read the books if you haven't, they pull off some bonkers shit

hate to break it to you guys but prolonged state of micro gravity is highly destructive for the human body
for us to become a interstellar civilisation would mean to either find a realist way to create artificial gravity or embrace the singularity and turn ourselves into machines, and at this point the later seems way more probable

Until shields are a thing it will basically be forever war, extreme range with drones launching drones at each other

BELTALOWDA

>for us to become a interstellar civilisation would mean to either find a realist way to create artificial gravity
Maintain constant acceleration or centrifugal force or both

Are you negros really forgetting about Casaba howitzers? Come on, they're perfect.

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Have you ever thought about how wild war of the worlds from a military progress sort of angle?

>When HG wrote that book in 1898 the tripods and their death rays and gas were an unimaginably powerful force that no contemporary army could even hope to stand against.
>40 years later, any of the major powers would have cleaned them up pretty easily.
>100 years later a few guys with planes could have destroyed their entire invasion force before the martians even knew they were under attack.
>120 years later we could probably glass a lot of mars's surface without too much build up.
Crazy stuff.

I really want to check them out but my local library never carry anything that could be considered popular.

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>I really want to check them out but my local library never carry anything that could be considered popular.
Have you tried making requests on new books?