Space warfare

i think we will use small ships that will get up close and fire small lasers at each other.

>so lasers are useless at long range

Attached: 1547894940154.jpg (574x713, 44K)

Read "The Forever War"

Relativity means "battles" will be fought over decades with essentially drones slamming into each other.

i agree us using radios to find life on other systems is like a chimp screaming in the woods hoping it will find humans

telescope + prediction based on trajectory
hyper advanced 16th century technology
bruh do you know what physics is

Attached: sadavamaria.png (420x420, 263K)

I can't see a valid argument against putting battleships in space. Seems to work for the Japanese...

Attached: XvrIqcg.png (1280x534, 1.07M)

this
anyone who thinks differently is a hopeful moron

light has to travel from the target to your eyes so you can fire at a target that is out of date

do you read

lets just think about this. if thare is a target next to the sun and we are next to earth it will take some 8 minutes for the light from the ship to reach our eyes. then we fire are laser that will take 8 minutes to reach its target by then they will have moved a vary long ways away from ware the laser will hit

fucking read the post

>Captain, we have an incoming projectile 70 million space miles out
> it'll reach us in 10 days
>EVASIVE MANEUVERS!

>telescope + prediction based on trajectory
hyper advanced 16th century technology
bruh do you know what physics is
>load randomized RCS/thruster bursts at randomized intervals into the navigation computer.
At a relatively modest range of 2 light-minutes, any active(RADAR/LIDAR) targeting data will be 4 minutes old by the time you receive it. Any passive(optical/thermal) data will be two minutes old. Assuming you manage to lock, aim and fire on the target the instant the data reaches your ship, the laser you fire will hit the area you target 4(passive) to 6(active) minutes after it was in the position you observed. Assume your target has a thruster(s) capable of instantaneous 1g acceleration on the ship and they fire a 1 second burst of acceleration a second after your observation point. They will have gained ~9.8 m/s of velocity from that burn. By the time your laser reaches your target point, the target will have moved 2352(passive) or 3528(active) meters from the position your data predicted them to be at.
Totally easy to hit them long range targets with lasers bro.

you are going to predict ware a target is on sight?

>ywn see Pillar of Autumn MAC launch 500 tons of freedom at Covenant scum on Captain Keyes orders
Why even live anymore?

Attached: 1508135415757.jpg (600x554, 43K)

yes but their will be a delay of 4 to 6 minutes ware you have no idea ware they are going. what happens if they changer direction? or take evasive manoeuvres?

multiple lazers all firing in a targeted pattern
think of how we track hurricanes on the news
just fill any vectors they can take with hot light
be like a lazer shotgun

Either you replied to the wrong post or you do not understand English very well.

So you're going to saturate a volume of space that is 5.44e10 cubic meters minimum with every volley you fire?
I don't even want to begin to think about the amount of energy you'd need to accomplish this.

then why use a laser at all why not just fire a nuke. if we have just given up on shoting the target with one laser

i do think laser would be vary good on a death star like weapon. because all you need to hit a orbiting target is how fast it is going.

>then why use a laser at all why not just fire a nuke. if we have just given up on shoting the target with one laser
Not the laser tard, but unfocused nukes in space are just expensive fireworks.

dont need to have more than 4 (there are only 4 directions you can go) i wouldnt think
use an AI and just start with the most probable firing solution then move down the list constantly updating the tracking data
plus if they are 2 ligt minutes out it will probably take them a week to actually get here
presumably the lasers will be firing from space and so they wont need much cooling and could fire rapidly

i thought we ware talking about lasers? wtf are you talking about?

death star is dumb
any advanced race could just put engines on an asteroid/ use an orbiting mass to nudge it into a collision course

you could overcome that problem with arrays of the laser weapons to the point where a hit was almost certain

>dont need to have more than 4 (there are only 4 directions you can go)
Stopped reading here. Not sure if trolling or actually fucking retarded.

> there are only 4 directions you can go
you can go in two directions at once
and you can slow down and speed up
and you can go farther or come closer

>dont need to have more than 4 (there are only 4 directions you can go)
That's not how the universe works.
>presumably the lasers will be firing from space and so they wont need much cooling and could fire rapidly
That's not how space works.

i mean death star like. as in big ass planet buster laser

I agree however, It would require a thrust system to allow the ship to flip to attack on different vectors.

It's that or just mirror the battleship.

Lower Bridge

Upper Bridge

Lower Turret

Uppper Turret.

bruh think of a cube
those are your directions
you can go in 6 ways total
you can only chose 4 of them based on your current vector of being an ALREADY MOVING SPACESHIP
just take more than 10 sec to think about shit

> ALREADY MOVING SPACESHIP
what?
i did not say it was moving.
are you ok?
do you need help?

yeah its a waste of resources
the best way to destroy a plant would be with an asteroid or a lab created plague
think of how much energy it would take to move a death star vs sending drones to infect people or using an orbiting mass to drag an asteroid into a planets path

>6 ways total

>grug go left
>grug go up
>grug go down
>grug go right
>grug no think way go up and left
> grug only go one way

why would the spaceship be stopped?
and actually nothing is static in the universe (except the universal background radiation lol)
all motion is relative

cannot go in two directions at once DUMB-ASS

why on just drop a shit load of tiny rocks around their planet so they have a lot of space debris

why are you targeting satellites?
the people on the ground are the enemy right

>cannot go in two directions at once DUMB-ASS
ok hears what you are going to do

stand up
figure out ware north is
walk north west in your room
their you go you walked two directions at once

Isn’t age of space a depressing thing?
>want to explore new planets
>take 10 years or so sleeping in ice chamber
>get to new planet
>it’s nothing but rocks
>repeat
>get sniped or captured by pirates/space worms/space ghosts

>dur hur direction is different than vector
youre right i was using incorrect nomenclature
i forget you people cannot read into shit so here ill clarify
YOU CANNOT TRAVEL IN TWO VECTORS AT THE SAME TIME

>take 10 years or so sleeping in ice chamber

what?
10 years?
even at the speed of light it will take hundreds of years to each alpha centauri.

>you can go in 6 ways total
You have 6 nominal directions of thrust, positive x, negative x, positive y, negative y, positive z, negative z.
>you can only chose 4 of them based on your current vector of being an ALREADY MOVING SPACESHIP
You don't understand how vectors actually work do you?
Example: I have a current vector equivalent to (20,0,0), meaning i'm moving 20 m/s in the positive x direction. If I continue to remain on that vector, i'll travel 1200 meters in the x direction in a minute assuming nothing interferes with my velocity. I can apply thrust in any of the six directions I mentioned earlier. So say I apply enough thrust to equal a vector of (-10.10,0), or the equivalent of ~14 m/s in a direction that is 45 degrees from the negative x axis and positive y axis. Since I've added new velocity to my vector, we have to combine the old vector and the thrust vector to get my new heading vector. (20,0,0)+(-10,10,0)=(10,10,0) or ~14 m/s in the direction that is 45 degrees from both the positive x and y axes. This change also means that I would only travel 840 meters from my initial position within a minute. This would also result in me being ~848 meters from the position I would have been in after a minute if I had stayed on my original vector.

Weeks of utter boredom broken by seconds of terror.

>YOU CANNOT TRAVEL IN TWO VECTORS AT THE SAME TIME

ok fine

you are in the middle of a box and the exit is in the top left

take a path that is the shortest way to the exit

you will be moving up left and forward.

yes you can change the direction of travel but not to two directions at once. that means under normal circumstances if you are moving under forward thrust there is only two axises(however you spell it) you can move along, thats 4 directions. unless your ship is made of magic, you cannot be in two places at once and you cannot decelerate instantly, and you CAN NOT travel on two vectors at the same time

Attached: images (1).jpg (314x160, 5K)

youre moving on two axses along ONE vector

Assuming you have the tech to accelerate your ship to any significant % of light speed the best way to clear a planet is to put it on any chunk of rock and hit the planet. Unless you meant bio-engineering was best for keeping it afterwards.

my dad is obama and my other dad runs Jow Forums so you will be depoerted and sind ban from the chan of the 4.
also im getting of i am going to go jerk off

>even at the speed of light it will take hundreds of years to each alpha centauri.

Actually it would take just 4,34 years of travelling at the speed of light to reach Alpha Centauri.

no i meant using a lab developed plague to clear the planet of any terrestrial forms
or you could develop self replicating nanobots that eat DNA and destroy all life

The telescope is useless since the light will still take the same amount of time to reach you as it will to fucking blast you.

Try reading the post again and notice that what you're replying to is a quote from another post.

Telescopes are USELESS you fucking physics dropout. You won't see the laser firing until it already hits you.

fug my bad

>presumably the lasers will be firing from space and so they wont need much cooling and could fire rapidly
Cooling is actually a big problem since there is no gravity or fluid for the heat to dissipate.

discussed this
projected system was satellite based firing on an incoming enemy
superior stability and power generation will always give defense the first shot
IE bigger more stable telescope can see farther + more powerful lazer

>space ghosts

Attached: index.jpg (284x177, 9K)

> there is no gravity for the heat to dissipate.
bruh thats dumb
second you could pipe in coolant plus outside of sunlight (and because spheres you could almost always hide theses satellites in the shadow of your planet and still fire upon any inbound enemy) space is cold AF
also the is small amounts of gas and dust in space bruh there is no such thing as empty space

Very high velocity railgun barrages and nuclear coilgun shells at 0.8Mm and closing. 12-60min active exchanges until ordnance closes to point defense ranges.

Great book. Basically Viet In space. It does a good job of showing how fucked space war would actually be if you stripped away most scifi tropes.

Drone platforms are the best range-closers

Gravity and fluid. Without gravity, hot air (Or whatever the fluid of choice is) will not rise, convective cooling will not happen.

Ships to ship will be missiles. Lasers are retard-tier.

Turrets are more for precision aiming, you will likely never have an enemy coming at you from more than one direction at a time, physics disallows ease of complex flanking, even with close-launch missile boats. Ship's body does the main aiming work. Turrets just save you RCS fuel.

Tried building a large caliber railgun in CoaDE, the materials and power scaling is complicated as fuck past a 1-6mm needleguns

Absolutely, convection can occur in the absence of gravity. Convection in general and “natural convection” are two different things. Clint Dunn Mechanical engineer
quora.com/Does-convection-occur-when-there-is-no-gravity

Football nuke barrages are pretty fun tho.

>Ships to ship will be missiles.
Unless we develop some kind of propulsion system that is orders of magnitude more effective and efficient than our current systems, missiles are not capable of carrying enough delta-v to be a real threat to a fighting ship at ranges beyond their specific impulse time.
It's a similar issue to current air to air missiles, the hit probability on an aware target drops exponentially the further you get from their NEZ envelope.

It'll probably be not unlike what submariners do today just in a much bigger environment.

>So take your space ship somewhere with negligible gravitational fields and shoot yourself in the face with a water gun full of cold water. It will still convect heat away from your face
That's conduction, not convection.

you're forgetting that you need to consider xy time dependent intercept vectors mucking up your mental image, you can dodge in all 6 directions and effectively have 360-deg maneuvering options at engagement ranges, you will (almost) never be close enough for it to be reduced from a sphere to an oblate plane

>It'll probably be not unlike what submariners do today just in a much bigger environment.
Our current understanding of physics states that stealth is impossible in space. If it maneuvers or has power it will be seen.

Wrong, you can fire any of your thrust groups in moderated pairs to yield an infinite vector variable, you just can't fire opposed groups against each other

Laser suffers from dispersion over distance, your hull will heat and discohering radiance from the laser will become a high-brilliance star on your scopes. You will likely have time to rotate or maneuver to avoid catastrophic heating of target points

yes you can vary speed
but why would you
you would want to come in as hot as you possibly could until the last possible moment
plus how big is our ship ? am i firing at a speck off dust or at a "space yamamato"
plus if you are attacking a planet there are only so many safe orbits you can take you could just use an AI to calculate probable vectors and shoot at all of them in turn the ship will have to cross a known point at some time and then bam

Any of you niggers play Freespace 2?
>install freespace open project with voice support
>get to scream at your AI wingm8s to cover your ass, bomb the target, form up, etc.
Best space game.

Attached: img-8.jpg (800x600, 122K)

Conservation of fuel is paramount, i build my battleships with 30-60cm of boron an internal spall-catcher, and a 1m standoff whipple shield for redundancy because the main boron shell makes the whipple barrier a negligible insurance addon; i engage my targets with hundreds of nuclear artillery shells and waste hundreds of thousands of 2mm osmium darts seeding the enemy vector with railgun bombardment. And this massive waste of taxpayer dollars can afford this budget while still carrying upwards of 8km/s in delta-v. Anything that isn't as armored as me is shredded and nuclear flash-cooked before the contingent of close-in lasers achieves range to where dispersion stops ruining their ability to drop heat on the target

>discohering radiance from the laser will become a high-brilliance star on your scopes.
It is still limited to light speed, you will will not see it until it is too late.

First actual response lol
I honestly like it
It totally beats my system

e

Attached: 21d73460-c95e-4b5f-a145-2eb5820324b2_1.f367de6813a2bce4c1f6249acd9bbf10.jpg (1000x1000, 50K)

They are really not. They have rather different effects compared to in an atmosphere and they do lose effectiveness proportional to the square of the distance, but x-ray output will fuck shit up for kilometers around and irradiate anything without large and heavy amounts of shielding in tens of kilometers.
Focused nuclear weapons like the Casaba and pump x-ray lasers have advantages, but nukes aren't bad by themselves.
No its a sphere, you start at the center and you can go anywhere in that sphere. The radius of the sphere is determined by how far you can go in the time it takes the weapon to reach you.
In addition to what the other user said, it literally doesn't matter to the position uncertainty what the initial velocity is unless it is moving at close to light speed. Whether its at rest wrt you or not, the difference in its position when it gets to its position is dependent only its potential acceleration.

>it's like none of the gun nuts actually know their orbital mechanics and engineering

Attached: capsule_616x353.jpg (616x353, 89K)

>30-60 cm boron
>all those weapon systems
>plus fuel
>8 km/s delta-v
Nigger do you know what mass ratio is?
Build an engine that can get you that much delta-v with all those weapon systems.

Attached: 476530_screenshots_20161004013934_1.jpg (1440x900, 222K)

what the fuck am I reading

Attached: Fpt6Td8.jpg (804x536, 163K)

First, You can still pump coolant in space, the lack of gravity doesn't matter. Second, the heat doesn't leave your ship except by radiation even with gravity. It makes no difference.
If you move the fluid, however you chose to - gravity, pumps, fans etc. its convection.
All convection is is the movement of heat by motion of the fluid.

So at these extreme distances where engagements would occur where even the speed of light matters, getting a hit would be dependent on how quickly your munitions travel, how large an area you could saturate with them at once, and the size of the area that your target can move to within the time your munitions need to reach the target.
This "target cloud" could be calculated given a positive identification of ship's model, factoring in its mass and engine power. However, the size of the cloud would still vary depending on the ship's actual mass - what if most of its payload is already spent? What if it's almost empty? Then, you could have multiple sizes of target cloud, each with different likelihoods, each with different hit probabilities when targeted.
With more conventional weapons, I think that realistically, any hit is lethal. You could saturate a large swath in a vacuum with shrapnel, but the relatively long travel time that such munitions require would increase the size of the target cloud exponentially. Perhaps it's possible to saturate the entirety of even this large target cloud with shrapnel for a guaranteed hit - I'm pretty sure that's where current tech is.
With current modern lasers, damage is dependent on how long they can be held on target, no? The beam sweeping over a region of the target for an instance wouldn't necessarily guarantee a kill. Filling a target cloud with enough beams fired long enough to kill sounds pretty impossible, unless the speed of the laser makes the target cloud extremely small.

I'd imagine that if lasers were ever featured as space weaponry that there would be coolant on board ships to be flushed into space once heated.

Trying to imagine how space warfare will be is akin to renaissance people's possible ideas on modern warfare. Entertaining, but ultimately pointless.

Combat in space would be incredibly difficult. You'd likely be moving in different directions at vastly different velocities. Imagine how much delta-v you'd burn by trying to match the target ship's trajectory and get close enough so that you can reliably target them.

I think the most reasonable solution would be launching (literally shooting) drones at your target's predicted path. They can actively adjust their path to the optimal trajectories to attack the target.

The type of attacks would depend on the technology level. If the drones are able to store or generate enormous amounts of energy while being lightweight, laser or radiation weapons would be viable. The goal in this case would be to overwhelm the target with heat.

Otherwise, more conventional weapons would be used. Firing projectiles from the small drones would be tricky, since you'd be propelling yourself in the opposite direction. Missiles could work, but that's a lot of extra mass to carry.

Another option would be to pre-seed the target's route with dense debris, having it traveling at a high relative velocity opposite to their trajectory. Each impact would hit like a rail gun. Even if they could detect it well in advance, they'd waste a ton of delta-v to avoid it, likely ruining their mission and possibly stranding them in space. The downside is that you now have a massive cloud of debris to track for centuries so that your ships and civilian ships don't run into it. It's the clusterbomb problem all over again.