AI War Beta 5.090 "Fish Or Cut Bait" Released!

[keith.lamothe]

On the more strategic level, I wonder to what degree fleets would even face each other.  If you have some way of getting a substantial mass up to, say, .5c, and some way of keeping it intact from micrometeorite impact, etc, then it's just a matter of finding out where the enemy planets will be at point of impact and send the things in ballistic from however many light-days are necessary to avoid detection during the acceleration phase.  You won't crack the planet, but good luck to anything trying to live or maintain industrial capacity on it.

Basically both sides would have to operate from secret planets (as long as they last) and spaceborne infrastructure that could be moved in a rapid and erratic enough fashion to avoid fractional-c strikes.

Unless of course they have some way of detecting something the size of a large house approaching with no active emissions.

[chemical_art]

Yes Keith I do wonder how much fleets would be needed.

I imagine the best course would be to make a stealthy ship that could carry a few dozen nuclear missiles. Most things pop from one missile (including your ship) so you make them big enough for whatever ftl you have and to carry the missiles, but no more, so you can make more.

My dad thought of fleet fights like this:

"Sir, missiles incoming!"

"Warp!"

(stretch lines)

eventually though

"Sir, we can't warp in time! "

"Oh n-"

[static]

(Another ship friendly in sensor range)

"Sir, the Exclibur is no more!"

Ships would just vaporize more or less if hit.

[Lancefighter]

Unless of course they have some way of detecting something the size of a large house approaching with no active emissions.

Todays weapons of mass destruction have nothing comparable to lobbing houses at planets.

[chemical_art]

Unless of course they have some way of detecting something the size of a large house approaching with no active emissions.

Todays weapons of mass destruction have nothing comparable to lobbing houses at planets.

But we are thinking of the future, where we get a huge slug of lead with a core of active nuclear weapons on it and put some engines on it, power it really fast outside enemy sensor range, then deploy gizmos to hide it until its too late to stop it since its not a matter of just shooting it since it will hit you anyway, and make it so the nukes cook off right in the atmosphere so you both ignite the atmosphere and rain debris over 25% of the planet.

At least, that was what I was thinking...

[Diazo]

Heh.

Nukes are actually pretty poor weapons as space engagements go.

Nuclear weapons will destroy a ship if they detonate exceedingly close to it. But if it is further away than about a kilometer, it won't do much more than singe the paint job and blind a few sensors. And in space a kilometer is pretty close range.

From Atomic Rockets - Conventional Space Weapons.

A shotgun type effect where a missile gets in close and detonates a spread of pellets into the path of the enemy craft would be much more effective.

"Pellets" being sized relative to the spacecraft and assuming they don't have force-fields of some sort to block the pellets.

More and more I'm seeing the simple KKV (kinetic kill vehicle) become the weapon of choice for hard sci-fi where they don't have magitech of some sort because of this.

If we are getting into the magi-tech range (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) then all bets are off as the flavor of the magi-tech will determine what happens, but for anything that gives even a token shout-out to science as we understand today, the KKV is the way to go.

D.

[chemical_art]

True, but wouldn't want to use nuclear energy if nothing else then to propell the projectiles in the cone and to propell the missile?

For me it sounds like you are just converting the energy from the sphere of the weapon into a cone while transferring the energy to a projectile, which I think is cool, but seems similar to people first trying to shoot at each other with gunpowder till someone released "If instead of the powder itself, we use the power to project shells..."

What I'm trying to say is your weapon is awesome, but the core is still using nukes, except you are dressing it up.

[keith.lamothe]

Kinetic kill is great if you can hit the target, but ballistics would only work at very short ranges (to avoid dodging) or very high concentrations (concentration requiring increasing prohibitively fast as range increases), and non-ballistic kkv's may not be able to pull the g's necessary to counteract its own incredible velocity enough to deal with an evading target.

Something a bit more likely to work would be like the Harrington-novel "laser head" where you use something to focus a portion of a missile's nuclear explosion into many extremely-short-lived lasers going in all kinds of directions to punch holes through anything nearby.

Of course, that universe's gravitic manipulation technology is basically magitech, albeit more internally consistent than the stuff found in star-trek/star-wars/etc.

[Diazo]

True, but wouldn't want to use nuclear energy if nothing else then to propell the projectiles in the cone and to propell the missile?

For me it sounds like you are just converting the energy from the sphere of the weapon into a cone while transferring the energy to a projectile, which I think is cool, but seems similar to people first trying to shoot at each other with gunpowder till someone released "If instead of the powder itself, we use the power to project shells..."

What I'm trying to say is your weapon is awesome, but the core is still using nukes, except you are dressing it up.

Well, I was more thinking a controlled release of some sort, maybe even tether the projectiles so they are closer to a net then a shotgun.

Their closing velocity, and therefore damage, would be from the missiles engine during flight, any explosion at the end to boost the pellets would have very little effect. (I think anyway).

Satellites in geostationary orbit move at 3 kilometers per second, low earth orbit at 8 kilometers per second. I'm assuming any sort of ship that could qualify as a combatant has a maximum velocity and acceleration to reach a significant percentage of these speeds and a missile better still.

A battleship gun fires a shell at 0.8 kilometers per second. That's not that big of a speed increase compared to how fast I'm assuming a missile would be moving so a controlled spread to guarantee a hit would do better.

Kinetic kill is great if you can hit the target, but ballistics would only work at very short ranges (to avoid dodging) or very high concentrations (concentration requiring increasing prohibitively fast as range increases), and non-ballistic kkv's may not be able to pull the g's necessary to counteract its own incredible velocity enough to deal with an evading target.

Something a bit more likely to work would be like the Harrington-novel "laser head" where you use something to focus a portion of a missile's nuclear explosion into many extremely-short-lived lasers going in all kinds of directions to punch holes through anything nearby.

Of course, that universe's gravitic manipulation technology is basically magitech, albeit more internally consistent than the stuff found in star-trek/star-wars/etc.

Well, I'm assuming a universe that respects science as we currently understand it and does not get into the magi-tech range.

That means reaction drives, limited ship sizes, no artificial gravity, etc.

The problem is when we get into magi-tech, the limits are arbitrarily defined by the author as it has no relation to science as we understand it, so different people get different 'observed effects' from the descriptions we see in books. That then descends into a matter of opinion as much as anything.

It's all my own headcanon anyway.


D.

[chemical_art]

The reason I said you'd need a secondary nuclear charge was as Keith suggest was to overcome the necassiry G's. For example, if your missile was turning when you wanted the pellets to spread, you need an assisted blast to help compensate for the turn, otherwise you wouldn't lead enough.  If the enemy ship is turning left relative to the missile, and your missile is accelerating the turning left to compensate as its radius tightens, then if you don't provide additional oomph to make the pellets for they will move at a set velocity left, leading to a potential miss.
   

Its a tricky system too, for you can't lead it very much on its impact before the spread becomes too wide. It won't give you much more range then a nuke. Even a net structure would only be effective for a little while before the anchor points spread too much apart shredding the material between the anchors, and that would take up volume that could instead fit additional pellets into.
           


         

[Mánagarmr]

...I'm still trying to wrap my head around how this became a discussion of space weaponry...

[keith.lamothe]

...I'm still trying to wrap my head around how this became a discussion of space weaponry...

That's not the surprising part.  The surprising part is how this isn't a discussion of the weaponization of breakfast foods (in space).

[Cinth]

*Throws a waffle in Keith's general direction*

[keith.lamothe]

It probably doesn't say good things about me that within 5 seconds I was thinking of how to construct a point-defense system involving a rubber band and a fork.

[Cinth]

Tabletop ballista and my hand held catapult will surely defeat such simple means of defense >

Load up the sausages and marshmallows!!! We're off to war!!!

[Mánagarmr]

A waffle at relativistic speeds would still be considered a fairly effective weapon, methinks.