Space Warfare

In response to a post by resar I came up with a boring response that was too long to put down as a reply. So here it is. Her subject was "Space Opera, Technocracies and Modeling Interstellar Warfare."

I've always been bugged by unrealistic space warfare. Most of what you see is Star Trek, of course, and that's about as unrealistic is it gets.

Those ships maneuvered like toy cars on a kitchen table. And their attempts to improve this weren't very impressive. The first one I remember is in _The Wrath of Khan_ where they hung a lampshade on the problem by having Mr. Spock say "Analysis indicates he is intelligent, but tends toward two-dimensional thinking." Whereupon the helmsman pulls a big DOWN lever on his console and Enterprise descends like a freight elevator. Then they started adding banked turns and rolls in The Next Generation, transporting two-dimensional toy car tactics into two-dimensional pseudo-dogfights.

Of course Trek-TNG quite regularly would say "Range, 80,000 kilometers" and then show a picture of the ships passing broadside to broadside at paint-scraping distance. Well, in space a few thousand miles WOULD be paint-scraping distance. Just rack that one up to the limitations of trying to show battles that are supposedly across millions of miles, but you have to make them exciting on a 13-inch screen.

I don't know what you thought of the space battles in Flanker's world. I stole outrageously from naval warfare in some ways. For example, you get absolutely no points for figuring out the historical reference of the Battle of Green.

But Flanker's universe depended on portals, places where the forces of gravity and so on from different sources canceled each other. Things "flattened out" there, so to speak. In space, these tended to occupy predictable "orbits" that had certain predictable relations to stars and planets in the neighborhood. While not fixed any more than Jupiter is fixed, and while they would tend to shift, form, or dissolve as stars moved or the orbits of planets changed, they could be viewed as "fixed" or at least predictable points over periods of, oh, I don't know, a hundred thousand years or so.

So my space battles were in large part like games of chess. There were certain spaces on the checkerboard that you could jump to, and these dominated everything else. If you could pop a fleet out of Portal Three Ecliptic Five at the right instant, you might checkmate the whole solar system.

However, popping out of a portal didn't mean you were at fighting distance yet. You might have to cross a distance such as between here and Jupiter, perhaps, or even more before you could get to grips with the enemy. And however great the acceleration the Battleships had- and it was enough that at need they could cross much of the solar system in a matter of hours- they still ran at sublight speeds, and were subject to Einsteinian limitations.

The ships used plasma weapons, lasers, and missiles. Plasma weapons were slower than light, and their beams were visible and could be dodged if fired from far enough away. Besides, the blast would cool before it reached you if it had to go too far. But they were absolute slammers at close range. They'd generally be used at ranges too short for much of a firing solution to be necessary. Yes, I was guilty of having to have my ships close to within a few thousand miles at most before letting go with a broadside, but largely because of the difficulty of firing solutions at long range, I thought it might be necessary to close in that far before you could do anything.

Torpedoes- I went naval enough to call missiles "torpedoes," a nod to the idea that space combat would be more like submarine combat than surface-to-surface- were rather disturbingly intelligent in some cases. Further, deportment sayeth not, at least not here. :D But they were slow enough to make them possible of interception, especiailly with plasma or laser weapons. They were therefore most effective at short range and from ambush.

The means of getting them to short range were various, but the most effective would probably be the minefield. On those rare occasions where you could predict where the enemy would go, you would sow space in his path with stealth torpedoes that would only go active when he got close. That's what my mines were; self-launching torpedoes. In space, the idea of an enemy ship actually bumping into a passive mine was so silly that even I never considered it.

A slight variation on the minefield was the "singleshot," actually by the time of the story a two- or three-shot warship. It was a low-powered, near suicide weapon, a weapon of desperation, a bundle of torpedoes with a minimal "spacecraft" pod attached. A single pilot on life support would drift this thing in toward the enemy, and take potshots from a position of ambush if he could. Then more or less wait for rescue, if any rescue was possible.

Lasers were long-range sniping weapons. Unlike plasma, you couldn't see a laser beam as it was coming toward you. And it was considerably faster than a plasma blast. And it didn't dissipate the way plasma did. But because you were firing it from great distances, light-minutes or perhaps even hours away, it was best for targets that couldn't dodge much. Firing solutions would be a bear. By saturating an area of space with laser beams, you might hit a distant, dodging target, but it was definitely iffy.

One of the chief differences between space war in Flanker's world and sea war in ours is the relative insignificance of fighters. The humans use them, but that is because their technology is relatively poor. When you don't have the guns or shields to go toe to toe with the big boys, you hit them with a swarm of small, expendable torpedo-carriers. Your aircraft-carrier analog stays well out of range of enemy fire. Those races in Flanker who had better-developed tech didn't bother with such small craft in space.

And indeed, the advantage of fighters in space is really just about zero. In the case of sea warfare on Earth the fighters get a huge advantage over the larger war machines because those larger machines have to go through water, and the fighter planes don't. In space, the difference between a battleship and a fighter would be more the difference between an earth battleship and a small boat. The small boat can carry a torpedo and might harm the larger ship. It might even be faster over a short distance. But in the final analysis it has no performance advantage; its slight advantage in speed, if any, is at the cost of any trace of other equally important qualities such as range and toughness.

Sorry for the boredom. You got me going on this and I couldn't stop. But anyway, I don't THINK space warfare in Flanker's world really resembles sea battles all that much.

As you said, there is the problem of sustainability, but then we are talking about empires or alliances of thousands of worlds putting together enough ships to attack enemy worlds one or two at a time. And the dependence on portals limits the volume of space you have to control to a manageable level.

In a way, space warfare would be like island to island warfare in the Pacific-- by outrigger canoe. But if you have twenty thousand islands, you could put together enough canoes to put big hurt on one enemy island at a time. In the end, that's what the navies of Flanker's universe do.