An analysis of Battlestar Galactica from the Naval warfare perspective

[MillCreek]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/28/aircraft_carriers_in_space?page=full


Interesting article about translating naval warfare concepts into space.

[just Warren]

That was good.

I read a comic book as a youth that the ships were cylinders and they fought by shooting missiles at each other that went so fast that warheads were superfluous and the point wasn't to hit the opponent's ships with the missile but for them to destroy it with their defense missiles and let the fragments hit. In one scene about one pound in aggregate of material hit a ship and the results were devastating. Many hundred of missiles were fired and successfully defensed so only that material hit but it was enough. Put me off the pew pew pew model of space combat forever. (Though I do enjoy those movies, mostly)

Also Jutland was mentioned I've only read one book on the subject but I can recommend it as a fantastic read: Here.

[MechAg94]

I would think if you had missiles that could accelerate that fast, the ships could accelerate out of the way pretty fast also.  Plus nukes might not be used against an enemy ship, but they vaporize small rocks headed your way. 

[just Warren]

It was years ago so i don't remember all of the subtle points of the fighting but to they seemed well thought out to me. I'd have to read it again to see if it holds up.

[MechAg94]

I was also thinking that human crewed ships would have a max acceleration compared to unmanned craft or missiles.  I guess physics and ship construction assumptions pretty much determine all that.  

David Drake had a book recently where people basically pedal bicycles through space.  That was different.

[AJ Dual]

I would think if you had missiles that could accelerate that fast, the ships could accelerate out of the way pretty fast also.  Plus nukes might not be used against an enemy ship, but they vaporize small rocks headed your way. 

Advantage always goes to the missile. Not factoring in labor, energy, budget etc. And as mentioned, assuming there's no magic mass suppression (like in EE Doc Smith's Lensman stuff) or "Acceleration Compensators" which are sometimes mentioned in Trek and Starwars "tech stuff", the missile can sustain G's higher than the crewed vessel can and live.

Assuming drive technologies are comparable, the missile will have a better mass fraction than the ship because the ship has crew, airlocks, life support etc. And even in engineering design, the missile doesn't need to come back, which means even systems for longevity, like cooling, or shielding to make certain things survive and last longer can be done away with as long as they last long enough to destroy their target.

Thanks MillCreek, that was a really nice read.

Another place that delves into some of these things is this great site:

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

[just Warren]

I'm guessing most space battles would happen near planets as ships or fleets were entering or leaving orbit. I'm thinking that as you can be pretty sure you'll find them there rather than in the void somewhere.  Also if you catch them with their back to the planet or wheel or station or whatever that cuts off one avenue of escape.

[drewtam]

It all depends on the made up FTL and sub-FTL technology...

If its wormholes... then there are bottle necks to fight over.

If every ship can FTL at will, then other made up FTL limitations are required to make the story go. If there are no FTL limitations, then there can be no defense of anything. The offensive side would always have complete supremacy. Think "Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles" with FTL capability.

If there is a made up limitation of "can't FTL near large mass like planet", then super orbital fighting kinda of works. But the offensive party still doesn't hang out for battle, they FTL into super-orbital position, launch nukes and escort drones on planetary trajectory, and FTL out.

More rules and tech can be made up to solve each of these problems to force a romantic picture of combat. Whatever. Its fiction, enjoy the story.

[just Warren]

The most romantic version for fiction for me, and it would be horrible in real life, would be that the only way to render a ship hors de combat would be to board it and fight for it on the inside rather than blasting it from the outside.

You could write an entire series of 5-6 books just on the taking of one ship.

Of course justifying the rules is the hard part. Ships so big that hitting them with anything has little effect and your only choice is to bore a hole in it and feed troops and bots inside? Complete with vehicles and air craft as there are large open spaces inside for some reason or another. Like how O'Neill envisioned space stations.

I'd read that. Even though it really is just a big dungeon crawl with guns n' bombs.


Speaking of super-massive ships that's how I wanted the Gallactica reboot to end with the BG and the Cylons in one of their many battles and then a ship so huge that the BG is not unlike a grain of sand on the side of an aircraft carrier. And it is full of humans, bots and bio-engineered races all of whom consider the BG humans and the Cylons as primitive barbarians with technology so primitive that even toddlers have more advanced stuff. So the show would end on a note of nothing that happened in the series mattered in the same way the fact that this one gnat 12 years ago flew one way and then another before I squashed it.

Okay, reading that over maybe I'm a still a tad bitter about how stupid the show got at the end.....

[MicroBalrog]

Warren: something like this already exists.

Some of the 40k novels are like this.

Wait for Balog to turn up with novel recommendations.

[seeker_two]

The only advantage energy-based weapons have over missles is storage space....you don't need a magazine when you can draw off ship's power. That also ends up being its greatest weakness....no power = no weapons.

I think most space-based weaponry will be small missles or railgun-launched projectiles. No matter what "shields" you have, you can't beat the laws of kinetic energy.....

[Jamisjockey]

I don't know much about physics but it seems to make the most sense.  Super hardened object traveling super fast.  Shouldn't even need to be very large. 

[Tallpine]

The most romantic version for fiction for me, and it would be horrible in real life, would be that the only way to render a ship hors de combat would be to board it and fight for it on the inside rather than blasting it from the outside.

If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing.

And if we're very very lucky, they'll do it in that order.

[MechAg94]

I don't know much about physics but it seems to make the most sense.  Super hardened object traveling super fast.  Shouldn't even need to be very large. 

Given your job, you probably know more about parts of it than most fans.

[MechAg94]

The only advantage energy-based weapons have over missles is storage space....you don't need a magazine when you can draw off ship's power. That also ends up being its greatest weakness....no power = no weapons.

I think most space-based weaponry will be small missles or railgun-launched projectiles. No matter what "shields" you have, you can't beat the laws of kinetic energy.....

IMO, that all depends on what tech you have to accelerate those mass objects.  Given current tech, there are definite limits.  I think space tech would likely follow current tech with a balance between armor and weapons with weapons always having an advantage. 

[Scout26]

Since the first Australopithecus picked up a stick and flung it at a rival, it has been Missile vs Shield/Armor. 

Missile eventually wins.   

[Jamisjockey]

The biggest thing for the missile vs. armor argument is the ability to target incoming missiles defensively. 
On earth this means when the incoming missile is blown into smaller bits, gravity and the reduction of mass will ensure that your armor can overcome the incoming fragments.
In space though physics would dictate those small fast moving pieces won't slow down.
So you'd need to change the trajectory as well, or best heavily armored that it doesn't matter.  Or literally vaporize the incoming missile with some kind of energy weapon. 

[Regolith]

Anyone read David Weber's stuff? He does space battles on fairly epic scales. At one point in his Honor Harrington novels, two sides comprised of several hundred superdreadnaughts are flinging several hundred thousand nuclear-bomb pumped laser headed missiles at each other.

In those books, things start boiling down to three considerations: how many missiles you can launch and control at once,  the range at which you can control them, and how many incoming missiles you can shoot down. "Armor" is kind of a wash; the way he sets up space travel makes all space ships invulnerable from above and below, but leaves the sides, front, and back wide open. The sides can be protected by a shielding, but the front and back have to be left open for the space drive to work. I think he set it up this way specifically so he could make "crossing the T"  a relevant tactic again.

[Tallpine]

The technology needed for human interstellar travel is so far beyond what we know now that any speculation about space battles (other than that they will occur if we ever get there) is hopeless.  It will be as far (or farther) removed from today as modern aerial jet combat is from the Plains Indians.  Nuclear weapons will likely be as obsolete as bows and arrows.

There is really no correlation between naval warfare and off planet warfare. 

Everything is moving, all the time - and virtually always subject to the gravitational effect of some body somewhere.  So, for two "ships" to be stationary relative to each other, they would have to be traveling parallel (curved!) paths at some enormous speed.  Orbital mechanics, either solar or planetary, affects manuevering.  In order to slow down, you have to speed up, and in order to speed up, you have to slow down 


FTL travel will necessarily include time travel, at least from the perspective of anyone at your destination.  Since everything in the universe is on some sort of ballistic trajectory, it is conceivable that both forward and backward time travel is possible given FTL velocities.  You would just need to FTL "backwards" to a point where something/someone was at some point in the past.

If you then blow them up, then that raises the question of their "future" which you presumably observed before you jumped space/time   But how is that really different from shooting someone with a supersonic bullet - just because they were dead before they heard the shot doesn't mean that they had an alternate future where they weren't dead.

Sound and light only affect our ability to observe the universe. 

[MechAg94]

The biggest thing for the missile vs. armor argument is the ability to target incoming missiles defensively. 
On earth this means when the incoming missile is blown into smaller bits, gravity and the reduction of mass will ensure that your armor can overcome the incoming fragments.
In space though physics would dictate those small fast moving pieces won't slow down.
So you'd need to change the trajectory as well, or best heavily armored that it doesn't matter.  Or literally vaporize the incoming missile with some kind of energy weapon. 

1.  Breaking up the projectile means the KE will not concentrate on a small part of the armor which swings the advantage back to the armor depending on whatever tech we are talking about.

2. If the target is not a space station, it will be maneuvering also.  So it becomes an issue of time and distance.  How much time does a ship have to move before the projectile arrives.  I think that sort of depends on the scale of distance involved and range of attack and defense systems.  Are we talking about a few hundred miles or halfway across the solar system?

3. For defense, the missile becomes a target as soon as it is spotted.  If it is maneuvering to avoid being hit, it will only be heading directly at the target during the last part of its flight.  Any hit on it before that will send the debris off in some other direction.  

4.  I guess that also gets us to how good detection systems are.  As I understand it we don't have telescopes good enough to see the Apollo landing sights.  How close to the target do you have to be before the "nothing is invisible in space" really applies.  

[MechAg94]

Tallpine, I agree with you on the limits of our knowledge.  That why all we can really do is speculate based on an extrapolation of current tech and potential tech as laid out in various SciFi books.

[just Warren]

And what about conflict in which there is no FTL?

This article touches on it a bit in a larger piece about writing stories in non-FTL settings.

[TommyGunn]

Phasers and photon torpedos will render all the speculation in this delightfully imaginative thread utterly moot. 

[Tallpine]

And what about conflict in which there is no FTL?

This article touches on it a bit in a larger piece about writing stories in non-FTL settings.

"These arguments all remind me of those solemn Victorian treatises of how transatlantic powered flight will never be workable, due to the intractable difficulty of carrying sufficient quantities of Welsh steam coal for the boilers."

 


Slower than light pretty much means stay within our solar system.  Heinlein did a lot with that, but he had the luxury back then of not know that Mars and Venus were not remotely habitable.

So maybe a system of "space station" colonies in the asteroid belt where they derive all their resources and even build new habitats from non-Earth sources 

I was going to write something like that, once I come up with a plot 

[AJ Dual]

A couple of random thoughts.

- You can't hide.

The laws of Thermodynamics dictate that any ship that has enough power to do much of anything, much less keep a living human crew alive, thrust, fight, communicate etc. will be warm enough that it'll be visible. Something like an "umbrella shield" or a cooling system  will just make things worse. The shield is mass that blocks your view too, and could have been fuel/weapons/gear instead. (and it won't really work) and cooling systems will ultimately just add more heat in the work they do to try and chill something that you don't show up against the backdrop of space.

We already have IR sensors/cameras that can detect stuff at millions of miles that's fractional differences in a degree. And in space, with the budget, making folding teloscopes out of mylar mirrors etc. to search for things/enemies is trivial as compared to all the other stuff like power, propulsion, weapons tech.

- Ship types will be dictated by acceleration and economics.

We have things like naval vessels, fighter planes, bombers, tanks, helicopters, ultimately because they have different payload/speed/range/capabilities that can't all be combined into one type of vehicle. In space, this may not be so. Depending on the technology for propulsion and power, one size of craft might easily be the "sweet spot" where bigger isn't "better", and neither is smaller. Or maybe "as big and powerful as possible" only divided by the range of your force projection/number of places you need to be or cover is where the economics of the thing point to. This could totally kill the "carrier and fighter" dynamic. And with acceleration, there may be two types to consider. High thrust that lets you accelerate quickly, and high efficiency thrust that lets you accelerate for long periods of time.  Most space propulsion systems as we understand them now tend to do one or the other, but not both.