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What future space combat would really look like

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Re: What future space combat would really look like

#111

Post by Locke1689 »

zeteo wrote: post #103
Locke1689 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major problem (which is addressed in the article, by the way) is that once you've set a course you can't really change it much at all. Newtonian mechanics really limits your options here. Warships and space battles would be completely preprogrammed: detect enemy ship; set course for enemy ship; accelerate to maximum velocity; attempt to kill enemy ship with automated systems and not die as you shoot past. This is…

Once you fire a rifle, everything is also Newtonian and deterministic. You still have to move into position, decide which target to fire at, with what ammo etc What you describe is quite close to an actual weapon used in WW2, the SG 500: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagdfaust

All of those things have mathematically optimal solutions given known information. It should be trivial to solve the system.

Re: What future space combat would really look like

#112

Post by atarian »

ohyes wrote: post #88

Space combat seems pointless to me. What exactly would they be fighting over? Presumably you want to reach space for resources, so asteroids, planets and moons with minerals, stuff like that. You might also want planets/asteroids/moons that are 'good' for colonization (easily terra formed or already life sustaining). You probably wouldn't see many fights where you are firing at the resource itself. No one with the mo…

You should definitely play EVE Online. This is totally the kind of stuff that goes on in the major corporations that players set up.

Re: What future space combat would really look like

#113

Post by cletus »

If you're interested in "realistic" (meaning: no FTL) space battles read Alastair Reynolds' Redemption Ark (and read Revelation Space and Chasm City before that).

It includes a chase between star systems that goes on for years and "close" (ie within a few light-seconds) combat that involves a lot of interpolation of enemy position, movement and actions.

Personally I still have serious doubts about the viability of any kind of prolonged manned presence in space. Its simply too expensive and the distances involved in interstellar travel are so vast that even perfect mass to energy transformation would make the process prohibitive in terms of cost and time.

But it's fun to muse about.

Re: What future space combat would really look like

#114

Post by tuppy »

zeteo wrote: post #106
ricree wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the rest of his post? He didn't predict general intelligence within the next 20 years. Rather, he predicted that the special purpose weapons AI would be sufficient to handle the sort of latencies that would happen in some hypothetical space combat. Perhaps I'm reading your posts wrong, but it seems a fairly conservative prediction to me.

We're talking about replacing people in combat vehicles with AI. Considering the need for tactics, strategy and improvisation in a conflict that can take place light-years away, that won't work with anything less than general-purpose AI.

Where is anyone talking about conflicts light-years away? I think we may be discussing different things. The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts, primarily because it is trying to deal with realistic space combat using current technology. FTL drives are not part of that paradigm.

Yes, obviously if something is light-years away you would need to develop general purpose AI to make those decisions or send a command ship with a human crew to the location, but the post you are replying to was discussing 10s to 20s delays associated with local space combat.

Re: What future space combat would really look like

#115

Post by troels »

talmand wrote: post #95
ohyes wrote: post #88

Space combat seems pointless to me. What exactly would they be fighting over? Presumably you want to reach space for resources, so asteroids, planets and moons with minerals, stuff like that. You might also want planets/asteroids/moons that are 'good' for colonization (easily terra formed or already life sustaining). You probably wouldn't see many fights where you are firing at the resource itself. No one with the mo…

What if the goal is to eliminate the planet-side species? Plus I'm willing to bet you could obliterate the surface of the planet using kinetic weapons and still have plenty of resources left over.

Why would that ever be a goal?

Re: What future space combat would really look like

#116

Post by zeteo »

tuppy wrote: post #114
zeteo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about replacing people in combat vehicles with AI. Considering the need for tactics, strategy and improvisation in a conflict that can take place light-years away, that won't work with anything less than general-purpose AI.

Where is anyone talking about conflicts light-years away? I think we may be discussing different things. The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts, primarily because it is trying to deal with realistic space combat using current technology. FTL drives are not part of that paradigm. Yes, obviously if something is light-years away you would need to develop general purpose AI to make those decisions or s…

> The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts

Neptune is more than 4 light-hours away, and the Oort cloud (discussed as a possible source of projectiles) a full light-year further. So I don't see how anything short of general purpose AI can be tele-operated for intra-system conflicts.

Re: What future space combat would really look like

#117

Post by brmj »

Here's a thought I've had in the past after encountering a document of this type: Stealth in space is trivial is what you are trying to keep hidden doesn't need to accelerate, support human life or do anything much that generates significant heat, especially if it can stay far away from what it is hiding from. Space is big and hard to hide things in, but it is full of all kinds of smallish debris in the vicinity of a solar system. If you have something of about the right size, orbit, albedo, radar reflectivity and temperature, it ought to be hard to distinguish it from a stray bit of rock or ice too small for anyone to have paid attention to it in the past.

Bearing this in mind, suppose that you built a small, camouflaged satellite which would just sit there at ambient temperature until it received instructions, upon which it would point itself at a given patch of sky, do the finest bits of the aiming using its own passive sensors and then fire a nuclear bomb-pumped x-ray laser at whatever has the misfortune to be there. With something like this, one could probably swat any reasonable craft out of the sky before it had time to respond. You could perhaps also use such things offensively by putting them on orbits that will take them within their effective range of whatever you want them to shoot, though they would stand out a bit more that way.

The only real countermeasure to these I can think of would be to move your spacecraft rapidly back and forth at all times, which is probably infeasible given the amount of reaction mass it would take.

I'm not sure what the implications of all of this are, but I suspect they would be interesting.

Re: What future space combat would really look like

#118

Post by amalcon »

zeteo wrote: post #109
amalcon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tank and plane crews are also "sitting in a glorified tin can", but that didn't preclude, say, WW2 from being vastly more strategic than any preceding conflicts. That was because military doctrine had adapted to the invention of radio at that point. That would actually go away at the kind of distances we're talking about. Thirty-second communication lag is enough to ruin the command battlefield view. Almost all of th…

>Almost all of those things were actually decided by the officers commanding the tank / plane battalions You'd be surprised: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Villers-Bocage#Mornin...

It's an interesting read, but that scenario could only occur due to imperfect information. With nearly-perfect information (like what would be available in space), the German defenders would have been mobilized ahead of time, and it would have been a straightforward battle.

Re: What future space combat would really look like

#119

Post by dustingetz »

troels wrote: post #115
talmand wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the goal is to eliminate the planet-side species? Plus I'm willing to bet you could obliterate the surface of the planet using kinetic weapons and still have plenty of resources left over.

Why would that ever be a goal?

we like trees, so we kill all the birds (etc) who live in the trees.

Re: What future space combat would really look like

#120

Post by InclinedPlane »

srl wrote: post #85
zeteo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh? My point was that humans on board can improvise (remember Apollo 13) and carry out their objectives even in the presence of a forewarned and intelligent opponent.

The real reason, of course, is that war is just so much cooler when people are dying. Sources: G. Carlin. Honestly, though, I fully expect AI to advance sufficiently in the next 20 years that a 10s delay is sufficiently small, and the AI can handle anything likely to occur in under 20s on its own.

And? If you are 10 light seconds away from a battle your round trip control delay is 20s. Also, if weapons are zipping around at 2,000 km/s then 10 light seconds is only 25 minutes flight time. We certainly won't have 2,000 km/s projectiles in 20 years but in 100 we might.
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