Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a real space battle is likely to be too expensive to make a good narrative: in the status quo, major military powers in the United States avoid naval battles because the ships that matter cost billions, they can only afford to field a dozen of them, and they have a huge likelihood of dying to the first hit by a much cheaper missile. In space, the ships will cost tens or hundreds of billions, no nation state w…
Anything that doesn't travel at 299792458 meters per second will not be a viable weapon in space. Two spaceships coming toward each other will be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away when they start firing on each other. The time lag will be over one second for lasers, so if the two ships are maneuvering randomly many laser shots will actually miss. Kinetic weapons will take minutes or hours to get there, making…
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#21Consider this: an unmanned missile can accelerate much faster than a manned spacecraft, so it can evade laser fire much more effectively as it approaches the enemy. At a critical distance it launches its payload: hundreds or thousands of tiny (e.g. 10 gram or so) fragments distributed in a grid (at a density of, say, 1/m^2 distributed over as much as a km^2 at the interception distance). These intercept the target at 10s, 100s, or 1000s of km/s. Such a weapon is hard to defend against, even with highly effective lasers, and is devastating to the target.