What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
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What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#2I stopped reading this article about two paragraphs in because it makes the mistake of thinking that a space battle would necessarily happen in human timescales.
A real space battle barring some silly fictional constraint (You can't hyperspace jump too close! The shields are just holding out! Can't fire from cloak! Etc etc) is going to be the perfect embodiment of warfare as we know it now: months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Except replace months with years and moments with milliseconds.
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#3lets hope non-existent.
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#4I stopped reading this article about two paragraphs in because it makes the mistake of thinking that a space battle would necessarily happen in human timescales. A real space battle barring some silly fictional constraint (You can't hyperspace jump too close! The shields are just holding out! Can't fire from cloak! Etc etc) is going to be the perfect embodiment of warfare as we know it now: months of boredom punctuat…
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 will be able to afford a fleet of them, and they will INVARIABLY be lost with all crew the first time they are acted on with hostile intent. The environment itself is plenty capable of killing the best the United States can produce without needing anybody chucking high velocity directed fire their way.
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#5I stopped reading this article about two paragraphs in because it makes the mistake of thinking that a space battle would necessarily happen in human timescales. A real space battle barring some silly fictional constraint (You can't hyperspace jump too close! The shields are just holding out! Can't fire from cloak! Etc etc) is going to be the perfect embodiment of warfare as we know it now: months of boredom punctuat…
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…
You might get some good `hacker action' breaking into the computer systems, though.
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#6This analysis is grossly naive. It notes the importance of kinetic kill in space battles but ignores utterly that the nature of the battlefield depends greatly on the nature of technology. As increasingly advanced propulsion technology makes feasible the next higher level of closing velocities (from 10-30km/s with chemical propulsion, to 50km/s with Nuclear Thermal Rockets and such-like, to 100km/s, 1000km/s and beyond with Orion, NSWR, fusion, pumped light/mag sails, etc.) the nature of battle changes. This is a far more complex topic than this overly simplistic article could ever hope to cover.
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#7depends on how far in the future you'll go.
frankly I think all the "space battles" will basically just boil down to two space shuttle cargo haulers duking it out to hijack the other guy's shipment
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#8lets hope non-existent.
we already have militarization of space, plenty of satellites up there, are armed to the teeth. The second they find anything important up there, you'll have space shuttles armed to the teeth.
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#9I stopped reading this article about two paragraphs in because it makes the mistake of thinking that a space battle would necessarily happen in human timescales. A real space battle barring some silly fictional constraint (You can't hyperspace jump too close! The shields are just holding out! Can't fire from cloak! Etc etc) is going to be the perfect embodiment of warfare as we know it now: months of boredom punctuat…
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…
An equilibrium will develop.
If you want to fight an interplanetary war, your soldiers have to travel through an environment that will do to them what a wood-chipper does to decomposing animal viscera. It's unavoidable. If it turns out we can't make survivable ships, space is the ideal interdiction environment. Kill 'em out there before they can get down here.
Some areas of space (e.g. certain planetary orbits) are naturally important because they allow you to exert influence on combat elsewhere (e.g. by dropping dense objects on the enemy). So as ships become more survivable, it becomes more feasible to try and garrison strategic positions, and space battles will 'just happen' as opposing garrisons come into contact.
Re: What Will Future Space Battles Be Like?
#10One would hope that once we reach that level of technology, we will have gotten past wars....