Nukes lose most of their destructive power in space. With no atmosphere to create a shock wave, nearly all of the blast is released in the form of EMP and radiation, both of which any spacefaring ship will be heavily shielded against for obvious reasons. I think you still get the fireball, but that's a fairly small radius.
Nukes still work at ranges less than a km. That's basically a contact nuke anyway.
Nukes still work at ranges less than a km. That's basically a contact nuke anyway.
And if they hit, it's bye bye ship.
I'd not be so sure.
They've nuked ships before the battleship Arkansas for example went down... the second time it was nuked at 170 yards from the center. And by taken down I mean just sunk because they triggered the nuke underwater. Its now upside down in Bikini's lagoon, best anyone can tell it got flipped over. Intact.
(I mean damn, planes may have outranged 'em but you gotta respect that kinda toughness on the old BBs)
Course you can go much higher with nukes today... but still man has built hunks of metal that have survived man's greatest weapon multiple times without going to pieces. In space where they will be less effective... suddenly the Galactica surviving that direct impact doesn't seem too sci-fi to me.
Oh sure you can use enough, but I'd think for the money you'd be better with ultra high-speed missiles with something hard and pointy to punch through the armored shell and then explode inside.
The difference being that, in space, if a nuke goes off next to you, all your telescopes, sensors, antennas and radiators melt/vapourize. Your hull suffers shockwaves and heating all over, holing in a hundred places. The engine likely doesn't work anymore.
A wet-navy cruiser can survive that in the ocean in calm weather. In space, that's a death sentence.
What's conducting the heat and shockwave in the vacuum, though?
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Originally Posted by GungHo, on Battletech
The Atlas is also goofy but it has that whole "Stay Puft Marshmallow Man" menacing smile thing going for it. The guy who drew that one up was obviously taken to the Nutcracker when he was a child... and he was screaming in terror the entire time.
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Originally Posted by Enterti, Cogidubnus
Glyphstone, out of all the playground I think you scare me the most...
What's conducting the heat and shockwave in the vacuum, though?
Radiation? Heat doesn't need a conductive medium to transit through, you know. Being close enough to an intense heat source like a nuclear explosion is going to ruin your day and wreck all your sensitive external equipment. Still, the effective range of a nuclear payload is pretty small in space. Much better would be a small shaped tactical nuclear warhead packed to propel a whole bunch of titanium ball bearings. The sheer velocity those things are going to be propelled at will punch through a spaceship hull easily, or at least cause severe structural damage through hull deformation, significantly increasing your effective range. It isn't perfect, since there's a nonzero chance of just missing the target with your grapeshot, but it's still better than trying to play "Get the nuke within 200m of the target", since the effective range would be more like a couple of kilometers.
Also, I wasn't claiming that missiles in their entirety were pointless in space warfare. Again, saturation missile fire at relatively close (two or three light seconds) range is going to be extremely effective barring incredibly effective point defense, since it gives only a couple of hurried attempts at shooting them down before they've already impaced, especially if they're being propelled at high speed on initial launch by a mass driver of some kind. It was the claim that a single very-long-range hours-to-impact missile would be of any value at all. The scenario is cool and all, but very unlikely. Realistically, at this point the only weapon we've actually got that works in space is the missile. Our lasers are too wimpy and short-ranged, our mass drivers have a nasty tendency to break after a couple of shots and our particle cannons are primitive to the point that finding one capable of killing an unarmoured human being in a reasonable amount of time anywhere on the planet is all but impossible. I'd expect that any space warfare that happens in the next hundred years or so will be based almost entirely on missiles. Because that's all we've got.
On the topic of missiles, I wonder how effective it would be to just blind them with a low-power laser? Aim your hot, shiny light into their thermal/optical sensor, maneuvre for a while and then let them glide harmlessly off into space once they can no longer effectively vector to target you. Seems like it might work, especially if you design your ships to spoof radar detection, and is extremely energy and space efficient, since all you need is a kilowatt laser on a small high-accuracy mounting.
Radiation? Heat doesn't need a conductive medium to transit through, you know.
Its also the least efficient method of transfer. While rarely depicted spaceships actually have considerable trouble dumping heat for all the "cold" of space.
Also worth mentioning anything is space is going to have to be pretty robust in that department with only the inverse square law protecting things from the sun. To say nothing of other radiation found in space.
Also for the general ideas on range warning, having retractable 'bunkered' instruments that take cover prior to detonation would not be unworkable.
I do like your ball bearing idea though.
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On the topic of missiles, I wonder how effective it would be to just blind them with a low-power laser? Aim your hot, shiny light into their thermal/optical sensor, maneuvre for a while and then let them glide harmlessly off into space once they can no longer effectively vector to target you. Seems like it might work, especially if you design your ships to spoof radar detection, and is extremely energy and space efficient, since all you need is a kilowatt laser on a small high-accuracy mounting.
You can also arguably be giving a missile a straight line guide to your location. Also depending on distances I've got to think that would be tough to keep lined up between two moving objects once you start having a lightspeed delay. Remember you wouldn't detect the missiles course changes in such a scenario right away either, but it would immediately stop being blinded. If that's enough I don't know.
Last edited by Soras Teva Gee : 10-12-2012 at 01:06 AM.
Its also the least efficient method of transfer. While rarely depicted spaceships actually have considerable trouble dumping heat for all the "cold" of space.
Also worth mentioning anything is space is going to have to be pretty robust in that department with only the inverse square law protecting things from the sun. To say nothing of other radiation found in space.
Also for the general ideas on range warning, having retractable 'bunkered' instruments that take cover prior to detonation would not be unworkable.
I do like your ball bearing idea though.
You can also arguably be giving a missile a straight line guide to your location. Also depending on distances I've got to think that would be tough to keep lined up between two moving objects once you start having a lightspeed delay. Remember you wouldn't detect the missiles course changes in such a scenario right away either, but it would immediately stop being blinded. If that's enough I don't know.
1: A nuclear explosion is a near-perfect black-body radiator. While the energy transfer is going to be a low slower than conduction or convection, and at least a bit of it is going to harmlessly radiate off your ship, it's still more than enough to cause some heat damage.
2: 'Bunkering' might work, but wastes precious mass and hull space. Not a bad idea once tech advances incorporate better, cheaper drive systems to make extra mass for defenses more viable, but from the 'century or so in the future, intra-solar only" standpoint we're looking at right now probably not worth the effort.
3: Stole the inspiration from a Claymore mine. Still, I think it solves the 'lack of medium for energy transfer' problem just fine. Why resign yourself to your nuke just burning the enemy when you can also use it to launch obscenely hot molten shrapnel at horrifying speeds in their general direction?
4: All true. Well, mostly. You really wouldn't have to worry about them using the laser as a designator unless it was designed for laser guidance to begin with, but you're totally right that just programming in an "If blind, course correct 60d.05 degrees in random direction until no longer blind then reacquire target" clause totally ruins the effectiveness of the countermeasure. Ah well, back to flare-spoofing and shooting them down then.
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Last edited by DaedalusMkV : 10-12-2012 at 01:45 AM.
For some sf that covers VERY missile heavy space combat look up the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. (If someone mentioned it already I apologise).
For some sf that covers VERY missile heavy space combat look up the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. (If someone mentioned it already I apologise).
About half a dozen times in the thread so far, and like I pointed out, while it does have extreme detail applied to its missile combat, it like most of the other tech in the series is designed around and dependent on the propulsion system Weber invented for the setting. Some of it still applies, but as a whole it's too divergent from known 'real-world physics' to be an accurate predictor of future space combat.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GungHo, on Battletech
The Atlas is also goofy but it has that whole "Stay Puft Marshmallow Man" menacing smile thing going for it. The guy who drew that one up was obviously taken to the Nutcracker when he was a child... and he was screaming in terror the entire time.
Spoiler
Quote:
Originally Posted by Enterti, Cogidubnus
Glyphstone, out of all the playground I think you scare me the most...
About half a dozen times in the thread so far, and like I pointed out, while it does have extreme detail applied to its missile combat, it like most of the other tech in the series is designed around and dependent on the propulsion system Weber invented for the setting. Some of it still applies, but as a whole it's too divergent from known 'real-world physics' to be an accurate predictor of future space combat.
What he said. Honor Harrington is a great series from the perspective of "Weber wanted missiles and two-dimensional 'man-o-war' warfare with an eventual evolution to WWII battleship-and-carrier combat and wrote all of the technology around making that work". But literally every piece of technology in the series was specifically thought up to bring about the wartime conditions depicted. It's the opposite of what we're doing here, which is speculating what space combat will look like based on real-world technology. Believe me, just having one of those magic inertial compensators that sci-fi series hand out like candy would completely, utterly change the face of this discussion.
To give him credit, he's one of the few modern space authors who very much doesn't play the two-dimensional 'Space is Flat' card - fleet formations are based around the 'wall' (obvious 3-D analogue to the man-o-war 'line', and activity off the system eliptic is a plot point/tactic in numerous situations. The rest of what you said is accurate, though, and makes it of little use for this debate.
*goes off to finish re-reading Shadow of Saganami for the bazillionth time*
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GungHo, on Battletech
The Atlas is also goofy but it has that whole "Stay Puft Marshmallow Man" menacing smile thing going for it. The guy who drew that one up was obviously taken to the Nutcracker when he was a child... and he was screaming in terror the entire time.
Spoiler
Quote:
Originally Posted by Enterti, Cogidubnus
Glyphstone, out of all the playground I think you scare me the most...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zombimode
Glyphstone, you are an evil person :D
Last edited by The Glyphstone : 10-12-2012 at 02:41 PM.
well there is something to be said for flat space combat in solar systems.
the fastest way in or out of a solar system is along the plane the planets occupy.
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The solar system is nominally spherical (or at least the Oort Cloud is) and shouldn't the fastest way out of a sphere be directly away from center? Ergo for us right along the planetary plane?
Been a long time since I've done geometry though...
well there is something to be said for flat space combat in solar systems.
the fastest way in or out of a solar system is along the plane the planets occupy.
More to the point, all of the interesting stuff is along the elliptic plane, such as planets people want to own.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GungHo, on Battletech
The Atlas is also goofy but it has that whole "Stay Puft Marshmallow Man" menacing smile thing going for it. The guy who drew that one up was obviously taken to the Nutcracker when he was a child... and he was screaming in terror the entire time.
Spoiler
Quote:
Originally Posted by Enterti, Cogidubnus
Glyphstone, out of all the playground I think you scare me the most...
Yes, but if you want OUT, don't you want to move *away* from the "interesting stuff"?
If you want to be "out" as in having relatively nothing around you but presumably a few stray asteroids and comets then yes. But strictly speaking you aren't out of the solar system by a long shot simply by leaving the plane since the sun's influence extends in all directions.
More meaningful would probably be where you are going long term, going to a star below/above the planetary plane you would leave it pretty rapidly taking a straight-line route.
If you want to be "out" as in having relatively nothing around you but presumably a few stray asteroids and comets then yes. But strictly speaking you aren't out of the solar system by a long shot simply by leaving the plane since the sun's influence extends in all directions.
More meaningful would probably be where you are going long term, going to a star below/above the planetary plane you would leave it pretty rapidly taking a straight-line route.
If you are going to a star, pretty much any direction is going to count as quick, or it will be a long, long trip.
Even if the plane of the ecliptic is, on a planarity scale ,fairly narrow, it still leaves plenty of room for anything on a more human scale to move in 3D space.
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Originally Posted by Calanon
Raven_Cry's comments often have the effects of a +5 Tome of Understanding
If you are going to a star, pretty much any direction is going to count as quick, or it will be a long, long trip.
Even if the plane of the ecliptic is, on a planarity scale ,fairly narrow, it still leaves plenty of room for anything on a more human scale to move in 3D space.
Going out past the Oort cloud is by most estimates it seems a significant portion of a light year. Wiki lists .79 but notes some estimates go as far as 3ly or most of the way to Proxima Centauri. For local interstellar travel that's pushing it for a detour if its also going to modify you course to you final destination which can still be only a small number of lightyears away, it will always be less efficient. One side of a triangle will generally be signifcantly less then two sides. That might not matter depending on how good your FTL is but I plenty of settings run more like the local neighborhood being a short cruise but not just getting on a bus.
Now to the second, yes there is still lots of room to maneuver a ship it, but there's comparatively little reason navigation wise to since there's no where to go to. And you wouldn't orbit the sun north or south to get to an object on the other side, you'd orbit east or west depending on where it was in the in its orbit. Once you get to the outer system this changes some, going to different Jovian moons or whatever will need some up and down I believe.
Given though that you first asked about the quickest way out of the solar system though I'm curious as to what your current query is?
To give him credit, he's one of the few modern space authors who very much doesn't play the two-dimensional 'Space is Flat' card - fleet formations are based around the 'wall' (obvious 3-D analogue to the man-o-war 'line', and activity off the system eliptic is a plot point/tactic in numerous situations. The rest of what you said is accurate, though, and makes it of little use for this debate.
*goes off to finish re-reading Shadow of Saganami for the bazillionth time*
About half a dozen times in the thread so far, and like I pointed out, while it does have extreme detail applied to its missile combat, it like most of the other tech in the series is designed around and dependent on the propulsion system Weber invented for the setting. Some of it still applies, but as a whole it's too divergent from known 'real-world physics' to be an accurate predictor of future space combat.
Just started into the Genre with Honor Harrington, and the way h handles the speed of the fighting tactically and dynamically are on par. The other great thing about the fights are that they have vessels whose shielding/transportation is weaker on the "sides" than the "top and bottom." This leads to some interesting intra-ship dynamics where they can shoot missiles at the enemy, and then rotate away in anticipation of the incoming volley. But overall the series is dependent on a LOT of the in-universe tech.
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Re: Aircraft carriers in space
