Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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 them essentially useless. With missiles (I'll assume missiles are nuclear here), not only are they slow but you can also set up computer controlled lasers to fry their control circuitry. Nukes require very specific detonation conditions and if you fry the explosive material it won't explode like a conventional weapon, it will just fail.

Also, with ships punching a hole in the bottom is enough to sink one - most ships hit by a one-shot-kill missile take a few minute to do down because they're sinking, not exploding. In space, this doesn't exist. You have fuel tanks and engines, but those can be safely put at the back of the ship, and in a battle you'll just rotate your ship so that the front faces the enemy.

Consider 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.

I would imagine that depends a lot on what the distance is. Release too close and you get blown up by a laser before you can release. Release too far and by the time they get there the ship will have moved away.

The missile will be smart enough to compensate for ship movements.

I don't mean the big missile, I mean the payload that InclinedPlane's strategy described - a missile shooting out a few thousand mininukes a short distance away. Such small payloads, even if we give them engines (which also makes them shine brightly to anti-missile lasers) are simply too small to outrun a ship - small engines tend to be very inefficient and slow.

The cost/benefit equation of war has changed drastically since the Romans kept themselves in a perpetual state of conflict in order to fund the republic with its spoils. Especially in this century, the cost of war implements has increased rapidly relative to the possible benefits from engagement.

The Egyptians were doing that way before the Romans. In general, having enough food to feed a standing army (as the Nile provided) gives a country a big leg up in the sacking & pillaging.

That's largely because the weapons industry has been corrupted by government funding, though. I find it hard to believe that the research, development and manufacturing of the F-22 Raptor would really need US $65B, and $125M per plane, for instance.

You might get some good `hacker action' breaking into the computer systems, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com