/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10479699
Drones. Small ones with a low signature. Like space missiles with AI. Some of them kamikazee with micronukes.

Keep government out of space.

The big ships will fire beams at each other but for the most part they will miss.

>>10479699
For the near to mid future, it will be planetary. Orbital weapons getting blown out of the sky by ASATs, maybe transports and/or IPBMs if we get off our collective asses and colonize other celestial bodies.

Everything is just too damned squishy and too damned predictable until we significantly increase available dV for anything else to happen. Wide spread, safe and reliable Nuclear Pulse, Thermal or Salt Water or Fusion. That is the sort of tier we're talking about for real space wars.

Everyone shredding each other with orbital debris. Or using big space mirrors to melt each other. Or interplanetary kinetic missiles.

>>10479699
Play this and find out.

https://youtu.be/qjWEGlot35Y

>>10479699
>What will space warfare look like?

like a brief flash of light followed by the extinction of humanity

because as soon as we have enough spaceships to have "space warfare" it's inevitable that some
>pic related
will deliberately crash one on earth to simulate an asteroid impact, because of reasons

>>10479704
>>10479789
>>10479775
>implying it wont be just spraying tiny projectiles at extreme velocities in hope of hitting the target

>>10479699
I don't know what it would like, but it would sound like your Friday night.
BOOM!

>>10479699
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
Also see the game Children of a Dead Earth.

>>10479699

Spaceships are the shotgun, the planet the barrel, the people the fish.

Itll be droids fighting. A spaceship is a huge risk to be firing from or to have in a dogfight.

It will look exactly like Star Wars Episode 8.

>large fusion-powered space vessels
>primarily operate in the vacuum of space, but can generate enough static thrust with air-breathing ion engines to hover in atmosphere for resupply
>engagements take place across several AU, using missiles as weapons and planetary bodies as cover
>orbital bombardment commences
>anti-orbital plasma weapons
>once space-superiority is established, enter the atmosphere and release the troop carriers
>provide support to ground forces with missile barrages
>ground forces apprehend the high value target

>>10479699
Pew pew
boom
>eardrums explode

The nation with the biggest optics and biggest lasers wins.

>>10479798
>implying Space Saudis would let them

>>10479839
Spray and pray doesn't work in space. U think you mean firing one large projectile that disintegrates just before impacting the target.

>>10479699
Giant robots with laser swords piloted by edgy teenagers.

truck sized blocks of matter being accelerated close to the speed of light that immediately obliterates the surface of planets at the moment of impact.

Interstellar war won't be a real thing because it's not a war. It's just which one launches that truck sized object earlier than the other immediately wins.

>>10480707
>lol let me just accelerate to near the speed of light.

>>10480712
It's not even that hard if you make the object out of a reflective surface.

You shoot it off the Earth/Moon/Spaceship with as much force as possible and then point the most powerful lasers possible at it that allows it to keep accelerating over a couple of years up to 99.9% of the speed of light.

When it hits a planet it would be as powerful as a million Tsar bomba nukes and would without a doubt destroy the entire surface of a planet and every big structure possible such as dyson spheres.

There is no reason warfare will be fought in any other way than this. Just lump projectiles at each other with the laser system and the first one that launched wins by default.

>>10480720
>over a couple of years

>>10479775
>For the near to mid future, it will be planetary. Orbital weapons getting blown out of the sky by ASATs, maybe transports and/or IPBMs if we get off our collective asses and colonize other celestial bodies.

During that phase of colonization, I'm not sure there is much motive for war.

>>10480665
space combat will requie something that
1) cant be shoot down before it reaches the target
and
2) cant be easily avoided by manouvering
due to (probable) large range of encounters
beams cant be focused at that range, big kinetic projectiles can be easily avoided and rockets/missles can be shot down before reaching target

>>10480720
>keep accelerating over a couple of years up to 99.9% of the speed of light.

At which point you've missed all the other planets and your projectile is headed out into interstellar space.

>>10480730
>>10480744
My original comment was about interstellar war though....

>>10479699
it wont look like anything because space travel will never happen

>>10480161
>large vessel
being ripped apart by gravity
brainlet

>>10479699
Ship to ship, I think basically submarine warfare but in space and further apart. Vessels would try to intercept one another and/or evade while trading long-distance torpedo fire while attempting to detect and evade oncoming fire.
Crest of the Stars has the right idea, with fleets hardly ever encountering one another visually but instead detecting one another at great distance and trading huge volleys of torpedoes.

>>10480756
In which case boosting a mass up to close to light speed from my planet aimed towards your planet is a really dumb way to go about it.

>>10479798
The simple solution to that problem is: Don't be on earth.

>>10479699
Drone missiles that are nuclear rail guns and nuclear lasers, all one-time use. They blast out towards the target to get as close as possible then disperse pods of rail guns and lasers which destroy themselves upon firing. The rail guns will use high velocity particles that try to dirty up the trajectory of the target with a big field of objects (aka, sand canons). The biggest goal will to be blinding sensors so that point defence can't be accurately used. Which a cloud of particles will do nicely. However, the main weapon will be subterfuge and propaganda.

>>10481021
>attempting to detect

You can't hide in space. 30 years ago you couldn't do it with shitty tech of that day. Now there's even better detection tech.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/essay-on-realistic-space-combat-i-wrote.131056/

>>10479704
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw&t=201s

>>10479699
Sniping at eachother with hyperkinetic rounds over AUs of range.

>>10480741
Destroying a single projectile heading towards you at high velocity would simply create many small projectiles heading at you at high velocities.

>>10481173
Can you imagine the processing power needed to predict where the target will be? If they know they are being fired at then any evasive maneuver could potentially move it too far off course for intersect. You'd need to shoot clouds of atoms out at a few % of C in order to hit something at such a distance and do damage.

Post-singularity warfare will be pretty epic. Trillions upon trillions of warships, many measured by the cubic kilometre. Point defence nukes, antimatter missiles, all controlled by AI.

Imagine campaigns on a galactic level, fighting over starlifter infrastructure or a Matrioshka brain. Planetary disassembly being a primary means of resourcing, akin to living off the land.

>>10481335
What about a projectile traveling at the speed of light?

>>10481315
that's what atmospheres are for

>>10481021
I don't think so, resources are do vast in space you could make thousands of battleship-like spaceships at the drop of the hat, early stage of the space era maybe but once enough ships are made to fight each other it will likely resemble a pitched battle, with artillery ships, smaller vessels as support, carrier craft, etc, until the scale gets so large it becomes continuous warfare over dug in battle lines, especially during planet sieges, then it's likely what will be the final state being similar to blitzkrieg and modern, mobile warfare like how land armies fight today, would be interesting to watch desu

>>10481359
While that is the best possible scenario (LASER) it is still damn slow. 1AU is still over 8.3 light minutes. Meaning 8.3 minutes for the laser to travel that distance. That's a long damn time for leading a target you don't know will be there or not.

>AUs of range.

8.3 x 2AU = 16.6 light minutes. Which is fine for a stationary or easily predictable trajectory target.

>>10479699
we can't really know until it happens. In the mean time read project rho and play children of a dead earth. In the near term space warfare will probably be situating 'repair satellites' near other countries satellites. When war happens, the 'repair' satellites use their robot arms to 'fix' the radio antenna and solar panels on the other countries satellites so that they don't work. This way, the country who launched the repair satellites can still have their satellites work. If you use a gun, you create orbital debris, this is not the case if you just snip some wires on the other country's satellites. But really war probably won't happen because it will just be dick waving.
>>10479775
>>orbital weapons
are a complete joke. It's easier just to boost stuff on missiles to a target, rather than waiting for it to orbit over exactly the right spot.
>>ASAT
so you want to blow up your own satellites too?
>>10479789
>>space mirrors
optics don't work that way.
>>10480161
I'm afraid you've played too many videogames
>>10479704
>>10480634
>>10481378
diffraction limited beam spread
>>10481315
and if these projectiles are spread out into a cloud of sand many meters across, it won't do much damage
>>10481336
If you asked a caveman about what war would be like today, they'd probably just say bigger sticks.

>>10481588
>diffraction limited beam spread

Just an example of an existing lightspeed weapon. It is still pretty shit at any far distance just for that.

>>10481632
of course we can potentially make the beam spread smaller if we use a smaller wavelength. For distances if an AU we need to use gamma rays. There actually might be a way for us to make gamma ray lasers near term. Aiming them would be hard, but then again everything about gamma ray lasers is hard. Current x-ray lasers are fucking ridiculously complicated. The shear number of different physics used is amazing.

>>10479699
Really boring. People mashing you with relativistic sabots from vast distances, most of the time you'll be lucky to see a speck of the horizon and will mostly be working with sensor data and machine learning tools to predict their location.

>>10481336
>Post-singularity
Ducking hell, stop with this meme.

>>10481697

>post-stone
>post-bronze
>post-horse

Nothing can ever happen for the first time, I agree. Good post.

>>10481723
Point being machine learning, which is all so-called "artifical intelligence" is, isn't exponentially increasing, and has been stalled since mid-this decade, and ANY stall shows it isn't exponential and those stalls will increase with magnitude as the technological barriers increase.

>>10481723
Singularity is complete sci-fi rubbish. You have no clue what you are even talking about. AI is a dead end tech already as is 99% of all tech.

>>10481671
Yeah, I was the one talking about nuclear lasers up in >>10481144 Everything about conventional distance shooting just won't be a thing for the most part.

>>10481806
Gamma ray lasers won't necessarily need to be one time use. Current x-ray lasers aren't. Bomb pumped x-ray lasers have probably never worked.

>>10481812
I was meaning the bomb pump ones. They have the potential of hitting many targets at once at near-space distances. I think the Excalibur program was a lot of grant-chasing BS though. It was started at the wrong time and the anti-nuclear movement probably shut that coffin for good.

>>10481588
>It's easier just to boost stuff on missiles to a target,
Missiles are not space war, unless you consider infantry firing at each other Air War, just because bullets go through the air. We're assuming a space war.
>rather than waiting for it to orbit over exactly the right spot.
This is not how orbital weaponry works. 6 weapons could hit any target in the world while still providing a significant decrease in response and flight time over missiles.
>ASAT
>so you want to blow up your own satellites too?
Depending on who I am in this little wargame, absolutely. Kesslering Earth has a far greater impact on the US than China for example. It would be a huge net positive for China to deny the US its extensive satellite infrastructure, even at the cost of it's own.

>>10481979
>>weapons could hit any target in the world while still providing a significant decrease in response and flight time over missiles
prove it faggot. You know what's even faster? Hypersonic missiles. A fucking crazy idea to go even faster is to make a tsunami using a nuclear bomb underwater to devastate coastal cities. But wait, what if you put a hypersonic missile on a sub so it can sit near the coast and fire when ready?

>>10482250
>You know what's even faster? Hypersonic missiles
Hypersonic missiles faster than object reentering with orbital velocity.
Now we know how retarded you are the meme weapon picture did the rest.

>>10482294
You've still not proven that orbital weapons are indeed faster faggot.Sure, they may be faster, but how are you going to make a fucking huge plane change maneuver so that you can actually hit a target faggot.

>>10479699
Like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXeUkrlxQ98

>>10482250
this pic looks like pure propaganda fearmongering

>>10482250
Is this a meme? We've had weapons capable of ruining the whole planet for many years.

>>10482250
How about hypersonic missiles coming down out of low orbit?

>>10481335
>Can you imagine the processing power needed to predict where the target will be?
If you're in a big ass ship going at full burn, how nimble are you really going to be?

>>10482948
At 1AU+ you don't need to be nimble to avoid something that takes 8+ minutes to reach you at light speed. Since lasers are out of the question at that distance, you have almost nothing to worry about other than massive dispersed clouds of fast moving particles which even a nimble craft probably could out maneuver if they can be detected. But, with current tech I think the fastest projectile from a rail gun is around 5,000mph. That would take 2.1 years to cross 1AU distance. At half the speed of light it'd take 16.6 minutes. 1% the speed of light and it'd take 13.8 hours to cross 1AU; which we'd be hard pressed to accomplish.

Thus, pretty much any ship with mobility will have plenty of time to get out of the way. Even a small degree of change will result in a huge change by the time the projectile crossed that distance. The weapon of choice would be a fast drone missile that closes as much distance as possible then lasers or launches its own projectile while outside of point system defence range.

>>10482250
>prove it
Read the RAND report, or the Project Thor documentation, or learn to google.
> You know what's even faster? Hypersonic missiles.
How fast do you think orbital weapons are going when they come down, anon?
6 satellites is enough to provide <12 minute coverage to the world, even assuming a modest entry profile, 10 with a realistic one. To match that with hypersonics requires a lot of investment - almost 200 launch sites (inc submarines)

>>10479699
Not sure that it will exist at all.

>>10482987
give me a citation faggot. RAND makes a lot reports.

>>10482971
>you don't need to be nimble to avoid something that takes 8+ minutes to reach you at light speed.
How are you supposed to know you've been fired at? The round is traveling at near lightspeed. You wouldn't see the launch until at best seconds before the impact.
And if you can't just change direction on a dime you've got inertia and no medium to bleed it off or slow you down. You can't turn an aircraft carrier around in 8 minutes, let alone your interstellar warship, unless you're going full sci-fi propulsion with things like inertial dampeners and non reaction engines.

>>10482987
>Project Thor
Based tungsten rods from the sky.

no casaba howitzer?

disappoint

>>10483163
>The round is traveling at near lightspeed

It isn't, even if it were you can always set your craft to make slight changes in trajectory every so often. That alone would negate any pinpoint targeting.

>You can't turn an aircraft carrier around in 8 minutes, let alone your interstellar warship

You misunderstand. A fraction of degree of course change results in a massive amount of distance difference after a few moments of travel. You don't need to stop and dodge bullets, you just barely nudge your ship and that's it. These distances and speeds are literally astronomical. There's almost nothing you can do to hit a target that can change its trajectory even slightly at 1AU distance. Hence the need for drone missiles getting close and doing it for you.

relativistic kill vehicles are overhyped because lots of that energy turns into neutrinos and most of the destructive force is fusion and it's not even 50 percent of the energy

>>10483265
Nuclear bomb pumped lasers do that basically. The explosion destroys a targeting payload that creates the neutrinos, gamma rays, and/or xrays depending on what they want to achieve. So, you load up these bomb lasers on a relativistic kill vehicle and shoot it towards the target. Once it gets in range it explodes and punches a hole through the target from a few thousand kilometers away.

>>10483292
oh...

wouldnt antimatter be just as effective?

>>10483292
also what if you accelerated antimatter to relativistic speeds???

does that double to energy...? because i thought the relativistic kill vehicle turns mass into energy but then there is more energy also because of momentum?

>>10483311
>>10483292
i mean kinetic energy* instead of momentum

>>10483307
>>10483311
We don't have antimatter we can do that with. Also, the exploding relativistic kill vehicle will do two things if it is a bomb laser. The first is to blast the laser at where ever the target is when it gets to that point and the second is to keep traveling. It is a ball of hot plasma nuclear explosion by that point, but it is still traveling at the same speed "for the most part." So, if the target moved, the laser will get it and if the target didn't move or move far enough, the laser will hit it and then the relativistic nuclear cloud will slam into it.

>>10479699
A.I controlled ships firing kinetic kill missiles frmo light seconds away.

>>10483232
So you're just constantly engaging in burns to evade potential attacks you can't see before its too late?
Even if its going half the speed of light you've got less than 4 minutes of time to identify where the shooting is coming from, reorient your primary drive, and burn hard and fast enough to get out of the way.
You've not got the luxury of a lot of time just because its far away.

>>10482667
it's basically SLAM but a torpedo instead
a very good weapon against a coastal nation
underwater nukes explosions produce a lot of radioactive sea salt which is bad news. I forget if it's sodium or chlorine that's the bad one when activated.

>>10483480
Space warfare will be all about not being there when the enemy's high order buttblaster reaches you. You seriously do not understand the distances and forces involved.

•First of all, we will never get any weapon up to even 1% of the speed of light in any useful way for quick shots against a moving target. It is absurd to think otherwise.
•Second, 4 minutes is plenty of time to move out of the way of anything coming at you, because you actually have more than 4 minutes.
•Third, if you can see an enemy anywhere, and you will see them because you can't hide in space unless you are hiding behind something like a moon or asteroid, you will always be changing trajectory slightly. Because of this, any enemy who can see you will be seeing your ghost.
•Fourth, the enemy will never see a real time image of you. At 1AU any image they see will already be 8.3+ minutes old. Because of this, the 8.3mins + your weapon's travel time means if the target moves just slightly at any moment, their trajectory will be wildly off course from your weapon's trajectory. Which means, if you change trajectory slightly every x amount of time, nothing can hit you unless it is a massive cloud of stuff spanning 100s-1000s of kilometers. This is why you have to use smart weapons that can change course as needed until they are close enough to fire the real weapon payload.

Pretty much anything you read in science fiction is complete bullshit when applied to the real world. There are a few exceptions, but not worth mentioning. Don't base anything on sci-fi.

>>10483388
>light seconds

Just 1 light second is around 300k away. Even lasers at that distance will disperse to much to be really usable. Multiple light seconds just compounds the problem. A missile, that has only kinetic energy as its weapon, will only be good against stationary targets or targets that don't change course. While AI controlled is great, it is limited in how much it can change the trajectory due to velocity required.

>>10479704
Depends. Final stage space wars will look like wizards battling. Early stage will be more like - >>10479704

To maintain ethics and avoid a Hitler we need to make sure its a sonic differentiation to keep the output of width to within means and not for the charter that we must destroy each other. Looking for a new rock to stand on will be hard up there and being so far away after a hit is like pooping out of home with a toilet seat that doesn't have a safety seat paper thing. I forgot the name suddenly.

>>10479699
What the hell could causes it? Wars over space resources are better executed on Earth. Wars with colonies are unlikely as they'll be dependent for a long long time. Interstellar is unlikely to say the least.
>>10482937
RfG, modern FOBS' and ICBMs are all hypersonic in the terminal phase.
>>10483087
He spoon fed you results you should have googled before posting in the thread and you're still trying to push that bullshit? There's only 2 Rand reports relevant to the topic, and if you can't find those he gave you another resource to use. At this point, it's on you.

>>10481732
>>10481800

>There will NEVER be an intelligence more powerful than a human brain, limited by 120 m/s neuron speed, skull sizes and 10-25 watts per day.

I can't imagine how dumb you'd have to be to think this. Lightbulbs use more energy than a brain and we have nuclear plants. The human brain is proof that intelligence is fucking cheap and easy.

Go read some Bostrom, educate yourselves.

>>10479704
>drones
yes but I could see rail guns being used with a degree of effectiveness too

>>10484830
"Google it" is not a citation faggot.

>>10479792
>Basically macross missile/laser hell

I was going to say it seems like warfare's 'coolness to reality' factor rises exponentially in a negative fashion - the more advanced warfare gets the less 'cool' the reality is. But that makes me reconsider it. Before I get blasted by it, by 'cool' I mean the way it matches up to the hype/fantasy by those not involved in it. Pre-gunpowder warfare had a disconnect between the fantasy of contemporaries and the reality (most casualties during the rout for instance) but it still had a semblance to what the uninitiated imagined. Still the reality was more dour and dreary. That divide between fantasy and reality expanded in the era of gunpowder, kept expanding to the present and will probably be astronomical, no pun intended, in the space era.

>>10479798
And then the USA will invade Mars or something?

>>10479699
For the remainder of human civilization: Anti-satellite. Nothing occurs further than earth orbit. Deal with it fags.

>>10484949
He gave you two sources, faggot.

>>10485066
if you're going to be throwing around anti-sats nothing will be occuring in earth orbit either

>>10480161
So are both planets in the same binary star system?

>>10481362
Must be a big ship.

>>10484858
Anon, you have no fucking clue what you are talking about. Life isn't sci-fi. Stop being deluded on sci-fi and grant chasing trash..

>>10479699
>What will space warfare look like?

Drone swarm weapons platforms. Point defence weapons. Nuclear-pumped near target lasers. Thick reflective Whipple shielding. "Sand/gravel" rail canons. Retaliatory kinetic strikes. Asteroid shield walls. Subterfuge, subterfuge, subterfuge.

>>10485576
for you

>>10485133
I don't see any citations faggot

>>10485600
The greatest mind's on Earth couldn't build one battle spaceship. Honestly, niggas be takin off in rockets.

>>10485739
>one battle spaceship

Because, it would be foolish to do so. You'd need a segmented system that can always break apart "quickly" and maneuver "quickly."

>>10485787
Acts of foolishness are the forefront of war. If you're afraid, try reach mars with a toy robot.

>>10485795
A big slow moving slow turning high mass battleship is just a big bullseye to 90% of the weapons in this entire thread. Even the dumb ideas ITT. It is like you want to make space warfare cool and nifty.

>>10483576
Exactly A.I will basically be trying to outwit each other when it comes to aiming their kinetic missile which could home in on targets if they get close enough.

>>10479699
Gravitationally assisted high-speed impact debris.

>>10485817
Long shots are good 1st strike weapons. You can have many fast solar orbiting kinetic weapons salted all over the place traveling at ridiculous speeds. They'd be the solar system equivalent of nukes/doomsday weapons. Juno satellite that went to Jupiter was traveling something like 73.7km/s. 1cm tungsten projectile traveling 72km/s would have the energy of 12.4lbs of TNT on impact.

12.4lbs of TNT doesn't sound like much, but this video shows what just 5lbs of TNT can do. If a gravity slingshotted weapons platform traveling at 72km/s disperses a field of 1cm tungsten balls over a large area it would most likely cause quite a bit of devastation. You could use that so a cloud of tungsten balls would orbit a specific area making it into a minefield and no-go zone for pretty much anything.

>calculations and numbers are probably far off, i'm not double checking things
>suddenly remember that tnt force weights are not tnt mass weights

Well fuck, I'm posting it anyway!

>>10485817
Targets wouldn't be the planets, orbital military infrastructure would be.

>>10479699
Relativistic projectiles, both smart and dumb

>>10479704
>Drones
Dumb idea. The electromagnetic activity would be so easily detactable, you could shoot it down with a laser from a safe distance away.

Any weapon that isn‘t similarly as fast as light will be useless. All will be done primarily with lasers.

>>10480697
This

>>10480660
Pretty much this, it's why the us gives them so many resources, to keep the region pacified.

>>10481336
>Fighting over infrastructure
If we had the tech to machine antimatter bombs, we would have the tech to fuck off to the other side of the Galaxy to live and let live. Not saying warfare wouldnt happen, but the needs for it would be purely ideological.

>>10485574
The whole series occurs in the centauri star system, which is basically the single most important trade route/refuelling point for earth's developing interstellar colonies.

>>10485977
This guy gets it
>>10486211
This guy dont

>>10479699
Asimov described it pretty well in Foundation.

>>10479699
There won't be space warfare, as in battleships fighting each other in space. There will be orbital defence networks, which will try to defend from high-volume mass destruction attacks (large clouds of random debris accelerated towards a planet to land where it may), which will in turn act as cover for landing swarms od automated self-replicating drone factories. The winner will be whoever lands enough factories on the opponent's planet to overrun them with attack drones.