/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.2258726]

When will we be able to have old school dogfights in space?

[Anonymous No.2258740]

NEVER.
The amount of fuel required to correct the recoil from conventional guns in space would be obscene.

[Anonymous No.2258745]

But what if we use magnetic railguns?

Magnets dont have recoil, right?

[Anonymous No.2258751]

>>2258745
only if newtons 3rd law is wrong,

spoiler alert: its never wrong

[Anonymous No.2258750]

>>2258745
Yeeeeess, they do.
The railgun pushes itself away from the bullet, and the bullet away from the railgun, using magnetism. There's still recoil, but not as much as gunpowder-based guns.

[Anonymous No.2258755]

>>2258751

Didn't einstein prove newton wrong?

[Anonymous No.2258760]

>>2258755
About what? Motion?
I don't remember something like that. Can you quote a source?

[Anonymous No.2258768]

1. Get computer
2. Acquire completely legitimate non-pirated copy of Freespace 2
3. ???
4. Dive, DIVE, *DIVE*!

[Anonymous No.2258769]

Space combat will involve taking potshots at each other across interstellar space with relativistic kill vehicles.

Prove me wrong.

[Anonymous No.2258771]

>>2258755
Essentially Einstein showed that newtons laws don't hold when we are dealing with speeds in the vicinity of the speed of light, rather they are approximations at lesser speeds. Regarding newtons third law though, that still holds.

[Anonymous No.2258772]

>>2258769
You're an underage faggot who loves to suck his grandpas cock, prove me wrong

[sage No.2258780]

>>2258726
ITT: The reason humanity isn't in space yet, too many war hungry faggots, who would rather make war then explore.

Are you happy faggots?

[Anonymous No.2258786]

>>2258780
But we could make wars in space. It will be a win-win situation.

[Anonymous No.2258800]

>>2258780
The biggest leap humanity has ever taken into space was because of a world war between Capitalism and Communism.

I don't understand what points you're trying to make, but I think you should just go back to your weed.

[sage No.2258803]

>>2258786
>doesn't relize that we spend most of our money on the military

If we used a significant portion of our money on science, WE WOULD BE IN FUCKING SPACE BY NOW! BUT FAGGOTS LIKE YOU HAVE SOME SHITTY WAR MENTALITY THAT PREVENTS PROPER SCIENCE FUNDING! GTFO FAGGOT!

[Anonymous No.2258805]

>>2258786
No, it would not,
war in space is shit.
do you even realize that to destroy the death star all you'd have to do is shoot a railgun through it, technology we can already get into space if we really had a reason to?

space combat is shit, it takes days to get to the moon, weeks for mars, all the while telescopes can detect your every move and have ample time to prepare for the invasion or just swat you like the annoying fly you are.

war through space is like saying you want to declare war on another country so you send 1 naked man on a life raft through an ocean armed with a tooth pick

This is why space will be great and everyone wants to get there, the invasion game is over, No one on earth can invade anyone on mars, and vica versa. the only war game left is mad.

[Anonymous No.2258809]

>>2258768
Independence War 2 would be better

[Anonymous No.2258824]

>>2258771
And you would have combat in space at speeds that mean if you can see your enemy, they have moved since them?
Dogfights in space won't work. Like >>2258805 said, the only thing left will be MAD of some flavor or another.

[Anonymous No.2258826]

>>2258824
>since them
*since then

[Anonymous No.2258842]

>>2258740
Lol no.

[Anonymous No.2258868]

There's no significant cover in space.

You can be seen across the whole solar system.

Your waste heat being even few degrees above the background temperature will cause you to shine like a beacon in infrared.

Unless you are more than several light seconds away from your target, they cannot avoid directed energy weapons. And even if they're far enough away to avoid weapon emissions, doing so will be by chance.

Any kinetic weapon with the KE to travel at a significant fraction of c is a one-hit kill no matter what the target is made of.

The acceleration and velocities necessary to avoid these weapons means that even if you by chance got close to a target you would barely have time to see it zip in and out of visual range as you tear past at immense speed.

Though at least one of you would invariably be dead because your fire control can't miss if you pass that close to one another.

You won't be circling and weaving around each other at the engagement distances involved.

There will be no dogfights in space.

There will probably be lots of missiles.

[Anonymous No.2258970]

>>2258868

It's what the Japanese have been preparing us for all along.

[Anonymous No.2258995]

Okay Okay I know dumb question... but is it crazy to think that some short of shielding would have to be in place before we even thought about weapons? I don't know any of the math behind any of these claims about railguns and death stars but would it be physically impossibly to have a shield that could withstand the weapons we would be using?

[Anonymous No.2259012]

>>2258995
The problem with "shields" is that there are no known physical principles by which they could operate. All shields in SciFi are pure magitech.

Assuming the ability to arbitrarily shape spacetime, you can "disconnect" from the rest of the universe to avoid incoming fire, but you also can't fire out, see anything else or move through space while this is happening. And the ability to arbitrarily shape spacetime is pure magic, nothing we know has given us any reason to believe that such a thing is possible.

In the real world, "defenses" are pretty much useless because even the strongest structural materials theoretically possible (carbon nanotubes, buckyballs etc) crumple into dust when they're struck with high velocity impactors on the scale we're talking about (relative velocity of >5km/s). The best defense is perform random manuevering, known as "jinking". At significant ranges (greater than half a light second), it means that nothing will ever hit you except for ultra-lucky shots, but you will still be fare game for guided munitions (missiles).

The on-going debate in SF communities is called 'Green vs Purple', and it is basically Laser vs Missile weapons. Depending on how powerful the lasers are and how good the drives you put in your missiles are, the balance of power can easily go either way for which one is "better". We can't say for certain which will be better in RL.

[Anonymous No.2259021]

>>2259012
I see. Well I guess for missiles you could have some kind of laser defense right? I mean they have that on Earth so up in space with nothing to block a signal it would be easy?

[Anonymous No.2259036]

>>2259021
Lasers are longer ranged in vacuum because atmosphere does not cause them to bloom (bloom = expand outwards as it moves forwards), but the range is still surprisingly limited since lasers still bloom in vacuum due to quantum effects. Oh, you can certainly hit targets at light-second ranges and beyond, it's just that the beam is so diffuse at that range that you can't cause any real damage.

Since the "effective range" of lasers is far lower than "one light second" for all but the most stupendously powerful lasers (not plausible for a space ship, maybe for a large orbital space station though), the ranges at which lasers ARE lethal are such that the speed of lasers means they never miss.

The advantage of missiles is that you can launch 20 of them, turn around and run away, and the 20 missiles will track down your target and you escape regardless of whether or not the other guy survives. Because missiles can coast at low velocities from very long ranges and don't "bloom", they can be fired from extreme range (light minutes, even).

As you say, lasers can intercept missiles. This creates the central conundrum here. Any laser weapon can be used as a defense system, any any laser defense systems can be overwhelmed with a sufficient number of incoming missiles (i.e. it can't destroy them before some of them slip through). The effectiveness of laser ships vs missile ships thus comes down to:

- How much does a laser ship cost?
- How many missiles can a laser ship destroy before it gets overwhelmed?
- How much does each missile cost?

If the missiles necessary to overwhelm a laser ship cost 1/10th of the price of a laser ship, then missiles win. If it takes more to build the missiles than it does to build the laser ship, then the lasers are better.

[Anonymous No.2259063]

[Anonymous No.2259073]

>>2259036
So are there really no defenses in space combat? I mean aside from maneuvering?

[Anonymous No.2259082]

>>2259073
Armor can save you from laser weapons for a while, but they will burn through pretty quick. Missile weapons are inevitably going to be traveling at 7+ KM/second, and at 3 KM/second, an object impacts with a force equivelant to it's own mass in TNT. 7 KM/s is "orbital velocities", actual space combat weapons could easily break 10-12 KM/s, and not even space stations will be able to survive that sort of thing. Unless they're built into the side of an asteroid or something.

[снайпер No.2259096]

>>2259036
>but the range is still surprisingly limited since lasers still bloom in vacuum due to quantum effects.

Well, I don't know much about the quantum effects, [IIRC, there's a saturation point where you can't pump anymore photons through a given space, but I'm not sure if that applies to atmospheres only] but I do know that you can't perfectly focus a laser so it continues on forever. There's always a focal point - and if you want that focal point further away, you need a larger focusing lens, more energy output, or a smaller wavelength.

So we're talking gigawatt reactors powering 15 meter diameter ultraviolet <span class="math">2.8*10^{-7}[/spoiler]m lasers to hit and kill something maybe 10,00km's away.

Considering the Earth itself has a diameter of about 12,700km's, [and the distance from the Earth to the moon is ~384,000km's] Lasers are effectively short range weapons in space.

[снайпер No.2259133]

>>2259073
It'll really depend on how much mass you want to dedicate to armor.

A typical penetrator used in tank combat has a speed of around 1km/s. To defeat this, you need to use RHAe of about 1000mm's. Modern MBT's sport between 900 and 1500mm's RHAe on their frontal turret.

[RHAe stands for Rolled Homogenous Armor equivlent - basically it's how much pure steel you'd need to stop the penetrator. Modern composite materials and armor design cut the actual thickness and density of armor required however, hence the equivalence.]

To stop a 7 or 8km/s penetrator, you might very well need on the order of 10,000+mm's of RHAe. It's pretty obvious how quickly infeasible this becomes. Especially in order to armor the entire spacecraft, and moreso when you take into consideration just how important it is to reduce mass on a spaceship as much as possible.

If anyone ever actually does armor a spacecraft, it'll be almost entirely on the nose, and the spacecraft itself will be either disk or cone shaped, so as to present the lowest surface area and most armor to the incoming projectile.

[Anonymous No.2259167]

Question: Is it possible to intercept a relativistic kill vehicle?

[снайпер No.2259180]

>>2259167
Maybe if you fire another RKV at the incoming one, but probably not likely.

Especially because an RKV is traveling so fast it never appears to be where it actually is.

[Anonymous No.2259189]

>>2259167
If you are exceptionally lucky with spamming your laser blasts and interceptor missiles, yes.

But depending on the RKV in question, it may not do you any good. If a large RKV is heading to a planet, it's going to do just as much damage a relativistic shrapnel slamming into the atmosphere as it would being a solid object, since when you're going at hypervelocitiy and above, all objects behave as fluids on impact anyway, and the energy transfer is just as bad as it was prior to interception (i.e. extinction level event).

The problem is even knowing that it's coming at all, and that there is an RKV to intercept in the first place. The information moving away from the RKV that you can detect is only slightly faster than the RKV itself, and you will only get seconds or minutes of warning depending on precisely how fast it is going.

[Anonymous No.2260055]

>>2258750
They both have equal and opposite momentum, but FUKKIN MAGNETS push both objects (projectile and gun) more gradually, instead of starting explosively, so it would be slightly less jostling to the ship.

[Anonymous No.2260077]

There won't be any true space warfare though there may be orbital weapons platforms and basic defensive armaments aboard space ships and stations. Space warfare fails the rational basis test, because anything that might piss you off is too far away to care, especially when you could just avoid any interaction with it by... going somewhere else or not going there in the first place. Space is vast, and all our evidence indicates that raw materials are not scarce on such a scale. Even stars that don't have planets still have lots of asteroidal and cometary debris for making whatever shit you might want for your flying fuckernauts and astrobastards.

Let's say you really have it in you to plaster somebody in another system that has pissed you off. Now, you better pack nukes, or heavy relativistic projectiles, and it better be sufficient to wipe out the "adversary" and preclude retaliation, but the good news is they'll never see it coming. Congratulations! You sure got them. What now? There's not even anybody to gloat over. Boring.

[Anonymous No.2260093]

we don't even have dogfights in the air anymore.
you can shoot stuff down from 50km away.
no reason to think there would be in space

[Anonymous No.2260152]

We could have them right now, but no agency is willing to cough up the dough to ship up two rabid canines to orbit just to have them kill each other and probably wreck a lot of equipment while they're at it.

[Anonymous No.2260180]

itt: sci-fi-fags

lrn2space-warfare. War in space will be fought with lasers and missiles. Anything that isn't guided or damn near instantaneous in travel will simply be dodged.

Not that it matters. The wars of the future will be fought via stock. Mining colonies won't be nuked, they will be bought out, workers and all.