The Death Of The Heavy Scifi Battleship

[Bamax]

This is NOT a suggestion, I like Outsider as is.

This is just an observation I made...which would be just about a mute point in the Outsider-verse because they have inertial dampeners that allow greater thrust to weight ratios than they really would get without it. Even so I reckon the warp missiles in this post would still be properly devastating in Outsider.


What happens when you do not have inerial dampeners in a scifi setting? Read on.


I totally realize that scifi is often a compromise between fiction and reality.

I also realize that at times, reality is simply not good enough.


Example? I will give one that includes a compromise between fiction and reality.


Fictional compromise: You have an 80,000 ton spaceship that uses antimatter thermal rocketry for main sublight engines. Ten percent of it's mass is propellant (8000 tons).

You also have a warp drive that can move space past your ship. At max acceleration the warp drive can warp space up to light speed in 60 seconds. Lightspeed is the max warp speed, but you can warp however slow you want, and accelerate slowly or up to max warp (60 sec to lightspeed).

Warp navigation: Warp travel is linear. Use RCS thrusters to point ship's nose where you wish to warp and engage. In warp you can pitch, yaw, and roll, but it won't change your linear warp direction.

To change your warp direction at warp, point your ship's nose where you wish to warp and engage. Off you go in another linear warp direction. You can drop warp at anytime you wish. Each time you reengage warp your warpspeed resets to zero before increasing to whatever acceleration you set up to maximum (60 sec to lightspeed).


Jump drive: Enables interstellar jumps. Jump maximum range is directly linked to how long you warp with your warp drive. Requires 15 minutes to power up for a jump, while your warp drive is inactive.

If you have not warped at all you have 7 light years of max jump range. Jumping is just like the method to engage warp, except you instantly jump interstellar. Jump range goes down based on distance jumped. To refill your jump bank jump bank you must jump within 7 light hours of ANOTHER star. Otherwise it will stay depleted until you use it all up.


Weapons: For self-defense, your vessel has 50 warp missiles that also have rocket engines and RCS. Warp missiles can max warp to lightspeed in 15 SECONDS. Warp missiles only warp for 60 seconds before dropping out of warp, as their warp engines have tiny warp power banks. After that they can only use their rocket engine.


The scenario in which your ship likely won't survive: A light second away you detect a vessel similar to your own. It launches a warp missile at you. You have fifteen seconds before impact.

You burn your RCS thrusters hard for 5 seconds to rotate your ship's nose away from the oncoming warp missile. You engage warp. At high warp your vessel and the missile narrowly shoot past each other, while you push your warp acceleration to the max to reach lightspeed in 60 seconds.

The warp missile flips over and reengages warp in your direction.

"Impact in 10 seconds captain!" barks your pilot.

Options?

1. Launch warp missiles and try to hit a warp missile with a warp missile...in less than ten seconds LOL.

2. Try to warp dodge again, only to realize now the missile has closed even more distance the moment it reaquires a firing solution on your vessel to hit it at warp.

3. Try to laser zap the warp missile in less than ten seconds.

4. A solution of your own if you can think of a good one.


Conclusion: So what is the point of all this?

A very simple one. The heavier your spaceship the more it's RCS turn rate is slower or it has to use up more propellant to turn faster. For survival you want a high turn rate, especially for dodging warp missiles. But that is only a temporary solution, as warp missiles fired a light second away will catch up sooner or later. They have faster warp acceleration.


My point? Against hypevelocity weapons that can reaquire for several tries...like warp missiles, big heavy ships are sitting ducks.

At scifi tech levels like this, warp fighter craft, even with 30 seconds only of warp, would likely be the kings of space combat.

The age of the big space battleship is over when it cannot effectively dodge fast weaponry nor shield against it.

[Arioch]

If you want a look at a setting with similar FTL rules but no artificial gravity or internal dampers, check out The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle.

Acceleration is limited out about 6g, but since there's a limit to how long humans can withstand that, normal travel acceleration is only 1 or 2 gees (if they're in a hurry).

There are two key effects: first, ships are either cylindrical or cigar shaped in design, and the internal layout needs to be able to function both when the ship is under acceleration (when "down" is the aft of the ship) and when it is coasting and spins for centrifugal effect (and "down" is out the side of the ship). It takes some crew effort to rearrange things when they switch from one mode to another.

The second is that it takes months to get anywhere.

[icekatze]

hi hi

It's a little bit of a contrived setup, but having fighters being optimal requires a bit of contrivance.

1. 10 seconds is a lot of time for a computer, and Kirklin mines are generally regarded as very effective against high velocity missiles. Since their trajectory is locked in as soon as they engage, calculating their trajectory and plotting an intercept munition that would at least force them to maneuver and break their trajectory will be trivial.

2. Why do missiles warp up faster than large ships? Large ships will have better power to volume ratios. Moving by warping space does not involve acceleration as defined by Newton's Second Law or Special Relativity. (There will be huge unintended consequences if it does.)

3. 10 seconds is a lot of time for a computer. Realistically speaking, the limiting factor of a laser as a point defense weapon is waste heat generation. But a large enough ship with a laser focusing lens that is large enough that the heat is distributed enough for continuous operation should be able to swat any number of projectiles out of the way.

4. Other considerations.
• Why does the ship need to point its nose in the direction of travel? If warp maneuverability is key, expect ships with their warp drive mounted on gimbals.
• Large constantly moving habitat ships will be necessary in this universe because first strike capabilities will make living on a planet a suicidal endeavor. Approaching a planet at maximum warp from a far enough distance will give defenders zero time to deploy countermeasures.
• Because objects can't change their heading will under warp, dodging by randomly adjusting their warp speed will make scoring a hit very difficult for missiles. Because a missile will need to lead the target, even slowing down slightly will cause a missile to overshoot. It might end up being a situation where combatants never get up to speed because they're constantly warping, hitting the breaks, turning, warping, hitting the breaks, etc.

[Mithramuse]

The Mote books are good for that, but the Langston Field is the big defense there, as far as Bamax's postulates go anyway. The increased surface area of a larger ship gives more area to absorb and store kinetic energy, thus more protection (so long as, say, you aren't trying to fly through an atmosphere...), so larger ships are still very useful. No near-lightspeed drive, either, just the jump points, so while missiles might be able to reacquire a target if they miss, and likely accelerate faster than ships, it's not nearly as extreme as warping up to the speed of light in 60s.

Overall I think that for an SF setting involving interstellar travel (or anything in space, really; could just be an in-system novel, like Alistair Reynolds' recent Revenger series), setting up the parameters of that travel will go a long way towards defining what might be happening and how things work in a story. Specific warp points lead to fixed bases and defenses around those points, like wormhole defenses in Weber's Honor Harrington series (though there the wormholes aren't the only means of travel, true) or the warp points in Starfire (though it's been a while since I've read those). Keeping things open can work as well (again, could see Honor Harrington books, or many others), but then other considerations might be added - distance limits as mentioned above, or other time sinks like 2300AD's requirement that a drive discharge into a gravity well after, what, 7.7 ly? or it kills everyone around the ship. That 7.7 ly limit was also imposed to limit direct travel and make the three 'arms' of human expansion in the RPG, though IIRC they ended up moving a few stars as well.

Anyway, lots of ways to approach different circumstances and stories, which is part of the fun of SF.

[Bamax]

Most of your questions can be answered as: "That's how it works. If it could better it would be."

Conservation of momentum applies to warp...and warp does not affect that.

I could shoot an astronaut with a lightspeed warp missile, and if the missile was moving backward relative to the astronaut before it warped, the missile will drop out and continue drfting away...unless it purposely ignites it's rocket engines to hit the astronaut.

It's main rocket engines do 100g acceleration for ten seconds.

[Krin]

You're making a lot of assumptions that warp missiles are even a thing. If they were, the society in question should be advanced enough to never need them.
My understanding is that they are not a thing because of a certain Mass / Energy Ratio, along with durability.

• The energy required for jump is significant, and must usually be built up for several minutes before jump.
• The energy cost to jump is up-front, and the ship is ballistic while in hyperspace. It's like a cannon-shot.
• The energy cost of a hyperspace jump is proportional to the mass of the ship.
• The ship must have some kind of inertial damping system to prevent being torn apart by the transition to hyperspace.

The torpedoes / missiles would break up literally upon entering / leaving hyperspace, for any number of reasons.
You would be dumping a huge fuel energy reserve into a single use torpedo, assuming it doesn't blow up in the process, which is not worth the trial and error it would need to get it working.
The only semi feasible warp torpedo I can think of is something that works on "micro-jumps" that would propel it forward faster than a regular fuel burn trajectory would, assuming even then it's stable and durable enough to do so.

[Ithekro]

Space Battleship Yamato has some of that in different terms. Early on the Gamilas have a new technology that can warp things a distance away from the launching platforms. This is used to deploy bombers across space with little to no warning before they can attack. Later this is used to deliver small warships, mines, and missiles to the target area to reduce the reaction time of the target.

Much later some powers have warp capable interstellar missiles (to parallel American-Soviet MIRV and other intercontinental nuclear missile programs). Some of these are planet killer missiles that can warp from several star systems away to the target system. While this is suppose to limit the reaction time of the target, due to how warp mechanics seems to work, the missiles come out of warp several minutes away from the planet, allowing the defense systems to come online, and ships to be launched to defend the place.

Space ships in Yamato cannot travel at FTL speeds in realspace. They can only push into warp that is a separate dimension where they jump from a point in space to another point in space, saving time. Its nearly instant, but not entirely. It can take seconds or even a minute to travel from point to point, with no control once in warp (unless something goes wrong, at which point they are stuck in another dimension until means of escape is found (usually via use of a wave motion gun, since it can break dimensional barriers).

[gaerzi]

Most of your questions can be answered as: "That's how it works. If it could better it would be."

Conservation of momentum applies to warp...and warp does not affect that.

Does it? It's a fictional concept used to work around the annoying fact that the laws of physics as we understand them make it very inconvenient to tell the kind of space opera stories we like to tell, with daring spaceship captains going from planet to planet just like some sort of corsair from the Age of Sail going from island to island, but in spaaaaaaace. We need something to abolish the tyranny of distance, so we come up with fantasy technologies for that, and sometimes, especially in "hard" SF, the authors will even think about some vaguely-plausible fantasy physics behind the fantasy technology.

What laws of physics do or do not apply to warp are therefore left at the discretion of the author, and it's more likely than not that "plot reasons" will be the main factor behind whichever choice is made.

I mean I'm pretty sure that in Star Trek, warp drives work according to very different principles depending on which episode you choose.

[Deacon Fr3y]

It's a fictional concept used to work around the annoying fact that the laws of physics as we understand them make it very inconvenient to tell the kind of space opera stories we like to tell, with daring spaceship captains going from planet to planet just like some sort of corsair from the Age of Sail going from island to island, but in spaaaaaaace. We need something to abolish the tyranny of distance, so we come up with fantasy technologies for that, and sometimes, especially in "hard" SF, the authors will even think about some vaguely-plausible fantasy physics behind the fantasy technology.

I wholeheartedly recommend You the Lost Fleet series. It deals with great detail about interplanetary travel of big ships (BB, CV, DD). The dampeners and artificial gravity are present, but without the annoying "the X-wings are ALWAYS fifteen minutes away" syndrome.
It seems a sci-fi author need no handwavium, when the plot, the characters and the settings are good enough to fill the days of waiting to cross a single solar system.

[Overkill Engine]

There's reasons large Battleships could still be around or still dominant in a sci-fi setting.

For example, the Handwavium-Narrative reaction necessary for FTL drives simply happens to require an engine size too large and expensive for them to be practical or economical to use in maneuverable munitions like missiles. Or the "warp envelope" creates a destructive ripple/field around the ship that takes a beam of coherent energy or massive matter barrier to overcome. Larger ships mandate a larger field and thus ever stronger force to overcome. Missiles go poof on contact.

Or your drives are FTL, but your sensors are not, so fighting at FTL takes a LOT of guesswork even for computers.

Now if the author has decided otherwise in their setting, then yeah, good luck keeping larger ships alive.

[Bamax]

There's reasons large Battleships could still be around or still dominant in a sci-fi setting.

For example, the Handwavium-Narrative reaction necessary for FTL drives simply happens to require an engine size too large and expensive for them to be practical or economical to use in maneuverable munitions like missiles. Or the "warp envelope" creates a destructive ripple/field around the ship that takes a beam of coherent energy or massive matter barrier to overcome. Larger ships mandate a larger field and thus ever stronger force to overcome. Missiles go poof on contact.

Or your drives are FTL, but your sensors are not, so fighting at FTL takes a LOT of guesswork even for computers.

Now if the author has decided otherwise in their setting, then yeah, good luck keeping larger ships alive.

I recently have realized that in scifi crew state what actually should not be said in combat.

If a missile will impact in ten seconds THAT should appear onscreen for all to see and take appropriate action quickly. It wastes precious seconds to tell the commander what they can see at a glance off a computer screen.

Furthermore, Commanders should have one word code words for specific orders to be done rapidly so that they can be carried out in seconds before possible impact or evasion.

In scifi all the dialogue is for the benefit of the audiebce to know what's happening,but realistically if something will potentially impact your vessel in ten seconds it is foolish to rely on crew alone to tell you that.


Now without rapid combat speeds, then if something will impact in say... minutes, that is reasonable to alert the captain to.

Seconds? Not so much. That should be all over the viewscreen like a video game LOL.

[Cthulhu]

I recently have realized that in scifi crew state what actually should not be said in combat.
If a missile will impact in ten seconds THAT should appear onscreen for all to see and take appropriate action quickly. It wastes precious seconds to tell the commander what they can see at a glance off a computer screen.
Furthermore, Commanders should have one word code words for specific orders to be done rapidly so that they can be carried out in seconds before possible impact or evasion.
In scifi all the dialogue is for the benefit of the audiebce to know what's happening,but realistically if something will potentially impact your vessel in ten seconds it is foolish to rely on crew alone to tell you that.
Now without rapid combat speeds, then if something will impact in say... minutes, that is reasonable to alert the captain to.
Seconds? Not so much. That should be all over the viewscreen like a video game LOL.

Exactly, in written media everything needs to be explained to the reader. In visual media, however, actors need to play their roles and actually say their lines. Them simply staring at flashing screens or shouting incomprensible battle jargon at each other would not make for a good TV show.
Hard sci-fi is a rare thing nowadays, since it requires a lot of time and effort in order to create a believable setting down to small details, while keeping it interesting for the reader.
I think the big sci-fi battleship would not die out anytime soon. For soft sci-fi, the "big is cool"-rule would keep those behemots on the screen. In hard sci-fi, it would depend on the specific setting the author created, big ships being just as viable as smaller ones.

[Ithekro]

Sci-fi space battleship either make up their own terms and form the crew/actors to explain to others (who should know already) in a way to tell the audience what is going on, or they fall back on World War era ship jargon that they expect people to have heard before so they don't need to explain as much.

[GrandAdmiralFox]

Actually, given that armor is going the way of Battletech of all things (back in 2016, a metal foam composite displayed the abilities of the frame material EndoSteel(tm) to a T, giving credence to Battletech armor being actually effective), you'll probably see battleships as a thing. Think of it as how Traveller is dominated by warships in its space military paradigm as things like nuclear dampeners more or less make it all but impossible for the most effective weapon (nuclear warheads) to take out spaceships and meson guns have an immense minimum output requirement.

[Keklas Rekobah]

↑ I never really went in for the "Highguard" rules.  Most of my Traveller campaigns involved commerce and trade, smuggling, running gun battles, merc tickets, and being pursued by Imperial authorities -- more like "Firefly" than "Space Battleship Yamato".

[Mercy Machine]

If you want a look at a setting with similar FTL rules but no artificial gravity or internal dampers, check out The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle.

     Another recommendation for this sort of universe is the "Antares Trilogy" by Michael McCollum: "Antares Dawn", "Antares Passage", and "Antares Victory" (bit of a spoiler there, no? ). FTL travel is by jumps through "foldspace" along known "foldlines" in spacetime, from "foldpoint" to "foldpoint", but apart from that, spaceship propulsion is by reaction drives (Why does everything have to be a "drive"? Is "rocket" a dirty word or something? Atomic rockets, yay!).
     The only "artificial gravity" is from acceleration or spin (which is acceleration, of course), so ships are shaped like cylinders or wheels, and have to change their internal configuration depending on whether "out is down" or "aft is down". There are no "inertial dampers" so the maximum acceleration of ships is limited by the ability of the crew to withstand it. In an initial chase the hero's ship accelerates at 3.5g for 54 hours, and this is regarded as exceptional. Specialised speeders can go up to 10g with their crew in acceleration tanks "breathing" oxygenated fluid, but this acceleration is damaging to their health. Military spacecrew's working lives are limited by their reducing ability to withstand acceleration as they age. Attached below is an artist's impression of the hero's ship Discovery, with a sister-ship in the background:

[Krulle]

Pretty sure Antares trilogy was already mentioned here somewhere.
Because I loved the way Michael McCollum packaged the point of us humans anthropomorphising everything, and how that brought two races close to extinction.

It's a pity he somehow abandoned the Gibraltar Earth series....

Anyway, his website http://www.scifi-az.com is also a great ressource for some short stories by him.

[Demarquis]

Resurrecting this mostly because I'm bored.

I want to introduce a hard sci-fi idea with soft sci-fi possibilities: the Alcubierre Drive. My understanding of this concept is at a lay-person's level only, so if someone knows better than I, please jump in and correct me. But an Alcubierre (which I will now call an "A-Drive" because that's easier to type) involves creating a bubble like region of folded space around the starship, which then pushes the ship forward much like a small chip on an ocean wave. The important element here is that the starship remains at rest with respect to the bubble of folded space around it, hence technically it isn't moving at all, and therefore isn't restricted to the speed of light relative to its' point of origin or its' destination. In addition, because it technically isn't moving, there isn't any acceleration, and therefore no inertia to dampen. While moving with the bubble, the starship doesn't interact with the environment outside the bubble, so to the crew it appears that they are entirely encased in a miniature universe (with slightly glowing walls). Meanwhile, outside forces can't affect it without bringing down the bubble first. I do not know what energies are required, but my guess is that if the ship's trajectory intersected a star (for example), the star would very likely affect the warp bubble much more than the warp bubble would affect the star. Since the collapse of the A-Drive bubble is likely to release a lot of energy, being stopped by the gravity well of a planet would probably not affect the planet itself very much, but it might mean a very bad day for anyone living on it's surface. The ship itself might simply come to a resting state if the collapse was gradual enough, or be ripped apart if it wasn't.

A-Drive "Jumps" in this case are a bit like firing a ballistic missile, in the sense that a certain amount of energy is required to create the warp bubble, which then sets off in some pre-selected direction, and when the energy is used up below some critical level, the bubble collapses and there you are. I would imagine that the ship's A-Drive might be able to contribute energy during the trip, which could extend the range to some extent.

Since the ship can't see beyond the warp bubble, navigation is challenging. A ship sized object might simply be pushed out of the way, either gently or catastrophically depending on how close the encounter was. Large enough gravity wells will tend to bend the trajectory around them, just like they do to STL objects, so "sling-shoting" around a star might be a way to change trajectory.

I have not been able to find any articles on what would happen if two A-Drive warp bubbles intersected, but based on the behavior of ocean waves, the result might be turbulence of a complex nature, or if the relative trajectories and energy levels were just right the two bubbles might simply merge with one another (thus, a ship under warp isn't entirely isolated). Two such ships would end up at rest with respect to each other, but they might end up close enough that an explosion of one would damage the other, so "A-Missiles" still make a sort of sense, if you can achieve the proper firing solution beforehand (bear in mind that you can't see one of these bubbles approaching you).

I think this might provide some interesting narrative possibilities. In a universe where FTL acted this way, very large battle starships wouldn't be impossible to destroy, but actually hitting one may be more a matter of luck than calculation. OTOH, if it's that hard for starships to hit each other (at least while under warp) then deep space combat probably never occurs. Most battles will take place very near some location of strategic importance to both sides, such that it's more important to capture it than destroy it.

Sounds unique and potentially interesting to me. What do you guys think?

Note: There shall be no jokes about "A-Hole" portals.

[DevilDalek]

There is also the important Sci Fi rule of 'DILC'
'Does It Look Cool'
That is a generalisation though. And if space battleships operate or don't operate in your setting, that s entirely up to you.

[avatar576]

It sounds like a cloaking device that works both ways. They can't see you, but as an added handicap, you can't can't see anything else. It would be a great way to force adversaries into a perpetual cold war. You could obliterate your enemy in one move, but they could do the same to you. Mutually-Assured Destruction.