Unless we are talking present day or close to it...... I think that history tells us that we don't have a clue what it would be like.
At the start of World War I, most Admirals and General (i.e. people who were proffesional in such matters) thought the war would be fought with the tactics dominant in the Napoleonic period (i.e. Massed infantry marching in neatly ordered formations and cavalry charging with lance and sabre).
At the start of World War II, most Admirals and Generals thought they would be fighting a replay of World War I (i.e. static defensive lines of trenches and massed MG's, the seas dominated by Battleships shooting it out with each other).
If history teaches us anything, it tells us that even most proffesional millitary thinkers don't fully comprehend the dynamics of their current conflicts when they first flare into being....let alone what some future conflict decades or centuries hence might look like.
We understand the laws of physics in space (or at least THINK we do.... which is another arguement) well enough.... we don't understand fully what devices/technologies mankind might come up with to use in such an environment in future....nor how they might apply to a conflict in space.
When/If it does come......I think very few people will really have a good idea what they dynamics of such a conflict will be before-hand. You may have a few B.H. Liddell-Harts, Jimmy Doolittles and Heinz Guderian but most folks are going to be completely blind-sided (IMO)
Assuming the universe behaves more or less like the laws of physics as we currently believe them to be, EVE probably has the most realisitic combat model of any game to date. (minus the warp drive physics) Battles will likely be straight line affairs of either interscting fleets or fleets coming head on at each other. There won't be a lot of manuevering going on. Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle have written several novels that do a good job of describing realistic combat mechanics and this web site will really go into some detail if you're interested in a scientific approach to the discussion. gizmodo.com/5426453/the-physics-of-space-battles
I originally wanted to reply to this thread "However Pournelle and Niven described it."
Missile and detecting moving masses in general would be a fairly big deal, as would avoiding enemy detection. Most bases in space wouldn't be very good militarily I don't think unless technology changes a lot or they were built into an asteroid or planetoid. Lasers would be useful even a long ranges (you can make lasers stay in a coherent beam for a long time if designed right), but the defense against them would likely be layers of ice around a ship (which could also be used for drinking water) -- thick sheets of ice would double as a radiation shield, so it's handy.
Btw, I think you'd would have conflicts out in the middle of nowhere to an extent. Intercepting the enemy before they get to you is generally a good idea. Especially since modern weapons are so very deadly to installations...protecting a planet's infrastructure would require intercepting the enemy as far out as possible.
By the time we can have fights in space I'd expect the ships to be largely automated. People like imagining human crews, but frankly we don't adapt well to space and we'll certainly be able to design robots and other technological systems that do most of the jobs a lot better (if not all of the jobs). It also means keeping an atmosphere inside the vast majority of the ship would not be necessary, which increases survivability. Given the size of space, I'd expect there to still be very large ships by naval standards, as such ships can more readily repair themselves when damaged (better manufacturing facilities), and they'll have room for better and more plentiful weapons. Modern naval warfare is pretty dang deadly if you get hit with almost anything, but we still have large ships, so I expect that will carry over to space. Though, modular ships might be developed so that large ships can easily and quickly separate into a bunch of smaller ones (might be useful for sneaking in closer if that's necessary, depending on stealth technology).
I do agree with the person who said it would be a lot like Naval Warfare. Generally I wouldn't expect ships to be heading straight at each other, but rather move parallel within firing distance -- getting close just makes you easier to spot and easier to hit so it would largely be confined to drones, missiles, and the like.
giantsquidRunes of Magic CorrespondentMemberPosts: 118
Originally posted by tman5
Real space combat would be incredibly boring compared to how we've been conditioned to imagine it. And limited. Virtually all combat would take place in orbit around planets, asteroids or stations. There would be no open space combat due to the vast distances and velocities involved. Natural and artificial orbital paths would be the fields of battle.
Combat would be decided more by ECM, ECCM and "stealth" technologies than the actual munitions used. The winner would usually be he who pulls the trigger first. There would be little chance to manuever once fired upon.
It would probably also be a lot of math. People in side a closed off bubble needing to look at computer terminals that spit out numbers so they can figure speed of the ship, speed of their missles, any objects creating gravity wells between enemies, and many more math problems to figure out when to shoot where to shoot.
The Honor Harrington series by David Webber is a popular series that contains lots of heavy actual space battles and it tries to assume the role of real world physics and war room strategies. The newest book has between 1 and 3 chapters in a row just covering a space battle between 2 ships, detailing each maneuver and missile fire and what goes into doing that with the book and other books in his series being almost 1,000 pages long.
his books are popular with: for instance- "Weber's descriptions of space combat remain magnificent."
—Science Fiction Weekly.
Here's an excerpt: "They've sent in three separate groups," Stackpole replied. "One dead astern of us, one at polar north, and one at polar south. The Flag is designating the in-system force we already knew about as Bogey One. The task group to system north is Bogey Two; the one to system south is Bogey Three; and the one directly astern is Bogey Four. Our velocity relative to Bogey Four is just over twenty-two thousand kilometers per second, but range is less than thirty-one million klicks."
"Understood."
Michelle looked back at her own, smaller, display. At the moment, it was configured to show the entire Solon System, which meant, by definition, that it was nowhere as detailed as Stackpole's. There wasn't room for that on a plot small enough to deploy from a command chair—not when it was displaying the volume of something the size of a star system, at any rate. But it was more than detailed enough to confirm what Stackpole had just told her. The Peeps had just duplicated exactly what had happened to them at the Battle of Sidemore, and managed to do it on a more sophisticated scale, to boot. Unless something reduced Task Force Eighty-Two's rate of acceleration, none of the three forces which had just dropped out of hyper-space to ambush it could hope to overtake it. Unfortunately, they didn't need to physically overtake the task force in order to engage it—not when current-generation Havenite multidrive missiles had a maximum powered range from rest of over sixty million kilometers.
So there has to be some translation like going from book to a movie. A more realistic, and gaming approach, may be found in the now very old Aerotech roleplaying strategy game. You had rules to build ships on paper, and a board where you kept track of those ships with counters. You had to deal with thrust, and constant movement while turning in space, as well as firing, and knowing when and where to fire to actually hit your target, gravity(how much gravity), etc...
One thing I've always thought sci-fi movies got wrong was aiming. I seriously doubt with computers as advanced as the ones shown that pilots would be able to out-respond them. Targetting would be deadly accurate and simple missing would be unheard of.
For instance, I would expect a large battle ship to be able to track, target and one-shot many small ships within a few seconds if not instantly upon command.
One thing to keep in mind is you dont even need exploding rockets,all you need is something with weight enough to puncture the space craft. also space craft dont need to be areodynamic in space they could be squares and still fly the same. ships will have alot more left right up down and side to side instead of curving. No friction.
played M59,UO,lineage,EQ,Daoc,Entropia,SWG,Horizons,Lineage2.EQ2,Vangaurd,Irth online, DarkFall,Star Trek and many others that did not make the cut or i just plain forgetting about.
The cost in production of manned ships plus training the flight crew and mechanics would be ridiculous. Not to mention how much energy/fuel would be needed to move vessels with a large mass. No,..fleet actions would just not be doable in either cost or manpower, at least not anytime soon (next several hundred years). The cheapest and most effective route, in my opinion, would be unmanned drones launched and recovered from unmanned orbiting stations. These drones would be cheaper to produce, manning wouldn't be no where near as an issue, plus they could travel faster for less cost. Like someone else said, these "space battles" would be fought closer to an actual strategic location such as a planet ,moon or asteroid belt. Also EW and EMP will play a major role. A few people mentioned how close EVE is to what the combat will be. I'm afraid that's probably not even close. If money was no object (money will always be an object), and the science/technology was actually possible to instantly clone someone with their mind and memory intact,...then maybe.
The winner will be decided on who can afford (money wise) to sustain all aspects of this type of warfare from the gound based supply personnel loading up replacement parts in a shuttle drone that is on it's way to an orbiting platform all the way to the R&D guys trying to find a new counter to the other guy's latest gizmo.
To me, the real test will be when physical territory is fought over on a planet's surface with little or no atmosphere and high/low gravity because that is where the next supply of resources will be.
So there has to be some translation like going from book to a movie. A more realistic, and gaming approach, may be found in the now very old Aerotech roleplaying strategy game. You had rules to build ships on paper, and a board where you kept track of those ships with counters. You had to deal with thrust, and constant movement while turning in space, as well as firing, and knowing when and where to fire to actually hit your target, gravity(how much gravity), etc... Aerotech
Here are some "old school" board game rules that did it pretty well from what I remember
The space battles of the future are characterized by the vast distances involved and the superior technologies devised to overcome them. Detecting your enemy may me quite difficult, especially if his drive emissions are shielded from view. Once detected, however, your weapons will be pitted against his defenses and the outcome will be determined by his ability to make you miss."
If you fire a laser at a highly reflective surface, wouldn't the laser be deflected? I imagine there would be some surfaces that would resist laser attack.
If you fire a laser at a highly reflective surface, wouldn't the laser be deflected? I imagine there would be some surfaces that would resist laser attack.
Reflective surfaces aren't 100% reflective, and any weapon-grade laser would burn away the reflectivity relatively quickly, to say nothing of micro asteroids and other space debris damaging the reflectivity. You'd have to soak the damage, and the best way to do that which I am aware of is with water, which has a wide liquid temperature range and absorbs a ton of heat per degree it is heated (nothing else we know of can compare really -- metals, for instance, heat up pretty easily).
The cost in production of manned ships plus training the flight crew and mechanics would be ridiculous. Not to mention how much energy/fuel would be needed to move vessels with a large mass. No,..fleet actions would just not be doable in either cost or manpower, at least not anytime soon (next several hundred years).
I'd be careful about making grand announcements about what we can do in the next SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS or even the next 100 years. A couple hundred years ago most of what we take for granted to do would come across as almost magical to them. Even 100 years from now our artificial intelligence and robots should be more than advanced enough to avoid the need to put actual people on ships if we chose (assuming humankind is similar to what we are today...which isn't a trivial assumption). Heck, if things keep going on the present rate, then by 2050 or so we'll have computers with as much processing power as the human brain (tossing another 60 years onto that and that technology will be highly refined). Technology is advancing at an extremely rapid rate.
I would say that RL combat in space would remind submarine combat. Stealth would be extremely important. You would be using different kind drones and nuclear missiles to hit enemy and same time keep your distance to enemy as far possible. Distances between ships would be hundred thousands kilometers or more. One hit to ship - would be likely destroy ship. Stations, ground targets and other static targets would be destroyed by kinetic, rail guns and nuclear bombarment. Movement would be slow - and it might take months to travel attack positions. Ships would be mostly automated, maybe 3-10 crew members - or - fully automated.
Space combat will never happen unless humans figure out how to travel close to the speed of light.
If that never happens then there will not be space combat for a very long time. Basically not until the sun is beginning to die and humans (taking for granted we still exist) need to leave the planet. At that point there will probably be multiple space stations that will be sent into orbit and then out into space once the sun starts to expand. Who knows if they will be sent in the same direction or not.
Anyway. Assuming we do figure out a way to travel close to or at/above the speed of light then space combat will boil down to a race between stealth technology and attack drone technology.
Long range space combat really isn't practical considering the time difference. Most, if not all, combat will be done close enough to predict with close to 100% certainty where the target will be when the weapon will reach them. The easiest way to do that is to send a drone. No need to risk human lives when by that time artificial intelligence will be far superior to human intelligence.
Someone already said it above but it's predicted that in about 50 years there will be a computer with the processing power of the human brain. In another 50 your phone will be smarter than you.
That prediction was made before the emergance of Quantum processor technology currently being refined. Quantum computing has the capacity to completely change the the world as we know it. That, combined with organic computing....
Well... like I said above, taking for granted we still exist.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
If you fire a laser at a highly reflective surface, wouldn't the laser be deflected? I imagine there would be some surfaces that would resist laser attack.
Reflective surfaces aren't 100% reflective, and any weapon-grade laser would burn away the reflectivity relatively quickly, to say nothing of micro asteroids and other space debris damaging the reflectivity.
Micro meteor impacts are also likely to make any attempts at stealthing a ship very difficult. A brand new ship right off the production line might have fantastic stealth but fly that thing around a solar system for a while at extermely high speeds and you're going to get pitting which will pretty effectively negate all of your carefull attempts to make the ship stealthy.
To anyone who thinks extremely long range space combat is unlikely; that philosophy will only last untill your enemy decides otherwise. You might not like the idea of firing on him when you can't be certain what position he will occupy when your shot gets there but what if he doesn't subcsibe to that theory?
Are you going to let him stand off at, say, 2 light seconds distance, taking pot shots at you while you don't fire back? Sooner or later he's going to get lucky. And it's not necessarily all about lasers. We can probably assume rail guns will be on these ships. So imagine a rail gun firing a shotgun blast of metal pellets at a respectable fraction of lightspeed.
How long are you going to let your enemy throw all this at you before you decide that "waiting till you see the whites of his eyes" is perhaps not the best strategy for space warfare.
One thing I've always thought sci-fi movies got wrong was aiming. I seriously doubt with computers as advanced as the ones shown that pilots would be able to out-respond them. Targetting would be deadly accurate and simple missing would be unheard of. For instance, I would expect a large battle ship to be able to track, target and one-shot many small ships within a few seconds if not instantly upon command.
Pretty much everything would be flying/firing by wire (i.e. computer) instead of by hand...unless something actualy happaned with biology/biotech to effectively give humans the same sort of computational/reactive powers as machines.
However, targeting might not be that straight-forward. You can hit something with 100% accuracy if you are able to predict with 100% accuracy it's path/speed of movement. It's how they were able to land that probe on that comet a few years back. However comets don't "fly evasively" in order to avoid being hit. When you are dealing with large distances and high speeds there is going to be a delay in weapon firing and weapon impact. In that time, the target can potentialy move in an unpredictable manner. Even with missles that can track and adjust thier flight in response to a targets motion....there is going to be some delay in the missles targeting system acquiring and processing the data on the target and adjusting it's own course in response to the targets. If that delay is significant enough...it can result in target moving sufficiently to result in a "miss".
In this case, the advantage would actualy be with the target rather then the attacker. The target doesn't actually need to be able to move in response to the attack in order to be missed. All it needs to do is know that an attack MAY be likely and constantly move in an unpredictable pattern to confuse potential targeting/tracking. This is similar to the way people move when their forced to cross open terrain today while under potential fire. If you run in a straight line at a constant speed without stopping...you are likely to be shot....because anyone drawing a beed on you knows exactly how much to lead you. If you move in an unpredictable pattern... weaving, varrying speed, etc..... You aren't actualy "dodging bullets" but you are confusing the shooters aim....as they have to constantly adjust and react in response to your movements... and there will be a delay between when you move and how long it takes them to adjust.
Frankly, the most reliable weapons may be ones that affect rather wide areas or cones. So I'm not sure that simple misses will actualy be that uncommon. That, of course, doesn't even get into the area of "false images" or decoys, etc.
I'd say that space combat will be very much like air combat is today. To make space combat something worth thinking about, we (and our opponents) would have already had to have found mastery over time and space. If we chose to fight, we would manipulate our position in time and space relative to our opponents, popping in and out of contact with each other like fireflies at night. It would be a classic dogfight at the root of it though.
The cost in production of manned ships plus training the flight crew and mechanics would be ridiculous. Not to mention how much energy/fuel would be needed to move vessels with a large mass. No,..fleet actions would just not be doable in either cost or manpower, at least not anytime soon (next several hundred years).
I'd be careful about making grand announcements about what we can do in the next SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS or even the next 100 years. A couple hundred years ago most of what we take for granted to do would come across as almost magical to them. Even 100 years from now our artificial intelligence and robots should be more than advanced enough to avoid the need to put actual people on ships if we chose (assuming humankind is similar to what we are today...which isn't a trivial assumption). Heck, if things keep going on the present rate, then by 2050 or so we'll have computers with as much processing power as the human brain (tossing another 60 years onto that and that technology will be highly refined). Technology is advancing at an extremely rapid rate.
In a round about way, you sort of agree with me. Actual human crews in an actual space faring combat vessel would be a logistical hurdle that would make unmanned space combat vessels more practical and cheaper. Lets look at it this way...what would be needed in a combat ship to support a manned crew?
Life support (oxygen or sometype of helium/nitrogen mix, very flamable either way)
Food (rather it's actually prepared meals or some type of MRE)
Water (the most basic necassity of any life)
Living quarters (the crew would have to sleep sometime)
Work positions/stations/terminals for the human crew to interact with
More mass and materials added to the vessel to make for those accomodations.
Not to mention a simple, but overlooked fact. Paying the crewmembers salaries to include basic wages, hazard duty and eminent danger pay, sepeartion pay. This all starts to add up
Did I mention the radiation shielding needed just to keep the crew from being cooked by solar flares. That will add even more mass and material to the ship.
To cut all of that expense out to a scale thats more practical and that can be maintained on a level of mass production, the solution would be unmanned vessels. Until the real life logistics can be worked out, all this other talk about how combat will be fought in space is still fantasy because it's the logistics of it all that will determine what actual weapons and tactics would be used in fighting in space. Though fighting in space sounds and looks cool in the movies and video games, in my opinion the main hurdle in future warfare will be fighting on the surface of another planet, not the space surrounding it.
If you fire a laser at a highly reflective surface, wouldn't the laser be deflected? I imagine there would be some surfaces that would resist laser attack.
Reflective surfaces aren't 100% reflective, and any weapon-grade laser would burn away the reflectivity relatively quickly, to say nothing of micro asteroids and other space debris damaging the reflectivity.
Micro meteor impacts are also likely to make any attempts at stealthing a ship very difficult. A brand new ship right off the production line might have fantastic stealth but fly that thing around a solar system for a while at extermely high speeds and you're going to get pitting which will pretty effectively negate all of your carefull attempts to make the ship stealthy.
To anyone who thinks extremely long range space combat is unlikely; that philosophy will only last untill your enemy decides otherwise. You might not like the idea of firing on him when you can't be certain what position he will occupy when your shot gets there but what if he doesn't subcsibe to that theory?
Are you going to let him stand off at, say, 2 light seconds distance, taking pot shots at you while you don't fire back? Sooner or later he's going to get lucky. And it's not necessarily all about lasers. We can probably assume rail guns will be on these ships. So imagine a rail gun firing a shotgun blast of metal pellets at a respectable fraction of lightspeed.
How long are you going to let your enemy throw all this at you before you decide that "waiting till you see the whites of his eyes" is perhaps not the best strategy for space warfare.
The scenerio you have described is entirely plausable but it really depends on the dynamics of the situation...which we just can't really predict well enough yet. In history, "Fire Discipline" and "Volume of Firepower" have been swapping places as the more advantageous approach for centuries depending upon the dynamics of the situation.
During the great age of muskets, soldiers were trained specificaly NOT to aim because it would slow them down.... and you wanted to get volleys out as quickly as possible. This made sense for the day, as the smoothbore muskets were inherintly inaccurate weapons even when aimed and the tactics of the day dictated massed ranks of men standing in straight lines perhaps 100 yds distant from each other (That also made sense given the fact that with the range and rate of fire of weapons...melee combat was still an important consideration in a battle...and good formation was the key to wining a melee).
As rifled weapons became more prevalent and accuracy and effective killing range of weapons increased, "Fire Discipline" started to become the more dominant tactic. This also made sense for the given dynamics...as the rifled weapons COULD be quite accurate at long range if time/care was taken to aim them. Soldiers also started to switch away from fighting in massed, regularly ordered ranks. Ranges were long enough that soldiers had time to assume a formation if the enemy were closing to melee. Rates of fire were still pretty low however.....meaning that alot could happen in between the time you fired a weapon and were ready to fire it again...so wasting shots was risky. More importantly though.....logistics were still pretty sketchy and modern industrilization was just really starting to take off..... meaning that troops were deployed with limited supplies of ammunition... If you used up all your ammo taking pot shots at the enemy...it was uncertain when you could get more....so conserving that ammo was important. This was especialy true in some of the far off colonial theatres where troops were often called upon to fight.
Heading into the 20th Century with increased industrialization and most importantly, advances in supply and transportation systems, along with an increase in the rate of weapons and quicker reload times (boxed magazines, ammo clips, etc).... "Volume of Fire" once again took predominance .... as soldiers were ready to fire again very quickly after taking a shot....and most importantly could more confidently rely on a regular resupply of ammo.
The cost in production of manned ships plus training the flight crew and mechanics would be ridiculous. Not to mention how much energy/fuel would be needed to move vessels with a large mass. No,..fleet actions would just not be doable in either cost or manpower, at least not anytime soon (next several hundred years).
I'd be careful about making grand announcements about what we can do in the next SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS or even the next 100 years. A couple hundred years ago most of what we take for granted to do would come across as almost magical to them. Even 100 years from now our artificial intelligence and robots should be more than advanced enough to avoid the need to put actual people on ships if we chose (assuming humankind is similar to what we are today...which isn't a trivial assumption). Heck, if things keep going on the present rate, then by 2050 or so we'll have computers with as much processing power as the human brain (tossing another 60 years onto that and that technology will be highly refined). Technology is advancing at an extremely rapid rate.
In a round about way, you sort of agree with me. Actual human crews in an actual space faring combat vessel would be a logistical hurdle that would make unmanned space combat vessels more practical and cheaper. Lets look at it this way...what would be needed in a combat ship to support a manned crew?
Life support (oxygen or sometype of helium/nitrogen mix, very flamable either way)
Food (rather it's actually prepared meals or some type of MRE)
Water (the most basic necassity of any life)
Living quarters (the crew would have to sleep sometime)
Work positions/stations/terminals for the human crew to interact with
More mass and materials added to the vessel to make for those accomodations.
Not to mention a simple, but overlooked fact. Paying the crewmembers salaries to include basic wages, hazard duty and eminent danger pay, sepeartion pay. This all starts to add up
Did I mention the radiation shielding needed just to keep the crew from being cooked by solar flares. That will add even more mass and material to the ship.
To cut all of that expense out to a scale thats more practical and that can be maintained on a level of mass production, the solution would be unmanned vessels. Until the real life logistics can be worked out, all this other talk about how combat will be fought in space is still fantasy because it's the logistics of it all that will determine what actual weapons and tactics would be used in fighting in space. Though fighting in space sounds and looks cool in the movies and video games, in my opinion the main hurdle in future warfare will be fighting on the surface of another planet, not the space surrounding it.
Kind of depends on what can be achieved with A.I., not just in terms of raw processing power...but also the sophistication of thier programming as well..... human beings have millions of years of programming in being "adaptable". Right now, I'd say the book is still out as to what the limitations of A.I. will be in future....or the costs to achieve/deploy them. It is just possible....even with all the downsides and extra baggage that it ends up being far cheaper to deploy a small human crew with relatively "dumb" computers.....then a big sophisticated A.I.
The there is also the question of how much power you want to trust an A.I. with. Will they be more or less susceptible to being "hacked" then a human crew?? Those questions are going to do alot to determine what the more viable solution is.
I usually tend to think it would be similar to the way it's shown in Babylon 5, the Earthforce Starfury fighters in particular. Edit: Example www.youtube.com/watch If you watch between 0.22 and 0.28 you can see how the ship spins depending on which of its four thrusters is fired, but still continues moving in the same direction.
I highly doubt anyone will be building short range fight that will be close enough to see the other fighter to engage.
It will probably more like sub warfare where you shoot long range missiles (prob with nukes) at the enemy.
Originally posted by GrumpyMel2 Kind of depends on what can be achieved with A.I., not just in terms of raw processing power...but also the sophistication of thier programming as well..... human beings have millions of years of programming in being "adaptable". Right now, I'd say the book is still out as to what the limitations of A.I. will be in future....or the costs to achieve/deploy them. It is just possible....even with all the downsides and extra baggage that it ends up being far cheaper to deploy a small human crew with relatively "dumb" computers.....then a big sophisticated A.I. The there is also the question of how much power you want to trust an A.I. with. Will they be more or less susceptible to being "hacked" then a human crew?? Those questions are going to do alot to determine what the more viable solution is.
Worst-case scenario you just copy human brain patterns over to an A.I, but that really shouldn't be necessary. We're already making a lot of progress with A.I. One advantage an A.I. with similar brain power to a human would have is that it wouldn't need a lot of the "programming" humans have. We have a ton devoted to things like mating and a lot of needless emotional crap that an A.I. would not need (to say nothing of our evolutionary baggage). Also, we can already evolve programs for sophisticated tasks, so it isn't like everything would have to be programmed manually. As for hacking, that's easy to stop...you just make the A.I.'s not physically capable of being written to from a wireless source.
And humans come with tons and tons of baggage. If you have no human crew then your ship can do things that would kill a human a dozen times over, and you don't need life support, oxygen, or any atmosphere.
Anyhow, the real question isn't "human or A.I.?"...in 50-100 years it might be a real question whether there is much difference between the two. We can already attach computers to brain neurons....I'd expect in 100 years "humans" by and large won't be physiologically like we are today.
Originally posted by GrumpyMel2 Kind of depends on what can be achieved with A.I., not just in terms of raw processing power...but also the sophistication of thier programming as well..... human beings have millions of years of programming in being "adaptable". Right now, I'd say the book is still out as to what the limitations of A.I. will be in future....or the costs to achieve/deploy them. It is just possible....even with all the downsides and extra baggage that it ends up being far cheaper to deploy a small human crew with relatively "dumb" computers.....then a big sophisticated A.I. The there is also the question of how much power you want to trust an A.I. with. Will they be more or less susceptible to being "hacked" then a human crew?? Those questions are going to do alot to determine what the more viable solution is.
Worst-case scenario you just copy human brain patterns over to an A.I, but that really shouldn't be necessary. We're already making a lot of progress with A.I. One advantage an A.I. with similar brain power to a human would have is that it wouldn't need a lot of the "programming" humans have. We have a ton devoted to things like mating and a lot of needless emotional crap that an A.I. would not need (to say nothing of our evolutionary baggage). Also, we can already evolve programs for sophisticated tasks, so it isn't like everything would have to be programmed manually. As for hacking, that's easy to stop...you just make the A.I.'s not physically capable of being written to from a wireless source.
And humans come with tons and tons of baggage. If you have no human crew then your ship can do things that would kill a human a dozen times over, and you don't need life support, oxygen, or any atmosphere.
Anyhow, the real question isn't "human or A.I.?"...in 50-100 years it might be a real question whether there is much difference between the two. We can already attach computers to brain neurons....I'd expect in 100 years "humans" by and large won't be physiologically like we are today.
1) Yes, we are making alot of progress with A.I. but we are still in the very crude stages of work there....We have no idea what stumbling blocks we might run into in the future with such progress. What we do with adpative AI these days (as I understand it) is have them learn through brute force to do tasks with very strictly defined rules (like play soccer)... even this is excrutiatingly slow for machines....though I'm sure we'll improve that over time. Humans, however seem to be able to think in very abstract terms and face situations very unlike any they have ever encountered before and yet come up with responses that are remarkably appropriate for those situations. It's uncertain what it would actualy take for a machine to be able to do something similar.
2) There is no assurance that "copying human brain patterns" over to an A.I is feasable...nor that it will actualy result in human-like intelligence.
3) Much of our "emotional baggage" is actualy a "feature" not a bug as far as millitary officers go. We don't treat our officers like robots....we expect them to make decisions off of very "human" codes of conduct. Half the time millitary commanders are not just evaluating what I "can" do in a given situation but what "should" (moral/ethical) I do in that situation. This becomes even more important when communication with higher authority is limited or impossible and officers have to act independantly.
4) I was cleaning up viruses in networks long before they had internet connections....let alone wireless connection....there are LOTS of different ways to compromise systems (not that individuals aren't susceptible to be "compromised" either.)
5) We have no idea of the resources/costs that it would take to support A.I.s of the level of sophistication which we are talking about...... compared to the resources/costs it would take to support a human crew. It MAY just be that human crews will be cheaper to support/deploy then hyper sophisticated A.I.'s. I agree we'll tend to go with whatever solution provides the best cost/benefit ratio....but I think what that is may not be entirely predictable.
Heck, look at the Soviet Army in WWII... they typicaly deployed thier infantry in ADVANCE of thier tanks....because it was far more cost effective to have an infantry man step on a mine or stumble into an AT gun then a tank. Manpower was a cheap resource to them when compared to vehicles.
6) ALOT of problems like inertia and radiation/emp shielding will probably need to be solved anyway to make routiene extra-planetry travel economical for even unmanned vessels. It remains to be seen how many of those solutions might be applicable toward things that would affect human crews.
7) You actualy hit on another factor....we don't actually know what bio-tech or bio-medical advances may look like in 100-200 years time. It's not inconcievable that human ship crews could differ significantly in thier biological characteristics from current day.
8) Do not ignore the social factor. There will be ALOT of pressure for "manned" space flight.......and for human supervision of powerfull millitary weapons.....simply because as a society it is both what we want and expect.
I think the best example of truly REALISTIC space combat is in Larry Niven's "Protector".
You fire your missiles.
A few MONTHS later, you check to see if they hit anything, since your target is light-weeks away and the real "battle" is between your computer predicting where is and his computer predicting where your computer is going to predict he is and making course corrections (weeks in advance) to not be there.
B5 is one of the best efforts at showing space combat, but the "real thing" is likely to be terribly, terribly, dull. (Combat in near-orbit will be mostly 0.01 seconds of missiles flying.)
Everything that's totally cool and awesome about space combat -- great big battleships, zippy fighters, pew pew lasers -- really isn't going to happen. This sucks, but that's that. Indeed, the idea of "spaceships" may be a pretty stupid one in the face of hard reality. I recently read a good essay -- can't find it now, sorry -- pretty much making a depressingly solid case that the way we will "explore space" beyond our solar system is in tiny little things no more than a few grams in mass, riding the solar wind, and carrying an uploaded personality or AI.
In-system travel is a bit more plausible, but it's looking more and more like it's going to be robots, not people, doing all the cool shit. Eventually, you'll be able to copy your mind into a robot probe, spend six months living inside a virtual reality simulation, then "come out" when the probe reaches, I dunno, Europa or something and take a look around.
But barring some truly radical changes in our understanding of the universe -- and if you actually look at what we know about physics, the task of finding something to replace it with that STILL EXPLAINS every phenomenon observed to date is really difficult -- we will probably never see anything like any concept of "spaceship' we currently recognize, not even the old classics like generation ships, Orion drives, or ramjets.
Originally posted by Neanderthal Micro meteor impacts are also likely to make any attempts at stealthing a ship very difficult. A brand new ship right off the production line might have fantastic stealth but fly that thing around a solar system for a while at extermely high speeds and you're going to get pitting which will pretty effectively negate all of your carefull attempts to make the ship stealthy. To anyone who thinks extremely long range space combat is unlikely; that philosophy will only last untill your enemy decides otherwise. You might not like the idea of firing on him when you can't be certain what position he will occupy when your shot gets there but what if he doesn't subcsibe to that theory? Are you going to let him stand off at, say, 2 light seconds distance, taking pot shots at you while you don't fire back? Sooner or later he's going to get lucky. And it's not necessarily all about lasers. We can probably assume rail guns will be on these ships. So imagine a rail gun firing a shotgun blast of metal pellets at a respectable fraction of lightspeed. How long are you going to let your enemy throw all this at you before you decide that "waiting till you see the whites of his eyes" is perhaps not the best strategy for space warfare.
The scenerio you have described is entirely plausable but it really depends on the dynamics of the situation...which we just can't really predict well enough yet. In history, "Fire Discipline" and "Volume of Firepower" have been swapping places as the more advantageous approach for centuries depending upon the dynamics of the situation.
During the great age of muskets, soldiers were trained specificaly NOT to aim because it would slow them down.... and you wanted to get volleys out as quickly as possible. This made sense for the day, as the smoothbore muskets were inherintly inaccurate weapons even when aimed and the tactics of the day dictated massed ranks of men standing in straight lines perhaps 100 yds distant from each other (That also made sense given the fact that with the range and rate of fire of weapons...melee combat was still an important consideration in a battle...and good formation was the key to wining a melee).
As rifled weapons became more prevalent and accuracy and effective killing range of weapons increased, "Fire Discipline" started to become the more dominant tactic. This also made sense for the given dynamics...as the rifled weapons COULD be quite accurate at long range if time/care was taken to aim them. Soldiers also started to switch away from fighting in massed, regularly ordered ranks. Ranges were long enough that soldiers had time to assume a formation if the enemy were closing to melee. Rates of fire were still pretty low however.....meaning that alot could happen in between the time you fired a weapon and were ready to fire it again...so wasting shots was risky. More importantly though.....logistics were still pretty sketchy and modern industrilization was just really starting to take off..... meaning that troops were deployed with limited supplies of ammunition... If you used up all your ammo taking pot shots at the enemy...it was uncertain when you could get more....so conserving that ammo was important. This was especialy true in some of the far off colonial theatres where troops were often called upon to fight.
Heading into the 20th Century with increased industrialization and most importantly, advances in supply and transportation systems, along with an increase in the rate of weapons and quicker reload times (boxed magazines, ammo clips, etc).... "Volume of Fire" once again took predominance .... as soldiers were ready to fire again very quickly after taking a shot....and most importantly could more confidently rely on a regular resupply of ammo.
Good post, I might have even learned something from it. I'll admit I never did understand why armies used to stand in massed ranks firing at each other.
For this space warfare conjecture though I should say that I'm assuming we'll have very efficient fusion reactors by then (which can fit on a spacecraft comfortably) because if we don't at least have that then there probably is no point even discussing this. Well, not really true, fission reactors could be used but if I'm going to dream I'll dream of fusion.
So for any given battle you could probably assume that the ships have essentially unlimited power for lasers. Missles or projectiles would be limited of course but I think it's fair to assume that power for the lasers will never run out, at least not soon enough to matter for the battle.
Also, lasers don't have to be fired in short bursts. You could sweep your laser through the projected possible locations of the enemy perhaps continuously. If you have multiple laser weapons you might be firing them all into the target area simultaneously.
So if these assumptions hold up then space combat most likely would be done at extremely long ranges. If you held your fire untill you got close enough for a "certain" hit you'd be dead before you got there.
On missles, people keep talking about missles but I doubt if they would be very usefull if the fighting is done at such extreme range. To easy to counter and you can't stealth it if it's thrusting. I could imagine maybe something like a launchable weapons platform, launched from a railgun if it could stand the acceleration, and this would be stealthed, and when/if it comes close to the enemy ship it targets and fires on it's own.
Originally posted by GrumpyMel2 1) Yes, we are making alot of progress with A.I. but we are still in the very crude stages of work there....We have no idea what stumbling blocks we might run into in the future with such progress. What we do with adpative AI these days (as I understand it) is have them learn through brute force to do tasks with very strictly defined rules (like play soccer)... even this is excrutiatingly slow for machines....though I'm sure we'll improve that over time. Humans, however seem to be able to think in very abstract terms and face situations very unlike any they have ever encountered before and yet come up with responses that are remarkably appropriate for those situations. It's uncertain what it would actualy take for a machine to be able to do something similar. 2) There is no assurance that "copying human brain patterns" over to an A.I is feasable...nor that it will actualy result in human-like intelligence. 3) Much of our "emotional baggage" is actualy a "feature" not a bug as far as millitary officers go. We don't treat our officers like robots....we expect them to make decisions off of very "human" codes of conduct. Half the time millitary commanders are not just evaluating what I "can" do in a given situation but what "should" (moral/ethical) I do in that situation. This becomes even more important when communication with higher authority is limited or impossible and officers have to act independantly. 4) I was cleaning up viruses in networks long before they had internet connections....let alone wireless connection....there are LOTS of different ways to compromise systems (not that individuals aren't susceptible to be "compromised" either.) 5) We have no idea of the resources/costs that it would take to support A.I.s of the level of sophistication which we are talking about...... compared to the resources/costs it would take to support a human crew. It MAY just be that human crews will be cheaper to support/deploy then hyper sophisticated A.I.'s. I agree we'll tend to go with whatever solution provides the best cost/benefit ratio....but I think what that is may not be entirely predictable. Heck, look at the Soviet Army in WWII... they typicaly deployed thier infantry in ADVANCE of thier tanks....because it was far more cost effective to have an infantry man step on a mine or stumble into an AT gun then a tank. Manpower was a cheap resource to them when compared to vehicles. 6) ALOT of problems like inertia and radiation/emp shielding will probably need to be solved anyway to make routiene extra-planetry travel economical for even unmanned vessels. It remains to be seen how many of those solutions might be applicable toward things that would affect human crews. 7) You actualy hit on another factor....we don't actually know what bio-tech or bio-medical advances may look like in 100-200 years time. It's not inconcievable that human ship crews could differ significantly in thier biological characteristics from current day. 8) Do not ignore the social factor. There will be ALOT of pressure for "manned" space flight.......and for human supervision of powerfull millitary weapons.....simply because as a society it is both what we want and expect.
1. Our best Supercomputers today are close to processing power of INSECTS. So the reason why things are so crude is very simple...the artificial brains we have available are limited to being extremely stupid.
2. We've made pretty could progress simulating neural nets, so I see no reason why that wouldn't work. It would be a rather complicated way to go about things, and personally I think a more "grounds up" approach will do the job just fine.
3. I'm talking about anger, rage, love, romance, fear, as unnecessary emotional baggage. Ethics aren't emotions. I'd refer you to Data as a Sci-Fi example of a being with very limited emotions (and our brains use a LOT of space to cover emotions, much more than is implied by the tiny emotion chip Data gets).
4. As you say individuals can be compromised. Heck, it is a lot harder to tell if a person is compromised generally speaking. An AI you could quite possible hardwire the basic intelligence if viruses were an issue, but my point was that requiring physical contact with the A.I. in order to infect it with something (and even then there would surely be safeguards) does a tremendous amount to cut down on potential viruses and the like.
5. As long as humans need oxygen, food, a narrow band of environmental conditions, etc, then costs to support them will be rather high. Machines might start off expensive, but the one certain thing is their costs will keep going down. Eventually it is a certain thing that machines will be easier to cover than humans (unless we modify how humans work to compete or kill ourselves off).
6. We do make routine interplanetary flights with machines already. The hostile nature of space is not that hard to overcome if you don't have to worry about keeping fragile lifeforms alive.
7. Granted, personally I think a synthesis between humans and machines is inevitable, otherwise machines will simply out compete us (heck, we're in for major economic strife and difficulty when machines can reliably do minimum wage and other unskilled labor). At that point though, the difference between the two will be pretty small. "Humans" won't be restricted by their current physiology in most senses (including brain power for what it matters).
8. Certainly at first. Which is why you'd likely have a very tiny crew on big ships, with most of the ship being automated. That makes the cost of keeping those people alive pretty small. Even a single-person craft would likely be massive by terrestrial standards for such vehicles. People will eventually get used to A.I. though (but whether or not there will be a big difference between an A.I. and a person physically by that point is far from certain).
Comments
Unless we are talking present day or close to it...... I think that history tells us that we don't have a clue what it would be like.
At the start of World War I, most Admirals and General (i.e. people who were proffesional in such matters) thought the war would be fought with the tactics dominant in the Napoleonic period (i.e. Massed infantry marching in neatly ordered formations and cavalry charging with lance and sabre).
At the start of World War II, most Admirals and Generals thought they would be fighting a replay of World War I (i.e. static defensive lines of trenches and massed MG's, the seas dominated by Battleships shooting it out with each other).
If history teaches us anything, it tells us that even most proffesional millitary thinkers don't fully comprehend the dynamics of their current conflicts when they first flare into being....let alone what some future conflict decades or centuries hence might look like.
We understand the laws of physics in space (or at least THINK we do.... which is another arguement) well enough.... we don't understand fully what devices/technologies mankind might come up with to use in such an environment in future....nor how they might apply to a conflict in space.
When/If it does come......I think very few people will really have a good idea what they dynamics of such a conflict will be before-hand. You may have a few B.H. Liddell-Harts, Jimmy Doolittles and Heinz Guderian but most folks are going to be completely blind-sided (IMO)
I originally wanted to reply to this thread "However Pournelle and Niven described it."
But that would have been cheating
Missile and detecting moving masses in general would be a fairly big deal, as would avoiding enemy detection. Most bases in space wouldn't be very good militarily I don't think unless technology changes a lot or they were built into an asteroid or planetoid. Lasers would be useful even a long ranges (you can make lasers stay in a coherent beam for a long time if designed right), but the defense against them would likely be layers of ice around a ship (which could also be used for drinking water) -- thick sheets of ice would double as a radiation shield, so it's handy.
Btw, I think you'd would have conflicts out in the middle of nowhere to an extent. Intercepting the enemy before they get to you is generally a good idea. Especially since modern weapons are so very deadly to installations...protecting a planet's infrastructure would require intercepting the enemy as far out as possible.
By the time we can have fights in space I'd expect the ships to be largely automated. People like imagining human crews, but frankly we don't adapt well to space and we'll certainly be able to design robots and other technological systems that do most of the jobs a lot better (if not all of the jobs). It also means keeping an atmosphere inside the vast majority of the ship would not be necessary, which increases survivability. Given the size of space, I'd expect there to still be very large ships by naval standards, as such ships can more readily repair themselves when damaged (better manufacturing facilities), and they'll have room for better and more plentiful weapons. Modern naval warfare is pretty dang deadly if you get hit with almost anything, but we still have large ships, so I expect that will carry over to space. Though, modular ships might be developed so that large ships can easily and quickly separate into a bunch of smaller ones (might be useful for sneaking in closer if that's necessary, depending on stealth technology).
I do agree with the person who said it would be a lot like Naval Warfare. Generally I wouldn't expect ships to be heading straight at each other, but rather move parallel within firing distance -- getting close just makes you easier to spot and easier to hit so it would largely be confined to drones, missiles, and the like.
It would probably also be a lot of math. People in side a closed off bubble needing to look at computer terminals that spit out numbers so they can figure speed of the ship, speed of their missles, any objects creating gravity wells between enemies, and many more math problems to figure out when to shoot where to shoot.
The Honor Harrington series by David Webber is a popular series that contains lots of heavy actual space battles and it tries to assume the role of real world physics and war room strategies. The newest book has between 1 and 3 chapters in a row just covering a space battle between 2 ships, detailing each maneuver and missile fire and what goes into doing that with the book and other books in his series being almost 1,000 pages long.
his books are popular with: for instance- "Weber's descriptions of space combat remain magnificent."
—Science Fiction Weekly.
Here's an excerpt: "They've sent in three separate groups," Stackpole replied. "One dead astern of us, one at polar north, and one at polar south. The Flag is designating the in-system force we already knew about as Bogey One. The task group to system north is Bogey Two; the one to system south is Bogey Three; and the one directly astern is Bogey Four. Our velocity relative to Bogey Four is just over twenty-two thousand kilometers per second, but range is less than thirty-one million klicks."
"Understood."
Michelle looked back at her own, smaller, display. At the moment, it was configured to show the entire Solon System, which meant, by definition, that it was nowhere as detailed as Stackpole's. There wasn't room for that on a plot small enough to deploy from a command chair—not when it was displaying the volume of something the size of a star system, at any rate. But it was more than detailed enough to confirm what Stackpole had just told her. The Peeps had just duplicated exactly what had happened to them at the Battle of Sidemore, and managed to do it on a more sophisticated scale, to boot. Unless something reduced Task Force Eighty-Two's rate of acceleration, none of the three forces which had just dropped out of hyper-space to ambush it could hope to overtake it. Unfortunately, they didn't need to physically overtake the task force in order to engage it—not when current-generation Havenite multidrive missiles had a maximum powered range from rest of over sixty million kilometers.
So there has to be some translation like going from book to a movie. A more realistic, and gaming approach, may be found in the now very old Aerotech roleplaying strategy game. You had rules to build ships on paper, and a board where you kept track of those ships with counters. You had to deal with thrust, and constant movement while turning in space, as well as firing, and knowing when and where to fire to actually hit your target, gravity(how much gravity), etc...
Aerotech
Just One MMOre
One thing I've always thought sci-fi movies got wrong was aiming. I seriously doubt with computers as advanced as the ones shown that pilots would be able to out-respond them. Targetting would be deadly accurate and simple missing would be unheard of.
For instance, I would expect a large battle ship to be able to track, target and one-shot many small ships within a few seconds if not instantly upon command.
One thing to keep in mind is you dont even need exploding rockets,all you need is something with weight enough to puncture the space craft. also space craft dont need to be areodynamic in space they could be squares and still fly the same. ships will have alot more left right up down and side to side instead of curving. No friction.
played M59,UO,lineage,EQ,Daoc,Entropia,SWG,Horizons,Lineage2.EQ2,Vangaurd,Irth online, DarkFall,Star Trek
and many others that did not make the cut or i just plain forgetting about.
The cost in production of manned ships plus training the flight crew and mechanics would be ridiculous. Not to mention how much energy/fuel would be needed to move vessels with a large mass. No,..fleet actions would just not be doable in either cost or manpower, at least not anytime soon (next several hundred years). The cheapest and most effective route, in my opinion, would be unmanned drones launched and recovered from unmanned orbiting stations. These drones would be cheaper to produce, manning wouldn't be no where near as an issue, plus they could travel faster for less cost. Like someone else said, these "space battles" would be fought closer to an actual strategic location such as a planet ,moon or asteroid belt. Also EW and EMP will play a major role. A few people mentioned how close EVE is to what the combat will be. I'm afraid that's probably not even close. If money was no object (money will always be an object), and the science/technology was actually possible to instantly clone someone with their mind and memory intact,...then maybe.
The winner will be decided on who can afford (money wise) to sustain all aspects of this type of warfare from the gound based supply personnel loading up replacement parts in a shuttle drone that is on it's way to an orbiting platform all the way to the R&D guys trying to find a new counter to the other guy's latest gizmo.
To me, the real test will be when physical territory is fought over on a planet's surface with little or no atmosphere and high/low gravity because that is where the next supply of resources will be.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
Here are some "old school" board game rules that did it pretty well from what I remember
"Traveller 2300 Star Cruiser"
"The Game
The space battles of the future are characterized by the vast distances involved and the superior technologies devised to overcome them. Detecting your enemy may me quite difficult, especially if his drive emissions are shielded from view. Once detected, however, your weapons will be pitted against his defenses and the outcome will be determined by his ability to make you miss."
If you fire a laser at a highly reflective surface, wouldn't the laser be deflected? I imagine there would be some surfaces that would resist laser attack.
Reflective surfaces aren't 100% reflective, and any weapon-grade laser would burn away the reflectivity relatively quickly, to say nothing of micro asteroids and other space debris damaging the reflectivity. You'd have to soak the damage, and the best way to do that which I am aware of is with water, which has a wide liquid temperature range and absorbs a ton of heat per degree it is heated (nothing else we know of can compare really -- metals, for instance, heat up pretty easily).
I'd be careful about making grand announcements about what we can do in the next SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS or even the next 100 years. A couple hundred years ago most of what we take for granted to do would come across as almost magical to them. Even 100 years from now our artificial intelligence and robots should be more than advanced enough to avoid the need to put actual people on ships if we chose (assuming humankind is similar to what we are today...which isn't a trivial assumption). Heck, if things keep going on the present rate, then by 2050 or so we'll have computers with as much processing power as the human brain (tossing another 60 years onto that and that technology will be highly refined). Technology is advancing at an extremely rapid rate.
I would say that RL combat in space would remind submarine combat. Stealth would be extremely important. You would be using different kind drones and nuclear missiles to hit enemy and same time keep your distance to enemy as far possible. Distances between ships would be hundred thousands kilometers or more. One hit to ship - would be likely destroy ship. Stations, ground targets and other static targets would be destroyed by kinetic, rail guns and nuclear bombarment. Movement would be slow - and it might take months to travel attack positions. Ships would be mostly automated, maybe 3-10 crew members - or - fully automated.
Spacedebate.org - website about space weapons
- http://www.spacedebate.org/
Railguns:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun
-
Almaz: Secret Soviet Armed Space Station
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz
"I know I said this was my last post, but you my friend are a idiotic moron." -Shadow4482
Just wanted to throw in my 2 credits.
Space combat will never happen unless humans figure out how to travel close to the speed of light.
If that never happens then there will not be space combat for a very long time. Basically not until the sun is beginning to die and humans (taking for granted we still exist) need to leave the planet. At that point there will probably be multiple space stations that will be sent into orbit and then out into space once the sun starts to expand. Who knows if they will be sent in the same direction or not.
Anyway. Assuming we do figure out a way to travel close to or at/above the speed of light then space combat will boil down to a race between stealth technology and attack drone technology.
Long range space combat really isn't practical considering the time difference. Most, if not all, combat will be done close enough to predict with close to 100% certainty where the target will be when the weapon will reach them. The easiest way to do that is to send a drone. No need to risk human lives when by that time artificial intelligence will be far superior to human intelligence.
Someone already said it above but it's predicted that in about 50 years there will be a computer with the processing power of the human brain. In another 50 your phone will be smarter than you.
That prediction was made before the emergance of Quantum processor technology currently being refined. Quantum computing has the capacity to completely change the the world as we know it. That, combined with organic computing....
Well... like I said above, taking for granted we still exist.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Reflective surfaces aren't 100% reflective, and any weapon-grade laser would burn away the reflectivity relatively quickly, to say nothing of micro asteroids and other space debris damaging the reflectivity.
Micro meteor impacts are also likely to make any attempts at stealthing a ship very difficult. A brand new ship right off the production line might have fantastic stealth but fly that thing around a solar system for a while at extermely high speeds and you're going to get pitting which will pretty effectively negate all of your carefull attempts to make the ship stealthy.
To anyone who thinks extremely long range space combat is unlikely; that philosophy will only last untill your enemy decides otherwise. You might not like the idea of firing on him when you can't be certain what position he will occupy when your shot gets there but what if he doesn't subcsibe to that theory?
Are you going to let him stand off at, say, 2 light seconds distance, taking pot shots at you while you don't fire back? Sooner or later he's going to get lucky. And it's not necessarily all about lasers. We can probably assume rail guns will be on these ships. So imagine a rail gun firing a shotgun blast of metal pellets at a respectable fraction of lightspeed.
How long are you going to let your enemy throw all this at you before you decide that "waiting till you see the whites of his eyes" is perhaps not the best strategy for space warfare.
Pretty much everything would be flying/firing by wire (i.e. computer) instead of by hand...unless something actualy happaned with biology/biotech to effectively give humans the same sort of computational/reactive powers as machines.
However, targeting might not be that straight-forward. You can hit something with 100% accuracy if you are able to predict with 100% accuracy it's path/speed of movement. It's how they were able to land that probe on that comet a few years back. However comets don't "fly evasively" in order to avoid being hit. When you are dealing with large distances and high speeds there is going to be a delay in weapon firing and weapon impact. In that time, the target can potentialy move in an unpredictable manner. Even with missles that can track and adjust thier flight in response to a targets motion....there is going to be some delay in the missles targeting system acquiring and processing the data on the target and adjusting it's own course in response to the targets. If that delay is significant enough...it can result in target moving sufficiently to result in a "miss".
In this case, the advantage would actualy be with the target rather then the attacker. The target doesn't actually need to be able to move in response to the attack in order to be missed. All it needs to do is know that an attack MAY be likely and constantly move in an unpredictable pattern to confuse potential targeting/tracking. This is similar to the way people move when their forced to cross open terrain today while under potential fire. If you run in a straight line at a constant speed without stopping...you are likely to be shot....because anyone drawing a beed on you knows exactly how much to lead you. If you move in an unpredictable pattern... weaving, varrying speed, etc..... You aren't actualy "dodging bullets" but you are confusing the shooters aim....as they have to constantly adjust and react in response to your movements... and there will be a delay between when you move and how long it takes them to adjust.
Frankly, the most reliable weapons may be ones that affect rather wide areas or cones. So I'm not sure that simple misses will actualy be that uncommon. That, of course, doesn't even get into the area of "false images" or decoys, etc.
I'd say that space combat will be very much like air combat is today. To make space combat something worth thinking about, we (and our opponents) would have already had to have found mastery over time and space. If we chose to fight, we would manipulate our position in time and space relative to our opponents, popping in and out of contact with each other like fireflies at night. It would be a classic dogfight at the root of it though.
I'd be careful about making grand announcements about what we can do in the next SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS or even the next 100 years. A couple hundred years ago most of what we take for granted to do would come across as almost magical to them. Even 100 years from now our artificial intelligence and robots should be more than advanced enough to avoid the need to put actual people on ships if we chose (assuming humankind is similar to what we are today...which isn't a trivial assumption). Heck, if things keep going on the present rate, then by 2050 or so we'll have computers with as much processing power as the human brain (tossing another 60 years onto that and that technology will be highly refined). Technology is advancing at an extremely rapid rate.
In a round about way, you sort of agree with me. Actual human crews in an actual space faring combat vessel would be a logistical hurdle that would make unmanned space combat vessels more practical and cheaper. Lets look at it this way...what would be needed in a combat ship to support a manned crew?
To cut all of that expense out to a scale thats more practical and that can be maintained on a level of mass production, the solution would be unmanned vessels. Until the real life logistics can be worked out, all this other talk about how combat will be fought in space is still fantasy because it's the logistics of it all that will determine what actual weapons and tactics would be used in fighting in space. Though fighting in space sounds and looks cool in the movies and video games, in my opinion the main hurdle in future warfare will be fighting on the surface of another planet, not the space surrounding it.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
Reflective surfaces aren't 100% reflective, and any weapon-grade laser would burn away the reflectivity relatively quickly, to say nothing of micro asteroids and other space debris damaging the reflectivity.
Micro meteor impacts are also likely to make any attempts at stealthing a ship very difficult. A brand new ship right off the production line might have fantastic stealth but fly that thing around a solar system for a while at extermely high speeds and you're going to get pitting which will pretty effectively negate all of your carefull attempts to make the ship stealthy.
To anyone who thinks extremely long range space combat is unlikely; that philosophy will only last untill your enemy decides otherwise. You might not like the idea of firing on him when you can't be certain what position he will occupy when your shot gets there but what if he doesn't subcsibe to that theory?
Are you going to let him stand off at, say, 2 light seconds distance, taking pot shots at you while you don't fire back? Sooner or later he's going to get lucky. And it's not necessarily all about lasers. We can probably assume rail guns will be on these ships. So imagine a rail gun firing a shotgun blast of metal pellets at a respectable fraction of lightspeed.
How long are you going to let your enemy throw all this at you before you decide that "waiting till you see the whites of his eyes" is perhaps not the best strategy for space warfare.
The scenerio you have described is entirely plausable but it really depends on the dynamics of the situation...which we just can't really predict well enough yet. In history, "Fire Discipline" and "Volume of Firepower" have been swapping places as the more advantageous approach for centuries depending upon the dynamics of the situation.
During the great age of muskets, soldiers were trained specificaly NOT to aim because it would slow them down.... and you wanted to get volleys out as quickly as possible. This made sense for the day, as the smoothbore muskets were inherintly inaccurate weapons even when aimed and the tactics of the day dictated massed ranks of men standing in straight lines perhaps 100 yds distant from each other (That also made sense given the fact that with the range and rate of fire of weapons...melee combat was still an important consideration in a battle...and good formation was the key to wining a melee).
As rifled weapons became more prevalent and accuracy and effective killing range of weapons increased, "Fire Discipline" started to become the more dominant tactic. This also made sense for the given dynamics...as the rifled weapons COULD be quite accurate at long range if time/care was taken to aim them. Soldiers also started to switch away from fighting in massed, regularly ordered ranks. Ranges were long enough that soldiers had time to assume a formation if the enemy were closing to melee. Rates of fire were still pretty low however.....meaning that alot could happen in between the time you fired a weapon and were ready to fire it again...so wasting shots was risky. More importantly though.....logistics were still pretty sketchy and modern industrilization was just really starting to take off..... meaning that troops were deployed with limited supplies of ammunition... If you used up all your ammo taking pot shots at the enemy...it was uncertain when you could get more....so conserving that ammo was important. This was especialy true in some of the far off colonial theatres where troops were often called upon to fight.
Heading into the 20th Century with increased industrialization and most importantly, advances in supply and transportation systems, along with an increase in the rate of weapons and quicker reload times (boxed magazines, ammo clips, etc).... "Volume of Fire" once again took predominance .... as soldiers were ready to fire again very quickly after taking a shot....and most importantly could more confidently rely on a regular resupply of ammo.
I'd be careful about making grand announcements about what we can do in the next SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS or even the next 100 years. A couple hundred years ago most of what we take for granted to do would come across as almost magical to them. Even 100 years from now our artificial intelligence and robots should be more than advanced enough to avoid the need to put actual people on ships if we chose (assuming humankind is similar to what we are today...which isn't a trivial assumption). Heck, if things keep going on the present rate, then by 2050 or so we'll have computers with as much processing power as the human brain (tossing another 60 years onto that and that technology will be highly refined). Technology is advancing at an extremely rapid rate.
In a round about way, you sort of agree with me. Actual human crews in an actual space faring combat vessel would be a logistical hurdle that would make unmanned space combat vessels more practical and cheaper. Lets look at it this way...what would be needed in a combat ship to support a manned crew?
To cut all of that expense out to a scale thats more practical and that can be maintained on a level of mass production, the solution would be unmanned vessels. Until the real life logistics can be worked out, all this other talk about how combat will be fought in space is still fantasy because it's the logistics of it all that will determine what actual weapons and tactics would be used in fighting in space. Though fighting in space sounds and looks cool in the movies and video games, in my opinion the main hurdle in future warfare will be fighting on the surface of another planet, not the space surrounding it.
Kind of depends on what can be achieved with A.I., not just in terms of raw processing power...but also the sophistication of thier programming as well..... human beings have millions of years of programming in being "adaptable". Right now, I'd say the book is still out as to what the limitations of A.I. will be in future....or the costs to achieve/deploy them. It is just possible....even with all the downsides and extra baggage that it ends up being far cheaper to deploy a small human crew with relatively "dumb" computers.....then a big sophisticated A.I.
The there is also the question of how much power you want to trust an A.I. with. Will they be more or less susceptible to being "hacked" then a human crew?? Those questions are going to do alot to determine what the more viable solution is.
I highly doubt anyone will be building short range fight that will be close enough to see the other fighter to engage.
It will probably more like sub warfare where you shoot long range missiles (prob with nukes) at the enemy.
Worst-case scenario you just copy human brain patterns over to an A.I, but that really shouldn't be necessary. We're already making a lot of progress with A.I. One advantage an A.I. with similar brain power to a human would have is that it wouldn't need a lot of the "programming" humans have. We have a ton devoted to things like mating and a lot of needless emotional crap that an A.I. would not need (to say nothing of our evolutionary baggage). Also, we can already evolve programs for sophisticated tasks, so it isn't like everything would have to be programmed manually. As for hacking, that's easy to stop...you just make the A.I.'s not physically capable of being written to from a wireless source.
And humans come with tons and tons of baggage. If you have no human crew then your ship can do things that would kill a human a dozen times over, and you don't need life support, oxygen, or any atmosphere.
Anyhow, the real question isn't "human or A.I.?"...in 50-100 years it might be a real question whether there is much difference between the two. We can already attach computers to brain neurons....I'd expect in 100 years "humans" by and large won't be physiologically like we are today.
Worst-case scenario you just copy human brain patterns over to an A.I, but that really shouldn't be necessary. We're already making a lot of progress with A.I. One advantage an A.I. with similar brain power to a human would have is that it wouldn't need a lot of the "programming" humans have. We have a ton devoted to things like mating and a lot of needless emotional crap that an A.I. would not need (to say nothing of our evolutionary baggage). Also, we can already evolve programs for sophisticated tasks, so it isn't like everything would have to be programmed manually. As for hacking, that's easy to stop...you just make the A.I.'s not physically capable of being written to from a wireless source.
And humans come with tons and tons of baggage. If you have no human crew then your ship can do things that would kill a human a dozen times over, and you don't need life support, oxygen, or any atmosphere.
Anyhow, the real question isn't "human or A.I.?"...in 50-100 years it might be a real question whether there is much difference between the two. We can already attach computers to brain neurons....I'd expect in 100 years "humans" by and large won't be physiologically like we are today.
1) Yes, we are making alot of progress with A.I. but we are still in the very crude stages of work there....We have no idea what stumbling blocks we might run into in the future with such progress. What we do with adpative AI these days (as I understand it) is have them learn through brute force to do tasks with very strictly defined rules (like play soccer)... even this is excrutiatingly slow for machines....though I'm sure we'll improve that over time. Humans, however seem to be able to think in very abstract terms and face situations very unlike any they have ever encountered before and yet come up with responses that are remarkably appropriate for those situations. It's uncertain what it would actualy take for a machine to be able to do something similar.
2) There is no assurance that "copying human brain patterns" over to an A.I is feasable...nor that it will actualy result in human-like intelligence.
3) Much of our "emotional baggage" is actualy a "feature" not a bug as far as millitary officers go. We don't treat our officers like robots....we expect them to make decisions off of very "human" codes of conduct. Half the time millitary commanders are not just evaluating what I "can" do in a given situation but what "should" (moral/ethical) I do in that situation. This becomes even more important when communication with higher authority is limited or impossible and officers have to act independantly.
4) I was cleaning up viruses in networks long before they had internet connections....let alone wireless connection....there are LOTS of different ways to compromise systems (not that individuals aren't susceptible to be "compromised" either.)
5) We have no idea of the resources/costs that it would take to support A.I.s of the level of sophistication which we are talking about...... compared to the resources/costs it would take to support a human crew. It MAY just be that human crews will be cheaper to support/deploy then hyper sophisticated A.I.'s. I agree we'll tend to go with whatever solution provides the best cost/benefit ratio....but I think what that is may not be entirely predictable.
Heck, look at the Soviet Army in WWII... they typicaly deployed thier infantry in ADVANCE of thier tanks....because it was far more cost effective to have an infantry man step on a mine or stumble into an AT gun then a tank. Manpower was a cheap resource to them when compared to vehicles.
6) ALOT of problems like inertia and radiation/emp shielding will probably need to be solved anyway to make routiene extra-planetry travel economical for even unmanned vessels. It remains to be seen how many of those solutions might be applicable toward things that would affect human crews.
7) You actualy hit on another factor....we don't actually know what bio-tech or bio-medical advances may look like in 100-200 years time. It's not inconcievable that human ship crews could differ significantly in thier biological characteristics from current day.
8) Do not ignore the social factor. There will be ALOT of pressure for "manned" space flight.......and for human supervision of powerfull millitary weapons.....simply because as a society it is both what we want and expect.
I think the best example of truly REALISTIC space combat is in Larry Niven's "Protector".
You fire your missiles.
A few MONTHS later, you check to see if they hit anything, since your target is light-weeks away and the real "battle" is between your computer predicting where is and his computer predicting where your computer is going to predict he is and making course corrections (weeks in advance) to not be there.
B5 is one of the best efforts at showing space combat, but the "real thing" is likely to be terribly, terribly, dull. (Combat in near-orbit will be mostly 0.01 seconds of missiles flying.)
Everything that's totally cool and awesome about space combat -- great big battleships, zippy fighters, pew pew lasers -- really isn't going to happen. This sucks, but that's that. Indeed, the idea of "spaceships" may be a pretty stupid one in the face of hard reality. I recently read a good essay -- can't find it now, sorry -- pretty much making a depressingly solid case that the way we will "explore space" beyond our solar system is in tiny little things no more than a few grams in mass, riding the solar wind, and carrying an uploaded personality or AI.
In-system travel is a bit more plausible, but it's looking more and more like it's going to be robots, not people, doing all the cool shit. Eventually, you'll be able to copy your mind into a robot probe, spend six months living inside a virtual reality simulation, then "come out" when the probe reaches, I dunno, Europa or something and take a look around.
But barring some truly radical changes in our understanding of the universe -- and if you actually look at what we know about physics, the task of finding something to replace it with that STILL EXPLAINS every phenomenon observed to date is really difficult -- we will probably never see anything like any concept of "spaceship' we currently recognize, not even the old classics like generation ships, Orion drives, or ramjets.
Reality sucks. And doesn't swallow.
The scenerio you have described is entirely plausable but it really depends on the dynamics of the situation...which we just can't really predict well enough yet. In history, "Fire Discipline" and "Volume of Firepower" have been swapping places as the more advantageous approach for centuries depending upon the dynamics of the situation.
During the great age of muskets, soldiers were trained specificaly NOT to aim because it would slow them down.... and you wanted to get volleys out as quickly as possible. This made sense for the day, as the smoothbore muskets were inherintly inaccurate weapons even when aimed and the tactics of the day dictated massed ranks of men standing in straight lines perhaps 100 yds distant from each other (That also made sense given the fact that with the range and rate of fire of weapons...melee combat was still an important consideration in a battle...and good formation was the key to wining a melee).
As rifled weapons became more prevalent and accuracy and effective killing range of weapons increased, "Fire Discipline" started to become the more dominant tactic. This also made sense for the given dynamics...as the rifled weapons COULD be quite accurate at long range if time/care was taken to aim them. Soldiers also started to switch away from fighting in massed, regularly ordered ranks. Ranges were long enough that soldiers had time to assume a formation if the enemy were closing to melee. Rates of fire were still pretty low however.....meaning that alot could happen in between the time you fired a weapon and were ready to fire it again...so wasting shots was risky. More importantly though.....logistics were still pretty sketchy and modern industrilization was just really starting to take off..... meaning that troops were deployed with limited supplies of ammunition... If you used up all your ammo taking pot shots at the enemy...it was uncertain when you could get more....so conserving that ammo was important. This was especialy true in some of the far off colonial theatres where troops were often called upon to fight.
Heading into the 20th Century with increased industrialization and most importantly, advances in supply and transportation systems, along with an increase in the rate of weapons and quicker reload times (boxed magazines, ammo clips, etc).... "Volume of Fire" once again took predominance .... as soldiers were ready to fire again very quickly after taking a shot....and most importantly could more confidently rely on a regular resupply of ammo.
Good post, I might have even learned something from it. I'll admit I never did understand why armies used to stand in massed ranks firing at each other.
For this space warfare conjecture though I should say that I'm assuming we'll have very efficient fusion reactors by then (which can fit on a spacecraft comfortably) because if we don't at least have that then there probably is no point even discussing this. Well, not really true, fission reactors could be used but if I'm going to dream I'll dream of fusion.
So for any given battle you could probably assume that the ships have essentially unlimited power for lasers. Missles or projectiles would be limited of course but I think it's fair to assume that power for the lasers will never run out, at least not soon enough to matter for the battle.
Also, lasers don't have to be fired in short bursts. You could sweep your laser through the projected possible locations of the enemy perhaps continuously. If you have multiple laser weapons you might be firing them all into the target area simultaneously.
So if these assumptions hold up then space combat most likely would be done at extremely long ranges. If you held your fire untill you got close enough for a "certain" hit you'd be dead before you got there.
On missles, people keep talking about missles but I doubt if they would be very usefull if the fighting is done at such extreme range. To easy to counter and you can't stealth it if it's thrusting. I could imagine maybe something like a launchable weapons platform, launched from a railgun if it could stand the acceleration, and this would be stealthed, and when/if it comes close to the enemy ship it targets and fires on it's own.
1. Our best Supercomputers today are close to processing power of INSECTS. So the reason why things are so crude is very simple...the artificial brains we have available are limited to being extremely stupid.
2. We've made pretty could progress simulating neural nets, so I see no reason why that wouldn't work. It would be a rather complicated way to go about things, and personally I think a more "grounds up" approach will do the job just fine.
3. I'm talking about anger, rage, love, romance, fear, as unnecessary emotional baggage. Ethics aren't emotions. I'd refer you to Data as a Sci-Fi example of a being with very limited emotions (and our brains use a LOT of space to cover emotions, much more than is implied by the tiny emotion chip Data gets).
4. As you say individuals can be compromised. Heck, it is a lot harder to tell if a person is compromised generally speaking. An AI you could quite possible hardwire the basic intelligence if viruses were an issue, but my point was that requiring physical contact with the A.I. in order to infect it with something (and even then there would surely be safeguards) does a tremendous amount to cut down on potential viruses and the like.
5. As long as humans need oxygen, food, a narrow band of environmental conditions, etc, then costs to support them will be rather high. Machines might start off expensive, but the one certain thing is their costs will keep going down. Eventually it is a certain thing that machines will be easier to cover than humans (unless we modify how humans work to compete or kill ourselves off).
6. We do make routine interplanetary flights with machines already. The hostile nature of space is not that hard to overcome if you don't have to worry about keeping fragile lifeforms alive.
7. Granted, personally I think a synthesis between humans and machines is inevitable, otherwise machines will simply out compete us (heck, we're in for major economic strife and difficulty when machines can reliably do minimum wage and other unskilled labor). At that point though, the difference between the two will be pretty small. "Humans" won't be restricted by their current physiology in most senses (including brain power for what it matters).
8. Certainly at first. Which is why you'd likely have a very tiny crew on big ships, with most of the ship being automated. That makes the cost of keeping those people alive pretty small. Even a single-person craft would likely be massive by terrestrial standards for such vehicles. People will eventually get used to A.I. though (but whether or not there will be a big difference between an A.I. and a person physically by that point is far from certain).