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I like the idea of onboard vibrations being an issue in space combat; this could lead to the crew having to "secure for silent running" so as not to throw off their aim.
It's a real problem with -Spy- Science Satellites where vibration from the scanning of one sensor interferes with another they usually solve it with Reaction Wheels to counter or smooth out motions. I'd imagine you'd do something similar with crew; no need to tell everyone to stop breathing, just have stabilization system to counteract them. -wait a minute, SteadyCam mounts anyone?
@@matthewconnor5483 At the same time, those often can be taken into account as they are predictable. In addition, tiny vibrations matter more at extreme ranges anyways, so people doing unpredictable movements causing tiny vibrations will be a factor again when you're dealing with firing weapons at hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
One of the things that isn't often discussed is the impact of "light lag" on ranged combat. Radar and lidar both travel at the speed of light, which means that if the target is 1 light second away, then it takes 2 seconds for the firing ship to receive the sensor data, meaning they then have to increase the lead for even a laser to account for that extra second of sensor delay.
True, although that's only the case for active sensors which provides some interesting writing opportunities I haven't seen explored where passive sensors have less latency than active ones.
@joshuadickinson4614 then read the Honorverse novels. They use gravitics as an FTL passive sensor system. But, in a harder sci-fi setting, passives are more limited. Most passive astro-sensors we use today rely on detecting and analyzing light from distant objects. And that still only travels at light speed.
@@joshuadickinson4614 Gravity also travels at the speed of light. As far as we know, *nothing* exceeds that speed, so regardless of sensing method, you will always have at least light speed lag.
An interesting concept here is that even in the actual chance to hit is small, simply forcing your enemy to evade is great on its own just to waste their propellant, especially when they're smaller than you (square cube law). Kinetics also render stationary installations pretty much impractical, because if your space station can't move it doesn't matter if it can see the railgun slugs being fired a week in advance. If you have good lasers it doesn't even cost you anything to do this, beyond power and heat. So it helps pressure your enemy, even if you never actually get to hit anyone at extreme ranges.
To quote (or at least paraphrase, because I can't remember the exact quote) the Honorverse: 'However, a planet (and in this case the weapons platforms orbiting it) suffered from one enormous tactical disadvantage - it couldn't dodge.'
On the other hand - especially if the setting includes shield - the station has an enormous advantage by simply being a lot bigger and not needing to move around. You can have meters of armor (or armor drones as mobile shields engaging your railgun slugs 10K away from the station), hundreds of point defense guns and thousands of sleeper mines/missiles that are impossible to detect until you are so close that you get hit.
The way I typically come across this either follows this, partially follows it by making it so even orbital fortresses have some form of propulsion to ensure you can't easily do extreme range sniping against them... Or just accept that they're around to make attacks need to reach a critical damage threshold or leave the enemy restricted to where they can travel. After all, stationary defences can spare a lot more mass and volume towards things like reactors, shields, point defence and armour to make destroying them very, very hard. They don't have to move fast after all.
@@SkyHawk2137 Yep, the square cube law means bigger is better for this sort of thing, more power, thicker shields and armour etc. The ultimate form of this are planets, of course.
Stations are always going to have some thrust capability if they're anywhere in the influence of celestial bodies. Station-keeping thrusters aren't going to work for skirmishing, but they should be just fine avoiding shots that were calculated long in advance.
There are so many people who talk about "realistic" weapons in space combat without realizing just how _long_ the ranges in space are. We joke about Star Wars ships being basically right next to each other in battles. but what else are you going to to? Imagine fighting a battle where it takes a day for a missile to reach the target. I'd honestly like to see a video about how traffic control works in space settings. The solar system in the Expanse has got to just be choked with debris and gridlock, right? Just how do you coordinate things when there's so much delay in detection and communication?
It honestly depends entirely on the setting. Why are ships fighting in deep space? Why are they even in deep space? Why are they fighting between the orbits of planets? How did they get there and why is another ship also there opposing them when the velocities wouldn't match up at all? Space combat can very realistically take place within the orbits of planets and in most situations, it's the only realistic place space combat would occur.
The good news is, traffic control really only matters at the ends of a trip. So you file a flight plan with your local traffic control as you leave, they watch you and control actions while you are leaving their space. Then you contact the opposite end and let them know when you're expected to be arriving. The give you an approach corridor, and begin control activities once you get within range. Between those points? No one cares. It's important in the modern world because a collision is a distinct probability. But in space? You have so much room that you would have plenty of time to react to an inbound ship.
@@Skhmt if you wait until planetary orbit to engage a hostile fleet, they can just Godrod your planet to death with impunity. It's basic math to hit a planet with a kinetic slug, even from 8-10 light hours out at the "edge of the solar system." But yeah, it's silly to have ships/fleets fighting each other in interstellar space unless some weird logistical impact of your setting's FTL makes that more reasonable.
@@Skhmt Though it only occurring in close orbit above habitable worlds is very much just a caveat of unrealistically efficient engines (not necessarily FAST, because it produces the same effect if they get to their destination in 100 years time, but ones that don't need to conserve delta-V in transit). So in Star Wars you have hypespace jumps with pinpoint accuracy, meaning ships effectively teleporting into orbit. And in something like 40k, you have patrol ships who's peak engine output can eclipse that of a star, meaning they can truly come from everywhere (even if it takes a few days, which is still fast at interplanetary distances). But if ships have to use orbital mechanics, they'll be approaching on calculable trajectories, at which point your fleet is effectively missiles - if you don't let AI hunt-and-kill by itself, the humans are basically on those ships to prevent comms lag not allowing an attack to be called off, just deployed on an intercept course to an enemy fleet.
@@Skhmt This brings up an interesting scenario where countries develop weapons accurate out to several light seconds. But since all the countries are on the same planet with their own military assets orbiting that planet, you get a MAD scenario where everyone's military assets are holding guns to everyone else's metaphorical heads because it's impossible to be more than a few thousand kilometers from the nearest enemy asset while in orbit.
The beauty of missiles is the variety of warheads one can mount. An extreme accelerating kinetic penetrator, explosives of all kinds, shrapnel, and even exotic stuff like nuclear pumped lasers.
Or using the some of the missiles themselves as ECM/ECCM platforms, or even remote sensor platforms to update faster than the launching platforms could update
@Sephiroth144 essentially sheperding other missiles in with terminal tracking. That is a neat idea when sensor lag starts exceeding human reaction times.
@@Tounushi That idea was used in the Honor Harrington novels. Als missile range went into the dozens of millions of kilometres they build special command and controll missiles to take over some of the fire controll and even added a FTL communication system to maintain real-time 2-way communication with the ship.
Their propulsion and maneuvering systems should not be overlooked either. For all intents and purposes space missiles are tiny versions of their faction's spacecraft, ones that don't have the limitations of their crewed counterparts. For example, a very short range missile only needs to be lightning fast, whereas medium range missile has to have stupidly high maneuverability to counter evasion and active protection systems. On the other hand, a very long range missile will only be about extreme propellant efficiency, with slow but steady acceleration to relativistic speeds.
with the faster projectiles, it matters that you can only "see it coming", and thus evade it, once its light reaches you. So no matter how far away you are, you'll never dodge a laser unless you have some kind of magic FTL sensors.
You can still evade it, but you don't try and respond when they're shooting. Instead, you either predict when they're shooting based on other factors, such as pre-fire weapon emissions, or more likely, random evasive maneuverers. By using random evasive maneuverers, you increase the size of your probability bubble and make it harder to anticipate where you're going to be. This works fine in settings where propellant is a non-factor in combat, but in other settings, burning fuels constantly is a risk as once your run out of propellant you're dead in the water and an easy target to either be destroyed or captured.
You can't dodge a laser beam - but if you can tell that a laser beam is being fired or will soon be fired, and there's sufficient distance, you can try to juke it. As the video says, it's partly a game of chance and partly an exercise in predicting where your opponent might be aiming.
@@KillahMate I'm not convinced. In the event of a 1st shot, when the battle hasn't yet begun, perhaps. In the case of a fight that has already started, much less certain. Yes, with realistic sensors, you only feel the laser fire when it's coming at you. But with random movement, targeting will also be much more difficult. Especially as what applies to lasers also applies to sensors. The attacker will only perceive movements with a delay.... It's the same problem as with projectiles, but at a greater distance.
"This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class Dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space! (...) I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty! Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'till it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime! That, Serviceman Chung, is why you do not "eyeball it". It is a weapon of mass destruction, you are not a cowboy shooting from the hip."
I did the math on that and he is correct. A 20 kilo mass, going 1.3% lightspeed, hits with the force of a nuke. When I did the math I was both impressed and satisfied that the writers went that extra step to do the math on my favorite quote.
Great scene, and certainly true when you're engaged in orbital combat - fire this with a planet or station somewhere in the background, and people are very likely going to have a bad day. Interplanetary or interstellar combat makes a miss somewhat less likely to be consequential however - the mean free path for that projectile through the Milky Way gives it almost no chance of ever hitting anything for hundreds of millions, and more likely billions of years. It could easily fail to hit anything before the heat death of the universe.
@@johnsmithfakename8422It'd be pretty disappointing if they didn't do the math tbh. That isn't a very complicated calculation and putting in a detail without making sure it isn't verifiably false is really lame
in this Warhammer book, Ciaphas Cain. The guy talks about how space battles are done form a massive distance, but he also talks about how in movies (yes Warhammer has movies) they show space battles as close combat stuff lel
Close combat is generally much more entertaining and easy to pull off. Long range "realistic battles" aren't as immediately visceral and requires a lot of unintuitive thinking to make work
Not to mention some of the insane speeds that ship could easily be traveling at to get into effective weapons range. Image being a movie director and trying to convey to the audience that the two fleets are closing at a combined velocity of 0.2 c and that effective weapons range comes and goes in a tiny fraction of a second.
A *much* better way to organize that evasion math is to describe a ship's "characteristic evasion time" value, i.e. the amount of time it would take the ship to displace itself from its current trajectory by one ship-length; then compare that characteristic evasion time to a projectile time-of-flight. That formulation then also makes it easy to incorporate other sources of delay, like sensor processing time, engine spool-up, or the need to secure cargo or crew before engaging maximum thrust; and also still works when the evasive action taken is to _shut off_ the engines to avoid a shot that's leading a ship that's already under thrust. This also allows a simplification of coordinated salvo fire, where you compare the time-of-flight to the ship's characteristic evasion time times the square root of the projectile count.
For space combat I'm a fan of the Honor Harrington books. Massed missile volleys using 'stand-off' bomb pumped laser heads to hammer enemy fleets, countered by E-war, counter missiles and PDLs (and the settings hand-wavy drive tech)
Personally, I liked the Starfire setting a little better, just because it has a greater variety of weapons and tactics. Not just clouds of missiles... Or, another way, Honorverse got a bit boring after Flag in Exile, as that was the last time an energy-range engagement between big ships happened.
@@templarw20Yeah, Honorverse starts cool but devolves into "Manticore the good guys win forever against comical bad guys thanks to their unassailable tech advantage via incredible numbers of missiles ad infinatum". (Not to mention the battles getting samey because it is all X missiles, Y missiles get distracted by electronic countermeasures, Z missiles are shot down via countermissiles and W missiles shot down by point defense but X-Y-Z-W is still some stupid high number more than enough to destroy sidewalls and annihilate ships via bomb pumped Xrasers) Especially as the relatively interesting bad guys of Haven who get some wins sometimes become good guys and because they are good guys they ally with Manticore. (Also Weber retcons the Solarian League from the ultra advanced hyperpower that single handedly enforces "no kinetic strikes on planets" rule to ineffectual isolationist bureaucracy which is simultaneously expansionist but also their ships are way outdated even by relatively early series standards let alone the current Mantie-Havenite tech (which they by all rights should be aware of, even if behind the latest generation Manticore supertech).)
And early in the series, the decisive portion of an action was still the knife-range energy duel, and while the Havenites and Manties did advance their missile technology to the point that missiles had become a reliable way to kill another warship, the Solarians were still stuck in the old mentality that missiles existed solely to prevent the enemy from running and reducing their energy broadside, so that the knife-range energy engagement would be what would decide the course of a battle.
The lore in the Lancer TTRPG core rulebook as well as its sister-system Lancer: Battlegroup system do such a good job of describing the incredible scope of the tightening gyre of space combat, as well as an incredible mechanical depiction of it in the latter system
I've only seen 11dragonkid's videos on the game and I love how that turns carriers on their head by making them a close range weapon, 1st edition Dropfleet Commander has a similar albeit less justified relationship.
EVE Online handles this in an interesting way. Guns have an optimal and falloff range, with Optimal being that range where it has the best damage, and fall off represented gradual reduction in accuracy over range. Turret tracking also has angular and transversal velocity to consider, so the direction and speed your target is travelling relative to you is also very important for how likely you are to hit. For instance, a battlecruiser might not have r guns that can track a frigate orbiting at close range, but if it is moving away in a straight line at a distance as the frigate chases it in a straight line, that frigate becomes almost stationary relative to the battlecruiser, so it becomes easier to hit.
I use the Hammerlock method constantly in my writings (Unavoidable Railgun ranges). With that said, there are other fun things to consider in space sci-fi writings: - Missiles are your best friend. - Even slow, straight-flying projectiles can still be fired at stationary targets from extreme distances. - In shows like Space Battleship Yamato, Gatlantian battleships utilized wormhole guns (Flame Strike Gun) to fire at extreme ranges. This involved warships that could fire instant, powerful energy beams that could traverse through the wormhole and smash into enemy vessels upon exiting the aperture. While devastating, defending ships could utilize large armored alloys in front of the warships to defend themselves from the hits.
As a fellow writer, keep in mind that "stationary" is a relative term in space. Nothing is truly static in space. Targets with a predictable pattern could also be effectively attacked with slow projectiles.
>Even slow, straight-flying projectiles can still be fired at stationary targets from extreme distances. This was featured in Light Bringer by Pierce Brown, one side predicted they'd send their vanguard fleet over the Martian north pole, so weeks in advance they accelerated a titantic railgun slug made from several melted enemy starships and devastated the fleet before they could react
but way before Hammerlock it is still worth firing a single round per second, just to force them to either take damage or continually be in high velocity acceleration
Well no serious military would keep anything important "stationary" in space. It takes little effort to adjust orbits a little even for large space stations to largely prevent this issue. Of course an enemy could try for a saturation attack with hundreds or even thousands of projectiles.
A cool thing about energy weapons in space is, that if we say lasers are the be-all-end-all of our setting and combat revolves around them, and there's no energy shields or armor or anything, you would actually have to deal with sensor lag. Since lasers move at light speed, AND any sensor system would also have to move at light speed, you might be fighting at a range of several light-seconds and have to deal with sensor data at any given moment being a few seconds old, even if you're getting feed in real time. I think that's really cool. Also: when talking about range in space, one has to remember FTL drives. If you have things like Star Trek's warp drive, where you can just come out of FTL close enough to see the whites in their sensor domes, range isn't a concern necessarily. It's another way to handwave long-range space combat in favor of big gun and torpedo slugging matches at close range
@@TheAchilles26 I think that's a technology sophistication question. At a theoretical infinite range it's obviously impossible, but ask a person in 1890 if they believe that in 100 years you'll be able to send moving pictures wirelessly between handheld "telegraph" devices, and you get some perspective of how technology improves
@Paveway-chan sounds great on the surface, but doesn't actually answer the simple fact of beam attenuation. Conversely, if you manage to develop the technology to accelerate a projectile to 90+% of light speed, you functionally get all the benefits of the laser within a greater range than beam attenuation lets lasers be effective.
One of the big questions with FTL capable settings are whether their sensors can see into or out of FTL, and whether their weapons are themselves FTL. If you're going through a gate, can you scan the other side? If I'm calculating a jump like the Galactica, I'm pretty much jumping blind unless it is a very short combat jump where I can already see the intended destination. In Star Wars ships have almost no ability to see into or out of hyperspace, and so they also jump essentially blind unless they have some exotic plot sensor for those times when an author needs a ship followed. In both settings there's basically no such thing as an FTL weapon, with the bizarre exception of the planet buster and ramming sequences from the sequel trilogy, but lets ignore those please, as they screw up the entire setting. However, in Star Trek the ability to warp generally comes along with the tech to use FTL scanners that can easily track objects in - or from - warp, which would make the reality of space combat in Star Trek deeply confusing and bizarre in any real tactical sense, and render any non-FTL weapon or ship essentially useless unless it's only designed for attacking fixed targets (I've never seen a reasonable explanation of why phasers work in warp...). There are also a fair number of written fictional settings where FTL capable weapons are employed from normal space, such as the C-Plus cannons of the Berserker universe.
@@TheAchilles26 The trick is being able to generate and focus enough energy to fire a projectile with mass at 0.9c. Yes, a projectile at a large % of light speed hits with an insane amount of energy, which is pretty sexy - but you always have to remember that it took *at least* that much energy to fire the thing in the first place without obliterating the ship that fired it. You must in essence be able to set an even bigger bomb off INSIDE your own ship without blowing yourself to kingdom come, and that isn't easy.
I'm writing my own space opera novel series, and in it I've addressed how space combat can start at long ranges with missiles and point-defense lasers, but it would grow to the ships getting closer and switching up to plasma and kinetic weaponry with the use of shields once the element of surprise is off the table.
That's exactly how the Honor Harrington series handles it, if you weren't already aware. Great stuff, and I can't think of any weapon system with a cooler name than "nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray lasers"
Just wrote a chapter to a novel I'm working on where I used interception as a cap on effective torpedo range. Torps/missiles getting shot at by point defense lasers; winds up being a thing where realistically they can't hit a target that has better acceleration than the ship that wants to shoot it down (so that they can't get close enough to give themselves a kill). Thus forcing them into a less straightforward approach of diving at a the black hole they're orbiting to slingshot ahead of the ship they want to kill.
4:40 An interesting tactic involving this prediction is something I've seen called "herding cats" Using less dangerous weapons such as secondaries, a pack of ships saturate as many possible sectors the target could dodge to, except one. If the enemy takes the bait, a round from a main caliber weapon such as a spinal mass driver is already waiting for them. If they enemy doesn't take the bait, they still get peppered if not shredded by smaller weapons fire. It's the Xanatos Gambit applied to target lead prediction.
I saw an example of that used in a 40k book of all places. In Lion: Son of the Forest, there's a defensive Imperial fleet fighting a Chaos Warband and they use lesser ships to flood avenues of escape and force them into a killbox with super long ranged nova cannons. It was actually kinda cool to see some logic applied to 40k
The velocity and dodge part reminded me of the 'immunity zone' of old battleships. Each ship had a range from the enemy that, based on their armor thickness, incoming rounds would arrive at too shallow an angle to penetrate either the deck or belt armor. The major internal spaces would be safe from damage. Naturally it wasn't something that could be achieved in real-world combat, because both ships were constantly moving, changing ranges and angles of fire.
That's the reason behind a lot of the maneuvering. You want to fight at whatever distance gives your shells the best penetration on the specific target, while making the most of your armor against shells from the enemy's cannons.
Zone of immunity was also a bit of a misnomer; they were designed to resist their own main battery, but flukes would happen. Never mind we never really had proper battleship slugging matches barring Jutland and those had impact fuzes if I'm not mistaken. Like the Hood exploded even though her armor was upgraded but shells used delayed fuzes that required thicker armor to actually arm so they'd penetrate into vital spaces. And yeah, I think naval gunnery had abysmally low accuracy
One of my favorite book series is the Black Fleet trilogy. They drive the ships a bit like a submarine. And while fighting in star systems sometimes they have to rotate crew out for rest while waiting for their missiles to go on target. That and the relativistic railgun shots they did on an organic ship was "energetic". They ran to the max speed of their ship going "downhill" into the star's gravity well and fired at a target in geosynchronous orbit. So they had to aim where it would be when the shells arrived. And only two of twenty actually hit. Its a very good series for those who like a bit more realistic space travel in their books. None of that instantly close to your enemies stuff.
In the Jay Allan's Crimson Worlds series they have a (IMO) great balancing of missiles, "bomber" craft, and heavy lasers. Each has a different range and set of strength/weaknesses much aligned with what you laid out here. Similarly, in Evan Currie's Odyssey One series they have something of a cat and mouse with one side armed with big lasers and the other with a mix of lower power laser and kinetic weapons. Each trying to use their strengths and exploit the other's weaknesses. I know I'm something of a broken record in the comments with both those series but so much recently has been something it touches on and/or does well. Book series are obviously much less conducive to including in a YT video than TV, movies, and games but it would be cool if you found a way to do so with either series.
Railgun: You can also move your ship up or down, or turn the ship by 90° while still moving forward (thus presenting a small target). Combat in space is three dimensional.
arguably by the time your weapons and sensors are operating at distances of greater than one light second, combat in space becomes four dimensional due to information lag
@@Skhmt In space? Not to my knowledge because you don't decelerate your forward momentum. You just turn on "the spot" as keep traveling in the original direction.
@@MrTryAnotherOne No, Skhmt is right. While your axis of momentum may stay the same your axis of thrust/acceleration, and therefore your ability to change direction will be retricted if you need to turn the whole ship to the target.
For an interesting inversion of this, look at the tabletop wargame Dropfleet Armada. Rather than having ranges for their weapons, its dependent on whether you can detect and thus get a lock on the target rather than if your weapons will run out of momentum before they hit. So, ships track their "spike" in detection value, which changes if the ship has made evasive maneuvers, gone full throttle or fired all of its weapons - probably more of a rating of how much heat a ship is giving off rather than an increase in radar profile. As a result, cloaking technology is very useful here. Interestingly, its the ground game, Dropzone Commander, that uses this idea of evading projectiles due to range, as the battlezone is assumed to be covered by a Missile Shield - a mix of jammers, laser-equipped drones etc. that can soft-kill hostile projectiles if they are detected early enough. Lower-tech armies don't have access to this shield, so can be shot at from longer ranges, and energy weapons have infinite ranges regardless.
When I was in the military (back in the mid-1980's) a scout platoon sergeant said that the defense they were taught to deal with wire-guided missiles (the top-tier threat at the time) was to drive as fast as possible AT the missile and turn hard at the right time to get inside the turn radius of the missile. We both agreed that it was nuts.
For fights around planets, projectiles entering unpredictable orbits and debris in general are often overlooked as well. After you shoot a laser at an incoming missile, the resulting shrapnel is still coming your way with nothing slowing it down.
One of the early Star Wars novels deals with that. Corruscant has planetary deflector shields, because anything that comes down will land in a densely populated city. And one side effectively blockades the planet without ships by forcing the shields to remain closed for weeks.
That's a current era problem. Longer range point defense missiles are preferred cause if you're using gun-based CIWS, the missile remnants will still impact. It's a lot easier to deal with shrapnel in an ocean ship than a spaceship, where every hole is a problem (especially given how fast everything is)
The Lost Fleet books by John G Hemry take a realistic approach to problems of range and accuracy in space. The main protagonist not only uses probability of where his enemy is going to maneuver their ships, but also uses the position of his ships to help guide the enemy to the spots in space that he can then bracket with weapons fire. I am simplifying it somewhat. But in David Drake's Leary series, the main protagonist also has the same talent, though in that series there is less swams of ordnance going down range like the Lost Fleet and other sci fi series.
In the Honor Harrington series, the primary ship armaments are super-ranged missiles with stand-off bomb-pumped lasers. They use "gravity wedges" for propulsion, which gets them accelerating at 700+ gravities. As such, most space battes in this setting are around MULTIPLE-millions of kilometers. There are lasers, but they're usually used for last-second point-defense, since 1-million km is about their maximum range, and anti-missile-missiles are more reliable countermeasures. And of course, there's plenty of E-Warfare, but I won't bore you with all the examples invented over the course of the series. Kinetic weapons are also used for point defense, and are pretty useless for direct ship combat, since it's hard to elad a target that could be multiple light-seconds away from where you think they are!
some of the best scifi books i've read have battles that last on the orders of days. 14 hour missile flight times due to being either too timid or too underarmored to deal with lasers or kinetics in close range. where being "on top" of another ship, with guns ready, means the target is already dead, and there's nothing they can do about it.
When it comes to space combat over distance in anime, I would suggest watching Starrship Operators. They go into mathing out hitting long range targets, viatbility of weapon types, and the observation of distance targets using optics while having to account for the observed ship no longer being there.
You got to study a lot of military doctrine to design good space ships. One thing I remember, for example, is that whether its a large bomber, or a small fighter, it needs front facing, pilot controlled weapons. Turrets stem more from the concept of flak, or sniping.
Something all writers have to remember is that if your setting doesn't have a weapon more reliable than missiles, there needs to be a reason for everyone not spamming them like it's Stellaris.
one other option [a more expensive munition, but something that is "real tech"] is a missile that operates like a Casaba Howitzer. Basically a nuclear shaped charge, the point being that the effective range of the created plasma lance is further than the range of point defense.
On the subject of accuracy being affected by vibrations and other mounts; already we have stabilization for naval deck guns that can already counteract the motion of the ship in moderate seas so I don't think this'll be much of a problem
I read a book many years ago that I can't remember the name of at this point, but the space combat was decided by saturating the areas where you "think" the enemy will be with micro-bomb/mine things that are essentially teleported into place. Thus combat devolved into who has a better onboard computer to basically play minesweeper and try to put your ship where the enemy isn't aiming while predicting where they will go at the same time so you can hit them, like a spaceship version of a dragon ball Z fight. I remember it also had a setting where the further from the galactic core you were, the slower your computers got.
Could you do an episode on what i loke to call "jousting" where ships are the shape of a missile to minimize armor mass while not reducing it's effectiveness also minimising the cross section and it consists of rushing towards the enemy while firing to increase the velocity (so also kinda the range like you said in the video, penetration and energy from the impact), this tactic/doctrine could be used by small ships or spacecrafts from a carrier (making carriers viable somewhat) either against long range ships or capital ships (and of course it would look cool against itself)
3:04 This is one of the reasons I appreciate the paranid capital ships in X4 Foundations. For the purposes of this comment, think of them as big flying saucers with a long pylon hanging off the bottom. It has a weird "T" shaped profile when pointing its main gun at its target, meaning that to avoid an incoming shot I can simply rotate the ship slightly. They are still huge capital ships, but because the saucer and pylon are quite narrow from the angle I want to face the enemy I don't have to actually move very far at all to avoid weapons that other, more conventional ship designs would have to move significantly farther to avoid. Of course that all goes out the window if you're being attacked from above or below, but them's the trade-offs.
I forget which book series it was but in it railguns were more batteries of smaller guns with the goal to be laying down a 3 dimensional matrix of shot at a rapid clip to improve hit
Excellent breakdown. Especially on lasers. Focal strength and power would determine potential damage output vis-a-vis distance and divergence and mitigating factors for incidence (eg. scattering countermeasures or even diffusion/reflective/refractive shielding etc). You also wouldn’t have any reaction time pre-emission since a laser is a laser. You’d have reaction time after being painted. Pre-emission you might be able to predict and/proactively deny a solution. After painting, you’d probably have the same options after as before emission you’re just aware of the incidence of occurrence. Space combat manuevering would be a terrifyingly lethal game of denying advantage, optimally attacking asymmetrically to defending, and exploiting opportunities. In terms of SCM, pretty cool stuff now when you start looking at the capabilities of VASIMR and MPD thrusters for propulsion/maneuvers. There's also the notion of using AI for elements in the battle space. Increasingly advanced AI duelling with one another might consume an enormous amount of energy and Moore’s law is proving troublesome; it would need fusion/fission energy for extended strategic and tactical operation. If anything less, it may be better to have wetware instead, although the similar biological limitations would apply in lieu of a human. I guess we’ll see how far neuromorphic computing goes. Regardless, intrinsic tradeoffs between hardware and wetware. This is a superior survey to another popular video on the internet dismissing any depiction of space warfare in science fiction. It was the most non-sciency, reductionist, errant speculation of future space warfare I have seen. I almost stopped watching when the creator made detecting Voyager 1 out to be a nothing - A specific energy output against a backdrop of noise and interference, against an extremely narrow reference plane, aligning precisely in motion with a known source vector, while taking into account Doppler effects and compensating, all while ensuring sufficient signal processing... at great operating cost. His point was space warfare would always be a known state between opponents. Everything he took from this and extrapolated on this and postulated made the video get worse and worse.
There is a laser reflector on the surface of the Moon, that observatories with a sufficiently strong laser can bounce light pulses off to make very precise measurements of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. By the time the laser reaches the moon, the beam has spread out to a 6 kilometer diameter beam.
@@Yora21 Yeah but that's from a source dealing with atmospheric distortion, and then the return has to contend with that as well. It'd probably be a lot less drastic if emitter and target were in space, but emitters would also have problems either due to damage or overuse
Make the propulsion properties of zero-g work for you with guided missiles. Eject them from the ship at speed and allow them to travel a decent portion of the distance before initiating their propulsion. They will be relatively stealthy up until that point as IR tracking won’t see them which gives you a better chance at evading PDS, the effective range of the missile begins in relatively close proximity to your target so they have a probably insurmountable distance they have to quickly travel to try to evade or outrun it, reduced response time for countermeasures to deploy which means a higher chance of hit on target, and you also can engage from ranges thought safe by your target.
OTOH the enemy would be a total fool to not monitor _everything_ sufficiently large (and missiles are going to be large) that splits off an enemy ship in a battle.
@@DarthBiomech But it could be useful for sneak attacks (like an old fashioned torpedo). In theory, nothing is invisible in space. But a torpedo could be fairly small, and a ship would probably not have the same capacity to detect small cool objects that planetary observatories have. You would have to hide the flash from the initial launch (which perhaps could be contained within an internal torpedo launcher), but I can see this having a place as a sneaky first strike weapon.
One of the faction in my personal sci fi setting developed a way to pass through solid objects via temporarily turning matter into energy essentially becoming spectral for a brief time. It makes much of their enemies weapons completely useless but has catastrophic effects on organic anatomy if overused. Essentially if you were to pass through a wall a portion of you is still in the wall having been spent during travel.
I love this channel for its technical and scientific understanding combined with decent tactical understanding. If accuracy is the problem, not fire power (because there is no unarmed spacecraft) you start "fighting space itself" to deny space to your enemy. Particle clouds in space can be great for concealment or can even protect from laser fire. From a narrative perspective battles boil down to 3 D holo chess battle ship, where both parties start to occupy and deny space by deploying minefields, loitering munitions or just sectors of space-flak. Fields of classic shrapnell or radiation channel or trap the opponent and force more of a stale mate or surrender situation. Because people tend not want to waste their lives or trillion dollar assets. Giant pitched battles really need a strong narrative explanation and justification.
Can you guys do a video on EMPs and other disabling types of weapons in realistic space combat? Electrical overload… I don’t know how “ion” stuff works in Star Wars etc…
David Drake's Daniel Leary books have very well thought out tactical and strategic space combat. Their missile calculation conversations alone truly satisfy the physics nerd in me.
I've been re-reading a few books from the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. His space navy battles are well written in that most things take place over hundreds of thousands of kilometers - with missiles that have burn/ acceleration and maneuvering times of maybe only a few minutes and then go ballistic only as well as taking into account the ships moving in relation to each other tactically. I picked them up again after bingeing The Expanse and wanted another hit of more realistic space combat - rather than WW2 dogfighting in space.
The video game From the Depths does a great job at showing all of the nuances with sci-fi weapons that's discussed in these videos. And it lets you build your own ships to use them! Watching the part about laser range and accuracy I was picturing the From the Depths laser wobbling as it tries to hit a distant target
That was absolutely fascinating. I thought it was especially cool that there is a range limit to particle beams and lasers. But generally it really adds some nuance to the whole situation. Nothing is a 'win button' even in fairly realistic settings.
Another major point to bring up with lasers at extreme ranges is heat buildup. That's one thing that's rarely ever accounted for in scifi, one of the only games I've ever seen that worry about it is Elite Dangerous, but it only accounts for local heat buildup. Being hit by lasers, especially in a microwave frequency or higher like ultraviolet, will build up heat with each strike, and that adds up to the heat the ship is generating by firing its own lasers. Eventually that heat will start to build up to the point of melting the other ship's heat sinks way faster than they'd want, and then the ship itself turns into an oven which bakes its crew to death after it loses those vital systems. Another thing you can do which I'm kind of stunned the Expanse didn't touch on from what little of it I saw is that exact concept. Heat buildup during all those engine burns and maneuvers, firing their weapons, never ended up in a significant issue for heat buildup, and I think that would have been a significantly fun issue to play with concerning those stealth ships at the beginning, and maybe give the Donnager an actual chance like it should have had. The small ships burning all those maneuvers to evade should have resulted in a shitload of heat building up, meaning they wouldn't be able to dodge counterfire as effectively as they did, but that's neither here nor there, and ultimately just my own critique of something I thought wasn't taken advantage of.
A counterpoint to missiles aside from active defence is that guided weapons like missiles need a large amount a high fidelity data to successfully use. Just because you can see the enemy doesn't mean you can fire a missile at it unless you have a sufficiently clear lock on the target.
Not if the missile has internal guidance and can correct its own course while in flight. This also makes the missile more resistant to jamming. And given how expensive space missiles would be already, and how relatively simple that technology is compared to what it would take for space warships, there is very little reasons why anyone would build them without that.
@@Yora21 Most if not all modern missiles already have internal guidance systems for the terminal phase of flight. The internal guidance is only activated during the terminal phase, ie going pitbull, until then it is guided by the launching vehicle usually. Internal guidance systems are less powerful and shorter range than their launching vehicle do to size and electrical power needs, so yes everything I said still applicable.
another cool thing i like to point out about how ships adjust when they become misaligned after firing a round is by using various thrusters. in the expanse we see the rocinante use its main engine thruster to counter the back lash from firing its frontal railgun during its brief battle with the free navy
One thing this vid reminded my of is the Honor Harrington series. David Weber is so accurate with so many things, and yet he only employs laser weapons in knife-fighting range.
In hard sci-fi as I understand it, there are three effective types of armament, each with its own strengths and weaknesses: Missiles - Can't be armoured against or dodged, but can be stopped (ie, shot down). (Rail) Guns - Can't be armoured against or shot down, but can potentially be dodged. Lasers - Can't be shot down or (practically) dodged, but can be armoured against. Each also has its own balance of per-shot vs baseline mass. Missiles - high per shot, but low baseline mass. (Rail) Guns - Much lower per-shot mass, but a much higher baseline mass than missiles, as you now need not just the handling equipment, but a decent reactor. Lasers - Effectively no per-shot mass, but an even higher baseline mass, as you need an even larger reactor, and a lot of heat-sinks (depending on the efficient of the laser).
Well said but saying railgun shells can't be shot down isn't quite true, yes they're much tougher than missiles but their flight path is more predictable and they don't need to be completely destroyed, only deflected/knocked off target.
@@joshuadickinson4614 They can be coated in radiation-absorbing materials to make active tracking difficult, and will generally be small and fast-moving.
@@joshuadickinson4614 Not impossible, but if you're not careful, you'll end up expending more power and mass to stop a round than the enemy did to fire it, which, in an equal exchange would be a loss for you.
If you want to look into a modern submunition weapon meant for taking down hard to target drones, look into the Rheinmetall Skynex. it programs detonation time into the munition at the end of the barrel as it is firing.
Timed fuses like that have been used in a lot (I think most) flak guns in world war 2. Given the vast distances and speeds involved in space combat, the tiniest timing error could have a huge impact on detonation being too early or too late. I would go with proximity fuses instead, which can detect when they are close to a target. (Also a very old technology in sea mines.)
@@Yora21 Radar fuzes were used in AA guns in WW2. The timed fuzes were used, but then proximity fuzes were implemented pretty late into the war though, I think (at least in terms of an anti-air role)
also as a weapon's "projectile" gets closer to the speed of light, the less time you have time to detect it cause your detection processes work at the speed of light.
4:11 one nit pick is that lasers lose energy over distance, inverse square law and all that. So you could be a lot closer than mentioned in the video and still be outside the effective range. I guess unless the laser is powered by some eldritch sci-fi power source.
It's also worth noting that for light speed weapons firing at extreme range, there is an equivalent knowledge delay and fire and hit delay. The light reflected from the target to your sensors takes time to get to you, so the detected information about the enemy is not real time. This introduces another delay that can be leveraged by a defender. This knowledge gap grows exponentially with range to target. Additionally, in certain scenarios, computation speed of fire control or search systems may also factor in as another delay.
ECM: Hi there. Amazing how he forgot to cover me. Good luck hitting anything without a target lock. ECM jams missiles. Stealth: Hi there too. I'm special electromagnetic armor that prevents target locks. Graviton Field: Hello. I project a gravity special barrier that slows/stops missiles, projectiles, and fighters. It's not nice to leave out counters to make missiles seem overpowered. They're not.
Even at 600,000km it would be impossible to evade a laser because since the weapon moves at the speed of light the first sign that it was being fired at you would be it hitting your hull. You couldn't evade purposefully because you don't know you need to; they may miss because you had moved for other reasons, though.
As a server admin currently designing the combat system for the SE server im assisting ive acthually found that theres a pretty interesting interplay between lasers and missiles as the defacto weapon for long ranges Lasers are fast but they generate a LOT of heat so you need to keep the output manageable. If its a energy limited setting such as lunar war its the best choice because fragile equipment + laser = bad time. if you got heavy armour however lasers suddenly fall of real fast and missiles become a thing due to larger payload but you cant get missiles close so long as a laser point defence grid is still active. The fight basically becomes about precision sniping out point defense before finishing the fight with missiles. If you got shielding on top of that you need a reliable weapon system like railguns wich cant get shot down and closer range suddenly is on the table.
I already gave it some through, and what I came up with is this: If active evasion, then the formula is this: Delay (Distance ÷ Light Speed) + Hit Delay (Distance ÷ Round Speed) = Evasion Time; If reactive evasion, then the formula is this: Hit Delay (Distance ÷ Round Speed) - Delay (Distance ÷ Light Speed) = Evasion Time; Next we have this: Acceleration X (the maximum acceleration of the X axis) × Evasion Time = X Length Acceleration Y (the maximum acceleration of the Y axis) × Evasion Time= Y Length Rotation (the vessel maximum Rotation) × Evasion Time = Maximum Rotation Currently Trajectory × Evasion Time = Point 0 (where the vessel will be, if it's trajectory isn't changed) By putting all of this on a 2d frame, you will get the Evasion Zone in the following shapes: If One End Axis Trust, with slow rotation (The Expanse): 人 If Both End Axis Trust, with slow rotation (The Soujour): two of those “人” like this >< If One End Axis Trust and Both End Axis Trust: ᗜ If Both Ends Both Axis Trust: O It is important to note that fast rotation creates weird shapes, until it makes a "circle", also this whole thing probably only works outside of gravity wells.
Every little bit of content, I learn what I did wrong with my wip Space Engineers capital ship projects. I’m currently doing a full new design of my tactical carrier idea; more reliance on missiles and PDCs, with lighter railgun turrets to support at mid range and melt larger targets in cqc. Also making the engine arrays larger to have more maneuverability and sacrificing some of the hanger amenities; resupply systems are being only on specific docking points and added armored doors, making the auxiliary craft capacity smaller than the prototype 30 ships and vehicles to 12. Will be keeping the atmo functionality with being able to land and deploy 2 ground based mining vehicles. Gotta be able to supply the big ship with materials for repairs and ammo.
With real life ballistic conventional guns firing in atmosphere there is a strong correlation between size and range; and it seems a lot of sci-fi tends to follow that concept. While the real life reasoning wouldn't apply in vacuum, it wouldn't be a huge stretch to justify big gun = big range. With lasers it is simply realistic, there is a direct correlation between the size of the aperture (the final lens/mirror) and the range of the focal point. If you want a particle accelerator, or railgun, or gauss gun with a higher muzzzle velocity then it is easy to justify that a larger scale makes higher velocity more practical. The video listed a variety of features that could be added to a variety of weapon types to improve accuracy and range, but these all require more advanced tech and added mass. Of course a larger, more expensive missile can have more range and independence, though those sub-munitions become an increasingly good idea.
3:50 It would be impossible for a ship to evade a laser weapon. Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, so it would be impossible to know about a laser being fired before it reaches you.
Then there's the whole question of "jump" drives that let you teleport in close to an enemy once you've detected them at which point you could make it the equivalent of a broadside and boarding engagement form the age of sail.
For stealthy combat, one could design a system to cold-fire a cluster of missiles for minimal heat signature and have them drift towards the target then activate within striking distance of the target for a surprise attack. They would only need a small amount of fuel capacity to keep them light for maximum acceleration once activated.
The biggest issue with trying to evade a laser is there's absolutely no way to know the beam has been triggered until it actually arrives at the target. In a realistic setting of course.
The best way to fight in space seems to be sending out boarding parties on (relatively) small craft. In sea warfare ships need to be big to carry huge guns and sufficient amounts of accordingly huge ammunition rounds. In space, having a huge gun apparently doesn't promise attractive effectivity.
I really liked the Castle Federation series by Glynn Stewart. They incorporate many of the time delay factors in how they can only see at the speed of light. Having to guess at the enemy's movements. Similar to the Lost Fleet series.
The question is, how do you have a setting with both missiles and anti-missile missiles. Wouldn’t the AMMs, if viable, be able to always catch the normal missile, since they wouldn’t need as big of a target warhead or as much fuel? Also, do you have a video just comparing the pros and cons of these various weapons systems (chemical guns/gauze weapons, missiles, lasers, plasma, partial/ion, etc), and why one might have one over the other, or even both? And any chance of doing more exotic weapons like sonic, chemical, rad (meant to irradiate a target or destabilizing atoms rather than the normal partial projection stuff), Blake hole weapons, gravity weapons, etc? Or even just bioships and organic tech.
Well, in real life we have both missiles and anti-missile missiles. But gun based CIWS still exists (USN and RN are looking into replacing it with lasers afaik though). So SAMs (that are anti-missile rather than anti-aircraft) are known to not be perfectly effective against Anti-Ship or Cruise missiles. But they are still made so they can't be useless either. So there must be some sort of place for AMMs.
suggestion for a video... those peaceful scenes you see at the end of the sci-fi movie where someone is enjoying a sunset with either two suns or two moons, or a really large moons.... I can't imagine the tidal forces with two moons, or a really close large moon... it certainly would likely not be peaceful. :-) Love your videos btw.
Well it can. But the internal stresses will rip a lot of materials apart. If we have a size for the ship, it should be fairly easy to calculate the g-forces at the end.
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Lol no
Got here so fast there’s no time between me sending my comment and it arriving to perform evasive maneuvers
10/10 Comment ngl.
Can confirm, I'm watching this on mobile and this was in the comment section preview
This comment defeated my passive and active sensors and evaded my hard-kill active protection systems.
YoU hAvE aLwAyS bEeN hEre
Watch out for Server 404 comment shadowbans. Nigh-unavoidable!
Always loved the "Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space" speech from Mass Effect 2.
It's not actually true but it's a good speech in context of people with no space combat experience.
"THE DEADLIEST SON OF BITCH IN SPACE!"
@@Skhmt One of the co-authors of The Expanse pretty much said the same thing, "Kinetic energy is a bitch."
@@Skhmt then what is true?
I like the idea of onboard vibrations being an issue in space combat; this could lead to the crew having to "secure for silent running" so as not to throw off their aim.
Movement from equipment like pumps would be a bigger issue then crew movement. Propellant sloshing could be a big issue during maneuvers.
It's a real problem with -Spy- Science Satellites
where vibration from the scanning of one sensor interferes with another
they usually solve it with Reaction Wheels to counter or smooth out motions.
I'd imagine you'd do something similar with crew; no need to tell everyone to stop breathing, just have stabilization system to counteract them.
-wait a minute, SteadyCam mounts anyone?
@@matthewconnor5483 At the same time, those often can be taken into account as they are predictable. In addition, tiny vibrations matter more at extreme ranges anyways, so people doing unpredictable movements causing tiny vibrations will be a factor again when you're dealing with firing weapons at hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
It also means that when you see the enemy ship suddenly cutting all thrusters, you immediately have to start evading at full thrust.
That's why we paint our bullets red. Because when they travel 5 times as fast, it will significantly increase our effective range.
Also, their target's scanners will assume they're redshifted, and therefore moving away from them, giving you the element of surprise.
Plus if we're going by Ork tactics, then we don't need accuracy! Just put enough dakka downrange and you'll hit someone eventually!
Can’t believe da ‘umies ‘aven’t figyad dis wun out yet!
Wuts all dis talk of kilometers and seconds? Ya shoot at dem and dey get hit! It simple dakka physics!
Red may work to make them go faster but my boys paint ours purple before launching them. That is if they don't disappear on us first.
One of the things that isn't often discussed is the impact of "light lag" on ranged combat. Radar and lidar both travel at the speed of light, which means that if the target is 1 light second away, then it takes 2 seconds for the firing ship to receive the sensor data, meaning they then have to increase the lead for even a laser to account for that extra second of sensor delay.
True, although that's only the case for active sensors which provides some interesting writing opportunities I haven't seen explored where passive sensors have less latency than active ones.
@joshuadickinson4614 then read the Honorverse novels. They use gravitics as an FTL passive sensor system.
But, in a harder sci-fi setting, passives are more limited. Most passive astro-sensors we use today rely on detecting and analyzing light from distant objects. And that still only travels at light speed.
@@joshuadickinson4614 Gravity also travels at the speed of light. As far as we know, *nothing* exceeds that speed, so regardless of sensing method, you will always have at least light speed lag.
and even if you increase lead, you don't know if the ship maneuvered onto a new course right away either.
@@SoloRenegade exactly.
An interesting concept here is that even in the actual chance to hit is small, simply forcing your enemy to evade is great on its own just to waste their propellant, especially when they're smaller than you (square cube law). Kinetics also render stationary installations pretty much impractical, because if your space station can't move it doesn't matter if it can see the railgun slugs being fired a week in advance. If you have good lasers it doesn't even cost you anything to do this, beyond power and heat. So it helps pressure your enemy, even if you never actually get to hit anyone at extreme ranges.
To quote (or at least paraphrase, because I can't remember the exact quote) the Honorverse: 'However, a planet (and in this case the weapons platforms orbiting it) suffered from one enormous tactical disadvantage - it couldn't dodge.'
On the other hand - especially if the setting includes shield - the station has an enormous advantage by simply being a lot bigger and not needing to move around. You can have meters of armor (or armor drones as mobile shields engaging your railgun slugs 10K away from the station), hundreds of point defense guns and thousands of sleeper mines/missiles that are impossible to detect until you are so close that you get hit.
The way I typically come across this either follows this, partially follows it by making it so even orbital fortresses have some form of propulsion to ensure you can't easily do extreme range sniping against them... Or just accept that they're around to make attacks need to reach a critical damage threshold or leave the enemy restricted to where they can travel. After all, stationary defences can spare a lot more mass and volume towards things like reactors, shields, point defence and armour to make destroying them very, very hard.
They don't have to move fast after all.
@@SkyHawk2137 Yep, the square cube law means bigger is better for this sort of thing, more power, thicker shields and armour etc. The ultimate form of this are planets, of course.
Stations are always going to have some thrust capability if they're anywhere in the influence of celestial bodies. Station-keeping thrusters aren't going to work for skirmishing, but they should be just fine avoiding shots that were calculated long in advance.
There are so many people who talk about "realistic" weapons in space combat without realizing just how _long_ the ranges in space are. We joke about Star Wars ships being basically right next to each other in battles. but what else are you going to to? Imagine fighting a battle where it takes a day for a missile to reach the target.
I'd honestly like to see a video about how traffic control works in space settings. The solar system in the Expanse has got to just be choked with debris and gridlock, right? Just how do you coordinate things when there's so much delay in detection and communication?
It honestly depends entirely on the setting. Why are ships fighting in deep space? Why are they even in deep space? Why are they fighting between the orbits of planets? How did they get there and why is another ship also there opposing them when the velocities wouldn't match up at all? Space combat can very realistically take place within the orbits of planets and in most situations, it's the only realistic place space combat would occur.
The good news is, traffic control really only matters at the ends of a trip. So you file a flight plan with your local traffic control as you leave, they watch you and control actions while you are leaving their space. Then you contact the opposite end and let them know when you're expected to be arriving. The give you an approach corridor, and begin control activities once you get within range. Between those points? No one cares. It's important in the modern world because a collision is a distinct probability. But in space? You have so much room that you would have plenty of time to react to an inbound ship.
@@Skhmt if you wait until planetary orbit to engage a hostile fleet, they can just Godrod your planet to death with impunity. It's basic math to hit a planet with a kinetic slug, even from 8-10 light hours out at the "edge of the solar system." But yeah, it's silly to have ships/fleets fighting each other in interstellar space unless some weird logistical impact of your setting's FTL makes that more reasonable.
@@Skhmt Though it only occurring in close orbit above habitable worlds is very much just a caveat of unrealistically efficient engines (not necessarily FAST, because it produces the same effect if they get to their destination in 100 years time, but ones that don't need to conserve delta-V in transit). So in Star Wars you have hypespace jumps with pinpoint accuracy, meaning ships effectively teleporting into orbit. And in something like 40k, you have patrol ships who's peak engine output can eclipse that of a star, meaning they can truly come from everywhere (even if it takes a few days, which is still fast at interplanetary distances). But if ships have to use orbital mechanics, they'll be approaching on calculable trajectories, at which point your fleet is effectively missiles - if you don't let AI hunt-and-kill by itself, the humans are basically on those ships to prevent comms lag not allowing an attack to be called off, just deployed on an intercept course to an enemy fleet.
@@Skhmt This brings up an interesting scenario where countries develop weapons accurate out to several light seconds. But since all the countries are on the same planet with their own military assets orbiting that planet, you get a MAD scenario where everyone's military assets are holding guns to everyone else's metaphorical heads because it's impossible to be more than a few thousand kilometers from the nearest enemy asset while in orbit.
The beauty of missiles is the variety of warheads one can mount. An extreme accelerating kinetic penetrator, explosives of all kinds, shrapnel, and even exotic stuff like nuclear pumped lasers.
Or using the some of the missiles themselves as ECM/ECCM platforms, or even remote sensor platforms to update faster than the launching platforms could update
@Sephiroth144 essentially sheperding other missiles in with terminal tracking. That is a neat idea when sensor lag starts exceeding human reaction times.
@@Tounushi That idea was used in the Honor Harrington novels.
Als missile range went into the dozens of millions of kilometres they build special command and controll missiles to take over some of the fire controll and even added a FTL communication system to maintain real-time 2-way communication with the ship.
Their propulsion and maneuvering systems should not be overlooked either. For all intents and purposes space missiles are tiny versions of their faction's spacecraft, ones that don't have the limitations of their crewed counterparts.
For example, a very short range missile only needs to be lightning fast, whereas medium range missile has to have stupidly high maneuverability to counter evasion and active protection systems. On the other hand, a very long range missile will only be about extreme propellant efficiency, with slow but steady acceleration to relativistic speeds.
Video starts at 1:05
with the faster projectiles, it matters that you can only "see it coming", and thus evade it, once its light reaches you. So no matter how far away you are, you'll never dodge a laser unless you have some kind of magic FTL sensors.
You can still evade it, but you don't try and respond when they're shooting. Instead, you either predict when they're shooting based on other factors, such as pre-fire weapon emissions, or more likely, random evasive maneuverers.
By using random evasive maneuverers, you increase the size of your probability bubble and make it harder to anticipate where you're going to be.
This works fine in settings where propellant is a non-factor in combat, but in other settings, burning fuels constantly is a risk as once your run out of propellant you're dead in the water and an easy target to either be destroyed or captured.
Erratic maneuvers make lasers miss if you're fighting at any range where the delay matters.
You can't dodge a laser beam - but if you can tell that a laser beam is being fired or will soon be fired, and there's sufficient distance, you can try to juke it. As the video says, it's partly a game of chance and partly an exercise in predicting where your opponent might be aiming.
@@KillahMate I'm not convinced.
In the event of a 1st shot, when the battle hasn't yet begun, perhaps.
In the case of a fight that has already started, much less certain.
Yes, with realistic sensors, you only feel the laser fire when it's coming at you. But with random movement, targeting will also be much more difficult. Especially as what applies to lasers also applies to sensors.
The attacker will only perceive movements with a delay....
It's the same problem as with projectiles, but at a greater distance.
@@nilok7 This bubble is growing as the attacker also has to deal with the time lag in his sensors.
"This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class Dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space! (...) I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty! Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'till it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime! That, Serviceman Chung, is why you do not "eyeball it". It is a weapon of mass destruction, you are not a cowboy shooting from the hip."
Bless that writer, and the voice actor.
Most memorable quote of the entire series 😆
I did the math on that and he is correct. A 20 kilo mass, going 1.3% lightspeed, hits with the force of a nuke.
When I did the math I was both impressed and satisfied that the writers went that extra step to do the math on my favorite quote.
Great scene, and certainly true when you're engaged in orbital combat - fire this with a planet or station somewhere in the background, and people are very likely going to have a bad day.
Interplanetary or interstellar combat makes a miss somewhat less likely to be consequential however - the mean free path for that projectile through the Milky Way gives it almost no chance of ever hitting anything for hundreds of millions, and more likely billions of years. It could easily fail to hit anything before the heat death of the universe.
@@johnsmithfakename8422It'd be pretty disappointing if they didn't do the math tbh. That isn't a very complicated calculation and putting in a detail without making sure it isn't verifiably false is really lame
“That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a fire solution!”
in this Warhammer book, Ciaphas Cain. The guy talks about how space battles are done form a massive distance, but he also talks about how in movies (yes Warhammer has movies) they show space battles as close combat stuff lel
Close combat is generally much more entertaining and easy to pull off. Long range "realistic battles" aren't as immediately visceral and requires a lot of unintuitive thinking to make work
Not to mention some of the insane speeds that ship could easily be traveling at to get into effective weapons range. Image being a movie director and trying to convey to the audience that the two fleets are closing at a combined velocity of 0.2 c and that effective weapons range comes and goes in a tiny fraction of a second.
A *much* better way to organize that evasion math is to describe a ship's "characteristic evasion time" value, i.e. the amount of time it would take the ship to displace itself from its current trajectory by one ship-length; then compare that characteristic evasion time to a projectile time-of-flight. That formulation then also makes it easy to incorporate other sources of delay, like sensor processing time, engine spool-up, or the need to secure cargo or crew before engaging maximum thrust; and also still works when the evasive action taken is to _shut off_ the engines to avoid a shot that's leading a ship that's already under thrust. This also allows a simplification of coordinated salvo fire, where you compare the time-of-flight to the ship's characteristic evasion time times the square root of the projectile count.
For space combat I'm a fan of the Honor Harrington books. Massed missile volleys using 'stand-off' bomb pumped laser heads to hammer enemy fleets, countered by E-war, counter missiles and PDLs (and the settings hand-wavy drive tech)
Hand wavey? It is scifi . You are allowed to invent things that doesn’t “work” in our limited understanding of the universe.
The Manticoran Missile Massacre™️
Personally, I liked the Starfire setting a little better, just because it has a greater variety of weapons and tactics. Not just clouds of missiles...
Or, another way, Honorverse got a bit boring after Flag in Exile, as that was the last time an energy-range engagement between big ships happened.
@@templarw20Yeah, Honorverse starts cool but devolves into "Manticore the good guys win forever against comical bad guys thanks to their unassailable tech advantage via incredible numbers of missiles ad infinatum". (Not to mention the battles getting samey because it is all X missiles, Y missiles get distracted by electronic countermeasures, Z missiles are shot down via countermissiles and W missiles shot down by point defense but X-Y-Z-W is still some stupid high number more than enough to destroy sidewalls and annihilate ships via bomb pumped Xrasers)
Especially as the relatively interesting bad guys of Haven who get some wins sometimes become good guys and because they are good guys they ally with Manticore. (Also Weber retcons the Solarian League from the ultra advanced hyperpower that single handedly enforces "no kinetic strikes on planets" rule to ineffectual isolationist bureaucracy which is simultaneously expansionist but also their ships are way outdated even by relatively early series standards let alone the current Mantie-Havenite tech (which they by all rights should be aware of, even if behind the latest generation Manticore supertech).)
And early in the series, the decisive portion of an action was still the knife-range energy duel, and while the Havenites and Manties did advance their missile technology to the point that missiles had become a reliable way to kill another warship, the Solarians were still stuck in the old mentality that missiles existed solely to prevent the enemy from running and reducing their energy broadside, so that the knife-range energy engagement would be what would decide the course of a battle.
The lore in the Lancer TTRPG core rulebook as well as its sister-system Lancer: Battlegroup system do such a good job of describing the incredible scope of the tightening gyre of space combat, as well as an incredible mechanical depiction of it in the latter system
I've only seen 11dragonkid's videos on the game and I love how that turns carriers on their head by making them a close range weapon, 1st edition Dropfleet Commander has a similar albeit less justified relationship.
@ those videos are probably the best source short of buying rulebooks, tbh
Was looking for this comment. They also have some interesting weapons, the kinetic kill clouds are a neat idea.
@@hughsmith7504 they really make perfect sense, it’s basically high-tech grapeshot
EVE Online handles this in an interesting way.
Guns have an optimal and falloff range, with Optimal being that range where it has the best damage, and fall off represented gradual reduction in accuracy over range.
Turret tracking also has angular and transversal velocity to consider, so the direction and speed your target is travelling relative to you is also very important for how likely you are to hit.
For instance, a battlecruiser might not have r guns that can track a frigate orbiting at close range, but if it is moving away in a straight line at a distance as the frigate chases it in a straight line, that frigate becomes almost stationary relative to the battlecruiser, so it becomes easier to hit.
Indeed and how bigger the weapons, the worse they are at tracking. But when they hit, it hurts.
“Stationary targets don’t respond well to 1400’s”
I use the Hammerlock method constantly in my writings (Unavoidable Railgun ranges). With that said, there are other fun things to consider in space sci-fi writings:
- Missiles are your best friend.
- Even slow, straight-flying projectiles can still be fired at stationary targets from extreme distances.
- In shows like Space Battleship Yamato, Gatlantian battleships utilized wormhole guns (Flame Strike Gun) to fire at extreme ranges. This involved warships that could fire instant, powerful energy beams that could traverse through the wormhole and smash into enemy vessels upon exiting the aperture. While devastating, defending ships could utilize large armored alloys in front of the warships to defend themselves from the hits.
As a fellow writer, keep in mind that "stationary" is a relative term in space. Nothing is truly static in space. Targets with a predictable pattern could also be effectively attacked with slow projectiles.
>Even slow, straight-flying projectiles can still be fired at stationary targets from extreme distances.
This was featured in Light Bringer by Pierce Brown, one side predicted they'd send their vanguard fleet over the Martian north pole, so weeks in advance they accelerated a titantic railgun slug made from several melted enemy starships and devastated the fleet before they could react
but way before Hammerlock it is still worth firing a single round per second, just to force them to either take damage or continually be in high velocity acceleration
Well no serious military would keep anything important "stationary" in space. It takes little effort to adjust orbits a little even for large space stations to largely prevent this issue. Of course an enemy could try for a saturation attack with hundreds or even thousands of projectiles.
A cool thing about energy weapons in space is, that if we say lasers are the be-all-end-all of our setting and combat revolves around them, and there's no energy shields or armor or anything, you would actually have to deal with sensor lag. Since lasers move at light speed, AND any sensor system would also have to move at light speed, you might be fighting at a range of several light-seconds and have to deal with sensor data at any given moment being a few seconds old, even if you're getting feed in real time. I think that's really cool.
Also: when talking about range in space, one has to remember FTL drives. If you have things like Star Trek's warp drive, where you can just come out of FTL close enough to see the whites in their sensor domes, range isn't a concern necessarily. It's another way to handwave long-range space combat in favor of big gun and torpedo slugging matches at close range
Lasers are not going to be even remotely close to combat effective at sensor lag distances due to beam attenuation.
@@TheAchilles26
I think that's a technology sophistication question. At a theoretical infinite range it's obviously impossible, but ask a person in 1890 if they believe that in 100 years you'll be able to send moving pictures wirelessly between handheld "telegraph" devices, and you get some perspective of how technology improves
@Paveway-chan sounds great on the surface, but doesn't actually answer the simple fact of beam attenuation. Conversely, if you manage to develop the technology to accelerate a projectile to 90+% of light speed, you functionally get all the benefits of the laser within a greater range than beam attenuation lets lasers be effective.
One of the big questions with FTL capable settings are whether their sensors can see into or out of FTL, and whether their weapons are themselves FTL. If you're going through a gate, can you scan the other side? If I'm calculating a jump like the Galactica, I'm pretty much jumping blind unless it is a very short combat jump where I can already see the intended destination. In Star Wars ships have almost no ability to see into or out of hyperspace, and so they also jump essentially blind unless they have some exotic plot sensor for those times when an author needs a ship followed. In both settings there's basically no such thing as an FTL weapon, with the bizarre exception of the planet buster and ramming sequences from the sequel trilogy, but lets ignore those please, as they screw up the entire setting.
However, in Star Trek the ability to warp generally comes along with the tech to use FTL scanners that can easily track objects in - or from - warp, which would make the reality of space combat in Star Trek deeply confusing and bizarre in any real tactical sense, and render any non-FTL weapon or ship essentially useless unless it's only designed for attacking fixed targets (I've never seen a reasonable explanation of why phasers work in warp...). There are also a fair number of written fictional settings where FTL capable weapons are employed from normal space, such as the C-Plus cannons of the Berserker universe.
@@TheAchilles26 The trick is being able to generate and focus enough energy to fire a projectile with mass at 0.9c. Yes, a projectile at a large % of light speed hits with an insane amount of energy, which is pretty sexy - but you always have to remember that it took *at least* that much energy to fire the thing in the first place without obliterating the ship that fired it. You must in essence be able to set an even bigger bomb off INSIDE your own ship without blowing yourself to kingdom come, and that isn't easy.
I'm writing my own space opera novel series, and in it I've addressed how space combat can start at long ranges with missiles and point-defense lasers, but it would grow to the ships getting closer and switching up to plasma and kinetic weaponry with the use of shields once the element of surprise is off the table.
Anything written yet or still in planning stages?
In my space opera there's something similar, but with weapons channeling abstract magic concepts on top of kinetics at close ranges
That's exactly how the Honor Harrington series handles it, if you weren't already aware. Great stuff, and I can't think of any weapon system with a cooler name than "nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray lasers"
- "Get us closer."
- "How close?!"
- "Right down their throat!"
An incredible channel filled with outstanding content!
Just wrote a chapter to a novel I'm working on where I used interception as a cap on effective torpedo range. Torps/missiles getting shot at by point defense lasers; winds up being a thing where realistically they can't hit a target that has better acceleration than the ship that wants to shoot it down (so that they can't get close enough to give themselves a kill). Thus forcing them into a less straightforward approach of diving at a the black hole they're orbiting to slingshot ahead of the ship they want to kill.
4:40 An interesting tactic involving this prediction is something I've seen called "herding cats"
Using less dangerous weapons such as secondaries, a pack of ships saturate as many possible sectors the target could dodge to, except one.
If the enemy takes the bait, a round from a main caliber weapon such as a spinal mass driver is already waiting for them.
If they enemy doesn't take the bait, they still get peppered if not shredded by smaller weapons fire.
It's the Xanatos Gambit applied to target lead prediction.
I saw an example of that used in a 40k book of all places. In Lion: Son of the Forest, there's a defensive Imperial fleet fighting a Chaos Warband and they use lesser ships to flood avenues of escape and force them into a killbox with super long ranged nova cannons. It was actually kinda cool to see some logic applied to 40k
The velocity and dodge part reminded me of the 'immunity zone' of old battleships. Each ship had a range from the enemy that, based on their armor thickness, incoming rounds would arrive at too shallow an angle to penetrate either the deck or belt armor. The major internal spaces would be safe from damage. Naturally it wasn't something that could be achieved in real-world combat, because both ships were constantly moving, changing ranges and angles of fire.
That's the reason behind a lot of the maneuvering.
You want to fight at whatever distance gives your shells the best penetration on the specific target, while making the most of your armor against shells from the enemy's cannons.
Zone of immunity was also a bit of a misnomer; they were designed to resist their own main battery, but flukes would happen. Never mind we never really had proper battleship slugging matches barring Jutland and those had impact fuzes if I'm not mistaken. Like the Hood exploded even though her armor was upgraded but shells used delayed fuzes that required thicker armor to actually arm so they'd penetrate into vital spaces. And yeah, I think naval gunnery had abysmally low accuracy
One of my favorite book series is the Black Fleet trilogy. They drive the ships a bit like a submarine. And while fighting in star systems sometimes they have to rotate crew out for rest while waiting for their missiles to go on target. That and the relativistic railgun shots they did on an organic ship was "energetic". They ran to the max speed of their ship going "downhill" into the star's gravity well and fired at a target in geosynchronous orbit. So they had to aim where it would be when the shells arrived. And only two of twenty actually hit. Its a very good series for those who like a bit more realistic space travel in their books. None of that instantly close to your enemies stuff.
elite dangerous high intensity combat music... very nice
In the Jay Allan's Crimson Worlds series they have a (IMO) great balancing of missiles, "bomber" craft, and heavy lasers. Each has a different range and set of strength/weaknesses much aligned with what you laid out here. Similarly, in Evan Currie's Odyssey One series they have something of a cat and mouse with one side armed with big lasers and the other with a mix of lower power laser and kinetic weapons. Each trying to use their strengths and exploit the other's weaknesses. I know I'm something of a broken record in the comments with both those series but so much recently has been something it touches on and/or does well. Book series are obviously much less conducive to including in a YT video than TV, movies, and games but it would be cool if you found a way to do so with either series.
Railgun: You can also move your ship up or down, or turn the ship by 90° while still moving forward (thus presenting a small target).
Combat in space is three dimensional.
However turning in place will cut your "forward" acceleration if that's a thing that's important.
arguably by the time your weapons and sensors are operating at distances of greater than one light second, combat in space becomes four dimensional due to information lag
@@MercenaryPen That's always true.
@@Skhmt In space? Not to my knowledge because you don't decelerate your forward momentum. You just turn on "the spot" as keep traveling in the original direction.
@@MrTryAnotherOne No, Skhmt is right. While your axis of momentum may stay the same your axis of thrust/acceleration, and therefore your ability to change direction will be retricted if you need to turn the whole ship to the target.
For an interesting inversion of this, look at the tabletop wargame Dropfleet Armada. Rather than having ranges for their weapons, its dependent on whether you can detect and thus get a lock on the target rather than if your weapons will run out of momentum before they hit. So, ships track their "spike" in detection value, which changes if the ship has made evasive maneuvers, gone full throttle or fired all of its weapons - probably more of a rating of how much heat a ship is giving off rather than an increase in radar profile. As a result, cloaking technology is very useful here.
Interestingly, its the ground game, Dropzone Commander, that uses this idea of evading projectiles due to range, as the battlezone is assumed to be covered by a Missile Shield - a mix of jammers, laser-equipped drones etc. that can soft-kill hostile projectiles if they are detected early enough. Lower-tech armies don't have access to this shield, so can be shot at from longer ranges, and energy weapons have infinite ranges regardless.
When I was in the military (back in the mid-1980's) a scout platoon sergeant said that the defense they were taught to deal with wire-guided missiles (the top-tier threat at the time) was to drive as fast as possible AT the missile and turn hard at the right time to get inside the turn radius of the missile.
We both agreed that it was nuts.
Dropfleet is a super fun game
For fights around planets, projectiles entering unpredictable orbits and debris in general are often overlooked as well. After you shoot a laser at an incoming missile, the resulting shrapnel is still coming your way with nothing slowing it down.
One of the early Star Wars novels deals with that. Corruscant has planetary deflector shields, because anything that comes down will land in a densely populated city. And one side effectively blockades the planet without ships by forcing the shields to remain closed for weeks.
That's a current era problem. Longer range point defense missiles are preferred cause if you're using gun-based CIWS, the missile remnants will still impact. It's a lot easier to deal with shrapnel in an ocean ship than a spaceship, where every hole is a problem (especially given how fast everything is)
The Lost Fleet books by John G Hemry take a realistic approach to problems of range and accuracy in space. The main protagonist not only uses probability of where his enemy is going to maneuver their ships, but also uses the position of his ships to help guide the enemy to the spots in space that he can then bracket with weapons fire. I am simplifying it somewhat. But in David Drake's Leary series, the main protagonist also has the same talent, though in that series there is less swams of ordnance going down range like the Lost Fleet and other sci fi series.
In the Honor Harrington series, the primary ship armaments are super-ranged missiles with stand-off bomb-pumped lasers. They use "gravity wedges" for propulsion, which gets them accelerating at 700+ gravities.
As such, most space battes in this setting are around MULTIPLE-millions of kilometers. There are lasers, but they're usually used for last-second point-defense, since 1-million km is about their maximum range, and anti-missile-missiles are more reliable countermeasures.
And of course, there's plenty of E-Warfare, but I won't bore you with all the examples invented over the course of the series.
Kinetic weapons are also used for point defense, and are pretty useless for direct ship combat, since it's hard to elad a target that could be multiple light-seconds away from where you think they are!
There's no sensor lag in HH. One of the setting's more infamous bits of "that's not actually how physics works" is that gravitic sensors are FTL.
some of the best scifi books i've read have battles that last on the orders of days. 14 hour missile flight times due to being either too timid or too underarmored to deal with lasers or kinetics in close range.
where being "on top" of another ship, with guns ready, means the target is already dead, and there's nothing they can do about it.
When it comes to space combat over distance in anime, I would suggest watching Starrship Operators. They go into mathing out hitting long range targets, viatbility of weapon types, and the observation of distance targets using optics while having to account for the observed ship no longer being there.
100% this. Starship Operators space combat is a masterpiece.
You got to study a lot of military doctrine to design good space ships.
One thing I remember, for example, is that whether its a large bomber, or a small fighter, it needs front facing, pilot controlled weapons.
Turrets stem more from the concept of flak, or sniping.
Something all writers have to remember is that if your setting doesn't have a weapon more reliable than missiles, there needs to be a reason for everyone not spamming them like it's Stellaris.
Do you have one? Not being sarcastic, just curious
One might be that ships are fast and tanky enough to almost always get into firing range of cheaper, harder hitting weapons.
Such reasons include sufficiently effective anti missile defenses.
@@TheAchilles26 Limited ammo supply on extended campaigns is another one.
@joshuadickinson4614 to an extent, but...... you're almost certainly going to run out of spaceship fuel way before you run out of ammo
one other option [a more expensive munition, but something that is "real tech"] is a missile that operates like a Casaba Howitzer. Basically a nuclear shaped charge, the point being that the effective range of the created plasma lance is further than the range of point defense.
On the subject of accuracy being affected by vibrations and other mounts; already we have stabilization for naval deck guns that can already counteract the motion of the ship in moderate seas so I don't think this'll be much of a problem
I read a book many years ago that I can't remember the name of at this point, but the space combat was decided by saturating the areas where you "think" the enemy will be with micro-bomb/mine things that are essentially teleported into place. Thus combat devolved into who has a better onboard computer to basically play minesweeper and try to put your ship where the enemy isn't aiming while predicting where they will go at the same time so you can hit them, like a spaceship version of a dragon ball Z fight. I remember it also had a setting where the further from the galactic core you were, the slower your computers got.
Could you do an episode on what i loke to call "jousting" where ships are the shape of a missile to minimize armor mass while not reducing it's effectiveness also minimising the cross section and it consists of rushing towards the enemy while firing to increase the velocity (so also kinda the range like you said in the video, penetration and energy from the impact), this tactic/doctrine could be used by small ships or spacecrafts from a carrier (making carriers viable somewhat) either against long range ships or capital ships (and of course it would look cool against itself)
3:04 This is one of the reasons I appreciate the paranid capital ships in X4 Foundations. For the purposes of this comment, think of them as big flying saucers with a long pylon hanging off the bottom. It has a weird "T" shaped profile when pointing its main gun at its target, meaning that to avoid an incoming shot I can simply rotate the ship slightly. They are still huge capital ships, but because the saucer and pylon are quite narrow from the angle I want to face the enemy I don't have to actually move very far at all to avoid weapons that other, more conventional ship designs would have to move significantly farther to avoid.
Of course that all goes out the window if you're being attacked from above or below, but them's the trade-offs.
I forget which book series it was but in it railguns were more batteries of smaller guns with the goal to be laying down a 3 dimensional matrix of shot at a rapid clip to improve hit
Sounds like Hedgehog anti-submarine depth charges.
Excellent breakdown. Especially on lasers. Focal strength and power would determine potential damage output vis-a-vis distance and divergence and mitigating factors for incidence (eg. scattering countermeasures or even diffusion/reflective/refractive shielding etc). You also wouldn’t have any reaction time pre-emission since a laser is a laser. You’d have reaction time after being painted. Pre-emission you might be able to predict and/proactively deny a solution. After painting, you’d probably have the same options after as before emission you’re just aware of the incidence of occurrence. Space combat manuevering would be a terrifyingly lethal game of denying advantage, optimally attacking asymmetrically to defending, and exploiting opportunities. In terms of SCM, pretty cool stuff now when you start looking at the capabilities of VASIMR and MPD thrusters for propulsion/maneuvers. There's also the notion of using AI for elements in the battle space. Increasingly advanced AI duelling with one another might consume an enormous amount of energy and Moore’s law is proving troublesome; it would need fusion/fission energy for extended strategic and tactical operation. If anything less, it may be better to have wetware instead, although the similar biological limitations would apply in lieu of a human. I guess we’ll see how far neuromorphic computing goes. Regardless, intrinsic tradeoffs between hardware and wetware.
This is a superior survey to another popular video on the internet dismissing any depiction of space warfare in science fiction. It was the most non-sciency, reductionist, errant speculation of future space warfare I have seen. I almost stopped watching when the creator made detecting Voyager 1 out to be a nothing - A specific energy output against a backdrop of noise and interference, against an extremely narrow reference plane, aligning precisely in motion with a known source vector, while taking into account Doppler effects and compensating, all while ensuring sufficient signal processing... at great operating cost. His point was space warfare would always be a known state between opponents. Everything he took from this and extrapolated on this and postulated made the video get worse and worse.
There is a laser reflector on the surface of the Moon, that observatories with a sufficiently strong laser can bounce light pulses off to make very precise measurements of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. By the time the laser reaches the moon, the beam has spread out to a 6 kilometer diameter beam.
@@Yora21 Yeah but that's from a source dealing with atmospheric distortion, and then the return has to contend with that as well. It'd probably be a lot less drastic if emitter and target were in space, but emitters would also have problems either due to damage or overuse
@@armorhide406 Huh? Okay take off 30%. @Yora21 has a point that remains.
Venus Wars clips! Aphrodians, we are so back!
God, those animation clips are amazing!
You were THIS close to using the term "Probability Ellipse" after you explained it.
Make the propulsion properties of zero-g work for you with guided missiles. Eject them from the ship at speed and allow them to travel a decent portion of the distance before initiating their propulsion. They will be relatively stealthy up until that point as IR tracking won’t see them which gives you a better chance at evading PDS, the effective range of the missile begins in relatively close proximity to your target so they have a probably insurmountable distance they have to quickly travel to try to evade or outrun it, reduced response time for countermeasures to deploy which means a higher chance of hit on target, and you also can engage from ranges thought safe by your target.
OTOH the enemy would be a total fool to not monitor _everything_ sufficiently large (and missiles are going to be large) that splits off an enemy ship in a battle.
@@DarthBiomech But it could be useful for sneak attacks (like an old fashioned torpedo).
In theory, nothing is invisible in space. But a torpedo could be fairly small, and a ship would probably not have the same capacity to detect small cool objects that planetary observatories have. You would have to hide the flash from the initial launch (which perhaps could be contained within an internal torpedo launcher), but I can see this having a place as a sneaky first strike weapon.
Every time I see somebody advertising Fleet Command I know they’ve never played it.
One of the faction in my personal sci fi setting developed a way to pass through solid objects via temporarily turning matter into energy essentially becoming spectral for a brief time. It makes much of their enemies weapons completely useless but has catastrophic effects on organic anatomy if overused. Essentially if you were to pass through a wall a portion of you is still in the wall having been spent during travel.
I love this channel for its technical and scientific understanding combined with decent tactical understanding.
If accuracy is the problem, not fire power (because there is no unarmed spacecraft) you start "fighting space itself" to deny space to your enemy. Particle clouds in space can be great for concealment or can even protect from laser fire. From a narrative perspective battles boil down to 3 D holo chess battle ship, where both parties start to occupy and deny space by deploying minefields, loitering munitions or just sectors of space-flak. Fields of classic shrapnell or radiation channel or trap the opponent and force more of a stale mate or surrender situation.
Because people tend not want to waste their lives or trillion dollar assets. Giant pitched battles really need a strong narrative explanation and justification.
Another excellent explanation.
Can you guys do a video on EMPs and other disabling types of weapons in realistic space combat? Electrical overload… I don’t know how “ion” stuff works in Star Wars etc…
I don't remember where or how, but someone once claimed the ion cannon is the most realistic of all the weapons in Star Wars.
David Drake's Daniel Leary books have very well thought out tactical and strategic space combat. Their missile calculation conversations alone truly satisfy the physics nerd in me.
I've been re-reading a few books from the Honor Harrington series by David Weber.
His space navy battles are well written in that most things take place over hundreds of thousands of kilometers - with missiles that have burn/ acceleration and maneuvering times of maybe only a few minutes and then go ballistic only as well as taking into account the ships moving in relation to each other tactically.
I picked them up again after bingeing The Expanse and wanted another hit of more realistic space combat - rather than WW2 dogfighting in space.
The video game From the Depths does a great job at showing all of the nuances with sci-fi weapons that's discussed in these videos. And it lets you build your own ships to use them! Watching the part about laser range and accuracy I was picturing the From the Depths laser wobbling as it tries to hit a distant target
Seeing the memento mori was quite nice.
That was absolutely fascinating. I thought it was especially cool that there is a range limit to particle beams and lasers. But generally it really adds some nuance to the whole situation. Nothing is a 'win button' even in fairly realistic settings.
Another major point to bring up with lasers at extreme ranges is heat buildup. That's one thing that's rarely ever accounted for in scifi, one of the only games I've ever seen that worry about it is Elite Dangerous, but it only accounts for local heat buildup. Being hit by lasers, especially in a microwave frequency or higher like ultraviolet, will build up heat with each strike, and that adds up to the heat the ship is generating by firing its own lasers. Eventually that heat will start to build up to the point of melting the other ship's heat sinks way faster than they'd want, and then the ship itself turns into an oven which bakes its crew to death after it loses those vital systems.
Another thing you can do which I'm kind of stunned the Expanse didn't touch on from what little of it I saw is that exact concept. Heat buildup during all those engine burns and maneuvers, firing their weapons, never ended up in a significant issue for heat buildup, and I think that would have been a significantly fun issue to play with concerning those stealth ships at the beginning, and maybe give the Donnager an actual chance like it should have had. The small ships burning all those maneuvers to evade should have resulted in a shitload of heat building up, meaning they wouldn't be able to dodge counterfire as effectively as they did, but that's neither here nor there, and ultimately just my own critique of something I thought wasn't taken advantage of.
Yes, my favorite subject
A counterpoint to missiles aside from active defence is that guided weapons like missiles need a large amount a high fidelity data to successfully use. Just because you can see the enemy doesn't mean you can fire a missile at it unless you have a sufficiently clear lock on the target.
Not if the missile has internal guidance and can correct its own course while in flight. This also makes the missile more resistant to jamming.
And given how expensive space missiles would be already, and how relatively simple that technology is compared to what it would take for space warships, there is very little reasons why anyone would build them without that.
@@Yora21 Most if not all modern missiles already have internal guidance systems for the terminal phase of flight. The internal guidance is only activated during the terminal phase, ie going pitbull, until then it is guided by the launching vehicle usually. Internal guidance systems are less powerful and shorter range than their launching vehicle do to size and electrical power needs, so yes everything I said still applicable.
One of the reasons that I love C.J. Cherryh's "longscan" from her Alliance/Union series.
another cool thing i like to point out about how ships adjust when they become misaligned after firing a round is by using various thrusters. in the expanse we see the rocinante use its main engine thruster to counter the back lash from firing its frontal railgun during its brief battle with the free navy
One thing this vid reminded my of is the Honor Harrington series. David Weber is so accurate with so many things, and yet he only employs laser weapons in knife-fighting range.
In hard sci-fi as I understand it, there are three effective types of armament, each with its own strengths and weaknesses:
Missiles - Can't be armoured against or dodged, but can be stopped (ie, shot down).
(Rail) Guns - Can't be armoured against or shot down, but can potentially be dodged.
Lasers - Can't be shot down or (practically) dodged, but can be armoured against.
Each also has its own balance of per-shot vs baseline mass.
Missiles - high per shot, but low baseline mass.
(Rail) Guns - Much lower per-shot mass, but a much higher baseline mass than missiles, as you now need not just the handling equipment, but a decent reactor.
Lasers - Effectively no per-shot mass, but an even higher baseline mass, as you need an even larger reactor, and a lot of heat-sinks (depending on the efficient of the laser).
Well said but saying railgun shells can't be shot down isn't quite true, yes they're much tougher than missiles but their flight path is more predictable and they don't need to be completely destroyed, only deflected/knocked off target.
@@joshuadickinson4614 They can be coated in radiation-absorbing materials to make active tracking difficult, and will generally be small and fast-moving.
@@GoranXII I know, just saying it's not *impossible* to intercept them.
@@joshuadickinson4614 Not impossible, but if you're not careful, you'll end up expending more power and mass to stop a round than the enemy did to fire it, which, in an equal exchange would be a loss for you.
@@GoranXII Isn't that true of *any* point defence system though?
If you want to look into a modern submunition weapon meant for taking down hard to target drones, look into the Rheinmetall Skynex. it programs detonation time into the munition at the end of the barrel as it is firing.
Timed fuses like that have been used in a lot (I think most) flak guns in world war 2.
Given the vast distances and speeds involved in space combat, the tiniest timing error could have a huge impact on detonation being too early or too late. I would go with proximity fuses instead, which can detect when they are close to a target. (Also a very old technology in sea mines.)
They showed a clip in the video of the Ahead ammunition in the video...
@@Yora21 Radar fuzes were used in AA guns in WW2. The timed fuzes were used, but then proximity fuzes were implemented pretty late into the war though, I think (at least in terms of an anti-air role)
also as a weapon's "projectile" gets closer to the speed of light, the less time you have time to detect it cause your detection processes work at the speed of light.
4:11 one nit pick is that lasers lose energy over distance, inverse square law and all that. So you could be a lot closer than mentioned in the video and still be outside the effective range. I guess unless the laser is powered by some eldritch sci-fi power source.
Lasers do not lose energy over distance, they lose _focus._ And how much focus they lose is reliant on their wavelength and mirror diameter.
1/r^2 is for isotropic point sources, a well collimated beam will have its own divergence angle and therefore it's only change in flux with distance.
I approve the use of more Gundam and anime clips.
It's also worth noting that for light speed weapons firing at extreme range, there is an equivalent knowledge delay and fire and hit delay. The light reflected from the target to your sensors takes time to get to you, so the detected information about the enemy is not real time. This introduces another delay that can be leveraged by a defender. This knowledge gap grows exponentially with range to target. Additionally, in certain scenarios, computation speed of fire control or search systems may also factor in as another delay.
Honor Harrington’s Universe answers a lot of these questions lol
Elite dangerous combat music threw me for a loop because I'm watching while playing the game.
The missile knows where it is
ECM: Hi there. Amazing how he forgot to cover me. Good luck hitting anything without a target lock. ECM jams missiles.
Stealth: Hi there too. I'm special electromagnetic armor that prevents target locks.
Graviton Field: Hello. I project a gravity special barrier that slows/stops missiles, projectiles, and fighters.
It's not nice to leave out counters to make missiles seem overpowered. They're not.
Even at 600,000km it would be impossible to evade a laser because since the weapon moves at the speed of light the first sign that it was being fired at you would be it hitting your hull. You couldn't evade purposefully because you don't know you need to; they may miss because you had moved for other reasons, though.
That's evasive maneuvers. You're dodging preemptively.
This video makes me nostalgic for EVE Online combat.
Gundam fans were on the edges of their seats the whole video, waiting for the Minovsky Particles to be mentioned as a reason for close range combat.
As a server admin currently designing the combat system for the SE server im assisting ive acthually found that theres a pretty interesting interplay between lasers and missiles as the defacto weapon for long ranges
Lasers are fast but they generate a LOT of heat so you need to keep the output manageable. If its a energy limited setting such as lunar war its the best choice because fragile equipment + laser = bad time.
if you got heavy armour however lasers suddenly fall of real fast and missiles become a thing due to larger payload but you cant get missiles close so long as a laser point defence grid is still active. The fight basically becomes about precision sniping out point defense before finishing the fight with missiles. If you got shielding on top of that you need a reliable weapon system like railguns wich cant get shot down and closer range suddenly is on the table.
Excellent video! Sharing this in our LEGO space groups to inspire builders!
I already gave it some through, and what I came up with is this:
If active evasion, then the formula is this: Delay (Distance ÷ Light Speed) + Hit Delay (Distance ÷ Round Speed) = Evasion Time;
If reactive evasion, then the formula is this: Hit Delay (Distance ÷ Round Speed) - Delay (Distance ÷ Light Speed) = Evasion Time;
Next we have this:
Acceleration X (the maximum acceleration of the X axis) × Evasion Time = X Length
Acceleration Y (the maximum acceleration of the Y axis) × Evasion Time= Y Length
Rotation (the vessel maximum Rotation) × Evasion Time = Maximum Rotation
Currently Trajectory × Evasion Time = Point 0 (where the vessel will be, if it's trajectory isn't changed)
By putting all of this on a 2d frame, you will get the Evasion Zone in the following shapes:
If One End Axis Trust, with slow rotation (The Expanse): 人
If Both End Axis Trust, with slow rotation (The Soujour): two of those “人” like this ><
If One End Axis Trust and Both End Axis Trust: ᗜ
If Both Ends Both Axis Trust: O
It is important to note that fast
rotation creates weird shapes, until it makes a "circle", also this whole thing probably only works outside of gravity wells.
Every little bit of content, I learn what I did wrong with my wip Space Engineers capital ship projects. I’m currently doing a full new design of my tactical carrier idea; more reliance on missiles and PDCs, with lighter railgun turrets to support at mid range and melt larger targets in cqc. Also making the engine arrays larger to have more maneuverability and sacrificing some of the hanger amenities; resupply systems are being only on specific docking points and added armored doors, making the auxiliary craft capacity smaller than the prototype 30 ships and vehicles to 12. Will be keeping the atmo functionality with being able to land and deploy 2 ground based mining vehicles. Gotta be able to supply the big ship with materials for repairs and ammo.
With real life ballistic conventional guns firing in atmosphere there is a strong correlation between size and range; and it seems a lot of sci-fi tends to follow that concept. While the real life reasoning wouldn't apply in vacuum, it wouldn't be a huge stretch to justify big gun = big range. With lasers it is simply realistic, there is a direct correlation between the size of the aperture (the final lens/mirror) and the range of the focal point. If you want a particle accelerator, or railgun, or gauss gun with a higher muzzzle velocity then it is easy to justify that a larger scale makes higher velocity more practical. The video listed a variety of features that could be added to a variety of weapon types to improve accuracy and range, but these all require more advanced tech and added mass. Of course a larger, more expensive missile can have more range and independence, though those sub-munitions become an increasingly good idea.
Count the Expanse references 🎉
Awesome video. You took such a simple topic and made it so interesting. I wonder how far lasers of the future will be effective as weapons.
A probability cone is a neat illustration of where a ship can be at any time point
ALL MEN TO BATTLESTATIONS
This is not a drill, I repeat, this is not a drill!
GENERAL QUARTERS!
3:50 It would be impossible for a ship to evade a laser weapon. Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, so it would be impossible to know about a laser being fired before it reaches you.
Well, if the ship is already burning at full speed and trying to avoid attacks, they do not need to see the enemy attack.
Yup, you can't dodge a laser. You can best be at a different place than the one your enemy is aiming at.
Then there's the whole question of "jump" drives that let you teleport in close to an enemy once you've detected them at which point you could make it the equivalent of a broadside and boarding engagement form the age of sail.
It's nice to see Venus Wars getting some love.
For stealthy combat, one could design a system to cold-fire a cluster of missiles for minimal heat signature and have them drift towards the target then activate within striking distance of the target for a surprise attack. They would only need a small amount of fuel capacity to keep them light for maximum acceleration once activated.
In the case of a ship to ship duel like scenario, this is when you just shoot everywhere the enemy could possibly dodge to at once.
The biggest issue with trying to evade a laser is there's absolutely no way to know the beam has been triggered until it actually arrives at the target. In a realistic setting of course.
It is actually not necessary to confirm you've been shot at in order to engage evasive maneuvers.
@@DarthBiomechthat fully depends on whether you thought the other ship was friendly or not.
if you consider relativistic effects, there is no way if knowing a correctly aimed photon weapon is fired before it hits you
I love the use of The Venus Wars footage; I feel like the last person that loves that particular garbage fire 😂
You should do an aiming video. The beam arrays in Star Trek are likely the king, but I wonder how many different ways there are to aim a weapon
Beam arrays as the ultimate point-defense and anti-fighter armament deserves SO much more recognition.
@@serinahighcomasi2248 Yes. They make such craft completely useless in Star Trek (which is why you dont see such small craft)
The best way to fight in space seems to be sending out boarding parties on (relatively) small craft.
In sea warfare ships need to be big to carry huge guns and sufficient amounts of accordingly huge ammunition rounds. In space, having a huge gun apparently doesn't promise attractive effectivity.
9:09 the heck did that guy do to make everyone that mad?
Get cancelled on Twitter?
I really liked the Castle Federation series by Glynn Stewart. They incorporate many of the time delay factors in how they can only see at the speed of light. Having to guess at the enemy's movements. Similar to the Lost Fleet series.
The question is, how do you have a setting with both missiles and anti-missile missiles. Wouldn’t the AMMs, if viable, be able to always catch the normal missile, since they wouldn’t need as big of a target warhead or as much fuel?
Also, do you have a video just comparing the pros and cons of these various weapons systems (chemical guns/gauze weapons, missiles, lasers, plasma, partial/ion, etc), and why one might have one over the other, or even both?
And any chance of doing more exotic weapons like sonic, chemical, rad (meant to irradiate a target or destabilizing atoms rather than the normal partial projection stuff), Blake hole weapons, gravity weapons, etc?
Or even just bioships and organic tech.
Well, in real life we have both missiles and anti-missile missiles. But gun based CIWS still exists (USN and RN are looking into replacing it with lasers afaik though).
So SAMs (that are anti-missile rather than anti-aircraft) are known to not be perfectly effective against Anti-Ship or Cruise missiles. But they are still made so they can't be useless either.
So there must be some sort of place for AMMs.
suggestion for a video... those peaceful scenes you see at the end of the sci-fi movie where someone is enjoying a sunset with either two suns or two moons, or a really large moons.... I can't imagine the tidal forces with two moons, or a really close large moon... it certainly would likely not be peaceful. :-) Love your videos btw.
I like a setting (and do so building my own) where different factions or races use very different technologies.
You forgot about resting mass. Nothing can just flip around like that. 5:00
Well it can. But the internal stresses will rip a lot of materials apart.
If we have a size for the ship, it should be fairly easy to calculate the g-forces at the end.