Best quote EVER, "I REGECT YOUR REALITY AND SUSBSITUTE MY OWN!!!!"

i love that quote, im also disapointed no-one had anythin to say bout my last post, i was all ready for a good argument

USAF, I could rant at you incoherently trying to ruin everyone's fun about a debate using cacultations based in theroy placed around concepts that the scientific commmunity at large will admit that they do not have a full grasp of. Using said arguements as tools in a subject that doesn't exist to begin with. If that'll help. But in the mean time I'll be on the deck of the starship awsomeness serving as the cabin boy of Master Chief Captin Sir Coolness. ADVENTURE AWAITS!!!!

Actually, all this debate about nuclear weapons or missiles in general is pointless. I agree that it is freaking cool to imagine missile slug fests between giant capital ships. (Especially in fiction)

But the truth is, this (missiles being the primary weapon for warships) won't happen. Ever. Not even if every law of physics we ever knew was wrong. Wanna know why? Lasers. Anti-Missile lasers already exist now. (Granted, these lasers would be less effective in a vacuum where there are no forces acting on the missiles, but in the future such lasers would easily be powerful enough to melt and eventually disintegrate the missile.) Google it if you don't believe me. Imagine how powerful they'll be in the future. So, what does this mean? It means any missile fired will probably be destroyed before it can even leave its launch tube, especially if it takes awhile to prep a missile for launch.

This doesn't mean they can't be auxiliary weapons, though. At extremely close range, missiles might have enough time to launch and hit the hull of the ship before the laser can charge and fire. Of course, this is if the other ship doesn't predict when/where you're going to fire the missile, which will be somewhat easy to tell due to energy/heat build up.

If lasers actually get powerful enough to destroy actual ships, then, heat shielding will be the best armor and ships will actually stand still. You can't outrun or dodge a laser. Of course, unmanned remote control fighters would probably have the same problems as missiles. Ships will be huge just so they have more surface area to dissipate the heat.

Will lasers require massive amounts of energy? In some ways, yes. Would it be possible? Most definitely. I wouldn't see too many smaller ships having dozens of lasers, but the large mile long or bigger capital ships will have more than they know what to do with. Heat does become a problem for the person firing it, but a cooling system wouldn't be that hard to implement in the future. Or just regulate the firing. After all, if you're far enough away your lasers will have enough time to cool before the missiles even come close to you.

Add this to the fact missiles are expensive and require resources. If you could spend the same amount of money for ten nukes on ten lasers, which would you do? And eventually, you will run out of nukes, meanwhile the lasers are still ripping you to pieces. Much faster than nukes can do.

This is, of course, only if lasers become powerful enough to destroy ships.

In my mind, this would be a test of who can put the most fire power to the best use at the best time. Whoever has the biggest, most numerous ships will probably win.

Missiles and projectiles would only play a role in extremely close ranges... meaning ships will probably try to enter the range at which these become viable with lasers manning the point defense systems. Because these lasers will also probably double as offensive weapons, the more you can misdirect the laser fire the better. (Although that probably wouldn't last very long, every second counts.) And if any of the weapons actually do manage to hit, they'll do massive damage.

In this way, you can avoid using nukes and putting the population on edge while still having military and utility potential.

That's my opinion, anyway.

LZRS!!!!!!!!!!
pew,pew,pew.
I completley forgot about lasers becomming viable weapons. Right now we are using microwaves as a means to cook people alive, google up pain ray. And the military has been working on lasers for years. SINS Space station/Deathstar anyone?
And railguns to, they exist now and think of what would happen to them or what new weapons would be devoloped with a thousand years or research and devolopment.

all i know is that in real life space combat wouldnt be anything like what it is in this game.

@ wanderer,
Only to add more to the discussion of space combat, I would like to ask questions regarding aspects of the nuke spamming you haven't covered in explanations.
How much weapon grade enriched uranium/plutonium would you need to build all the warheads? As little as I know about enriched uranium, doesn't it take about 10x the ammount of raw uranium to make the refined ammount of enriched uranium? How many warheads would you have to have to allow you to spam them at enemies? 1,000 10,000 100,000 1,000,000? How many missles would you need to combat a force of X number of spaceships via spamming? In the vastness if space how large of an explosion do you need? How much uranium per missle? 10 kilos, 100 kilos? Isn't the ammount of energy required to refine enriched uranium/plutonium really high? Of course you have nuclear power plants running to power the operations but they would need thier own ammounts of enriched uranium as fuel right? How long does it take to refine enriched uranium or plutonium? You can allways build more reactors to speed up the procces, but that would require more enriched uranium to be used as fuel right?. Doesn't enriched uranium/plutonium erode itself from the inside out or the outside in? Wouldn't the constant internal heat and radiation damage the internal workings of the missle over time? How long could a nuclear missle sit for before becoming unstable/unusable as a weapon? How do you go about reparing/replacing the warheads as they degrade? What about cost? What about saftey of the people handling the weapons? You wan't people to put up calcs proving fighters are better than missles or shut up. You clearly have calcs proving missle to fighter weapon superiorty. But do you have calcs proving missle to fighter manufacturing superiorty? Or manufacturing superiorty vs other more conventional weapon systems? I'm not going to use issue of faster than light travel. So travel from point A to point B could take months if not years. So my question is, can you give me the calcs showing how much uranium, energy and time would be needed to manufacture the missles required to combat an armada of 10,000 ships? Or how about 50,000? Or 100,000? You might say manufacturing that many ships would be impossible but then again we can allready manufacture millions of cars a year. Streamline assembly lines work well. Since travel takes months if not years you will also need to take into account replacing missles that degrade over time. Its a known fact to since the U.S has to commit millions of dollars worth of time and recources to keep the current warheads we have working. You may feel free to use faster than light travel if you want. So can you give me the calcs proving that building and maintaining the number of warheads required to maintain the space combat you describe is by cost a material, energy, and time effective or efficent manner of combat?
With that said, I feel that I could build a fleet of carriers with fighter drones to be launched from the carriers a resonably far distance away and be "safe". Since there is no horizon in space it may as well offer the best diffence against missle attacks peroid. Since I can see everything comming from everywhere I would only need to move to stay out of range of the missles or use swarms or patroling drones to intercept them. I would hazzard a guess that you very well would reach the limits of your war machine long before I would.

^^^ A few paragraphs are your friend.   

Listening to the good old Science cable channel, I heard a scientist make an interesting statement (to paraphrase):

"The problem with a lot of our scientific community is that they assume they know all there is to know about physics on our earth.

I am willing to assume there are principles in physcis that we haven't discovered yet and those may make the rest of what we know obsolete.."

The element of surprise will rule as it always has through history, if we get to war in space or now. Why is so much expense spent in Stealth technology now, with all its different types? Visual, radar, heat signatures, electronic signatures?

My earlier post was generalized I assume but this is the aspect of technology that determines where warfare will go.

If you can hide missiles long enough, they will be viable. If you can hide a ship long enough, that will determine the type of weapons to be used for offense.

Your abiltiy to detect threats determine what kinds of counter measures you use for defense.

Currently a structured, multiple approach is used depending how early you detect your threat.

Lasers are viable now and as stated earlier rail guns are on the scence as well as rudimentary particle beams.

Focused microwaves are really no different that band widths of radar now used.

My background? Five years with the USN/DOD with an EW system used to detect and counter missiles....

The principles I believe will stay the same but implemented differently due to the technology available.

I think that we are all focusing to much on the weapons systems and not enought on tactics and the different types of ship. I know that the weapons systems affect the type of ships and tactics, but unless there is a reason for there to be differnt type of warships, we are still going to make one type and have one type of tactics.

So here lets sum up the different type of weapons.

Energy weapons (lasers)

Pros:
Move at the speed of light and there for are 100% accurate ( if you do ever thing right)
Can not be blocked by Anti-missile/anti-fighter systems

Cons:
Produces wasre heat
Require extra energy to fire

Kinetic Kill

Pros:
Can not be blocked by Anti-missile/anti-fighter systems, as the round it self produces no heat. All the heat produced, should be in the ship it self.
Some of the energy may be recoverd.

Cons:
Produces wasre heat
Require extra energy to fire
Require ammo

Missiles:

Pros:
Only the mssiles produces waste heat
Only the missile require extra energy to get to the target
Can attack by it self, and there for does not need the motherships sensors to find a target.

Cons:
Require ammo
The missile it self can be tracked, and there for can be blocked by anti-missile/anti fighter systems.

But no matter which weapons you like, you are only going to build one type, just like most of us did in Galactic Civilizations 2. It cost to much research three differnt weapons systems, as well as the retooling need to build them.

though what about different weapons in different roles, thats like saying no soldier should use stinger missles because m16s are cheaper and easeir to make

Not a valid basis for an argument. This is not a trial, and this won't fly in any debates

Neither will yours. It's all purely speculative.

I think that the different roles will be based on the min-max range of the weapon and the cost of it and the ammo for its use, USAF-Prometheus.

One of the reasons that we still use guns on US fighter is that missile, have a min range in which they can't fire, if the target is too close. But why not replace missiles, with mini guns then? Will the guns have a small max range, and the missiles have a larger max range.

Unsubstantiated paranoia I might add. A full out nuclear war in the 1980s would at worst see the U.S. cease to exist as a viable political entity with its military destroyed and half to two thirds of its population killed, Britain would see its military wrecked, but as a common wealth it would still survive.

Germany would be hit as hard as it was in WW2 and many areas would be saturated in gas, but would be safe to move around within a week.

France would lose a quarter of its population, Albania would lose half its population, Greece and Turkey would lose a third of their populations and their militaries would be wrecked.

Israel would lose Dimona and soon cease to exist.

China would escape any destruction as it had made it clear by then that they were not with the Soviets.

USSR would lose about a quarter of its population and half its military, mainly because they wisely ignored the ABM treaty and built a massive ABM and Anti-Bomber defense which would absorb most of the U.S. ICBM and Bomber attack.

Global temperature would drop from a half to a full degree. WW3 would see the deaths of 380 to 460 million causalities top out of a global population of some 3.5 billion people.

Nowhere near doomsday.



FYI, we have detonated nukes in space, Teak and Orange shots, both 3.8 megatons in 1958.



Ask yourself if that makes any sense what-so-ever when trying execute a combat mission.



Seeing is not the same as having a target lock,please learn about how targeting is done before making statements that will come back to bite you in the ass.



Not in dispute, but the military will have stronger and thicker armor plating, and far more advanced sensors and scanners.



No, idiots came into positions of power and hid the realities of nuclear power and deceived people into believing it was an evil. Nuclear power is incredibly safe and far cleaner than coal fired plants. Solar power doesn't scale up to what we need, wind doesn't scale up for what we need, and Geothermal doesn't scale up for our energy needs. Try doing some unbiased research.



Not a reasonable argument, this is not a trial, this is an open debate.



Those were conventional warheads, we are talking about nuclear tipped warheads. FYI in the 50s based on those results it was decided to just slap nukes on the missiles so even a near miss ensured a kill. It lead to the AIM-47 Falcon which incorporated the W42 nuclear warhead with .5 kiloton yield, but some idiots decided to go for a 100 lb high-explosive design instead. Far better to reliably kill an enemy bomber carrying a 40 megaton bomb with a half kiloton bomb to ensure a kill.



Which we can analyze through mathematical models to see if they work. This is not Star Trek where you just build something and it just works. You do design studies first to see if it is feasible, then go to prototype phase to see if its pracital, then pre-production to iron out any bugs and rigorous tests, then finally full production.



Yes you do or concede.



Yeah ignore what the Airforce is doing with drones today and ignore the fact this actually began in WW2 not the 50s, and ignore the fact that what applys in an atmosphere doesn't apply in space.

You also ignore that all our missions to other planets have been done by drones which reached them by traveling at speeds that would have killed a human.

Your wall of ignorance is quite disturbing.



"Sigh" I find you lack of logic disturbing.






Not a reasoned argument, again this isn't a trial. Educated guesses are facts which are backed by mathematical models that can be proven or disproven, yours and that raging hobo are not as they are opinions. Learn the difference between fact, expert opinion, and a layman's opinion.



See above.

Edit Note: The quote function seems to be malfunctioning for some odd reason. NM, found what was wrong.

Cutting you short as it was all one unreadable mess.

Start here

Then do your own further research. The non fiction writings of Stuart Slade are excellent source material. Yeah he is the same guy who wrote the "The Big One" where over a thousand B-36s nuked Nazi Germany. But, you'll never find a more knowledgeable man on nuclear weapons and targeting.

Was wondering a bit...what if we use UAV (or this case USV...) instead of fighters? In this case, no worries about life support, cockpit, G-force, and those stuff...all are stil controlled by humans...just from somewhere safe...(like inside the battlecraft...)

Just a suggestion...

And yes...I know that you might say that just make it into missiles and no need to worry about controlling it or those stuff...but I just think that the fuel needed to use it in combat (and retrieve it...) might be less that what is needed to construct many, many more...

yeh that was sort of what i was trying to say, though it seems i failed, its still a reason that space combat could use more than one weapon type

I don't think that the gap between missile and drone(UAV or USV) is very big, onyhow. RIght now people are trying to make a drone that carrys three bombs and fly around the battlefield. After it uses all three rounds, it turns into a missile and attack one last target.

Yes I could see what you were trying to say USAF-Prometheus. The real question I think we should be asking are self is not which one weapons are we going to use, or if there is going to be space fighters, but what are the ranges of laser, kinetic kill weapons and missiles. And when I mean ranges, what is ther min and max range. From this we can list what type of ships are need, and give them name(based on there jobs) as well as there jobs in the military.

I have also come up with that we could also have differnt class of ships if Economies of scale(see wiki if you need to). If we make the ship 10 times bigger and get an increase in speed, firepower, and/or armor of more then 10. Then we are going to build one class of ship as the done-every thing class, self repiar hold supply (you know the Strategic endurance thing) , fight and so on. And then we are going to build a one ship fleet class, in which we remove most of the strategic endurance to maximize it combat endurance. On the other side of the coin, if we can a greater economie of scale with stratgic endurance then we will have one mother ship and smaleer attack ship.

Does any know if we have beam spread or if there is a beam angle in outer space.

I'm not entirely convinced that stealth isn't possible in space. Currently they are working on negative refractive index lenses that theoretically could bend the light back upon itself to cause something to dissappear. Now if it works in the visible light spectrum there is no reason that a lens couldn't be built in the infrared to effectivelly stealth the heat signature from the object.

quote]Nowhere near doomsday.[/quote]

True its nowhere near doomsday people have envisioned. Death would only happen slower for the unlucky that would have to survive. Possible weather patern changes, colapse of a world economy at large, Massive political power vacums, and the enriched urainium/plutonium set loose by the explosions would filter through every part of the ecosystem.



I concede this part of the arguement, I spoke to soon.



It does, disassembling weapons as a meens of transport has been military pratice for generations. Its why modern soliders are trained to assemble multible weapons from a box of assorted parts containing 3 complete weapons and random parts. Guerallia fighters have longed used the pratice to aviod detection. Countries used the pratice as a meens of devloping weapons but keeping them hidden. Its a sound military pratice used time and again.



I'll concede this argument, What I want to say I have no meens of conveying into a plausable argument.



Misidentifications have happened before, USSR nearly launced nuclear arms (less than 2 min away from doing at one point) over a small research rocket was fired by the US. (they knew it wasn't large enough to be a nuclear missle, they just didn't know what it was for sure) And had actualy shot down a passenger jet (and knew what it was) that had acidently flown into thier airspace. It is proven to have happened before and will happen again. Its just a matter of time. Far more advanced sensors and scanners may help deter but not prevent.



For starters, unbiased research is impossible since it is performed by humans and its proven impossible for a human to be truly unbiased. And I agree, idiots came to power and will countinue to do so. We have our people at large to thank for that. Nuclear power may be safe but far from being as efficent as it needs to be. We are currently hidding a mountain of nuclear waste under a mountain and pretending its not there.



Yes it is, if you tried using the nuclear debate 300 years ago you would have been dismissed as unreasonable.



FYI In refrence to the dogfighting, I failed to point out the US planes wern't even equiped with guns. Missles were thought to be supreme and guns were removed since a one shot = confirmed kill was the concept. When actual dogfighting came about US planes found themselves time and again at severe disavantages against thier soviet MIG counterparts. "Some idiots" were highly trained military engineers and stratigests, you can only call them that now since you have the luxury of aquired knowledge and experiance.



True, its not Star Trek. But then again you can go through all the models you want, get to the trial and find find it doesn't work.



Well your wall of ignorance is more disturbing, You've shown calcs showing missle vs fighter. I asked for a scenerio where missle vs fighter calcs determined an outcome in war. Not drone work. Drone work in WW2 was trial and error. How many of these intersteller drones have we crashed into other worlds? Why are we even bothering to plan sending humans when drones could do the work anyways?



I concede this argument, I'm not an authority in interplanetery physics.



No I don't.



"Sigh" I find your opinon of my logic disturbing.



Insert self important opinionated comment.



The track record of "expert" opinon vs "layman's" opinon hasn't been good. And educated guesses are by fact guesses which often are diven by opinon.



Sorry.



Thank you for the link.
It provided answers to alot of questions I had about weapons grade enriched uranium.

Its unbelievably expensive.

Its very time consuming
.
Its consumes a very large ammount of material.

It consumes a massive ammount of electricity.

Its impossible to conceal.

Nuclear reactors are not efficent. Clean and powerfull, yes. Efficent, no. Argue all you want, all the time and energy that is spent on building, maintaining nuclear reactors vs their output durring thier entire lifetime is horrible.

Thats just enriched uranium, plutonium is even worse,

It only exists in nature in extremely trace ammounts.

It can only be produced/refined in a nuclear reactor.

One reactor can produce the ammount needed for one bomb in 2 months.

Low efficenticy reactors (20% enriched uranium aka fuel grade) can produce plutonium.

High efficenticy reactors (90% enriched uranium aka weapon grade) produce very little if any plutonium.

Specifically built breeder/production reactors can be built.

Weapons grade enriched uranium/plutonium degrades with time.

Nuclear weapons require constant upkeep and repairs, Thier own payloads "eat" away at the weapon itself.

Building reactors on ships requires weapons grade uranium or plutonium to be used as fuel. (keeps the cores small)

That just covers the costs uranium and plutonium, not the cost, energy and material consumption of the other aspects to nuclear weapon manufacturing. Heavy water manufacturing, material for handling and transport of the nuclear material, ect.

So I would like to say again, Nuke spamming = not pratical.

The costs of building and then maintaining a nuclear arsenal cappable of combat on a scale of space combat does not seem feasible. Its simply to great for a military's warmachine to sustain.

Possible? yes
Cost efficent? no
Energy efficent? no

Your weapons are very diffucult to build and maintain and are constantly in need of repairs and replacing regardless of being used or not.

Your reactors, the very heart of your warmachine and thier supporting systems are screaming, sitting targets.

Wars now and in the past have been won through supply, the ability to produce a large force of anything and keep producing it over and over and over. Napoleon failed his invasion of Russia over supply, Hitler's German warmachine failed over supply, The US failed at Vietnam over supply. Say what you want, each had in common that they had better weapons, better tatics, and still failed due to the lack of being able to sustain the effort.

How do you expect to build them and damn what everyone else says? Are you serious when you said that?

If you think that you can just build and damn everyone else and still have the material, energy, and money to build a force large enough for space combat. You unfortunately live in a fantasy world not unlike Star Trek.

Hey wanderer, I'm just wondering: did you notice that the subject we're talking about is 'what do you guys think space warfare should be like'? We're talking about what we imagine space combat would be like, in our imaginations, not what it is going to be like. To paraphrase what you seem fond of saying, I find your lack of focus disturbing. Are you a Star Wars fan?

Now to say something for the discussion: why is it that we've all steered away from something many space fantasy settings have, which is the shields? While I'm not sure they could exist as depicted, per se, at the very least starships of the future could have electromagnetic shielding. This could protect them from solar radiation, perhaps projectiles, and yes, 'nuclear spamming' (I'm talking to you again, wanderer). Arguably the most dangerous part of nuclear radiation is the gamma rays, aka high frequency electromagnetic radiation. EMS + EM radiation = shield mitigation! (And NO, wanderer, I don't have numbers to prove this, but Wikipedia, while not entirely reliable, is what I use.) This would probably work, but don't hold me to it.

Smileso, doesn't refracting light so it doesn't show up on sensors work both ways? It'd just bounce away once it hits the cloaking field, wouldn't it? You'd be blind if you couldn't see EM radiation because of your cloak. I'm not sure though.

i wouldn't count on missles being the being the end all in space combat. i think it will be beam weaponry ftw.

even today weaponized lasers are being developed for missle and fighter interception. right now, the air force has a 747 flying with a laser powerful enough to knock a missle or a fighter out of the sky from 100 miles. and who knows how soon it will be before we weaponize current particle accelerator technology. people are already worried about the LHC creating blackholes (granted their worries aren't scientifically sound). imagine the destructive capabilities of a refined weaponized particle accelerator in the near future.

Lets keep it clean guys. Wanderer17 brings up a lot of good points, and his first post(with its links) gave us a lot of information form other sites that asked the very same question I asked all of you. The so caled "smart guy" not only has what he has listed but what other people have listed as ideals and some facts and numbers. This does not mean, that I don't have questions for Wanderer17 or the smart guy, or that I don't have fact that I could add, for and against. But before we kill each other, lets ask are selfs some questions.

Now I don't know how many of you play other space RTS or which one of you do, but when we did have fighters and stealth was it truly that useful.

Lets take this very game for example. How many Carrier, HC and LRM do you all use. Last I checked, there were post that said that carrier are useless and it was HC rush vs LRM spam. How useful was fighters in this game(SoaSE)?

But lets look at other games as well. Can you name some games in which haveing fighters really made a difference? Then we must ask why they made a difference, in order to understand why having space fighters would be worth the cost of building them in the first place.

When we had cloaking in the Homeworld games, Star wars empire at war: Forces of corruption and other games, do it make the fights into hide and go seek with bazookas. Did I gain any thing by having my ships able to clock? I'm really did we gain any thing. Did having clocking in homeworld and the other games give me an edge?

So before we say Wanderer17, the "Smart guy" and any one else is wrong or right, lets look at even if we could cloak are ships, and even if we build space fighter, would they be useful? Because even if we could build it, there not point in building it, unless we gains something out of it. Just like why we have different class of ships. We build them, because we get something out of each of the different class of ship.

*sigh* well, i though about it some more and arrived at the conclusion that in the future , i would like space combat to be as it is now. nonexistent.We'll have diplomatic shuttle spams instead. there. would anyone else like that ? alas, before you tell me, i know its impossible.

Maybe if you gave a cloaked missile a preprogrammed heading to follow to reach an enemy ship, it wouldn't need to see. But that's the only use I can think of for a cloaking device, and I don't think it's worth the cost.