On Interstellar Empire
As the post title should make clear, this is a discussion of space opera. It is true, according to commenters who know more than I do, that the theoretical door to FTL is not quite welded shut, but we are far outside the scope of the Plausible Midfuture, even for the most generous interpretation of that phrase.
But the heroes of high fantasy do not fight their dragons with cardboard swords. Likewise, even in operatic settings we are entitled to the appearance of plausibility.
The question of interstellar empires arose in comments on a recent post about artificial intelligence (go to the second page of comments, around #215 or 220). The thread drift concerned the use of bluntly named killbots, but my immediate concern here is not with the technology of interstellar war but its 'geopolitics' (astropolitics?).
It is a quite basic - but rather unappreciated - fact of power politics in space that, except for independent colonies located on the same planet, there are no contiguous borders. In fact, we can get a bit narrower than that: independent colonies on the same continent or landmass. Yes, borders can be drawn through an ocean, or - given a suitably holographic map - even through interstellar space, but you cannot march across them.
At least, you cannot march across them unless you have stargates of the sort that can be localized onto a planet. Unless your FTL technology permits interstellar streetcars, it likewise precludes interstellar armies. To be sure this does not preclude interstellar marines, or espatiers. But marines are fundamentally a naval arm, and espatiers are fundamentally an arm of space forces, whatever name you choose for the latter.
And this is significant ... why, exactly?
It is significant because your all conquering space legions can conquer no one - at least no one off-planet - unless they are transported by an all conquering space fleet. At which point the legions' own task is more or less the mopping up operation.
Which is significant in turn because, historically, maritime powers have been a considerably different beast than land-based powers, more or less as sailors have differed from soldiers. At least in their internal politics they have generally been more liberal, and in their external affairs more concerned with control of trade than with the direct rule of territory. Victoria, for example, became Empress of India only after indirect rule through the East India Company went pear shaped.
These political differences seem to reflect broader cultural differences, reflected even in epic poetry: The Iliad is a soldier's epic, the Odyssey a sailor's epic.
In my old Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy I made this an argument for the likely predominance of trade federations in classic FTL settings, and I think that argument still essentially holds.
Discuss.
The image of Brunhilde comes from a website, Soldiers of the Queen, which deals mainly with the Victorian British army, but also includes an opera page.
456 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 456 Newer› Newest»jollyreaper:
"And the funny thing about your argument here is that you're basically saying that yours is the only possible interpretation of how things could be and anyone who feels differently is some kind of fool."
Not even close. I'm simply saying that there is a readership -- a fairly large one, I think -- that has been turned off by the dumbed down flights of fancy that pass for science fiction these days. I simply can't read most of what is written because the science and tech are so bad, and the stories are such worthless dreck. And I seriously doubt I'm alone.
Military SF is especially bad. Ringo, who is supposed to be the second coming of...something, is hailed as a great expert because he served a few years in the Army as a paratrooper. Sorry guys, his take on the military is nonsense on stilts, to borrow a turn of phrase. War ain't nothing like the way he makes it out to be, nor were the Marines and soldiers I knew anything like his military characters. We won't even go into Weber or the guy who wrote the Lost Fleet disaster under the pen name "Jack Campbell" (really?).
Being able to attack enemy traffic only in or near solar systems means that the situation would something akin to the U-boat war in WWI, except no submarine stealth to help the commerce raider, nor even the slim advantage of actually being a military weapon system designed for war (which the u-boat was).
Depends on how stealthy you get to be. U-Boat losses were unacceptable by the end of WWI but advances made them deadly again by WWII only to become very vulnerable again by the end of the war. Surface commerce raiding was a non-starter but might have been more effective against an enemy without such a strong surface fleet.
They'd do good for a few months, then be eaten alive by convoy escorts. That's if they're lucky.
I was imagining both sides in this scenario kind of half-assing it with the auxiliary forces so the escorts might not be much better than the raiders in this scenario.
The Japanese were really weird with how they operated. They refused to convoy and told their subs to attack combat ships rather than transports. Not really logical but that's what they did.
If Power B suspects a commerce raiding campaign by Power A, then it would start convoying on spec. Funny thing about convoys, they may concentrate targets, but they guarantee that the raiders will meet the counterraiding forces. Oops.
If that's what they're doing, then then Power A doesn't spread its raiders across all possible space lanes but concentrates where the convoy is. They'll risk serious losses but have the hope of causing even greater losses on the enemy.
Adolph Galland argued for a similar approach against American bomber formations. He wanted to hold back his forces and marshal them for a concentrated attack on just one large formation. He thought that they weren't doing enough damage inflicting losses of a few percent scattered across the whole theater. Hit one bomber stream and inflict 50% or more losses, that might cause the Americans to rethink their strategy. He was overruled.
Your corruption scandal would be a historical footnote to a much larger strategic disaster. All the merchant ships lost chasing the dream of prize money would handicap Power A's ability to move commerce and war supplies. If front line units were sent out with the raiders as stiffeners against convoy defenses, that would only serve to dissipate the main battle fleets' strength.
True. But what if Power A was able to keep its merchies home or on patrol as auxiliaries while power B was unprepared for the war? Now its having to use front line units as escorts which means they are spreading thin and leaving some other target less protected.
There's an old saying that wars are won by the side that makes the least number of mistakes. If I were writing out this scenario, I'd want to make sure that each side has a mix of good and bad ideas, just to keep it feeling real.
Military SF is especially bad. Ringo, who is supposed to be the second coming of...something, is hailed as a great expert because he served a few years in the Army as a paratrooper. Sorry guys, his take on the military is nonsense on stilts, to borrow a turn of phrase. War ain't nothing like the way he makes it out to be, nor were the Marines and soldiers I knew anything like his military characters. We won't even go into Weber or the guy who wrote the Lost Fleet disaster under the pen name "Jack Campbell" (really?).
Ok. If we're talking those guys then yeah! lol I just finished the Lost Fleet more out of morbid curiosity than anything else. I think we could have an entire post on just how big of a wallbanger that series was. The biggest sins in that series:
1. Co-President Psychobitch
2. Thin characterizations aside from Co-President Psychobitch
3. Poorly imagined universe with the two sides seemingly made out of the same cardboard Domino's uses for pizza
4. Poorly imagined technology and tactics that really didn't make any sense given the engagements described.
5. Too many extraneous pages for the amount of story being told. The whole thing could have been collapsed to one thick novel.
There's having a difference of opinion and then there's just doing things in a way nobody could really defend. My teeth hurt every time Capt'n Jack whipped his fleet around in a 180 at .1c to reverse course.
jollyreaper:
"And that's the company line, Tony. There are critics disagree with you. And the gap between the two views is where interesting stories can be told."
What views? It's all spin. Did you even bother to investigate the editorial policy of the periodical you quoted? The article wouldn't have been printed if it didn't contain an anti-administration editorial slant. Other journals, investigating the same facts, would have a pro-administration slant on anything they published.
I was addressing realities, not partisan hype. PMCs are used for real world missions that actually need to be done. If the contracting process gets abused from time to time, or the contracts sometimes administered by crooks, well, I have news for you: It's no big deal. I've worked with contracts and contractors for many years. I have yet to see a contracted job that didn't have some irregularities somewhere.
But what's really funny is this:
"The Pentagon has become so dependent on private military companies that it literally cannot wage war without them. Troops already rely on for-profit contractors to maintain 28 percent of all weapons systems.
'There are some weapons systems that the U.S. military forces do not have the capability to do their own maintenance on,' concedes David Young, a deputy commander at the Defense Contract Management Agency."
Except perhaps for the absolute percentage of systems that require civilian tech reps, this would have been old news fifty years ago. The US services have used forward-deployed civilian tech reps at least since WWII, and probably earlier. The US Navy has been full of them for as long as anybody I know remembers. My grandfather ran into one or two of them on a sub tender during WWII. I know whenever the USS Long Beach deployed away from San Diego, even if just over to Hawaii for a few weeks, we always had a few tech reps aboard. The whole idea that civilian contractor assistance is some kind of scandal is just preposterous.
Tony:
"Not even close. I'm simply saying that there is a readership -- a fairly large one, I think -- that has been turned off by the dumbed down flights of fancy that pass for science fiction these days. I simply can't read most of what is written because the science and tech are so bad, and the stories are such worthless dreck. And I seriously doubt I'm alone."
A) These days? It's not as if Campbell-age SF was any better in the realism department. New Wave was science fantasy as often as not. I'm rather partial to cyberpunk myself, but I can understand some of the objections to the political extrapolations. Not necessarily agree with them, but understand them.
As for "these days", have you read any Peter Watts? George Alec Effinger? Richard K Morgan? (I should also mention Alistair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter, but I haven't read enough of their stuff to rate a proper opinion.) There is hard SF out there. Perhaps it's just difficult to find hard space opera.
B) As far as the regulation of torchships goes - we haven't banned private ownership of aircraft, have we? There are places in the world where undesirables can fly large planes, aren't there? Sure, we heavily regulate them here, but not everywhere is here. Doesn't need to be, either. No airliner can outrun a missile; as established on other threads, no manned torchship will outrun a torch missile. Perhaps that's security enough for some.
C) Political speculation is, well, hard. Ostensibly that's what we're arguing about here, even more than the tech - what kinds of empires, and how strong. Political biases shape the discussion. Beliefs on which political systems and objectives are (or will be) ascendant color expectations for reasonable, plausible future political constructions.
Based on what you've written here, you seem to believe in both the necessity and inevitability of strong empires. Which is fine, of course. Just...perhaps avoid assuming that your conclusion is the only one which is "realistic", and others doomed to in- or meta-stability. You may be right, you may not, but the world we already know is full of madmen and tyrants and monsters and the people who follow them. There's space enough for all of them (see what I did there?).
“Now, when those airplanes are torchships, and the number of people any one can kill is millions, rather than thousands, there is not going to be any kind of unregulated use, at all, anywhere. Period.”
Ironically, it was too much regulation of air travel that allowed the Sept. 11th terrorists to mostly succeed. They exploited the weaknesses in the system, and the law-abiding passengers did as they had been trained by the authorities to do. I could almost laugh at extending that insanity into a setting with potentially planet-cracking FTL technology, if it didn’t remind me of how painful human stupidity can be right here and now.
jollyreaper:
"Depends on how stealthy you get to be. U-Boat losses were unacceptable by the end of WWI but advances made them deadly again by WWII only to become very vulnerable again by the end of the war."
By the end of the war? The Battle of the Atlantic is usually figured to have been won by spring of 1943. Even Doenitz was admitting it to his diary (if to nobody else) by late summer.
"Surface commerce raiding was a non-starter but might have been more effective against an enemy without such a strong surface fleet."
Against an enemy without such a strong surface fleet, it would have been a moot point. The subs would have sufficed, just as US boats did in the Pacific.
"I was imagining both sides in this scenario kind of half-assing it with the auxiliary forces so the escorts might not be much better than the raiders in this scenario."
Assuming both sides are so ignorant of the history of commerce warfare as not to be able to figure out beforehand what a dumb ol' grunt like me knows, one or both sides will figure out soon enough that "half-assing it" is not a plan for success. The first power that implements a decent commerce campaign with real military resources and/or sets up an effective convoy system is well on the way to winning.
"If that's what they're doing, then then Power A doesn't spread its raiders across all possible space lanes but concentrates where the convoy is. They'll risk serious losses but have the hope of causing even greater losses on the enemy."
Didn't work out that way in real life. It turned out that the best way to get u-boats to expose themselves to ASW forces was to concentrate the targets in convoys and add ASW escorts.
Tony:
"One of the funny things about Romance is the insistence of the readership on historical accuracy. [...] The same has to apply to future Romance,"
You can't write historically accurately about the future. It hasn't happened yet, it isn't in the history books.
History is instructive but I'd still want to war-game the setting out to see just which way it would go chiseler has many examples of prewar thinking that never quite panned out. Some things should always hold true like "get him before hangers you" but the way of making that happen might not work in practice. Prewar thinking focused on forcing the enemy into the Decisive Battle to settle the war but the problem with a plan like that wa the enemy had to cooperate with you.
As for the halfassing it bit, I'm imagining powers that don't have a strong naval tradition and are unprepared for the realities of the war they're foolishly entering into. Plenty of historic examples of that kind of thing. Now the side that takes the longest to learn the lessons, they're likely to be the ones to lose.
WRT using civilian ships for offensive naval roles (as opposed to support and logistics), that pretty much went out with the East India company. Auxiliary cruisers died a horrible death in WWI (think RMS Lusitania), and I can't think of any successful revivals since.
Navies send purpose built warships on detached duties (frigates in the age of sail, light or armoured cruisers in the age of steam) since these ships had the capabilities and trained crews needed to do the job (and enough crew to have detachments for other tasks like manning prize ships or sending a shore party to do a job). If anything, modern warships which are highly automated will have difficulty carrying out secondary tasks since the crew is so much smaller than in the past. A constellation of laser and kinetic stars might only have a few maned command and control nodes to determine the fire/no fire parameters and provide some very basic troubleshooting and repair if needed en route, which is the same problem written large. Given the limited manpower and tool set in the space environment, maybe the default position has to be a blaze of laser energy followed by 100,000 KKV's
WRT polities in the Solar or Interstellar period, I think we will be looking at something more like "city states" since planets and colonies with closed life support systems are essentially self sufficient. Unless communications and transport has a negligible cost, the largest polity might be something like the Jovian moon system (and even then many of the minor moons might be "the wild west" for political and economic purposes.
The situation might resemble ancient times, when the Roman Empire and China coexisted without any reference to each other, and a very tenuous trade link existed between the two. Now we are not really talking Empires, but "silk road" convoys picking their way through the dark between markets. Going to Vernor Vinge, traders might have difficulty even imagining what might be desirable on the other end, especially if there has been a great deal of cultural drift or changes due to genetic engineering or high level AI.
WRT military SF, I like Ralph Peters "The War in 2020" despite its rather dated premise (the Japanese as the enemy? Really? Very end of the 1980's world view). Ringo writes polemics disguised as SF (and not very good ones at that. I'll take my Heinlein neat). Joe Haldeman writes good military SF, and John Scalzi has gotten good reviews although I havn't gotten to reading The Old Man's War yet.
Milo:
"You can't write historically accurately about the future. It hasn't happened yet, it isn't in the history books."
Really? The best and most popular SF novels and future histories all have a sense of verisimilitude, which is established by sensible and believable technological extrapolation and a good understanding of human nature. In the case of military SF, the strategy and tactics also have to make sense to people who know something about strategy and tactics, while the military technologies have to make sense to people who know how military organizations use technology.
Which is probably what makes military SF such a bastard child these days. The people that know what they're talking about don't write about herosim and daring do. They write about military realities and the true cost of war. That doesn't make the shiny, happy people our society has been raising these last thirty or so years comfortable at all. So the popular "military" SF is ludicrous garbage, full of Victorian stereotypes, slightly distressed.
The situation might resemble ancient times, when the Roman Empire and China coexisted without any reference to each other, and a very tenuous trade link existed between the two. Now we are not really talking Empires, but "silk road" convoys picking their way through the dark between markets.
That's the kind of setting I'm thinking of. The world is too small here on Earth. Exactly what you said about the past, giant continent-spanning empires sharing the same planet but only dimly aware of each other. While computers will of course exist and yottabytes of information could probably be made available, the ruler of a polity on one side of the human sphere might not really know much of anything about a polity on the other side. The information's there but they haven't bothered keeping up with it, it's not relevant to them. Giant all-out wars of total annihilation would be a page A20 story in the newspaper. (or whatever passes for that in this day and age.) It's the kind of mind-boggle like gamma ray bursts representing something that's a Pretty Big Deal (ginormous cosmic explosions like novae) and are supposed to be rare events in the universe but, because they're visible across most of that universe, but we see one of them a day. Whoaaa.
There's also the question of lines of communication. If FTL means there are chokepoints and a hostile empire sits on that chokepoint, you're not going to know what's happening on the other side of it, not if there's not any long way around.
So, either there's plenty of information available but of little immediate relevance until a war starts (wars are God's way of teaching us stellar cartography), or maybe there's not much information at all. Either option keeps space huge, mysterious, and interesting.
and John Scalzi has gotten good reviews although I havn't gotten to reading The Old Man's War yet.
Old Man's War is a four book series. Overall, very entertaining so long as you don't actually try to make any sense of the setting he's created. What I truly don't understand is why there's so much of a focus in this setting upon infantry combat between sophonts of the competing races rather than combat bots and the insistence of doing colonization the manual way with landing farmers. Seriously? Also, given that they have body replication tech and mankind needs every mind it can get, why are colonists allowed to die of old age? The soldiers are all recruited from the about to die on Earth.
Which is probably what makes military SF such a bastard child these days. The people that know what they're talking about don't write about herosim and daring do. They write about military realities and the true cost of war. That doesn't make the shiny, happy people our society has been raising these last thirty or so years comfortable at all. So the popular "military" SF is ludicrous garbage, full of Victorian stereotypes, slightly distressed.
Don't forget you have Tom Clancy and Dale Brown techno-thriller fantasies coming from the right-wing perspective.
Writers across the political spectrum have a tendency to write "take that!" stories, making the bad guys or simply the people they disagree with caricature strawmen to setup and smack down.
While plenty of utter monsters have existed through history, they're not the scariest villains to me. The kind without honor, will betray you in an instant, beastly appetites, thuggish and cruel. Yeah, they exist but you hate them for who they are right from the start.
The scary ones to me are the compelling villains. Someone with a sense of honor, someone you could respect, someone of accomplishment you could admire who nevertheless has horrifying beliefs.
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." -- Winston Churchill
What's really scary is when someone can make such arguments so convincingly, you find yourself swept up in it.
jollyreaper:
"Prewar thinking focused on forcing the enemy into the Decisive Battle to settle the war but the problem with a plan like that wa the enemy had to cooperate with you."
But you have to know why things didn't work out as planned, not just make up any old excuse that fits your preferred story arc. For example, in WWI the quest for decisive battle ran headlong into the capability of the modern industrial state to resist quick defeat. In WWII, both the US and Japanese wanted to fight a decisive battle in the Western Pacific, but the Japanese were too successful iniltially, forcing the US to step back and rethink everything. Going all the way back to the Peloponesian War, the Athenians had a justified fear of meeting the Spartans on land, so they decided to just let the Spartans and allies ramble around in the Attic hinterland until they got tired and went home, and just eat food shipped in from overseas. If you can't justify why things are the way they are, your readers are going to project your work against the neares interior partition.
"As for the halfassing it bit, I'm imagining powers that don't have a strong naval tradition and are unprepared for the realities of the war they're foolishly entering into. Plenty of historic examples of that kind of thing. Now the side that takes the longest to learn the lessons, they're likely to be the ones to lose."
I'd love to see your historical examples.
But you have to know why things didn't work out as planned, not just make up any old excuse that fits your preferred story arc.
Yes. Perhaps you missed the part where I said I look to history for guidance. The proviso I'd add to that isn't that history repeats itself but not at a 1:1 correlation. If you just transplant everything you end up with silliness like Weber's Rob S. Pierre running Haven in the Honorverse.
jollyreaper:
"Don't forget you have Tom Clancy and Dale Brown techno-thriller fantasies coming from the right-wing perspective."
What's your fascination with left and right, j? I'm not part of the VRWC. For every opinion I hold that upsets liberals, I've got another that upsets conservatives. Can we have an educated, non-partisan discussion? Or are we determined to pigeonhole everything into a preconceived partisan niches?
Just to set the record straight, I gave up on Clancy and Brown -- and technothrillers in general -- about 20 years ago.
"The scary ones to me are the compelling villains. Someone with a sense of honor, someone you could respect, someone of accomplishment you could admire who nevertheless has horrifying beliefs.
...
What's really scary is when someone can make such arguments so convincingly, you find yourself swept up in it."
What you want is not villains, but well designed and executed antagonists. Which is pretty basic stuff. Without dropping any names, I once had a one-on-one discussion with somebody who's name you'd recognize about that very issue in novel writing craft.
Thucydides:
"A constellation of laser and kinetic stars..."
This is something I wanted to get to when we were discussing the CoDominium future history, but I got distracted.
The ultimate problem with the single-purpose robotic spaceship is overhead. A technological base is only going to be able to make so many propulsion systems, sensor suites, battle management computers, spacecraft chassis, etc. The number of which are first line, capable of engaging in combat against the best enemy systems, are probably going to be a small fraction of the total. This will drive technology in the direction of relatively large, multi-capable vessels, probably crewed.
Raymond:
"It's not as if Campbell-age SF was any better in the realism department."
With odd exceptions that I think even the author would be hard put to explain (e.g. Starman Jones), the average writer in the 50s and 60s was much more interested in realism, WRT to what was known and understood aboout technology -- not to mention culture, history, and human nature -- than the vast majority of authors today. Authors just don't know what they're talking about these days.
"As far as the regulation of torchships goes - we haven't banned private ownership of aircraft, have we?"
And there probably wouldn't be a ban on private ownership and operation of torchships. What there would be is heavy regulation of ownership and tight control of operations. For the umpteenth time, the cost-benefit equation is just not the same as that associated with even the largest jet aircraft. Even when intentionally used as weapons, jet aircraft can only kill thousands. If intentionally used as weapons, torchships could kill millions, or even depopulate an entire planet (for a big enough torchship -- or just a torchship launced mass -- moving fast enough). Risk management for those kinds of consequences could rationally include long prison terms for something as simple as a poorly designed flight plan, much less actual, intentional misuse.
"Political speculation is, well, hard. Ostensibly that's what we're arguing about here, even more than the tech - what kinds of empires, and how strong. Political biases shape the discussion. Beliefs on which political systems and objectives are (or will be) ascendant color expectations for reasonable, plausible future political constructions."
Much less than you think. People have always had an interest in security. Franklin's epigram about liberty and safety was made from a very particular and special historical perspective. In more general terms, any liberty that people enjoy is useless without some basic level of security in which to enjoy it. The greater the potential threat to security, the more regulation people will put up with to avoid it. If enemies are real and dangerous, strong government makes sense. If risks like torchships are real and dangerous, same-same.
"Based on what you've written here, you seem to believe in both the necessity and inevitability of strong empires. Which is fine, of course. Just...perhaps avoid assuming that your conclusion is the only one which is "realistic", and others doomed to in- or meta-stability. You may be right, you may not, but the world we already know is full of madmen and tyrants and monsters and the people who follow them. There's space enough for all of them (see what I did there?)."
That's wholly dependent on the level of threat that a given technology, person, or group presents. If there's one thing people have proven themselves to be good at, it's arming themselves to suppress real threats, even if they sometimes wait a bit too long.
If you want to boil down my opinion into a few words, the more energy a device can compress into a given volume, the more regulation one will see imposed on that class of device. Where politics are concerned, the greater a threat to secure everyday life some influence is, the stronger some agency -- a single government, an alliance, a confederacy, or even an empire -- will become to resist that influence. When you match up disruptive influences with highly energetic technologies, yes, I think that governemnt will be strong and its influence widely felt.
I can imagine that just before the start of armed interplanetary or interstellar conflicts (i.e. war), that both sides only have a few orbital customs inforcers, gunships, and some asteroid deflectors. There might be some lightly armed space cruisers that support a few teams of police and a SWAT team or two, but nothing that could really be pictured as a warship; at the begining of the war, yes, there would be 'auxiliary' warships as both sides scrambled to get combat capable assets in play; later, purpose built warships would emerge and remain in use from then on, but probably not at the begining. That would be an intersting story, full of mistakes and failed military concepts.
Ferrell
Okay, why would powers that have serious enough problems to engage in war not have the military forces to do so? If the answer is because it's too expensive, then how do they conduct enough trade, or interact in any way enough that war seems like a necessity? Wars, after all, happen between communities that have high levels of communication and economic interactivity, not between strangers.
Boy, The Lost Fleet sure gets some rave reviews around here! [/snark]
My stereotype of military SF is that, even more than SF in general, it is pretty heavy on political and military pr0n. Not quite a year ago I wrote on the ur-work of the subgenre, Starship Troopers, and my rather complicated feelings about it. The later stuff, that I've read, so far hasn't lit my fires.
I mostly have heard good things about Scalzi's Old Man's War, but the title gimmick bugs me so much I haven't tried to read it.
On the earlier subthread about the place for irregular forces, armed merchantmen, pirates, and the like, all of this seems in part related to the 'density of power,' which I linked well upthread (before #200).
Taking up a particular point of interest:
Okay, why would powers that have serious enough problems to engage in war not have the military forces to do so? If the answer is because it's too expensive, then how do they conduct enough trade, or interact in any way enough that war seems like a necessity?
Perhaps because the 'density of power' was previously low enough that they were not stepping on each other's toes in any serious way.
Consider the following - pretty standard - future history:
1 - FTL is developed, interstellar colonization follows, then Earth blows itself up / turns inward / whatever, leaving a bunch of half developed colonies.
2 - An interregnum follows, since the colonies lack the industrial base for regular starship operations. Gradually they grow and re-establish contact, but at first the contact is too limited for toe-stepping. So, while there might be wars on individual colony planets, no one has reason to develop interstellar forces.
3 - Trade networks develop to the point where toe stepping does happen - and suddenly the parties involved must scramble to develop star forces, the first generation of which will likely be ad-hocced from available resources, i.e. civil ships, etc.
4 - And there you go!
Rick:
"3 - Trade networks develop to the point where toe stepping does happen - and suddenly the parties involved must scramble to develop star forces, the first generation of which will likely be ad-hocced from available resources, i.e. civil ships, etc.
4 - And there you go!"
There may be a novel or two in that, but before Our Hero, merchant cadet Purebright of the Sundrenched Republic, progesses too far in his adventures, there will be a Defense Department, a Navy, purpose-built warships, and all that entails, politically, economically, and strategically.
Yes, the outlined transition would take place, but would it necessarily be short relative to Purebright's career?
Given an initially very low 'density of power,' the toe-stepping and threat perceptions need not arise overnight, but perhaps over a period of decades.
And the earlier stages especially could be gradually because those institutional structures do not yet exist to focus attention on still-marginal threats, let alone lobby for bigger budgets.
Placing weapon packages aboard merchant ships can make sense when only merchies on long voyages face direct threat, and fully separate purpose built warships would be very expensive.
For that matter, the ever popular rider ship blurs the distinction - is the combination an armed merchant ship, or merchant ship with escort? Season and stir for your desired tech flavor.
Also, it is not uncommon for Romance to picture as timeless eras circumstances that were actually transitional and fairly brief - 'pirates of the Caribbean' a case in point.
General aside: How am I supposed to finish my next post when comments like this one invite whole new topics?
Tony
The Pournellian space fleets seem to revolve around the premise that large numbers of crewmen are needed to maintain the ship during cruise, and having a large number of damage control parties provides a greater advantage during battle, since you can continue to fight longer than the other guy (until the Langston field implodes!)
This is the Rocketpunk scenario writ large, and it makes sense if manpower is plentiful and cheap. If capital is cheap and manpower expensive, then the maximum POI for your side is to man the factories, not the fleet. Robot ships can be build and assembled faster and cheaper, since they don't have the bulky and expensive life support systems and crew accommodations. Compare MOL and Almaz to modern recon satellites.
The Admiralty can focus on training the officers and ratings for diplomatic and non combat missions, and the frigate going into orbit to show the flag will have a constellation in the High Guard to make sure things go your way.
As for the halfassing it bit, I'm imagining powers that don't have a strong naval tradition and are unprepared for the realities of the war they're foolishly entering into.
Ships are the easy part. The Ottoman Empire used many of the techniques of the Venetian Arsenal to rebuild quickly after Lepanto, but the massive losses of officers and men prevented the fleet from going on the offensive after this point. The French in Napoleonic times, the USN at the start of the Civil War, the Germans and former USSR all suffered from similar problems.
Even the PLAN's desire to build up to 5 aircraft carriers seems a bit silly, since they will be up against twice as many larger and more capable USN carriers, backed by generations of experience.
I am guessing Cadet Purebright will retire knowing the next generation of officers and ratings will be able to use his hard won experience in the coming war (unless he is killed gaining that experience).
"I understand the desire for authors to keep war dangerous to life and limb, but I really do not believe that soldiers are going to be happy with the idea of putting themselves in danger simply for the sake of being in danger even though they're no actually needed for anything. Nor, for that matter, will the populace or the rulers. People aren't morons."
Oddly enough, Mamoru Oshii explores this idea in the movie "Sky Crawlers". The powers that be discovered that humans have this *need* for conflict, and it needs to be real death, not just an overgrown American Football game. If it wasn't created for them artificially, the societies would drive themselves into a war. Thus begins what amounts to a refight of WW2, with cooler-looking planes, and "immortal" pilots (a spin-off of some company's cancer research). These pilots are essentially modern-day gladiators, with a much higher budget.
It's mostly a cool trip down the rabbit-hole, but it raises some interesting points. Watch the movie, I've already spoiled about half the metaplot.
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"I couldn't find a comparison between the cost of a ship of the line from the age of sail and a destroyer in this day and age. Not sure if the comparison would be quite appropriate."
The USS Constitution cost $300,000 in 1797 dollars. According to http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi , that's the equivalent of $3.8m in 2009 dollars. I don't know if that includes weapons.
The USS Arleigh Burke (similar size, crew, and place in the scheme of things) cost $322m new, not including weapons. So, that's 100x more expensive in raw dollars, but as a percentage of GDP? I'm pretty sure the GDP of the US is a couple thousand times the size it was in the 1790s.
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As far as the hyperspace-is-dangerous trope goes, well, the mid-ocean with nothing to see but that strangely purple water is different enough to do strange things to your mind. Been there, done that. Normal space does those strange things even faster, according to those that look at it too long. Navigable hyperspace would, by definition, have some really weird effects on the human mind caused by the changes in certain laws of physics. The Peacemaker stories imply that all the demonic imagery is just in your mind, though.
ony: "Being able to attack enemy traffic only in or near solar systems means that the situation would something akin to the U-boat war in WWI, except no submarine stealth to help the commerce raider, nor even the slim advantage of actually being a military weapon system designed for war (which the u-boat was).
They'd do good for a few months, then be eaten alive by convoy escorts."
The FTL system being used may allow ambushes though. Perhaps if you know when the next few ships are coming in - hyper in ahead, wait at the edge of the system for them to emerge from hyperspace, and nail them whilst their sensors are blinded & before the in-system defences can get there and nail you.
In addition, even if it only works for a while, it can still be useful. "Okay raiding fleets, go forth and be a pain in the arse, but get back ASAP if they start using convoys & proper escorts".
"Only the US Navy against the Japanese was ultimately successful -- it had the best ocean-going submarine boats, the highest level of resource commitment, and an enemy that couldn't help itself even if it wanted to."
The main reason the US Navy succeeded was because the Japanese were stupid. Not using a proper convoy system for example... oh dear. I don't think the Japanese could have survived even if they had used proper anti-commerce-raiding measures, mind you - the Allied powers were just too big - but they could have done a lot better than they did.
jollyreaper: "Depends on how stealthy you get to be. U-Boat losses were unacceptable by the end of WWI but advances made them deadly again by WWII only to become very vulnerable again by the end of the war. Surface commerce raiding was a non-starter but might have been more effective against an enemy without such a strong surface fleet."
The initial German raids in WW1 were pretty effective until the Admiralty got its act together. In WW2 meanwhile, Britain had some of the best ASW ships around... they just didn't have the range / design to operate in the Atlantic, having been designed to bottle up German subs in the Channel & North Sea. When France fell, this strategy fell with it.
Raymond: "Just...perhaps avoid assuming that your conclusion is the only one which is "realistic", and others doomed to in- or meta-stability."
Heck, that in- or meta- stability may be the whole reason for the story. And from what I've seen in history, stable, long-lasting governments are usually grown, not made.
Thucydides: "WRT polities in the Solar or Interstellar period, I think we will be looking at something more like "city states" since planets and colonies with closed life support systems are essentially self sufficient. Unless communications and transport has a negligible cost, the largest polity might be something like the Jovian moon system (and even then many of the minor moons might be "the wild west" for political and economic purposes."
Self-sufficient they may be, but I wonder if the people would want to be merely self-sufficient. Barring some very unusual colonisation model, your colony will start out small & relatively low-tech. The precision machine tools et al you need to build the microprocessors for a holodeck will come from a more developed world, which encourages you to retain close links with such worlds, at least initially.
However, that initial need then becomes tradition, even when the colony doesn't need those things because they've a good enough industrial base. So will they rebel? Depends on the situation you cook up for the story of course - the point though is that I can see larger nations emerging due to this.
jollyreaper: "The scary ones to me are the compelling villains. Someone with a sense of honor, someone you could respect, someone of accomplishment you could admire who nevertheless has horrifying beliefs."
True. I think there've been a few good "evil from page 1" types (Boskone anyone?), but the ones I prefer are the types who come across as rather more human (if that's not too species-centric).
Tony: "For example, in WWI the quest for decisive battle ran headlong into the capability of the modern industrial state to resist quick defeat."
Not quite. It's possible that Jutland could have been a more decisive battle, but whilst a British defeat would have Britain lose the war in an afternoon, a decisive British victory would only have allowed a more complete blockade of Germany.
The tradition of the "decisive battle" goes back in no small part to Mahan, who raised the profile of big battles like Trafalgar at the expense of what the Royal Navy usually employed: a strong blockade to keep its enemies bottled up in port.
IOW, the "decisive battle" as a war-winning move never really existed (except, perhaps, against maritime powers): it merely allowed the winner to better blockade the loser into submission.
"I'd love to see your historical examples."
The Confederacy in the American Civil War didn't have a clue when it came to naval warfare: it lost a lot of key ports and the like, and by the end was running low on food, which is... worrying for an economy dominated by agriculture. Its wooden ship designs are also amusing once you realise that many of them were done by for carpenters to make, as they lacked the skillset to make proper designs. Also I believe many of those most in favour of war with Britain in 1812 were those who didn't rely as much on maritime trade as, say, New England.
Tony: "If you want to boil down my opinion into a few words, the more energy a device can compress into a given volume, the more regulation one will see imposed on that class of device."
I would append to that a note that this has to be relative to something. Again, just about every starship in Star Wars has engines that put torchships to shame... but their armour and shielding are so good that they still need to have dedicated multi-GT turbolasers to blow the other guy up.
In cases like this, it's probably not "energy density" that governments worry about, but things like automated construction systems. If a private company can ship in everything for the Death Star 2 in secret, I'd worry less about whether they can smash into planetary shields and more about whether they might set off a von Neumann swarm by accident.
Ferrell: I can imagine that just before the start of armed interplanetary or interstellar conflicts (i.e. war), that both sides only have a few orbital customs inforcers, gunships, and some asteroid deflectors."
Yes... if the war comes upon people as a surprise, which is unlikely. Most powerful nations today have regular planning sessions and war games to try and estimate, for example, the likelihood of a US-Chinese war, and the best ways to fight it.
Re: Rick
I was being a bit flippant, but there is a point to be made here: at no point in history that I can think of was a there a serious naval war -- something more than state-sanctioned piracy -- where both sides didn't have an organized navy. If there's enough toe stepping to start a war over, there's enough toe stepping to motivate naval construction.
Re: Thucydides
I think you missed my point. I wasn't talking specifically of Pournelle's future history. Your attempted additions to it just put me in mind of a broader point. And that point is that constellations of unmanned, single purpose weapon platforms presuposes essentially unlimited resources. Well, unlimited resources simply don't exist. That's why we have only a dozen nuclear carriers, and why we could only buy so many F-22 fighters.
You mentioned the present day deprecation of manned orbital reconaissance stations in favor of robotic systems. That's relevant today, but to have space war in an interstellar future, the cost of manned systems will have had to come down to a manageable level, else there wouldn't be interstellar societies to have wars.
You mentioned that someday people would be a more valuable resource than hardware. Really? That's what you're going with? People are cheap, cheap, cheap. In WWII we killed off tens of thousands of our most fit, skilled young men in the skies over Europe and Japan. We still dominated the postwar world.
I'll put my money on manned warships for the future -- at sea, in solar space, in an interstellar milieu -- not for romantic resons, but for practical ones.
Teleros:
"The FTL system being used may allow ambushes though."
How? If you have a system of fixed jump points, commerce raiding isn't even going to happen, because naval activity will be focussed on the jump points, and nowhere else. If you have a free-form FTL, there's no way to predict where a ship or convoy is going to enter a solar system. Ambushese would be impossible, on practical grounds.
"The main reason the US Navy succeeded was because the Japanese were stupid."
The Japanese didn't have enough escorts to do much convoying. Even using their best approach, it would have been marginally effective.
"Not quite. It's possible that Jutland could have been a more decisive battle..."
It was totally impossible. Scheer was never going to fight the whole Grand Fleet at once. That he came close to doing just that at Jutland was the consequence of misadventure piled upon misadventure. And Scheer bailed as soon as he could.
"The Confederacy in the American Civil War..."
I guess I should have been more specific. I meant to elicit examples where both sides were totally unprepared. For the Civil War, one could make a case for the land forces being ad hoc for the first year or so, but the Union Navy was ready for war, if not as large as it needed to eventually become.
It's not so much about cost as it is about performance. Except in the case of gross scale mismatch, where a handful of crew man a megaton warcraft, humans are a major mass penalty for a ship-of-the-line (or whatever you want to call the class of warcraft primarily designed for slugging it out in full-scale battle). Patrol frigates, command cruisers, convoy escorts? Sure. Warcraft for large engagements? Maybe, but not certainly.
Patrol frigates, command cruisers, convoy escorts? Sure. Warcraft for large engagements? Maybe, but not certainly.
I suppose it would depend on your setting.
If we run with the assumption that humans want another human on the spot to make political decisions that will not be trusted to the AI, then there will always be a human ultimately in charge. For a patrol, the you may have a destroyer squadron and the destroyer tender equivalent will also be the command ship. For convoy escort, the heaviest manned ship in the convoy could well be civilian and the fleet commander puts his flag there, the escorts are unmanned and flying protection. For the main fleet, you'll have several command ships so that the fleet can be broken into task forces if necessary. The command ship stays secure in the center of the formation and passes instructions to the unmanned ships.
If ships are a zillion tons already and the mass requirements of human lifesupport could be considered a rounding error, the only question would be whether humans would hurt ship performance. And we're thinking that 20G maneuvering is getting into pure magictech territory.
When you think about it, the mission profile of something like the Enterprise D becomes really strange. As the Fed flagship it's a big propaganda tool: it's a symbol of technical prowess, a vehicle for carrying out diplomacy, a little bit Coast Guard, a little bit law enforcement, an exploration vessel and incidentally a main battleship of the Federation fleet. And everyone has their families onboard.
There's a long history of ships being built originally for one mission and being repurposed for another but seldom do you see a ship trying to do both missions at once. That could be the most fantastic part about the entire ship!
Humans are already considered expensive, at least in the West. This shows up in many areas, including using UAVs and eventually UCAVs to replace piloted aircraft, replacing permanent workers with pensions and benefits with part time or temp workers without in the business environment, and replacing or supplementing workers with robots in places where it is difficult or less practical to eliminate full time employees.
The amount of armour and protective gear "grunts" wear today is also a reflection of this. In AFV terms, things like heavy APCs could have been developed anytime since WWII, indeed the "Kangaroo" was a repurposed Ram tank chassis, but MRAPs, HAPC's and so on have only caught on in the last decade rather than during the Cold War when the threat was mass artillery and tank fire rather than a few IEDs.
For a setting in space, people will be even scarcer (in relative terms) the farther away you go from the metropole, but they will be augmented with as much high tech as possible so they can build and develop their colonies. No matter what the tech, an unmanned system can always be smaller, lighter and cheaper than a similar manned system, since the habs and life support systems can be eliminated from the design (just as a UAV is smaller than a comparable manned aircraft). For a space example, imagine the ISS and remove the hab modules and associated life support systems. (this example would be complete if we replaced the habs with lightweight "pallets" where remote science experiments can be performed). The R&D, manufacturing and launch costs of the habs can also be eliminated.
By this reasoning, I can build one manned frigate and several robotic combat ships with the same investment of resources that might be used for (say) two frigates. Over time, a compound interest effect happens; I eventually have much more fighting power in reserve than enemies who do not use robotic systems.
Re: Thucydides
You're still missing the point, T. Wepaons system outfits are not unlimitted. Sensor suites are not unlimited. Propulsion plants are not unlimited. One can't just snap his fingers an make more of them. We're back to pros and amateurs again -- a robotic, single-use warcraft makes a great tactical toy in theory, but it's probably a non-starter in practice, with any kind of realistic resource base.
WRT the current value placed on human life in the West, we still put people in fighters and bombers, and aboard warships.
Tony:
"Wepaons system outfits are not unlimitted. Sensor suites are not unlimited. Propulsion plants are not unlimited. One can't just snap his fingers an make more of them. We're back to pros and amateurs again -- a robotic, single-use warcraft makes a great tactical toy in theory, but it's probably a non-starter in practice, with any kind of realistic resource base."
- Nobody said single-use.
- What, we can't shift production from habs to engines? Powerplants and sensor suites are expensive, yes. So are hab units. And as we've established on the many space warfare threads, the presence of humans on a given craft (I'm not referring to the constellation level) aren't likely to give any performance advantage to offset the mass penalty.
"WRT the current value placed on human life in the West, we still put people in fighters and bombers, and aboard warships."
And we're deprecating them rather quickly on the aircraft side...
One point worth considering about the size of empire:
The maximum size is limited by the speed of communication. The maximum comms-time observed with on-planet empires is roughly 2 years, but those were near-independent operations.
More typical was 6-9 months delay from event happening to event being reported in the Imperial Capital.
This means that if your FTL is instantaneous jump points with real-space travel time between, and no FTL comms, then your maximum effective empire size is going to be about 3 light-months from the jump-points.
Raymond:
"- Nobody said single-use."
Single use in this context means single weapon type.
"- What, we can't shift production from habs to engines? Powerplants and sensor suites are expensive, yes. So are hab units."
Remember, we're talking insterstellar scale. If we have the energy to do that, people are going to be living on planets whenever and wherever they can, not in habs. Even if society is mostly hab-based -- especially if society is hab-based -- converting hab building and maintencance infrastructure into shipbuilding is going to cause problems, particularly in peacetime, which is when the character of military forces are set.
"And we're deprecating them rather quickly on the aircraft side..."
We are? I've seen a lot of speculation in that direction, but not much actual movement. Hellfire armed Predator isn't exactly a strike package.
Tony - at no point in history that I can think of was a there a serious naval war -- something more than state-sanctioned piracy -- where both sides didn't have an organized navy.
Organized navies, as we understand them, were not the norm in northern European waters right through the 16th century. England had one in the sense that it had a number of purpose built royal warships and an organization to maintain them, but it had no standing officer corps.
No one else had that much. The French invasion force of 1545 (against which the Mary Rose sank in action) had a handful of ships personally owned by the king, at least one personally owned by the queen, a squadron of chartered Genoese galleys, and a whole bunch of requisitioned merchantmen, armed for the operation.
The Spanish Armada wasn't much different - it included 10 Portuguese royal galleons, another 10 galleons of the Casa de Contratacion, a partnership of the crown and merchants of Seville that operated the American treasure convoys, and a very mixed bag of other ships chartered or requisitioned from across Catholic Europe.
For that matter, the Dutch continued to use merchant ships even in battle forces during the Anglo-Dutch wars, though they also had purpose built warships.
A relevant question also is what constitutes 'naval construction' in a given setting. Entire purpose built ships? Riders carried aboard merchant ships? Weapon packages clamped onto cargo racks?
Tony:
"Single use in this context means single weapon type."
Nobody said single weapon type, either. Or are you saying single-purpose?
"Remember, we're talking insterstellar scale. If we have the energy to do that, people are going to be living on planets whenever and wherever they can, not in habs. Even if society is mostly hab-based -- especially if society is hab-based -- converting hab building and maintencance infrastructure into shipbuilding is going to cause problems, particularly in peacetime, which is when the character of military forces are set."
I was more referring to boosting the production of powerplants and sensors preferentially - and production would be boosted during any war of any significant duration.
"We are? I've seen a lot of speculation in that direction, but not much actual movement. Hellfire armed Predator isn't exactly a strike package."
X-47B had its first flight last month (4 Feb), and it's very much a strike platform. BAE Taranis is supposed to fly next year. Don't know about the timeframe for the MiG Skat, but it's in development.
Rick:
I would rate the Spanish Armada as an organized navy, even if it appears a hopeless adhocracy by today's standards. One of the things we have to remember is that the military usages of any given time count. In NW Eaurope, from before the fall of Rome to the widespread adoption of gunpowder artillery, vessels involved in military adventures were almost exclusively for transport of ground troops. Fighting at sea was rare, and when it did happen, it tended to take the form of grappling and fighting as if on land. Still, at the same time, in the Eastern Mediteranean the Byzantine Empire maintained a navy of warships, including the shipping of relatively advanced weapons like Greek Fire siphons.
So I think I'll stick with the opinion that naval warfare implies a navy, at least on one side.
Tony: "If you have a free-form FTL, there's no way to predict where a ship or convoy is going to enter a solar system. Ambushese would be impossible, on practical grounds."
Free-form FTL up to a limit around a star perhaps? Commerce raiders may decide to hang out around the least-time end point from another system in that case - at least if there's no regular warships there waiting to escort the merchants into the system.
"The Japanese didn't have enough escorts to do much convoying. Even using their best approach, it would have been marginally effective."
Like I said, they were stupid :P . If you're living on a resource-poor island and don't protect the flow of vital goods & materials coming in... oh dear.
"It was totally impossible. Scheer was never going to fight the whole Grand Fleet at once. That he came close to doing just that at Jutland was the consequence of misadventure piled upon misadventure. And Scheer bailed as soon as he could."
I'm engaging in a little "what if" here than anything else. No, I doubt Scheer wanted to go down in flames like that (although their navy officers *did* seriously consider that at the end of WW1, which helped encourage its sailors to mutiny...), my point was that it would only have been decisive for one side, a victory by the other would've had little outcome on the war by comparison.
"WRT the current value placed on human life in the West, we still put people in fighters and bombers, and aboard warships."
Moreover, not all Western nations are equal. From my personal experience, I'd say that the USA values the lives of its soldiers more than, say, the UK.
Raymond: "And we're deprecating them rather quickly on the aircraft side..."
However, look at the missions where we're seeing the most use of robots: ones that are low key, and either very boring or very dangerous, even by modern warfare standards. Land mine / IED removal, drone strikes on Taliban leaders in the mountains, supporting human soldiers in urban warfare, etc. And always with a human in ultimate control. And whilst we may be seeing unmanned bombers in the next few years (is the X-47B remote controlled?), I doubt we'll see an equivalent interceptor aircraft for quite a while. At least, not a good one :P .
Tony said"Ferrell: I can imagine that just before the start of armed interplanetary or interstellar conflicts (i.e. war), that both sides only have a few orbital customs inforcers, gunships, and some asteroid deflectors."
Yes... if the war comes upon people as a surprise, which is unlikely. Most powerful nations today have regular planning sessions and war games to try and estimate, for example, the likelihood of a US-Chinese war, and the best ways to fight it."
Actually, it only takes one side to be surprised. I would imagine that a bunch of colonies getting tired of being micromanaged by people orbiting a dot in the sky (and having a small capacity for ship building), they arm a few of their ships and strike at the central government's paramilitary bases and suddenly the central government is forced to play catchup; there probably will be no question of the ultimate outcome, but it might take years to resolve itself.
If China had not been so preoccupied with itself, it might not have been screwed-over so baddly by Japane in WWII; sometimes countries do dumb stuff just like induviduals do.
Ferrell
From what I’ve been reading (and there’s been a lot over a few days), a big yet fundamental hurdle into the existence of any possible interstellar empire in the first place is travel. STL travel is exponentially more plausible and offers interesting sociological, cultural and even biological evolutionary story hooks for the author, but an Interstellar Empire I strongly doubt it. Settled words in such a universe would be more akin to very distant trading partners than planets under the umbrella of a single government. As Scott has mentioned, communication is vital to keeping any possible Interstellar Empire in stable cohesion. If it takes years, if not decades, for information to be passed from the metropole to the nearest settled colony world then there’s no guarantee that said colonists would adhere to the mandates and commands of the metropole completely, if at all. As if possible rebellious or even separatist colonists in an STL setting were bad enough, think of how long it would take to answer emergencies and the provisions of humanitarian aid when something happens to said colony?
As for the argument of FTL and fleet type derailment of the original blog entry, well that’s simply a natural plot point when one works out the presence of a single Human Interstellar Empire, never mind multiple or extrasolar sapient civilizations. An Interstellar Empire can’t expand far if it can’t reach its destination within a reasonable amount of time to respond to the demands of settlers and corporations, and being a member of said Interstellar Empire is no guarantee of security and safety from either foreign or domestic threats if there is no military to project said will and protection to member-worlds and hostile incursions.
To me, an STL civilization makes more plausible sense for a Solar Nation-State with (maybe) some extrasolar settlements and colonies whose round trip travel times are noticeably shorter than a decade.
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I'm reposting this reply again since for some odd reason, the blogger deleted my entry even though it stated that it was already recieved and published.
From what I’ve been reading (and there’s been a lot over a few days), a big yet fundamental hurdle into the existence of any possible interstellar empire in the first place is travel. STL travel is exponentially more plausible and offers interesting sociological, cultural and even biological evolutionary story hooks for the author, but an Interstellar Empire I strongly doubt it. Settled words in such a universe would be more akin to very distant trading partners than planets under the umbrella of a single government. As Scott has mentioned, communication is vital to keeping any possible Interstellar Empire in stable cohesion. If it takes years, if not decades, for information to be passed from the metropole to the nearest settled colony world then there’s no guarantee that said colonists would adhere to the mandates and commands of the metropole completely, if at all. As if possible rebellious or even separatist colonists in an STL setting were bad enough, think of how long it would take to answer emergencies and the provisions of humanitarian aid when something happens to said colony?
As for the argument of FTL and fleet type derailment of the original blog entry, well that’s simply a natural plot point when one works out the presence of a single Human Interstellar Empire, never mind multiple or extrasolar sapient civilizations. An Interstellar Empire can’t expand far if it can’t reach its destination within a reasonable amount of time to respond to the demands of settlers and corporations, and being a member of said Interstellar Empire is no guarantee of security and safety from either foreign or domestic threats if there is no military to project said will and protection to member-worlds and hostile incursions.
On the Automation vs. Manned combat spacecraft, I am of the thought that not only should there be a human in the loop but that drone-based weapon platforms shouldn’t be deployed too distant from central constellation command where the “Kill Switch” signal isn’t received properly. Even if one isn’t afraid of Terminator-esque rogue AI running rampant, it should disallow hostile forces to reprogram the unmanned weapon platform against you (given enough time, resources, and skilled technicians mind you).
To me, an STL civilization makes more plausible sense for a Solar Nation-State with (maybe) some extrasolar settlements and colonies whose round trip travel times are noticeably under a decade.
Oh and before I forget, and this piece of advice is a bit late considering that said FTL blog entry is already posted, for Rick's problem with TVTropes I would suggest that said blog entry should at least be written out in a word document before clicking on said Tropes Link.
That and for future link references to said website by potential repliers, one should at least be mindful to put a "disclaimer" immediately before and after to warn those that the reference materiel should only be done when one isn't about to perform a task or if they need something to occupy their extra time. Whatever helps in getting more blog entries completed.
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This is the second time I had to resubmit the same reply to this blog. I'm starting to see why so many people are so hard set against automated machines being frontline warfighters if a simple program such as this continues to make the same mistake.
From what I’ve been reading (and there’s been a lot over a few days), a big yet fundamental hurdle into the existence of any possible interstellar empire in the first place is travel. STL travel is exponentially more plausible and offers interesting sociological, cultural and even biological evolutionary story hooks for the author, but an Interstellar Empire I strongly doubt it. Settled words in such a universe would be more akin to very distant trading partners than planets under the umbrella of a single government. As Scott has mentioned, communication is vital to keeping any possible Interstellar Empire in stable cohesion. If it takes years, if not decades, for information to be passed from the metropole to the nearest settled colony world then there’s no guarantee that said colonists would adhere to the mandates and commands of the metropole completely, if at all. As if possible rebellious or even separatist colonists in an STL setting were bad enough, think of how long it would take to answer emergencies and the provisions of humanitarian aid when something happens to said colony?
As for the argument of FTL and fleet type derailment of the original blog entry, well that’s simply a natural plot point when one works out the presence of a single Human Interstellar Empire, never mind multiple or extrasolar sapient civilizations. An Interstellar Empire can’t expand far if it can’t reach its destination within a reasonable amount of time to respond to the demands of settlers and corporations, and being a member of said Interstellar Empire is no guarantee of security and safety from either foreign or domestic threats if there is no military to project said will and protection to member-worlds and hostile incursions.
On the Automation vs. Manned combat spacecraft, I am of the thought that not only should there be a human in the loop but that drone-based weapon platforms shouldn’t be deployed too distant from central constellation command where the “Kill Switch” signal isn’t received properly. Even if one isn’t afraid of Terminator-esque rogue AI running rampant, it should disallow hostile forces to reprogram the unmanned weapon platform against you (given enough time, resources, and skilled technicians mind you).
To me, an STL civilization makes more plausible sense for a Solar Nation-State with (maybe) some extrasolar settlements and colonies whose round trip travel times are noticeably under a decade.
Oh and before I forget, and this piece of advice is a bit late considering that said FTL blog entry is already posted, for Rick's problem with TVTropes I would suggest that said blog entry should at least be written out in a word document before clicking on said Tropes Link.
That and for future link references to said website by potential repliers, one should at least be mindful to put a "disclaimer" immediately before and after to warn those that the reference materiel should only be done when one isn't about to perform a task or if they need something to occupy their extra time. Whatever helps in getting more blog entries completed.
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@Tony:
"I was being a bit flippant, but there is a point to be made here: at no point in history that I can think of was a there a serious naval war -- something more than state-sanctioned piracy -- where both sides didn't have an organized navy."
I can think of one single example, but its a biggie:
Rome in the first Punic War.
Not only did they have to scramble to build a navy (rather than relying on their Greek maritime allies) once hostilities begun (and even having to copy Carthaginian designs after some sank near the italian Coast), but they also lost tens in storms before they perfected their sailing technique. I can point you to several texts that cover this, even if in brief detail.
As regards robots, I usually handwave a device such as a BCI that makes a human "somehow" better than a robot, or at least better if he cooperates with another robot- thus you have some expednability in some dedicated robotic platforms, and still a large human presence in militaries.
With regards to the contracting comment:
Army Considers Returning to Old-Fashioned System of Soldiers Maintaining Vehicles Instead of Contractors
Friday, March 04, 2011 After running what one general called “a rental car company,” the U.S. Army has decided to go back to having soldiers perform maintenance on helicopters and trucks, instead of relying exclusively on contractors.
General Raymond Mason, deputy chief of staff for Army Forces Command, said the service needs to have a better balance between what contractors provide and what the Army’s own personnel can do. For too long now, soldiers have been dropping off equipment for repairs or maintenance, Mason said, turning the service into a Hertz operation.
By having the Army’s own perform work on vehicles and aircraft, it should be able to get equipment back online faster and save money too.
Using what’s known as condition-based maintenance systems that predict equipment failure, the Army says it saved $210 million in aviation repairs last year.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x555028
The motto of business is if something's worth doing, it's worth doing for money. If a business is for-profit, it must make a profit. Nobody is going to be satisfied with breaking even the way a non-profit is supposed to. (Granted, there are non-profits operated as scams but the intent is to operate for a greater purpose than making money which is why they get the breaks.)
How are we to believe that contracting out government services to private contractors will save us money, especially when every example of this we've seen costs more money?
And an interesting point raised by fighting wars with PMC's -- we're spending treasure, not blood. Those aren't draftees coming back in coffins. Without PMC's, we'd have to draft to keep the wars going. We don't notice the bleeding. And even as far as the volunteers go, that can be rationalized away as "they knew what they were signing up for." This is essentially the exact same moral hazard presented with regards to killbot armies.
If we want to take the skin-in-the-game argument to the furthest extreme, how about putting a bomb collar around the necks of the highest leadership in the country? Every time a soldier dies, there's a one in a thousand chance the bomb collar goes off. Because if we're able to rationalize away volunteers dying as different form draftees, maybe the leaders can rationalize away caring about people dying who aren't themselves.
And yes, I know this is an absurdist proposition and I'm freely admitting it. But I think it's about as extreme as deliberately keeping a person in the loop to be killed one we have the technical means of removing them entirely. Right now it's just a philosophical question because we can't do away with the grunt with the rifle. But in two hundred years if we're still sending Johnny off to war in lieu of killbots because we think that will keep people paying attention...
Another reason why killbots would be a bad idea is that they take away the sacrifice people make for their country when they go to war. People usually go to war (I'm discounting mercs and draftees here) because they're willing to fight and possibly die to protect their country. Take that away and war merely becomes a more destructive form of economics, with no sacrifice made other than the cost of the robots themselves. Then, it all boils down to who can crank out the most killbots and get them to the front lines faster. Then, there is no purpose to war, as no one's willing to fight it without a robot proxy.
Geoffrey S H:
"I can think of one single example, but its a biggie:
Rome in the first Punic War."
The Carthaginians had a navy.
jollyreaper:
"...in two hundred years if we're still sending Johnny off to war in lieu of killbots because we think that will keep people paying attention..."
...we'll be doing the right thing. If we just send out killbots -- IOW, if all we can do is kill somebody, not shake his hand, share his food, etc. -- then all we're doing is preying on the technologically less sophisticated.
Raymond:
"Nobody said single weapon type, either. Or are you saying single-purpose?"
Nobody said single weapon type? I'm pretty sure that's the idea behind "laser star" or "kinetic star".
...we'll be doing the right thing. If we just send out killbots -- IOW, if all we can do is kill somebody, not shake his hand, share his food, etc. -- then all we're doing is preying on the technologically less sophisticated.
So what would you think about the bomb collar idea for the political leadership? Because I'm sure anyone reading that suggestion would say "Oh, wait, no, you're talking crazy-talk."
The Rama sequels were generally awful but one bit that stuck out is the octo-spiders had a tradition that leaders who suggested the species go to war would be killed at the termination of the conflict. There was also some sort of royal jelly thing where they underwent changes to make them better suited for martial leadership. But the salient point here was that if you thought it was worth sending other people to die for something, you would die in turn.
I think it's a wonderful moral statement. Would break down in practice with hummies because you'd have leaders shirking necessary fights because of not wanting to die. And if you say "oh, well maybe if it's defense against attack you don't have to kill the leaders" then you'll have elaborate preemptive wars arguing that invasion and conquest is really defensive so no executions are needed. Or if not that, the leader will just make sure the war never ends so he can safely die on office.
Come to think of it, I think there was also a scene in a Piers Anthony book where the leaders of Iran and Iraq were spirited away from their bunkers and locked in a room with knives. They were told that they could settle their differences and the last side with someone capable of crawling out would be the victor, leave the children out of it. A lovely if impractical fantasy.
Re: jollyreaper
Top ut it in a few words, you are being ridiculous.
Up until the last few hundred years, kings fought alongside their soldiers more often than not. In great Britain it's still considered a royal duty to serve actively in the armed forces. We already have a possible future king of Great Britain that fought in Afghanistan.
In WWII George VI would not leave London during the Blitz or V-weapon attacks. His wife and the future Queen Elizabeth II (and her sister) stayed as well. In WWI, when he was just Prince Albert, the future king George VI was a turret officer aboard HMS Collingwood at Jutland.
George's prime minister, Mr. Churchill, also stayed in the City during the Blitz and V-weapon campaign. In WWI he spent several months in the trenches as an infantry officer. Prior to that he fought at Omdurman as a cavalry officer.
Let's see, who else...
Frederick the Great.
Wilhelm I, first German Emperor, fought at both Ligny and Waterloo.
Hilter was, very famously and notoriously, a frontkaempfer in WWI.
Stalin did his share of fighting in the Russian Civil War.
Kruschev was a front line political officer at Stalingrad. (Regardless of what one thinks about Soviet era commisars, the ones in the Red Army took the same risks as the soldiers.)
Mao was a soldier before he was a premier.
Uncle Ho was a fighter before he was, well...Uncle Ho.
Napoleon.
George Washington heard the lead fly, both as a junior officer and a general.
Alexander Hamilton was an artillery officer early in the Revolution, spent time on Washington's staff, and led a light infantry battalion at Yorktown.
US Presidents who were Civil War combat veterans: Ulysses Grant (Mexican-American War also), Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.
Theodore Roosevelt led a regiment in the Spanish-American War.
Harry Truman was an artillery captain in WWI.
John Kennedy had something to do with a small craft, hull number 109...
John Kerry and George W. Bush, whatever one thinks of the character of either's Vietnam service, were both officers that took daily military risks during Vietnam, one as a boat commander and the other in aerial flight.
Personally, I like my Presidential and Congressional candidates to have combat arms military service in their CVs. A lot of people do.
So the conclusion to draw here is that leaders tend to learn nothing from their military experience because they keep getting us involved in stupid, pointless wars.
You're missing the point I was making about the bomb collar.
1. It's generally thought to be a good thing to keep our soldiers out of harm's way and remove the need for them to die in war.
2. The counter-argument to that is if you remove the blood risk, then we go to war too easily. So we need to keep humans at risk on the pointy end of the spear.
3. Leaders represent the dull end of the spear, kept safe on the home front. Regardless of whether it's killbots or GI's getting blown up, the leaders aren't facing any risks themselves. If risk is seen as a good thing and a reason to keep humans as moving targets on the front lines, why not allow the leadership to share in that risk? For the record, I think most people would find the bomb collar idea crazy but I would suggest that if you feel that way, the feeling should also carry through to putting "shoot me" signs on soldiers and keeping them in harm's way. Why would one be acceptable and not the other? I do think that killbot armies would be a whole lot easier to use than live soldier armies and that's a very bad thing but I don't think simply saying that will prevent us from developing them.
4. You point out that there's a long history of leaders who have both served as combat soldiers on the front lines and have also been in positions of influence to cause these wars in the first place.
5. Those leaders risked their lives when they were armored with the invulnerability of youth. Would they be so cavalier doing the same things as middle-aged men? Some, perhaps.
Just from my POV, I don't think it's possible to have a war where both sides are in the right. Either one side is the aggressor and the other the victim or both are equally guilty of choosing the fight. If both sides were blameless, they'd be settling their differences at the negotiating table instead of on the battlefield. Things get murky when you talk about getting involved in a fight not your own to defend someone else. There's a fine line between standing up for the weak and sticking your nose where it doesn't belong.
jollyreaper:
"So the conclusion to draw here is that leaders tend to learn nothing from their military experience because they keep getting us involved in stupid, pointless wars."
Incorrect. The conclusion to draw here is that leaders who have experienced the risks of combat know what they're doing when they put other people in a position to face those risks.
"You're missing the point I was making about the bomb collar."
No -- I just think you're being absurd, without the absurdity servint to illustrate a valid point.
"1. It's generally thought to be a good thing to keep our soldiers out of harm's way and remove the need for them to die in war."
Incorrect. The objective is to avoid needlessly risking their lives and limbs. Keeping soldiers out of harms way is a naive and morally reprehensible ideal. That so many people think that's what we should be doing is to our great shame.
"2. The counter-argument to that is if you remove the blood risk, then we go to war too easily. So we need to keep humans at risk on the pointy end of the spear."
We don't need to. It's just that if our enemies can't hold at least some of us at risk, we cease fighting war and begin a career of unaccountable predation.
"3. Leaders represent the dull end of the spear, kept safe on the home front...If risk is seen as a good thing and a reason to keep humans as moving targets on the front lines, why not allow the leadership to share in that risk?"
Are leaders without risk? I don't think the Presidential security aparatus exists solely to protect Da Man against nutjobs with cheap handguns. It is thought that Congress was directly targeted on 9/11 by the plane that was crashed in Pennsylvania. In the cases of both al Qaeda and Iraq, it's not like we said, "Oh, Osama and Saddam are leaders, let's leave them alone."
"4. You point out that there's a long history of leaders who have both served as combat soldiers on the front lines and have also been in positions of influence to cause these wars in the first place.
5. Those leaders risked their lives when they were armored with the invulnerability of youth. Would they be so cavalier doing the same things as middle-aged men? Some, perhaps."
How do you define "youth"? Grant was just three weeks shy of his 40th birthday at Shiloh. Churchill was 42 in the trenches. He was 70 during the V-weapon offensive, when he stood just as much risk as anybody else living in London. Teddy Roosevelt was also closing in on 40 when he fought in Cuba. Truman was 34 in 1918, in France.George Washington was 45 at Monmouth, NJ, where he accepted a great deal of personal risk.
"Just from my POV, I don't think it's possible to have a war where both sides are in the right..."
Irrelevant to the question. we're talking about accepting risk in war, right or wrong. And I really don't think you've proven your point.
Getting back to the original point of the thread, (I think); an empire's extent is equal to the furtherist it can receive news of a crisis and effectively respond to it; if it takes a year to hear about a natural disaster at Colony Z then that colony is effectively outside of the empire, no matter what the lawyers say. Let's take a modern example; The Falklands War. The UK was barely able to respond effectively and timely to the invasion of their most remote territory. That is the extent of their "empire". So, whatever method you decide on for your interstellar communications and travel, your response time should be less than a couple of months AT THE MOST, and everywhere beyond that is outside of your empire.
Ferrell
your response time should be less than a couple of months AT THE MOST, and everywhere beyond that is outside of your empire.
You get into a pretty interesting question of politics here. Rome was divided into two before the fall of the West. Depending on the type of FTL and the nature of military threat, you could have a large empire operate on a distributed basis, each sector controlled by a military/political leader with the understanding that adjacent sectors would lend aid. So by the time the sector on the furthest side of the empire hears of a problem on the opposite side, it's probably already been resolved and that news will take just as long to make the journey.
Of course, having to do this within an empire could lead to individual leaders trying to strike out on their own. Unless there are some extremely powerful cultural traditions to penalize such action, I think that a sector system would probably be the first step in the eventual collapse of the empire, it's just a matter of waiting for a strong enough personality to arrive.
Of course, there's also the question of just how order and authority are maintained. If the people buy into the idea of the empire, then they will have loyalty to it. If empire was imposed upon them or it's some sort of cobbled together system that they don't feel in their bones the same way they do about family and tribes, then high levels of force might be required to keep everyone together which would argue for a constrained size.
The British Empire was a going concern when a year was a good round trip time between England and Bengal. The Romans actually had better communications, thanks to their military roads and sea communications along the coasts of Mare Nostrum. The key in both cases was not being able to respond quickly, but being able to respond surely and with enough force to make potential adversaries think twice.
WRT the problem of local rule, obviously you make your viceroys out of men from the imperial center who have a vested interest in returning home.
WRT the problem of local rule, obviously you make your viceroys out of men from the imperial center who have a vested interest in returning home.
I don't know. Something like that sounds meta-stable to me.
@ Tony:
"The Carthaginians had a navy."
Oh, You meant both powers AT THE SAME TIME not being prepared… ah I see. My mistake, misunderstood there.
In that case, maybe the air war of WW1… but that’s just a single front and not applicable, not the entire war.
With regards George V and Churchill, George Rex attempted to serve on the flagship of the fleet at Sacpa Flow. Churchill, insanely, contemplated stowing away on the landing craft for D-Day- given his war-role, it was stupid but maybe he thought it would be important for moral...hmm...
Anyways, both scuppered the efforts of the other to do so.
jollyreaper:
"I don't know. Something like that sounds meta-stable to me."
Cute. Judging by the Roman experience, and to a lesser degree the British, that's the only arrangement you can reasonable bank on.
@Tony:
"Incorrect. The objective is to avoid needlessly risking their lives and limbs. Keeping soldiers out of harms way is a naive and morally reprehensible ideal. That so many people think that's what we should be doing is to our great shame."\
That has me curious- I'm doing a course that concerns this sort of thing at the moment? Do you mind if I press you on this further?
Do you mean that we should not be quite so enthusiastic to send robots out if they combat the human troops of less-advanced countries?
Or something else? I might have misinterpreted you there, but if that is what you meant, then I would definately agree with you- robots on robots is one thing (leaving out the detail of civiians getting caught horribly in the crossfire), but happily sendng metal devices t slaughter troops that have no chnace whatsoever of beating them and then obliterating them completely is just a Highway of Death writ large, and quite horrific. Apologies to anyone in the r&d section of military robotics, its just alittle overwhelming at times...
Re: Geoffrey S H
The principle applies at any point along the spectrum of conflict, against any enemy. To quote myself from an earlier topic:
"One of the most fundamental features of war is it's risk-reward nature -- the 'unlimited liability', as Peter Young called it, of the commitment made by the soldier/sailor/airman. In a normal civilian job, if it gets to be too personally dangerous, the worker can always quit, or strike for safer conditions. In war, when it gets too dangerous, that is usually precisely the time that one is expected not to quit or go on strike, but to keep on going."
Young also once said on a TV documentary (Gwynne Dyer's War IIRC) that being a soldier does not begin with killing the enemy, but in putting oneself at risk of the enemy killing oneself. Clausewitz agreed: "War is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others."
The point is that when we don't risk injury or death, we may be using violence, but we aren't engaging in war. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's not "war".
Even if we fight against a robot force with robots, people will still be killed, if by no other means than getting in the way. Maybe somebody would call it war, because it deals in deciding and issue with force. I would instead call it formalized negligent homicide and wanton destruction.
Juat out of curiosity, what is the course, and towards what end are you pursuing an education?
I will ask everyone on the war & morality subthread to remember that you are handling highly explosive stuff, and show according caution. If a comment thread blows up, you won't regret it as much as more literal explosions, but you will probably still regret it.
Tony:
"Risk management for those kinds of consequences could rationally include long prison terms for something as simple as a poorly designed flight plan, much less actual, intentional misuse."
How exactly will long prison terms deter suicide bombers?
"Okay, why would powers that have serious enough problems to engage in war not have the military forces to do so?"
Because space travel is new, and so the sides are stuck cobbling together what weapons they can because it's all untested technology. Perhaps ye olde rebellion of the colonies scenario, with a relatively mature but still weak colony against an Earthly superpower that's very strong here on Earth but hasn't put much attention into military space assets because they weren't expecting a rebellion. Of course you still have to explain why the colony wants to declare independance and why the superpower cares enough to not just let them.
This is something that I can only see happening once. After the first space war, however large or small it may be, all powers with the funds to do so will look into how to secure themselves against space threats.
However, I should note that military technology these days is advancing faster than people can field-test it. World War I was not much like World War II strategically. If technology continues to advance this fast, then each major war may be its own thing, hard to compare to the next or the previous war. And as such, every war begins with people not being sure how good their shiny new weapons and tactics actually are.
Rick:
"For that matter, the ever popular rider ship blurs the distinction - is the combination an armed merchant ship, or merchant ship with escort? Season and stir for your desired tech flavor."
Is the rider ship controlled by a navy, or is it a private mercenary ship?
I'd say any armed ship working directly for a government counts as a warship (or police ship?), even if it also doubles as a cargo transport. "Armed mechant ship" makes me think of an independant crew with privately owned weapons for self-defense.
Tony:
"If you have a system of fixed jump points, commerce raiding isn't even going to happen, because naval activity will be focussed on the jump points, and nowhere else."
If you have jump point FTL, then you might be able to attack a solar system by surprise without other solar systems knowing about it, but only if you bring enough forces to pillage the entire solar system, not just a few merchant ships.
It does, of course, become easy for whoever is in control of the chokepoints to extract tolls from passing ships. If these aren't entirely legitimate then you might get robber barons.
"If you have a free-form FTL, there's no way to predict where a ship or convoy is going to enter a solar system. Ambushes would be impossible, on practical grounds."
Isn't freeform FTL basically analogous to sea travel, except with the addition of another dimension? The additional dimension would make it harder to catch people because of the additional degree of freedom for them to scatter in, but with regular patrols I imagine you should be able to find some travellers. What you need is an area that you're capable of patrolling but the enemy isn't.
Also note a common space opera device is for stealth technology to exist, but be expensive or taking up a lot of ship space or the like, so that only specialized stealth ships are equipped with it. This would make it plausible for pirates to be able to find merchants while the merchants can't predict where the pirates are hunting. Until some merchants decide to invest in a stealth-equipped blockade runner...
Thucydides:
"For a setting in space, people will be even scarcer (in relative terms) the farther away you go from the metropole, but they will be augmented with as much high tech as possible so they can build and develop their colonies."
Will they? Breeding isn't very difficult. Given a few generations, humans will expand to fill the available space. The main limit on a colony size isn't how many children they're having, but how many people their dome cities' life support is capable of dealing with. If only a tiny portion of your planet has been terraformed into arable farmland, then that limits populations.
Meanwhile, a far-off outpost removed from the main industrial centers wouldn't have nearly the technological capability you suggest, due to lacking the infrastructure to build it all. Making the infrastructure for locally manufacturing high technology is considerable harder than making more humans, which is something most of us are easily capable of and have an instinctive drive towards doing.
Scott:
"One point worth considering about the size of empire: The maximum size is limited by the speed of communication."
That's the maximum size for a peaceful empire to hold together. If travel is significantly slower than communications, then you can hold an empire together across longer distances than you can effectively travel as long as everyone is willing to play nice, but the moment anyone decides not to play along anymore the jig's up because they're too far away for a punitive expidition.
Also note that it's a sliding scale. If communications are very fast across any distance, then you're likely to have a fairly centralized government. If the far reaches of the empire take months to talk to, then you're going to have a feudal system with vassals and fiefs that are nominally beholden to the empire, but mostly operate autonomously unless something really big is happening. (And yes, if communications are fast but travel is slow, then you probably still have centralized governments - up to the distance where they can still plausibly threaten a punitive mission if you disobey.)
"This means that if your FTL is instantaneous jump points with real-space travel time between, and no FTL comms, then your maximum effective empire size is going to be about 3 light-months from the jump-points."
Lightspeed communications inside any solar system are going to be measured in hours. This is slow enough to be a little inconvenient while playing MMORPGs but it more than fast enough for an effective centralized government. So it's only interstellar communications that you need to worry about.
Saber:
"STL travel is exponentially more plausible and offers interesting sociological, cultural and even biological evolutionary story hooks for the author, but an Interstellar Empire I strongly doubt it. Settled words in such a universe would be more akin to very distant trading partners than planets under the umbrella of a single government."
Even the nearest star systems will be years apart by lightspeed communications - and more if it's hard to find star systems with planets amenable to human use (or even planets at all). This is juuuust enough for people to share a little gossip and new technology, and certainly not enough for any kind of centralized government.
Barring staged antimatter rockets, STL travel is going to be much slower than lightspeed, which means you're probably talking sleeper ships or generation ships. Even the fastest interstellar ships would still be a lifetime undertaking for their crew. (If you've extended the human lifespan, then... well, that doesn't really change much. Just that we can live longer doesn't mean we've become much more patient.) Nothing short of epic MacGuffinite could be worth trading with such costs and delays, and worse, both sides would need to have epic MacGuffinite of different sorts. Other than that, the only travel you would see would be one-way colony ships, probably for ideological motivations (feeling that humans "should" expand as far as we can, or wanting to find out what's out there).
Incidentally, the existance of communications that are much faster than travel is something relatively new. For much of our history a courier was the fastest you could get.
Jollyreaper:
"Come to think of it, I think there was also a scene in a Piers Anthony book where the leaders of Iran and Iraq were spirited away from their bunkers and locked in a room with knives. They were told that they could settle their differences and the last side with someone capable of crawling out would be the victor, leave the children out of it. A lovely if impractical fantasy."
"Trial by champion" has been used at various times by ancient armies. However, the problem with this is that it only works if the losing side's remaining soldiers and populace are willing to abide by the result. If they resent their conquerors enough to be willing to go against tradition to win their freedom, then the system breaks down.
That's very interesting.
Essentially I "might" become a proffessional historian with the courses I am doing, but I was given the option at my University of doing one course not asiated with tghe history department- and I chose international politics. Now, it was either a choice between regional developement or a new course studying the developements in warfare and strategy in the 21st century, I essentially flipped a coin and 21st C won out. Its proved highly informative vis a vis current events, but one part deals with use of robots, which, from my experiance reading history, WILL have effects on the civilian "sector". I apologise for prolonging this contentious issue, but that comment caught my attention.
Most other courses deal with Atlantic Economies, cultural transference and thedevelopement of literature, etc, etc, etc. All extreemly interesting in themselves.
Just to perhaps pour something cold on this hot water- for every technology that can be used in military application, there is almost always some way it can be used for peaceful purposes, or some positive effect on civilisation as a whole it can have. Not always, but usually.
I think more emphasis also has to be placed on the divide between the ideal world and the real world. In the ideal world, you have the resources you need to do things right. You can fight Powell-doctrine-style with ridiculously huge and dominant force, will have clear-cut objectives and victory conditions.
In the real world, everybody's fighting for a piece of the pie. So you've got good ship designs, good designs that have become outdated, bad designs straight from the start but the navy had to buy them because the shipyard is owned by the idiot son of a former leader who has to be placated for political reasons, some admiral with connections has a bug up his butt about some tactical doctrine that makes no sense in the real world but he's managed to convince the politicians so you're saddled with these marginally useful ships, etc. And the peacetime budgets are usually unequal to the war so there's a scramble to hold the line with existing units while the factories tool up back home.
If we look at US history, we weren't ready for WWI. We weren't ready for WWII. Korea was fought with mostly WWII leftovers with a few new toys. Vietnam was a big surprise because we were building for nuclear war and fighting in Europe, not jungle warfare. Gulf War 1 was a pleasant change of affairs because the Iraqis were using Soviet equipment and doctrine. While we were fighting in a desert and not in Europe, we were engaging an enemy similar to what we were trained for. But the desert environment did play merry hell with the equipment.
The comment above about how vastly different each war could be raises a good point. In my setting I'm going to stick with a kind of tech plateau so that the variables aren't so much in the technology but in how the different sides organize and employ their doctrines.
It sounds as if there is need for further discussion of space warfare: weapons, tactics, and strategy, in the operatic as well as Realistic [TM] context.
Well, not exactly 'need,' but a desire for such, which I will likely pander to. :-)
@Rick:
If that might involve creating some technology that rules out alpha strikes and then allows the prospect of salvos (kinetic or laser) to come into play, then that would be very interesting!
WRT war and morality:
What's the difference between killbot fleets and modern-day ICBMs, cruise missiles and armed drones? Doesn't "wanton destruction and negligent homicide" apply to certain lopsided engagements even if we have our own people in danger?
Milo:
"Isn't freeform FTL basically analogous to sea travel, except with the addition of another dimension? The additional dimension would make it harder to catch people because of the additional degree of freedom for them to scatter in, but with regular patrols I imagine you should be able to find some travellers. What you need is an area that you're capable of patrolling but the enemy isn't."
Patrolling and blockades happen near shore, generally speaking. If you have freeform FTL which can approach planets, you could probably work in something similar - bearing in mind, of course, the intersection of FTL close to planets and WMDs.
How's this for a scenario:
PLanet A is located around a G type star, is an M world, an Earth twin plus or minus a bit, where a colony has been long enough to grow to about 25 million persons. The planet supports GM crops from earth, (Coffee, Cocca, Wheat, Maise, etc.) It has the highest tech level( robots, cities, advanced medical tech, etc,) and still retains it's FTL and space travel infrastructure. Every few months a packet arrives from Sol, but that is all that ties it to the homeworld.
Planet B is on the hot,inside of the habitable zone. Dry, not terribly friendly, but has an amazing amount of Platinum group metals, plus some other goodies. A geologists wet dream. It has a smaller population, it's tech level is lower than Planet A. It has lost it's space infrastructure, but can handle incoming traffic( They don't have anything more then a few orbital ships, no interplanetary/ interstellar, but they can support ships from Planet A [ landing fields, hangars, provisioning, etc.]), but is in the market for Planet A's commodities, and tunnel boring tech.
Planet C is on the high outside of the habitable range, in the depths of an ice age, with colonists living in domes to keep warm, but they have a cold surface with a breathable atmosphere. They are a colony of Planet A, have a relatively small population, and rely on Planet A for FTL support. They have been breading GM yak/bison hybrids, GM sheep with amazing wool, and harvesting an amazing hard wood, making awesome products with it. Planet C's stuff is highly valued on Planet A, and they can use the stuff from planet B.
It all boils down to a nice triangle trade. Planet A ships food crops to Planet B, Planet B ships metals and valuable ores to Planet C, Planet C ships Yak/Bison, Wool, and hard woods to Planet A.
Ships from Planet A make the circuit every few months bringing home the bacon for mom and the kids. They also deliver communications from system to system as well, fucntioning as a FedEx service as well.
Plenty of space for buckles to get swashed in, no?
Back to economics (Blogger is eating my posts, but apparently not delivering them into Spam)
If a "militarized" ISS was built (using a nuclear reactor and having a sensor suite and missile battery strapped to the truss), we would end up with a ship massing roughly 1000 tons and costing a billion dollars (using the million dollars/ton formula).
An unmanned Kinetic star could be built without the habs and life support and massing (say) 800 tons, costing $800 million dollars. A production run of five ships (one control frigate, four kinetic stars) would cost $800 million less than five all manned ships, giving the owning power $200 million to invest in other things, or build another kinetic star, thus having a six ship fleet for the same investment.
This isn't unlimited resources, just using automation to get the most out of your existing resources. After a few cycles like this, (and ignoring second and third order effects, or variable like adding 200 tons of missiles to the kinetic star), the constellation will have far more firepower than the all manned fleet for a similar investment.
I think a 20% increase in numbers is not worth the loss of quality of a robot drone versus a crewed craft. Now if you can double or triple your firepower, then you might have something.
What's the difference between killbot fleets and modern-day ICBMs, cruise missiles and armed drones? Doesn't "wanton destruction and negligent homicide" apply to certain lopsided engagements even if we have our own people in danger?
At least in the case of the ICBMs, they are weapons so horrible that the mere threat of their use has been adequate for 50 years. It is possible that killbots would also fall into this category, but I don't consider that to be very likely.
Cruise missiles and armed drones, however, are currently only one part of the warfighting equation. There are still humans involved every day in the battles. Armed drones are simply a strong back to carry the weapon and sensors into range, there's still a human at the controls at the present time.
With the Killbots, there's no human decision-making. Did this group of people (out after curfew, +1 threat), just shoot into the air? If YES, then shoot back.
Oops. That was a wedding party.
While the same decision loop has been made with a human inside it, it's still easier to prevent another similar accident from happening if the humans are in the loop.
See also Mamoru Oshii's movie "Sky Crawlers" for "humans need war" analysis.
Cruise missiles and armed drones, however, are currently only one part of the warfighting equation. There are still humans involved every day in the battles. Armed drones are simply a strong back to carry the weapon and sensors into range, there's still a human at the controls at the present time.
There's also a question of just how much of a gap there is between pressing the button and the target dying. Modern homing torpedoes are pretty scary killing machines already. They're robots that will hunt you down and kill you. Same with a cruise missile or air-to-air missile. But they're sufficiently close to the kinds of weapons we're used to that it feels like a human doing the killing. Fire missile, target dies. Sometimes you kill the wrong guy. We're used to artillery doing that, it's part of what we deal with.
But having said that, is there really any difference pressing the button to put the drone on patrol, ready to shoot at any target? Land mines are fairly indiscriminate and we're happy with deploying them.
I think this is more of a human hangup than a real distinction, like being willing to eat cow but not horse. Why? They're both animals. Animals are made of meat. But horses are different. Why? I don't know. But it's also ok for a sub to send out a robot to hunt down and kill another ship or fire artillery with no certainty that only bad guys will be killed but it's not ok to send a drone out on kill patrol.
That drone craft would hve to have VERY good defences so as not to be lost and diminish the performance of the constellation-of course, the constellation would defend it themselves and draw the enemy's fire where it can be intercepted... but nevertheles it presents a massive weak link in a supposedly superior fire system. If it is lost, then the manned craft will have a field day... and are we sure that a totally autonomous platform, even in an environment of predictable orbits and stealth-lessness, can be programmed against all possible threats and tactics?
The communication nodes and antenna of the controller would have to be well armoured lest a quick laser strike or saturated kinetic salvo even lightly damage it...
With the Killbots, there's no human decision-making. Did this group of people (out after curfew, +1 threat), just shoot into the air? If YES, then shoot back.
Oops. That was a wedding party.
While the same decision loop has been made with a human inside it, it's still easier to prevent another similar accident from happening if the humans are in the loop.
I dunno. An F/A-18 pilot at 1000 ft and 300 knots is not really positioned to make that judgment call effectively anyway - and more likely to think it is their ass being shot at, and respond accordingly.
Regarding robotic versus manned weapon platform spacecraft in a constellation, I'm not persuaded there is much useful damage control that can be done aboard spacecraft during combat - and removing the crew also removes the vulnerable and delicate life support system.
(But all this is stuff that needs to be taken up at greater length!)
(But all this is stuff that needs to be taken up at greater length!)
Why do I sense another topic coming on? :)
A human is capable of making observations like "Do I see a bunch of festive decorations? If yes, it's probably a wedding.". The question is whether you have a clear enough view to identify festive decorations (which, I'll note, being decorations, would be visually striking per definition), and whether you have time to check for them before returning fire.
Even if you really are getting shot at, recognizing which direction the fire is coming from is going to take a short examination of the surroundings. So unless you take any hint of hostility as an excuse to carpet bomb the surroundings, you should have already gotten a look at who's shooting while you're busy aiming, which should allow you to make a friend-or-foe decision nearly for free.
If the life support system is placed near the CIC (where the main brain would be for an automated craft) then that might not be so much of a disadvantage- its really just the habitat modules that would be the extra mass, and the best possible computers might still be fairly mass accumulating anyway (I build a capable light computer- you build a capable computer that's heavier but even better, etc)...
Milo
This isn't just about a single 20% increase (although many battles have been won with a far lesser margin) but also the ability to compound the advantage over time. There was also a glossing over of second and third order effects (the ship in the example has 200 tons less mass, so is a higher performance ship. I can also add 200 tons of missile battery for less cost than the manned habs [but now am changing the cost factors] or even use the $800 million for other purposes from a tax cut at home to investing in R&D to bread and circuses [depending on any number of factors]).
True, people are easy and fun to make, but getting millions or billions of trained people takes time. Increasing your industrial capacity can generally be done more quickly (when you new factory is built your new generation of workers is only two years old! Better break out the robots.) Out on the frontiers, we are talking about populating solar systems, so a colony with a million people is still a speck compared to the metropole with a planetary population of billions.
True, people are easy and fun to make, but getting millions or billions of trained people takes time. Increasing your industrial capacity can generally be done more quickly (when you new factory is built your new generation of workers is only two years old! Better break out the robots.) Out on the frontiers, we are talking about populating solar systems, so a colony with a million people is still a speck compared to the metropole with a planetary population of billions.
I think that's going to be the source of the most profound culture shift between dirtsiders and spacers. We've talked about how the additional cost of having an extra kid in a terrestrial village is minute whereas adding extra life support in a space station situation promises to be very expensive. So automation we wouldn't think of developing on Earth becomes absolutely necessary in space. We can pay illegals to pick our strawberries for next to nothing but if we're talking the hydroponics bay on Starbase 7, a $100 million agrobot to handle all the planting and harvesting could save $500 million in accommodation space. I'm pulling the numbers out of thin air, possibly vacuum, but the basic premise seems sound enough.
Unless we find easily human-habitable planets (which seems unlikely), I think Earth will remain unique with the teeming populations of underemployed people.
In previous discussions we were going back and forth as to whether space life would more closely resemble a libertarian paradise or North Korea. Even if it starts out that draconian and pressures ease as more infrastructure is developed, that would have to have a profound psychological effect on the second generation spacers who grew up in that environment.
Does the premise seem reasonable that the first and second generation spacers would have to be incredibly capable pioneer-mentality people, highly-trained and capable of cross-specialization? Would it seem likely that their legal system would favor the death penalty for any case where a person cannot be coerced into usefulness because they couldn't afford to provide life support for someone who isn't working?
Of course, a lot of that would also depend on whether these people are contract workers on rotation (like oil rig workers) versus pioneers. And I think the likely dividing line there would be the cost of transport. If it's cheaper to ship them out and not bring back anyone but top execs, then I could see even a corporate-sponsored mission turned into colonization.
Re: Thucydides
So, you get a fleet of ships that has to be used as a fleet of ships (reltaively close together, due to lightspeed comms issues), rather than a slightly more expensive fleet of ships that can be used as individual units, as requirements develop. I know which way I'd go with that one...
Re: ICBMs, cruise missiles, and killbots
Missiles, even nuclear armed ones, are still just artillery. A human has to decide what target to attack, when, and with what. Then another human (most often several other humans, even with simple HE warheads) has to actually agree that the order to attack is legal and follow a set of complex procedures to actually launch the weapon(s).
Killbots are just out there, with an ROE that can't possibly cover every situation. If you give them the autonomy you would give a human, they'll do things you don't want them to do. Think of the wierd answers Watson came up with on Jeopardy -- they made perfect sense from the perspective of its programming, but made no human sense whatsoever.
Re: US readiness for various wars. The US, by its very nature, prior to the Cold War, could not be materially ready for a major war. (Small wars the US tends to be constantly ready for, and tends to fight well.) And the US generally does a lot of learning in the opening stages of major international wars, because we are usually the last ones to get sucked in, and our adversaries have already climbed the learning curve. But it doesn't take us all that long. We went from Pearl Harbor to Midway in six months. We went from Savo Island to the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in three. The US Army went from Kasserine Pass to El Guettar in one month.
Yes, it did take us a couple of years to build up overwhelming force in WWII, but we were ready enough not to lose in the meantime. Also, in WWI, let's not forget that the Germans felt they had to win in early 1918, or the US, given a year to mobilize, would be the margin of victory.
BTW, stories of Gulf region conditions, and their effect on US equipment are highly exagerated.
Based on many of the arguments in past space warfare threads, I would tend to discount the ability of an individual ship to be able to influence much. A fleet is a fleet, and the bigger fleet will tend to have certain advantages (just like God is on the side of larger battalions on land).
With robotics the same level of resources has the potential to get a bigger, more capable fleet, I think the rational response will be to invest in constellations rather than individual fleet units.
Thucydides:
"True, people are easy and fun to make, but getting millions or billions of trained people takes time."
Why do you need millions or billions of trained people?
The total displacement of all nautical warships in the world today is 7000 kilotons, which would make for a pretty huge space armada. I'm not sure how many crew members a spaceship needs per ton, but the Space Shuttle orbiter masses 0.1 kilotons, and has a typical crew of 6-8. Maybe double that for a pessimistic estimaye, and our space armada would need a total crew of one million people.
With partial automation and only a few crewmembers on each ship, rather than hordes of redshirts, you can go much lower. Since space travel is unlikely to have much use for unskilled labor, this is not unreasonable.
Milo
I was responding to the assertions that a civilization needs large numbers of people in order to be productive, project force, build lots of things etc.
This isn't even the case here, since small nations like Singapore can have high GDPs and standards of living. Looking at it from another angle, the bulk of US taxes is paid by a very small minority of people, indicating that productivity (as roughly indicated by earning power) isn't spread uniformly across the population.
Using robotics and AI to leverage the productivity of the population will be the only way to go if you want to become and stay wealthy as a person or as a society. (Given the coming demographic bust in Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and China, we will be seeing the effects first hand in the 2020-2035 time frame).
http://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/cold-warriors-question-nukes/
Cold Warriors Question Nukes
George Shultz served as President Reagan’s Secretary of State, and Bill Perry as President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to both President Nixon and Ford. Sam Nunn was Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee for eight years. Their key roles in the Cold War has led many to call them Cold Warriors. That status makes their recent, repeated calls for fundamentally re-examining our nuclear posture all the more noteworthy. Their most recent attempt to awaken society to the unacceptable risk posed by nuclear weapons is an OpEd in today’s Wall Street Journal “Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Proliferation.” (That link requires a subscription to the Journal. There is also a subscription-free link at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.) Here are some key excerpts:
Deterrence based on nuclear weapons … [depends] on calculations for which there is no historical experience. It is therefore precarious. …
We have written previously that reliance on this strategy is becoming increasingly hazardous. With the spread of nuclear weapons, technology, materials and know-how, there is an increasing risk that nuclear weapons will be used. …
From 1945 to 1991, America and the Soviet Union were diligent, professional, but also lucky that nuclear weapons were never used. Does the world want to continue to bet its survival on continued good fortune with a growing number of nuclear nations and adversaries globally? …
the U.S. and Russia have no basis for maintaining a structure of deterrence involving nuclear weapons deployed in ways that increase the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon, or even a deliberate nuclear exchange based on a false warning. …
while the four of us believe that reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective, some nations will hesitate to draw or act on the same conclusion unless regional confrontations and conflicts are addressed. We must therefore redouble our efforts to resolve these issues. …
Ensuring that nuclear materials are protected globally in order to limit any country’s ability to reconstitute nuclear weapons, and to prevent terrorists from acquiring the material to build a crude nuclear bomb, is a top priority.
Thucydides:
"Based on many of the arguments in past space warfare threads, I would tend to discount the ability of an individual ship to be able to influence much. A fleet is a fleet, and the bigger fleet will tend to have certain advantages (just like God is on the side of larger battalions on land).
With robotics the same level of resources has the potential to get a bigger, more capable fleet, I think the rational response will be to invest in constellations rather than individual fleet units."
I'm sorry, since when has a fleet's only mission been major fleet actions? If that's the reasoning of "past space warfare threads" -- and that's not the way I read them, but if you do... -- then I would suggest you don't appeal to them for authority on anything. Most warship activities are small patrols, single or two ship exercises, crew training, and small detachment deployments. On that scale, the autonomy of a single ship, or a division of two ships, is paramount.
Thucydides:
"This isn't even the case here, since small nations like Singapore can have high GDPs and standards of living."
Singapore's wealth is skimmed off the international trade of large industrial economies. If it didn't sit on a trade croassroads, Singapore would be just another poor, overpopulated province of Malaysia.
"Looking at it from another angle, the bulk of US taxes is paid by a very small minority of people, indicating that productivity (as roughly indicated by earning power) isn't spread uniformly across the population."
Concentration of capital has nothing to do with individual productivity. I certainly don't believe in the labor theory of value, but people who have a lot of money don't produce wealth at some ridiculously exagerated individual level. They just manage and accumulate capital.
I imagine I'll be writing at greater length on ships' crews, but my quick take is that the 'battleship' function is more readily automated than the 'gunboat' function.
And I agree with Tony that high pay has only a tenuous connection with 'productivity' - at least of the sort relevant to building space fleets and the like.
Movie stars' and sports stars' salaries reflect the public's apparent eagerness to watch them in action. Most CEOs' salaries, in the US, reflect the CEO mystique, plus a system where CEOs largely set each other's salaries, and Wall St salaries are pretty much good old legalized skimming.
And the general fact that some gamblers do really well and become really rich. But to understand even a society built around ponies and casinos you'd have to look elsewhere.
What if humans are needed to watch over the systems while on the platforms? What if they might increase the efficiency "somehow"? JuThat' sjust a thought. I've alreqady stated I'm almost certain robots will replace every aspect of human civilisation eventually, and that they will enver be AI's, so please don;t tell me that there is no need for humans in pitched space constellation on constellation combat, I'm just throwing a bone out here to be gnawed on.
So on 'Engineering Disasters # 3000- the collapse of the Wolf 359 to Sirius number two Wormhole" would conclude that the two wormhole mouths were broght too close together and that excesive quantum vibrations tore it apart before it could act like a time-machine?
Ferrell
Geoffrey:
"What if they might increase the efficiency "somehow"?"
I couldn't think of any way that would happen without the highest grade of handwavium imported from the mines of Sirius B. When was the last time a human was better than a computer at calculating trajectories at thirty thousand kilometers range?
Ferrell:
"So on 'Engineering Disasters # 3000- the collapse of the Wolf 359 to Sirius number two Wormhole" would conclude that the two wormhole mouths were broght too close together and that excesive quantum vibrations tore it apart before it could act like a time-machine?"
I think you meant to post in the FTL thread, but yes, it'd probably say just that (with a bit more math).
The total displacement of all nautical warships in the world today is 7000 kilotons, which would make for a pretty huge space armada. I'm not sure how many crew members a spaceship needs per ton, but the Space Shuttle orbiter masses 0.1 kilotons, and has a typical crew of 6-8. Maybe double that for a pessimistic estimaye, and our space armada would need a total crew of one million people.
A better starting place for a vessel designed for long-term independent operations would be a submarine, but let's start with a PT boat. .05 Kt, crew of 16. That's twice the crew requirement per ton you postulated.
My old 'home,' an Ohio-class submarine, is roughly 19kt and has a designed crew of 15 officers and 140 enlisted. A Virginia-class is 8kt and has a crew of 15 officers and 120 enlisted. Notice that both classes of subs have the same number of officers. That's Captain, Executive Officer, Navigator, Weapons Officer, Engineer and Supply Officer (senior officers), and 11 junior officers.
Actually, let's do this though-experiment from the bottom up: Start by listing all the jobs you think need to have a person doing it. Sensor operators (at least 1 per sensor), comms operators, pilots and gunners (1 per weapon system). A couple guys to keep the life-support going and a couple more guys to keep the powerplant working. Now add a couple guys to keep everyone fed. Got a number yet?
About 20, right?
Now triple that, because one person can't stay on the job 24/7 for any useful length of time. The US Navy has found that the longest you can really maintain good awareness is 6 hours. That makes 60 people with no room for someone hurt or sick, or training, so add a few more. I've seen as many as half a 'watchsection' additional. Now, you need someone to be officially responsible for all this mess, so add some officers. That's at least 6 junior officers just to stand watches and another 5-6 senior officers. (Senior officers don't stand a lot of watches, they have too much paperwork to do!)
What's that come to? 70 crew +15 officers is 85 bodies, regardless of the size of the ship!
Ships aren't airplanes, they have to carry their entire ground crew along with them!
Scott:
With all of that, you're making drone craft look pretty appealing by comparison.
Let's not forget the extra bodies you have aboard to do unskilled labor that nobody is cruel enough to assign to a single person for the duration of his cruise (mess duty, compartment cleaner, laundry, etc.). And when the crew gets big enough, you have to add technical specialists:
personnel clerk(s)
storekeeper(s)
hull tech(s)
auxiliary engineer(s)
weapons tech(s)
electrician(s)
data systems tech(s)
doctor (plus assistant(s))
Raymond:
"With all of that, you're making drone craft look pretty appealing by comparison."
Actually, you make them look worse. All of those systems don't fix and maintain themselves. So the control craft has to get real big to accomodate all of people needed to work on drone systems, plus all of the people needed to support them. And the mother ship has to be made big, because you have to have drone ship maintenance hangars, because nobody's going to go EVA to disassemble and inspect a missile launcher. So maybe what you wind up with is a control ship, a tender, and several drone ships.
Or you could just have several manned ships and optinally a tender for operations a long way from home. Oh...and much more flexibility in where you go and what you do, because manned ships can be sent places alone, or sent places in pairs, or any other combination smaller than a cookie-cutter robot squadron.
200 people means a pretty big hab for any sort of long- or medium-term operation. That mass could be better used for bigger lasers or more missiles, or not used at all, which can have dramatic improvements in both tactical and strategic mobility. Plus, it can allow tactics less palatable with crewed craft - it's easier to send a ship further ahead to draw open the enemy's laser shutters when you don't have to worry about the two hundred letters of condolences you have to write after the battle.
Addendum:
Or 85 people, or 50, if you can skim the crew down that low.
@ Ramond:
"I couldn't think of any way that would happen without the highest grade of handwavium imported from the mines of Sirius B. When was the last time a human was better than a computer at calculating trajectories at thirty thousand kilometers range?"
That was a bone/idea thrown out just in case someone had an obscure case in mind. Nothing more. Otherwise, no matter how much we fantasise that humans have to work the machiner/ form inspection parties/ whatever, there is ultimately nothing that robots cannot replace- nothing at all. Humanity is ultimately completely useless. Harsh, but that's technological progress for you.
Scott:
"Sensor operators (at least 1 per sensor), [...], and gunners (1 per weapon system)."
How many of those you need depends on how complicated your sensor readouts and weapon controls are. If your on-board computer is good at combining all sensor information into a single display, then you only really need one sensor operator (plus spares), which may well double with your weapon operator(s) (who need to understand the sensor data anyway, whether they're monitoring it personally or having it passed on by another person, in order to know where to aim).
You're assuming that a ship has either full automatisation or no automatisation whatsoever. This is a false dichotomy.
"Now triple that, because one person can't stay on the job 24/7 for any useful length of time."
Due to the lack of stealth in deep space, you will typically know about an impending battle well before it happens. Thus around-the-clock watches are not needed. You can run on a skeleton crew normally and wake everyone up when the enemy is at hand.
Exceptions are if you're conducting an extended planetary siege (which is one of the roles robots will be doing poorly at anyway), or if your FTL or other magitech introduces stealth. In case of jump-type FTL, then you still only need people on combat during combat and jump operations, not during realspace travels far away from jump points.
"Ships aren't airplanes, they have to carry their entire ground crew along with them!"
Crewed ships need ground crew no more than robot ships do.
If ships need to bring their not-actually-ground-crews along to function effectively, then now you have a crew, so purely robotic craft are ruled out by default. If they don't need to bring their ground crews along, then airplane-resembling values are sounding much more reasonable.
All grist for an upcoming post!
Raymond:
"200 people means a pretty big hab for any sort of long- or medium-term operation. That mass could be better used for bigger lasers or more missiles, or not used at all, which can have dramatic improvements in both tactical and strategic mobility. Plus, it can allow tactics less palatable with crewed craft - it's easier to send a ship further ahead to draw open the enemy's laser shutters when you don't have to worry about the two hundred letters of condolences you have to write after the battle."
If you use a submarine as a prototype, obviously you don't worry so much about the size of the habitation section, because it's built into extra space all throughout the vessel. Also to your advantage, systems that need maintenance are either completely or mostly inside the pressurized envelope. And, obviously, your breathing gas reservoir is mostly in the hab section. I'm having trouble seeing the problem.
@ milo
Strictly from the navy aircraft sense, aircraft are limited endurance vehicles. They return to base at the end of the mission, either the carrier or a land base. That's different from a warship that spends months on-station and has to keep all the parts and pieces operational without the benefit of dockyard assistance.
Also, most aircraft operate in such a way that the "watch" just so happens to be the people flying it for the entire mission. Fighters don't have relief pilots. AWACs and maritime patrol craft do fly with spare crew but they represent the far extreme or aircraft missions.
A warship has to be ready for action around the clock. Now you were saying that there's no stealth in space so if there's fighter attacks coming in or whatever, there's plenty of warning for the full crew to be prepared. Well, this is really going to depend on what your mission is.
If you go with the Lost Fleet scenario, engagements are over pretty quickly. You know when you're arriving in a system and know that you may or may not face combat at the jump point. Once through you then formulate your plan and combat will usually be several days off. Combat is resolved in maybe 10 minutes start to finish.
But if a ship had to maintain combat readiness or days on end, no way to anticipate when the next attack is coming, must be always vigilant, you're going to need spare crew.
Raymond: ""So on 'Engineering Disasters # 3000- the collapse of the Wolf 359 to Sirius number two Wormhole" would conclude that the two wormhole mouths were broght too close together and that excesive quantum vibrations tore it apart before it could act like a time-machine?"
I think you meant to post in the FTL thread, but yes, it'd probably say just that (with a bit more math)."
Actually, I thought I had posted it on the FTL thread...
Anyway; on spacecraft crews; a cargo ship might get away with 6-8 people at a minimum for long duration trips, but a military ship would need at least 5 people (operations, internal systems, external systems, command, relief) per watch in the control room and 2-4 people (maintainance techs) in the service and repair center and/or life support. So, 9-10 people x four shifts = 36 to 40 at minimum...plus another shift for to even out all the extra stuff.
Thinking about it, a type of warship spacecraft might be a drone carrier; it could be used like your manned control ship/robo-destroyer group, or as constallation protection, or patrol/convoy escort, or whatever.
Empires would most likely have a wide range of warships to deal with whatever situations might come up; those individual ships would be fairly flexable as far as mission goes. Those ships might be assigned to bases that each cover a specified territory; that way you don't have to send all the way to the capital, just to the nearest base. Over the course of their career, military crews would be assigned to various bases, just like they do now. No matter if it was the Evil Empire or the Enlightened Federation, this would help stability and security, as well as extend the reach of your empire.
Ferrell
Tony:
"If you use a submarine as a prototype, obviously you don't worry so much about the size of the habitation section, because it's built into extra space all throughout the vessel."
Spaceships care more about mass budget than volume budget. Submarines need a lot of mass anyway so they can sink.
Jollyreaper:
"Strictly from the navy aircraft sense, aircraft are limited endurance vehicles. They return to base at the end of the mission, either the carrier or a land base. That's different from a warship that spends months on-station and has to keep all the parts and pieces operational without the benefit of dockyard assistance."
Again, drone ships are also going to spend months on-station.
If your drones are robust enough to only need maintainance once every few months, then you can do the same with your crewed ships. If your drones are serviced by a nearby carrier ship that stays out of actual combat, then you can do the same with your crewed ships. If you just accept that your drones are poor at damage control and thus more expendable than crewed ships, then now they've taken a significant hit in combat effectiveness compared to crewed ships, so you're starting to lose the rationale that would have made them worth it in the first place.
A further thought: the drone carrier would have one or two maintainance techs per drone and an operator per shift per drone; So, for a dozen drones, you'd need a dozen techs, and 48 operators (plus the 40+ ships crew), at a minimum; so this drone carrier would have a crew of 100 to 200. Even the smallest long duration military spaceship would have a crew of around 40. It would seem that spacecraft would be crewed like an aircraft, but with multiple shifts.
Any thoughts?
Ferrell
Tony:
"If you use a submarine as a prototype, obviously you don't worry so much about the size of the habitation section, because it's built into extra space all throughout the vessel. Also to your advantage, systems that need maintenance are either completely or mostly inside the pressurized envelope. And, obviously, your breathing gas reservoir is mostly in the hab section. I'm having trouble seeing the problem."
Except that clashes with everything we currently know about spacecraft design, most of which is unlikely to be deprecated anytime soon (even in a universe of semi-common FTL travel). Spin sections, solar storm shielding, powerplant radiation shielding (and long trusses to capitalize on the inverse square law) - all of this eats into the mass budget. And submarines are hardly what I'd consider the starting point for spacecraft design. There have been whole threads here about this sort of thing: about how the single-hulled spacecraft of yore is unlikely to be the most efficient design, about the sensitivity to mass budgets, about the enormous power levels and requisite shielding. Habs are expensive in mass terms regardless of space. Crew are expensive in mass terms.
Milo:
"If you just
accept that your drones are poor at damage control..."
If the space warfare threads are anything to go by, even as a starting point, all spacecraft will be poor at damage control.
Drones would be considered more expendable than crewed spacecraft because, well, they're not crewed. I'm not saying they would necessarily be designed to be thrown away - just that it would give a commander a bit more leeway.
I will invoke the authority of previous threads on space warfare on this blog since most of us have participated in these discussions and since there is little relevant space combat experience to draw from.
What little there is makes the idea of a manned combat craft rather improbable; the high closing velocities means that spacecraft are vulnerable to the kinetic energy of even small moving masses. Over in Atomic Rockets, there is a humorous picture of an astronaut about to dump the cat's litter out the airlock to destroy the enemy ship; a real twofer! While there are some ways to armour the ship, in practical terms only a massive citadel structure could hope to survive, leaving much of the ship to be shredded by the contents of Sneaky's litter box moving at 11 kilometers/second or faster.
As for the independent missions. there seems to have been a consensus there will be some sort of local orbital patrol/space guard to keep an eye on things in orbital space. As well, each constellation (at least in my example) has a control ship, which can do the port of call functions, with the metaphorical "big stick" in the high guard position. Since it takes a long time to get to your patrol stations in Solar or Interstellar space, moving a group of ships at once makes more sense than the single HMS Surprise on a cruise trope.
Even if the mission is considered well within Captain Aubrey's capabilities, the situation could change pretty radically in the months or years in transit. As well, the INSS Surprise could actually be the ship that benefits from having the constellation at hand, the crew can cannibalize a ship in the constellation for parts or fuel and remass if things go wrong.
The large size of contemporary naval crews (the minimum suggested was 85 or so), is also incentive to go for robotic ships. Each crew member will need several tons of shielding, as well as food, oxygen, water and a lesser amount of other consumables during a long cruise, so with a very light 5 tons/man mass allowance, the ship has another 425 tons mass to carry about. Someone can calculate a realistic figure of shielding, food and so on, I bet the calculated figure will be worse.
We had a big discussion about this many threads back. There's also some really good stuff on atomic rockets talking about crew positions.
Excellent points were raised above about the consolidation of crew positions. On a B-17 you had pilot, co-pilot, radio operator, navigator, and I think a flight engineer in addition to all the other guys who were just gunners. Some of the guys like navigator and radio operator pulled double-duty as gunners, too.
A B-2 has just two crewmembers, both pilots. A lot of the workload could be consolidated.
Apaches, Cobras, and Hinds are all helicopter gunships and operate with separate pilots and gunners. The task of flying is complicated enough that the pilot can't afford to be distracted with shooting. The canceled Comanche was doing away with that position because the pilot could handle flying and shooting now.
We can also look at the difference between manned fighters. The F-4 and F-14 both flew with backseaters to operate the radar. The F-15 as initially produced did not but the Strike Eagle variant put a backseater onboard. F-16, F-18, F-22, all are one-seaters. (The superbug F-18 variant adds a backseater.)
Excellent points were raised about separating jobs and crew positions. Smaller ships will have one crewman wearing multiple hats whereas larger ships with larger hats might have one crewman per hat. A good comparison would be an accounting department. For a small business one bookkeeper does everything from payroll to collections calls. A larger business could have one person for accounts payable, one for accounts receivable, one person handling payroll, and an entire collections department.
Anyway; on spacecraft crews; a cargo ship might get away with 6-8 people at a minimum for long duration trips, but a military ship would need at least 5 people (operations, internal systems, external systems, command, relief) per watch in the control room and 2-4 people (maintainance techs) in the service and repair center and/or life support. So, 9-10 people x four shifts = 36 to 40 at minimum...plus another shift for to even out all the extra stuff.
I think it really depends on the tech level you're talking about. Are the ships going to feel like 21st century subs in space or are we going to get funky? An example of funky would be the crew has their bodies placed in life support tanks looking like the Matrix and are in virtual space for the whole mission. Expert systems handle most of the ship's functions with oversight from the human minds. (pretty much like the brainships mentioned before but without leaving the bodies behind.)
You can really fall down the rabbit hole speculating on all of this.
I let some posts out of spam jail, and evaporated a couple of duplicates!
Milo:
"Spaceships care more about mass budget than volume budget. Submarines need a lot of mass anyway so they can sink."
Actually, pressurized volume is an important factor in submarine design, because shell area expands by a power of two, while volume expands by a power of three. And the more pressurized volume per unit of hull mass equates to so many more tons of ballast water that have to be shipped to overcome buoyancy. Also, all of that water in the ballast tanks has to be propelled along with the boat.
And you're totally ignoring the convenience of having stuff inside to do maintenance on it. The ISS, for example, has a lot of machinery on the inside of the pressurized volume that strictly speaking doesn't need to be there, except for the fact that it's easy to work on when it's inside. Another thing about having machinery inside the pressurized volume is that you don't have to have independent cooling and heating systems for each item. The Soyuz spacecraft actually takes advantage of this fact. There is a large pressurized volume inside the service module where electronic systems are installed, and heat management is accomplished by air conditioning.
Raymond:
"Except that clashes with everything we currently know about spacecraft design, most of which is unlikely to be deprecated anytime soon (even in a universe of semi-common FTL travel). Spin sections, solar storm shielding, powerplant radiation shielding (and long trusses to capitalize on the inverse square law) - all of this eats into the mass budget. And submarines are hardly what I'd consider the starting point for spacecraft design. There have been whole threads here about this sort of thing: about how the single-hulled spacecraft of yore is unlikely to be the most efficient design, about the sensitivity to mass budgets, about the enormous power levels and requisite shielding. Habs are expensive in mass terms regardless of space. Crew are expensive in mass terms.
Except that it doesn't really clash at all. As previously pointed out to Milo, we already design long endurance spacecraft for the maintenance convenience of putting critical equipment inside pressurized volume. We also place critical systems inside pressurized volume for design simplicity. For spacecraft designed to last decades, there's no reason to expect that we wouldn't provide large pressurized volume to minimize EVA.
WRT single hulled spacecraft, that's a just a straw man. One can desing a craft with several pressurized modules -- see ISS or Soyuz.
And crews are expensive in mass terms compared to what? If we design spacecraft to withstand several hours -- or even minutes -- of multi-gee acceleration, the structure is going to be way more massive than any crew accomodations.
Thucydides:
"I will invoke the authority of previous threads on space warfare on this blog since most of us have participated in these discussions and since there is little relevant space combat experience to draw from."
That's a red herring. There is plenty of experience crewing naval vessels. Whatever some may have talked themselves into believing, that experience says that unless future spacecraft are going to be able to do away with maintenance and repair, they're going to need to be crewed. Period.
"What little there is makes the idea of a manned combat craft rather improbable; the high closing velocities means that spacecraft are vulnerable to the kinetic energy of even small moving masses. Over in Atomic Rockets, there is a humorous picture of an astronaut about to dump the cat's litter out the airlock to destroy the enemy ship..."
WWII destroyers were broken in half by single torpedo hits. Two or three torpedoes, or a couple of minutes of well-aimed gunfire could sink a cruiser. Three or four 1,000 lb bombs could cause a fleet carrier to be written off. Even today, a single heavy anti-ship missile will neutralize, and probably outright sink, any surface combatant smaller than a carrier. A single torpedo will still sink a submarine. Naval combat systems today are all about not getting hit. Future combat systems in space will likewise be all about not getting hit.
BTW, the kitty litter weapon is a dumb joke. The kitty litter will stay in the same orbit as the spacecraft it is dumped from.
"As for the independent missions. there seems to have been a consensus there will be some sort of local orbital patrol/space guard to keep an eye on things in orbital space."
For wealthy, densely populated planets. For newly settled worlds, not so much.
"Since it takes a long time to get to your patrol stations in Solar or Interstellar space, moving a group of ships at once makes more sense than the single HMS Surprise on a cruise trope."
So, above we invoke a lack of definite knowledge, but here definite knowledge is asserted?
"The large size of contemporary naval crews (the minimum suggested was 85 or so), is also incentive to go for robotic ships. Each crew member will need several tons of shielding, as well as food, oxygen, water and a lesser amount of other consumables during a long cruise, so with a very light 5 tons/man mass allowance, the ship has another 425 tons mass to carry about. Someone can calculate a realistic figure of shielding, food and so on, I bet the calculated figure will be worse."
If crews are necessary, or even just desirable, they will be accomodated.
I suppose I'm just going through a "wehat if"... yes, craft will not be man powered, but what if computers systems were not as good as they are currently? Yes, this is impossible (x10), but imagining a massive super heavy battlecraft with thousands of crewmen, but with realisticn elements (such as decks facing parallel to flight and massive heat radiators) is one small mental exercise, in addition to more realistic communication satellites 100 years from now.
As I have stated repeatedly, if computers can replace humans in anything, then there is the awareness that whatever I write about, humans in that story will have no place there, 100, 500 or 1000 years from now. Thus I have three options... try and ignore a potential robot-centric world or accept it and factor it into the future history. The Third option is to just sometimes write a story without the slightly irritating problem of robots replacing humans in everything... thus I imagine occasioanlly crewed war and freight craft.
And just to avoid being misunderstood, I will reiterate again that this is an impossible and compltely ludicrous setting... humans are utterly obselete as a species in any proffession, whether it be military, mechanical, analytical or cultural... its only a matter of (a sometimes very long) time before we are replaced with unthinking machines that can do the job better than us but which will never, ever, be sentient or sapient.
Geoffrey S H:
"And just to avoid being misunderstood, I will reiterate again that this is an impossible and compltely ludicrous setting... humans are utterly obselete as a species in any proffession, whether it be military, mechanical, analytical or cultural... its only a matter of (a sometimes very long) time before we are replaced with unthinking machines that can do the job better than us but which will never, ever, be sentient or sapient."
Oh...I imagine there will be quite a large selection of cultural and technological niches in which it will be simply cheaper to have humans doing the work, regardless of how sophisticated computers get. I also imagine that a lot of them will be in areas that humans are used for in naval crews currently. I certainly don't expect there to be a robot missile tech anytime in the next few millenia.
And just to avoid being misunderstood, I will reiterate again that this is an impossible and compltely ludicrous setting... humans are utterly obselete as a species in any proffession, whether it be military, mechanical, analytical or cultural... its only a matter of (a sometimes very long) time before we are replaced with unthinking machines that can do the job better than us but which will never, ever, be sentient or sapient.
There was a story I read years back where cyborgs had almost completely replaced baseline humans. The cyborgs were still mentally human -- real conceited jerks -- and the line separating baseline human and cyborg was more social class and monetary than mental ability, though cyborged humans could think faster, too.
Our softskin human, basically a space janitor, is dragooned into flying the first FTL prototype. Seems that they'd already lost several cyborgs to space madness and they couldn't figure out why. So our monkey boy is sent to what would seem like a sure but possibly instructive death. The FTL ship comes back and he's perfectly fine. What? How's that possible? The cyborg scientists check things out and it turns out that the FTL process fries cyber-interfaces -- only plain meatbrains won't get fried. FTL is now effectively denied to the cyborgs -- only the baseline humans can be sent to the stars. (you can imagine that the cyborgs immediately set to work seeing if they could fix their interfaces but the author implication here is that it could never be worked around.)
A funny thing for a short story but a little too big of a kloodge to base a whole novel on.
Oh...I imagine there will be quite a large selection of cultural and technological niches in which it will be simply cheaper to have humans doing the work, regardless of how sophisticated computers get. I also imagine that a lot of them will be in areas that humans are used for in naval crews currently. I certainly don't expect there to be a robot missile tech anytime in the next few millenia.
What would maintenance entail on a hypothetical starship? And I think that we should draw a distinction between manned and unmanned ships since we shouldn't count the maintenance involved with life support as part of the rationale for having humans up there.
Anything that moves will eventually break. Solid state things like computers tend to last forever but the fussy mechanical bits will wear out. So the powerplant is the first most obvious question. What's powering the ship? The next question would be the engines. Presumably the powerplant is feeding energy to them to make the ship move. You're not going to be looking at the steam fittings and salt corrosion that navy ships encounter. (Unless our spaceship is using a nuclear reactor which will have plumbing and turbines.) I know the nuke carriers have to cut the decks open for refueling and that's a process that only happens once a decade. How do the nuke subs handle refueling? Is there any maintenance conducted on the reactor while at sea or is that only handled in port?
Would it be simpler/cheaper/more mass efficient for a starship to carry the means of replacing commonly failing parts for critical systems or to have multiple redundant systems and just swap the failing one offline?
Metal fatigue would certainly still be a threat even in the far future but I think inspecting for that would still be something done at starbase.
If our starships are equipped with missiles, we can consider what the Navy's doing with the Tomahawk. "The missile concept is one of a wooden round. The missile is delivered to ships and submarines as an all-up-round (AUR), which includes the missile that flies the mission, the booster that starts its flight, and the container (canister for ships and capsule for submarines) that protects it during transportation, storage and stowage, and acts as a launch tube." All maintenance is done on-shore between deployments. Nobody has to touch the missile once it's loaded.
Tony:
"Whatever some may have talked themselves into believing, that experience says that unless future spacecraft are going to be able to do away with maintenance and repair, they're going to need to be crewed. Period."
Weren't you arguing in the space station thread that spacecraft maintenance will be minimal, and major systems will be (semi-)disposable modules?
"As previously pointed out to Milo, we already design long endurance spacecraft for the maintenance convenience of putting critical equipment inside pressurized volume. We also place critical systems inside pressurized volume for design simplicity. For spacecraft designed to last decades, there's no reason to expect that we wouldn't provide large pressurized volume to minimize EVA."
And as Milo pointed out, pressurized volume isn't the primary limiting factor. Mass is. The ISS isn't the greatest example, as it doesn't have the radiation shielding for interplanetary (or interstellar) missions, nor does it have to deal with radiation from a reactor.
And as you yourself pointed out earlier, naval vessels still receive regular refits - I doubt the entire craft will be away from refit facilities for decades.
And as you yourself pointed out earlier, naval vessels still receive regular refits - I doubt the entire craft will be away from refit facilities for decades.
I can't find a good set of definitions for all the different levels of maintenance.
Maintenance itself is defined as:
Activities required to conserve as nearly, and as long, as possible the original condition of an asset or resource while compensating for normal wear and tear.
depot level maintenance: High-level maintenance performed on equipment requiring major overhaul or substantial or complete rebuilding.
So I guess one thing we can ask it how much twiddling will the equipment need on a regular basis? Even if a jet has a flight engineer, he's not crawling out on a wing to work on the engine. I remember reading about one of the early large Russian multi-engine biplanes that had walkways built into the wings so that mechanics could actually go out there to work on balky engines.
So the questions are:
1. How long will a starship's mission be in your setting?
2. What are the necessary parts and pieces to make your starship a useful vessel?
3. What's likely to break?
4. Will the addition of a human to fix things break the budget?
Given the cost of shuttle launches, it probably would have been cheaper to plan the Hubble as a series of satellites with equipment improvements on each launch rather than trying to make it maintainable. We got our money's worth out of the Mars rovers. Even if the stick wheel would have been a $50 part for a human to replace, you have to factor the cost of getting the human out there in the first place.
Before we see manned missions to Mars, I wonder if we might not see mechanic bots instead. Really good dexterity, the ability to do anything a human could do, not driven by AI but programmed by mission control on Earth. It wouldn't be an autonomous maintenance bot but basically a telepresence tool. Certainly cheaper than sending a canned primate out there.
For most practical purposes, I think that any sophisticated spacecraft will be essentially a "wooden round". Systems will be as simple and reliable as possible, modular if a hot swap is really needed ("I predict failurte of the AE-35 unit in 72 hours, Dave. Mind going out and fixing it for me?" "Uh, sure Hal. There seem to be a lot of EVAs all of a sudden...") and designed to be checked and replaced in port if at all possible after normal cruises. Even having a pressurized volume for the electronics bay isn't a big deal, it might only be a bit bigger than the computer case.
Deep space probes from Pioneer on have all demonstrated these attributes, as well as the ability to be reprogrammed and "upgraded" from mission control on Earth when really needed. The Pioneer and Voyager series spacecraft were able to take very clear pictures of Uranus and Neptune due to software upgrades for the camera equipment, for example. An accompanying spacecraft with a flight control crew does the same thing for a constellation with a much shorter lightspeed lag.
WRT economics, Singapore has a sophisticated manufacturing and export economy, so they are not just "skimming" the profits from being astride a trade route. Small nations and nation states have succeeded in creating wealthy and sophisticated economies in the past and present (Athens, Venice, the Hanse, Elizabethan England, the Netherands, Israel), often without access to natural resource wealth either.
As for using taxpayers as a metric; per capita income does not discriminate between those who create wealth and those who consume it, whie people who pay taxes can be assumed to be creating wealth. While the top 1% of income might be off the edge of the bell curve, the bulk of taxpayers are doing some sort of productiv work, and people in moderately high income brackets are generally small and medium business owners.
Raymond:
"Weren't you arguing in the space station thread that spacecraft maintenance will be minimal, and major systems will be (semi-)disposable modules?"
Yes, under plausible midfuture technological constraints. In the context of insterstellar empire, you have to shift gears.
"And as Milo pointed out, pressurized volume isn't the primary limiting factor. Mass is. The ISS isn't the greatest example, as it doesn't have the radiation shielding for interplanetary (or interstellar) missions, nor does it have to deal with radiation from a reactor."
And, as should go without saying, if we're talking interstellar empire, we're talking sufficient power to make hull mass a minor issue.
"And as you yourself pointed out earlier, naval vessels still receive regular refits - I doubt the entire craft will be away from refit facilities for decades."
Nope, but time to port and ability to even get there is a real issue. Here, on Earth, today, a US naval vessel is no more than a few days from a friendly port with a decent shipyard. In many cases that port is an actual US Navy base. So, if, as happened to one ship I was on -- USS Cleveland, 1990 -- you could lose a forced-draft air blower on a boiler, limp into Subic Bay, and sit tight for six weeks while a replacement was found, shipped out, and installed. If the left-handed disgronificator on your hyperjump engine takes a crap, things might be a bit different.
Re: jollyreaper & Thucydides
One has to think in terms of length of mission and availability of replacements. Packaged missiles can fail pre-friing diagnostics for any number of reasons, many of them remediable by a good technician with some tools and replacement parts. But, since we're never further than a few days steaming from an ammo ship with a replacement round, we deem it okay to have a failure rate and rely on depot level maintenance. If you're several weeks or months away from a service vessel, things would probably be different.
The same logic applies to completely robotic warships. The minute one leaves dock, it's starting to degrade. And comparisons to durability of robotic probes really don't hold up, because probes are ridiculously simple compared to warships. One probe might equate to part of a single module of a multi-module sensor system (even one made "as simple and reliable as possible"). As the ship degrades, it becomes less and less capable. So, after a few months, you might need half again as many robot ships as you would need of well-maintained manned ships.
Thucydides:
"WRT economics, Singapore has a sophisticated manufacturing and export economy, so they are not just "skimming" the profits from being astride a trade route."
It's hardly the basis of their economy. And the capital for the industry that Singapore does have came from being a trade middleman.
"Small nations and nation states have succeeded in creating wealthy and sophisticated economies in the past and present (Athens, Venice, the Hanse, Elizabethan England, the Netherands, Israel), often without access to natural resource wealth either.
With the possible exception of Israel, all on the basis of trade and/or imperial mercantilism.
"As for using taxpayers as a metric; per capita income does not discriminate between those who create wealth and those who consume it, whie people who pay taxes can be assumed to be creating wealth. While the top 1% of income might be off the edge of the bell curve, the bulk of taxpayers are doing some sort of productiv work, and people in moderately high income brackets are generally small and medium business owners."
So let me get this straight...a dentist or a lawyer is a force of production?
One has to think in terms of length of mission and availability of replacements. Packaged missiles can fail pre-friing diagnostics for any number of reasons, many of them remediable by a good technician with some tools and replacement parts. But, since we're never further than a few days steaming from an ammo ship with a replacement round, we deem it okay to have a failure rate and rely on depot level maintenance. If you're several weeks or months away from a service vessel, things would probably be different.
The same logic applies to completely robotic warships. The minute one leaves dock, it's starting to degrade. And comparisons to durability of robotic probes really don't hold up, because probes are ridiculously simple compared to warships. One probe might equate to part of a single module of a multi-module sensor system (even one made "as simple and reliable as possible"). As the ship degrades, it becomes less and less capable. So, after a few months, you might need half again as many robot ships as you would need of well-maintained manned ships.
This is why I'm partial to the robotic droneship/mothership model. The mothership has all the support equipment and supplies and is capable of running for months away from resupply while the drones are a mix of guns, engines, armor and reaction mass.
The mothership enters the system and deploys the droneships. They will engage the defenders and return for repair and resupply. They're not carrying unnecessary things like humans and repair shops. If we stick as closely as possible to realistic space combat where it's thrusting and shooting at boring velocities with no stealth in space, I don't see where a human could have an advantage in that kind of fight. It would seem like you'd rather keep the humans as far away as possible on the mothership.
Then again, if the setting has twinkish Star Wars hyperdrives, we're back to what you described with the US Navy, even the furthest hinterlands of the oceans only a few day's cruise from a Navy base.
Tony:
"Yes, under plausible midfuture technological constraints. In the context of insterstellar empire, you have to shift gears."
I think some of those constraints would still hold, in principle if not in degree. But I see your point.
"And, as should go without saying, if we're talking interstellar empire, we're talking sufficient power to make hull mass a minor issue."
Depends. If starship mass is in the low kilotons, then hab mass still matters. If it's in the megatons, then no. (I did actually put that qualifier in my original statement.)
"Nope, but time to port and ability to even get there is a real issue."
I was thinking along the same lines as jollyreaper's mothership/tender model, in which case the drone craft are only a short tactical distance away.
"So let me get this straight...a dentist or a lawyer is a force of production?"
Of course. Why wouldn't they be?
Raymond:
"Depends. If starship mass is in the low kilotons, then hab mass still matters. If it's in the megatons, then no. (I did actually put that qualifier in my original statement.)"
IMO larger masses are more likely, if for no other reason than it seemd to take a lot of equipment to generate and control a lot of energy.
"I was thinking along the same lines as jollyreaper's mothership/tender model, in which case the drone craft are only a short tactical distance away."
How short a tactical distance? Even a few light minutes renders positive control in combat questionable. At shorter tactical distances, it's hard to see why you would want to expose your only maintenance facility and crew so close to the line of fire. A divided maintenance and control capability, even if less efficient, is probably more practical for combat systems more complex than a strike fighter. Even main battle tanks receive their primary maintenance from their own crews, not from ordnance personnel.
"Of course. Why wouldn't they be?"
Once again, I don't accept labor theories of value. Lawyers and dentists (and airline pilots and bank managers and computer programmers and...) all exist as factors in an efficient division of labor. They don't make more money because they do more work. They make more money because their skills are relatively rare, require more dedication to training and maintenance, and demand a premium for those reasons. But none of those professions do any more work than any other. Some do considerably less.
Tony:
"IMO larger masses are more likely, if for no other reason than it seemd to take a lot of equipment to generate and control a lot of energy."
I think it depends on overall techlevel and FTL details. If you're using a freeform, smaller-is-faster FTL type, the smaller craft make more sense. If it's an all-starships-are-massive FTL, then go with the larger ones. Flavor to taste.
"Once again, I don't accept labor theories of value. Lawyers and dentists (and airline pilots and bank managers and computer programmers and...) all exist as factors in an efficient division of labor. They don't make more money because they do more work. They make more money because their skills are relatively rare, require more dedication to training and maintenance, and demand a premium for those reasons. But none of those professions do any more work than any other. Some do considerably less."
It's not a labor theory of value. Professionals (and service industries in general) contribute to the velocity of money, which is the only economic value which makes any sense in a modern economy.
Raymond:
"Depends. If starship mass is in the low kilotons, then hab mass still matters. If it's in the megatons, then no."
Just so we're clear, the largest sea ship (and largest mobile human-made object) so far is only 650 kilotons. The largest airplane is 0.6 kilotons.
I don't know where you're planning to get multimegaton starships from. At most I could see some of the biggest and grandest dreadnoughts in the fleet being that large.
Tony:
"They don't make more money because they do more work. They make more money because their skills are relatively rare, require more dedication to training and maintenance, and demand a premium for those reasons."
So they do do more work. Training is also a form of work, in that lazy people try to avoid doing it. People with rare skills need to have done the work of both learning the skill and applying it, which makes them do more total work than people who need merely apply their inborn skills of moving heavy stuff.
Raymond:
"It's not a labor theory of value. Professionals (and service industries in general) contribute to the velocity of money, which is the only economic value which makes any sense in a modern economy."
If you forget about the infrastructure, particularly power production...
"If you forget about the infrastructure, particularly power production..."
The infrastructure only has economic value if it's used. It's in the category of captial goods, for sure, and certainly has a multiplier value. But infrastructure isn't valuable in and of itself - it is required, yes, but its value is dependent on other economic activity taking advantage of it.
Raymond:
"The infrastructure only has economic value if it's used. It's in the category of captial goods, for sure, and certainly has a multiplier value. But infrastructure isn't valuable in and of itself - it is required, yes, but its value is dependent on other economic activity taking advantage of it."
Which invites a chicken and egg argument -- would all of those electrical and petrochemical power consumers exist without a large and relatively cheap energy industry, or does a large and relatively cheap energy industry exist in response to all of those electrical and petrochemical power consumers?
My answer would be that both are equally important to each other. Asserting that one or the other is primary is mistaken.
Tony:
"My answer would be that both are equally important to each other. Asserting that one or the other is primary is mistaken."
That particular relationship is a standard dynamical one, frankly - they both feed off each other. There's a bias in favor of the consumers after a certain point, as consumer demand drives expansion of infrastructure. There's a certain inertia to infrastructure, since it's difficult to disassemble and reallocate resources spent building it, which leads to generally more conservative expansion thresholds.
But that's actually irrelevant to what I was saying, which is that infrastructure's merely a subset of an economy, and that it's not a useful measure of the whole when viewed in isolation.
Raymond:
"That particular relationship is a standard dynamical one, frankly - they both feed off each other. There's a bias in favor of the consumers after a certain point, as consumer demand drives expansion of infrastructure."
There's no consumer demand if infrastructure costs too much. Supply and demand balance. Econ 101, right?
jollyreaper
Your drone/mothership combo sounds a lot like a present day manned bomber dispensing a load of cruise missiles and penetration aids. If the drones simply fly in dispensing KKV submunitions and perhaps being programmed to crash into the highest value targets themselves then we have a match. (The mothership would resemble a B-36 in size, scale and crew size rather than a B-2 in this model. The other less fortunate analogue would be the USS Akron and its on board F9C Sparrowhawks).
Looking farther ahead, the ultimate space weapon (using known physics) is the xaser star, built around a kilometer long liniac. I can't find the thread on Rocketpunk which references it, but the xaser can essentially kill targets a light minute away and soft kill unhardened targets up to a light hour away.
Given the huge size of the weapon, the xaser would be the carrier and the manned frigate the battle rider. The ship detaches and leaves the xaser in high guard while showing the flag in port, or accelerates hard on a different vector when the xaser is unleashed against a target. Sticking with the xaser is unhealthy, since the defender would be sending swarms of 2000+ KKV's in an attempt to overmatch the xaser's self defense capabilities. (the xaser itself could also carry swarms of KKV's in addition to the control frigate).
Tony
Your comment about ships only being a few days sail away from port has few analogues in space, even a very powerful VASMIR ship will take 39 days to reach Mars, and ultra high performance spacecraft will reach the outer planets in trip times measured in months. For the most part, a ship will simply coast on minimal power, since the enemy can hardly sneak up on you. This is an ideal setting for an automated ship or an AI. Aircraft can fly as UAV's or drones like the cruise missile since the operating environment is still fairly simple. The Navy is experimenting with unmanned combat ships, but since the sea is a much more complex operating environment, this is much harder to do. Robotic land vehicles have even more limited success since the land is even more complex terrain.
Your drone/mothership combo sounds a lot like a present day manned bomber dispensing a load of cruise missiles and penetration aids.
It quite was I was envisioning. In the genetic sense the assumption is that:
a) the ftl and human bits are the expensive part of going interstellar
b) it's cheaper to fly your guns out to the target and shoot than take your whole support base with you
c) the "guns" as it were are still going to be plenty massive and capable of independent operation. The mothership might sit pretty out in the oort cloud while the drones carry the fight in-system. They're not going to be cruise missiles or expendable, the idea is that they will be recovered. They're unmanned warships that will return to the mothership for servicing.
There's no real model for that really in the real world, MAYBE if you look at the old destroyer/destroyer-tender setup that ended up going away a while back. Makes it interesting because it's not a direct rip from naval warfare.
Makes you wonder how strange space combat would seem to people who grew up on a desert planet without a tradition of naval warfare. Would they say "Ok, look, it's not going to quite be caravans in space" but still fall back to calling their trade vessels camels, their combat vessels horses, and planets become oases. lol
The specific implementation I'm imagining for the setting I'm working on is that the starships are ginormous, think spacing guild from Dune huge. Hyperspace allows FTL speeds in interstellar space and you need the big ships to do it safely, no way around it. You have to go STL in stellar space but it's still faster than you could ever manage on reaction engines in realspace. In stellar space the big ships are wallowing, slow things and have to go slower the closer in they get. Smaller ships can be of more tactical use in system space.
I'll avoid using the blue water and brown water comparisons and say it's more like big fish ruling the deeper waters and minnows using their size to their advantage in the shallows amongst the weeds.
So among military starships you start with the scouts. They're as small as you can get away with and very, very fast. They'll serve as couriers between stars because there's no interstellar FTL coms. They'll scout through hyperspace because there's very poor visibility compared to realspace. They'll also engage the enemy's scouts and try to catch his couriers. They're generally too weak to engage merchantmen.
The medium starships have balanced usability and will be the classic mothership. They'll fight when they have to in interstellar space and in the emptier areas of stellar space. The spaceships they carry will be huge by our standards and probably on the scale of what we think of as "big" so the motherships by comparison will be "ludicrous huge."
The heavy starships would be used for directly tangling with planetary defenses and represent the capital ships in this system. They're too slow to catch anything smaller than them and too heavy to be countered by anything other than opposing heavies. But they're really expensive and so no side can afford to spam these things out and just blanket the enemy like a poorly-balanced computer strategy game.
Now as for the carried escorts, the spaceships, you end up seeing the same roles. The lightest and fasted ships do the scouting, the medium ships do the bulk of the fighting. The heavies among the spaceships would anchor the formation and provide the greatest weight for action.
I'm still playing with how all this balances out.
Thucydides:
"Your comment about ships only being a few days sail away from port has few analogues in space..."
The subject is interstellar empire, presumably viable in time of travel and ease of trade terms, not the plausible midfuture in Solar space. We're talking levels of energy production and consumption that make the technology and economics of 21st Century astronautics and aeronautics irrelevant.
jollyreaper:
"the ftl and human bits are the expensive part of going interstellar"
Unless we've missed something absolutely fundamental, the FTL part is going to be so expensive in terms of power production and control that bringing people along -- much like 20th Century battleship design -- is going to be an afterthought for some junior engineers to work out.
Unless we've missed something absolutely fundamental, the FTL part is going to be so expensive in terms of power production and control that bringing people along -- much like 20th Century battleship design -- is going to be an afterthought for some junior engineers to work out.
Let me clarify -- by humans being the expensive bits, I mean placing value on human life and not wanting to use them as cannon-fodder. If humans are a necessary part of military operations, we're going to still want to keep them as safe as possible. The most junior human in the fleet is going to be a tech on the mothership and he's not likely to be twisting the wrenches but supervising the robots twisting the wrenches.
Of course, the value of human life would depend on the culture involved. If we follow the progressive school of history rather than the cyclical school, we'd happily note that more and more value is placed on human life as the years go by. Projecting forward, the individual human would be greatly valued indeed. So why the need for a military? Because not every culture would share that ideal, thus the military is required to fend them off.
jollyreaper:
"The most junior human in the fleet is going to be a tech on the mothership and he's not likely to be twisting the wrenches but supervising the robots twisting the wrenches."
Not likely. In maintenance activities, humans turning wrenches is ancillary to what they're actually doing, not a primary skill. That's why we have had great success in automating factories, but why we don't even consider automating the local garage. At one end you have a scriptable progression of programmable tasks. At the other end you have a new problem presented with every malfunction.
If you want to say, well, at least there's room to automate routine diagnostics. Sorry, no, not really. Check out missile testing, beginning at 8:17 in this film. We continue to make the diagnostic equipment smaller and more capable, but the fundamental process architecture has been established for half a century, and doesn't seem likely to change.
"Of course, the value of human life would depend on the culture involved. If we follow the progressive school of history rather than the cyclical school, we'd happily note that more and more value is placed on human life as the years go by. Projecting forward, the individual human would be greatly valued indeed. So why the need for a military? Because not every culture would share that ideal, thus the military is required to fend them off."
In reality, human life is cheap. Only imposition of certain cultural values makes it more valuable in people's minds. Change the environment, and the value of life changes. Even in the US, where we think we have such a great handle on the value of human life, we deprecate those lives that don't seem to matter so much to us: jihadis, starving Africans, murder victims, etc.
Tony writes: Yes, under plausible midfuture technological constraints. In the context of insterstellar empire, you have to shift gears.
This is a central question that I'll be taking up in a future post.
One factor here could be whether spacefaring civilization passed through the Plausible Midfuture on its way to an interstellar setting. If it did, the technologies for highly automated ships are already on hand, and c. 2000 sea navy crewing practice is not the baseline people will work from.
I'll also note that while wormholes involve Preposterous Energy, it is not inherent that this must be generated aboard starships.
Oh hell, really, the more operatic the setting, the more the constraints depend mainly on what the author wants.
Rick:
"One factor here could be whether spacefaring civilization passed through the Plausible Midfuture on its way to an interstellar setting. If it did, the technologies for highly automated ships are already on hand, and c. 2000 sea navy crewing practice is not the baseline people will work from."
People will, as always, work from the baseline of what is necessary. When triremes needed over 100 rowers, large merchant vessles probaly had crews of 8-10. When early modern navies needed hundreds of men on each ship to man guns, a lightly armed merchantman might have a crew of 40-50, and maybe as few as 20, if no armament at all was shipped. When battleships routinely had crews of up to 2000, and carriers up to 5000, similar sized merchant vessels could get by with as few as 20-30, thanks to containerization and associated ashore support. When space merchants might have crews of 5-10, space warships may have scores of crewmwmbers, or even hundreds, because people will be needed for all of the things that just don't exist on a merchant carrier.
"I'll also note that while wormholes involve Preposterous Energy, it is not inherent that this must be generated aboard starships."
Really, what use does one have for all of that energy, except beating planetary gravity wells, flitting around in space, and jumping from star to star? Or, to put it another way, we can make large diesel engines that move 100 kt oil tankers around, but we don't put those in cars, or even in train locomotives.
"Oh hell, really, the more operatic the setting, the more the constraints depend mainly on what the author wants."
Seems to be a hard time accepting that, for some people...
I'm getting more & more convinced by a blogger who says the reason for our power generation mostly coming from burning dead plants & animals is that the people who get rich from that situation put all the road blocks they can in the way of nuclear power.
There's a combination of explanations as far as I can see. It's a little bit of all of the following:
1) Technology is hard to do. Coming up with a better idea is tough.
2) Of all the new ideas people come up with, none of them beat fossil fuels in terms of price/energy generated. (we're at the point where this truism is starting to change)
3) Self-defeating prophecy. If alternative energy is always more expensive, nobody will fund research to make it less expensive. *bangs head against wall*
4) The true cost is hidden from the citizen. The true cost of car culture is not represented to the average citizen by the cost of car/insurance/gas. Informed economic decisions are hard to make in such an environment.
5) The people who are making so much money off the current model want to continue making money off that model and so try to keep the cost of energy at the point that maximizes their revenue without rising so high to justify more investment in alternative or actively sabotage alternative energy research. Witness Reagan tearing the solar panels off the White House and negotiating with the Saudis to flood the market with oil after the gas shock of the 70's.
6) Everybody wants the other guy to economize.
7) When faced with complex problems, humans either panic or dither.
What makes this interplay complex is that the contributing factors will wax and wane in importance over the years. And there's always a tendency to indulge in woo-woo conspiracy theories and miss the plain and proper criminal conspiracies that are usually less romantic but more pragmatic and profitable. GM killing the street car lines is interesting. Yes, that did happen but it's even more complicated than that with a lot of boneheaded resource allocation decisions made all around, including demographic shifts and well-intentioned rules biting us in the butt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal
"I'll also note that while wormholes involve Preposterous Energy, it is not inherent that this must be generated aboard starships."
I think this is more in reference to the various FTL systems where ships go to artificial or natural wormholes for the FTL portion of the journey. The ship itself only needs to move about in inertial space and have the ability to transit the wormhole without being damaged or destroyed by tidal stress or any other real or author induced hazards of FTL transit. even a gossamer ship powered by a solar or magnetic sail would be able to reach the wormhole entrance, dump or furl the sail and transit to the exit point.
Presumably, the author could postulate some sort of wormhole that exists in cis lunar space, which can be reached by an Apollo or Zond class spaceship, but the implications of frying the Earth with the energy required to instantiate the wormhole, disrupting plate tectonics, the Moon's orbit and the tides due to the gravitational effects and so on would render the FTL part of the story rather secondary to the ongoing global disaster...
Jollyreaper:
"Makes you wonder how strange space combat would seem to people who grew up on a desert planet without a tradition of naval warfare."
Makes you wonder just how hard the science can be in a setting that has a desert planet.
Even the driest planets that are capable of supporting life should still have some small seas, generous patches of woodlands, etc. The seas might not be big enough to be a major strategic factor for most countries, but they'll be there... and really, chances are that if water is so rare, then ruling the areas that have water will be of paramount strategic importance.
Tony:
"Really, what use does one have for all of that energy, except beating planetary gravity wells, flitting around in space, and jumping from star to star?"
We will always find use for more energy. For one thing, energy contributes directly to the production capacity of our industry. Basically... every industry.
Makes you wonder just how hard the science can be in a setting that has a desert planet.
Even the driest planets that are capable of supporting life should still have some small seas, generous patches of woodlands, etc. The seas might not be big enough to be a major strategic factor for most countries, but they'll be there... and really, chances are that if water is so rare, then ruling the areas that have water will be of paramount strategic importance.
The oceans serve as a heat pump, distributing heat around the world and lessening the thermal gradient. A desert world without oceans would probably be just about lethal around the equator with either habitable ring zones around an uninhabitable polar region or only the poles are habitable. Trips through the equatorial regions would be harrowing. Maybe the oasis in this case could be deep canyons that can provide shelter from the sun during the daylight hours. There would have to be some powerfully valuable stuff located at one pole and not the other to justify the trips.
When I played with my (crude!) climate sim program, it had nothing good to say about planets with no significant surface water.
In fact, below some critical level I'd guess that water-poor planets end up with essentially all their water locked up in ice caps, and daytime equatorial temperatures that are roasting hot. At best there'd be a narrow habitable ring in each hemisphere - 'habitable' in about the sense that the Sahara is habitable.
IANAPS, but I don't think Arrakis could happen.
So basically, Mars (assuming it had a thicker and more breathable atmosphere) would basically be the limit for how much desert a desert planet can have and still be habitable?
I think if Mars was to be warmed up with a thicker atmosphere, much of the current trapped water would become available for the local ecology (although we would be talking multiple small lakes, streams and probably nothing larger than one of the Great Lakes. The Oceanus Borealis would probably not be filled again this time around unless we brought more water in the form of comets or ice from the Jovian moons.
Given the very inhospitable sorts of planets being found to date (hot Jupiters orbiting close to the local sun, "super Earths" and so on), any Interstellar Empire will probably spend much of its time and energy terraforming any scrap of suitable mass. Imagine stellar systems full of asteroid colonies and Island Three type structures, since the planets are busts.
This would also suggest a massive space going culture capable of towing asteroids and comets around, and perhaps teleoperated, robotic or AI installations on planetary bodies where there is something worth mining. If they feel little attachment to planets, and are scattered in many small outposts, how will their culture develop?
Thucydidies said"This would also suggest a massive space going culture capable of towing asteroids and comets around, and perhaps teleoperated, robotic or AI installations on planetary bodies where there is something worth mining. If they feel little attachment to planets, and are scattered in many small outposts, how will their culture develop?"
I think that either "shirt-sleeve" worlds would have reduced value, or they would be worth fighting wars over for they're control.
Geoffrey S H said"And just to avoid being misunderstood, I will reiterate again that this is an impossible and compltely ludicrous setting... humans are utterly obselete as a species in any proffession, whether it be military, mechanical, analytical or cultural... its only a matter of (a sometimes very long) time before we are replaced with unthinking machines that can do the job better than us but which will never, ever, be sentient or sapient."
I assume that you mean non-creative professions; unthinking machines won't be able to innovate, invent, direct market strategy, design new product lines or advertising; in other words, your future will have all the grunt work done by robot, but those robots will have no purpose or function but to serve human needs. Have I got that correct? So in your setting, your culture would probably find the concept of robots killing humans the ultimate horror...human-only militaries would make sense in this setting.
Rick: I doubt water-poor planets would be colonized unless they had some resource that was increadably valuble to the local economy. Although, a couple of bands of 3000 Km by 300 Km would be a heck of a big garden...
Ferrell
"I assume that you mean non-creative professions; unthinking machines won't be able to innovate, invent, direct market strategy, design new product lines or advertising" -Ferrell.
We-ell... I've heard enough stories of proffessionally designed robots testing small theories on their own or other things we would associate wityh creativity. In the 60's a computer "composed" a small musical peice. Now, all of this is simplistic and not very demanding... but with the developement of computing power, the ability of a machine ton design a better version of itself might become more and more possible. Note that this is NOT AI- it is merely a cold brute-force analysis that uses mathematical models to give the illusion of creativity, while proving itself superior to human brain processes. This is what I imagine might happen, a thouand years from now robots will mathematically be able to tell "the perfect joke" so to speak- and thus pr0ving that all the universe is mathematical, and creativity is part of that model. Bank's Culture... but with unthinking, cold machines shephearding an obselete and useless humanity who didn't even have the comfort of creating a super-race of self-aware AI to chat with.
Yeah, from that you can tell I'm probably scpetical of the ability to "fashion" intelligence. If I'm wrong, then great! If I'm right... then things do look alittle bleak. One setting has this ultimate developement at the end of the timeline, another ignores the presence of machines, as you have alluded to, and other simply handwaves human brain power as being able with help to calculate better than machines through collaberation with robotic computing power- humans need robots and robots need humans, essentially.
Of course I could be very wrong... but the eventual usurpation of culture by computers seems inexoriable to me, no matter how long it takes. certainly, militaries will eventually become entirely robotic, except at the top level. If airpower replaces combined arms as per the "Afghan Model" bar afew light companies, and UAVs are the way to go in airforces then this process will happen very quickly.
Although, a couple of bands of 3000 Km by 300 Km would be a heck of a big garden...
For values of 'garden' that include the Sahara. Which in cosmic perspective is valid, but to us, not so much.
I've just finished reading through all of the comments, and I have a couple of my own WRT crew.
First, damage control. Damage control is not there to put the ship back together after it gets blown apart. That's the job of the shipyard. The damage control crews are there to make sure it gets to the shipyard. (I'm not claiming that DC never fixes anything. Just that it doesn't do what most SF authors seem to think.) Spaceships don't sink or catch fire, so they're sort of useless.
Second, repairs. What would a drone, even one not directly carried by a mothership, need repairs for? What pieces operate during cruising? The reactor and engine (not fixable in flight), thrusters (ditto), and some solid-state electronics (minimal repairs required). Thus, I don't need a full-time maintenance tech aboard each ship. Or, more accurately, I don't need enough to justify having a crew aboard each ship. If humans are needed for major repairs, there will have to be enough of them aboard to affect performance. Even if we put them aboard large ships as an afterthought, I can't see enough to do the kind of repair work Tony talks.
unskilled labor that nobody is cruel enough to assign to a single person for the duration of his cruise (mess duty, compartment cleaner, laundry, etc.)
Well, subs (which don't have *any* unskilled labor onboard) assign the most junior personnel (ie the least-skilled) to mess-crank for a few months. Everybody cleans spaces, and everyone does their own laundry.
I was a yeoman. For those that don't speak Navy, an admin clerk, disbursing clerk, postal clerk, legal clerk, and HR clerk. My watch was driving the boat, or standing lookout if we were on the surface, or whatever. After 6 hours of that, I'd spend an hour or so cleaning, and another 2 hours or so doing admin work. *Everyone* on a sub wears 2-3 hats, usually more.
How do the nuke subs handle refueling?
That's a shipyard job.
Is there any maintenance conducted on the reactor while at sea or is that only handled in port?
Borrowing info from the WSJ: Core temps are roughly 550-600 deg F. It takes a couple weeks to dump enough heat to get close to the reactor vessel.
However, US Naval reactors are pressurized water designs with parallel systems. You can go to a reduced-power status and perform maintenance on some systems, usually electrical generation. Almost every electrical and mechanical part of the reactor is outside the reactor compartment, so that you can work on it.
As a reminder, a watchsection is a minimum-safe-operation level. You wake everyone up to be able to fight.
I assumed that you'd see multiple sensor operators just due to the 360x360 search volume, in addition to the fact that the different sensors have different profiles and tell you different pieces of information. You see, the Navy currently has a minimum of one sensor operator per sensor system. Most air-search systems have multiple operators per sensor.
Remember, your sensor techs (ST) also know how to fix the sensors, while your firecontrol techs (FT) know the limitations of the weapons and countermeasures. You don't want to double them up, because an ST's job is to look for things. A FT's job is to shoot them. Those are not the same skillset, even though most FTs are very good at some ST jobs. You don't ask the FTs to fix sensor systems, and you don't ask STs to fix firecontrol systems.
What pieces operate during cruising? The reactor and engine (not fixable in flight), thrusters (ditto), and some solid-state electronics (minimal repairs required).
Well, a power turbine may be possible to fix inflight. Thrusters I will grant as shipyard jobs. Solid-state electronics not needing repair/replacement? Not so much. The techs usually replaced a couple entire boards per system every 2000 hours of operation... less than 3 months.
One of my good friends had a job code of 'undocumented troubleshooter'. That means he gets to write the procedure that will tell the next guy how to tell which part failed, write the procedure to replace that part, *and* write another procedure to test the repair, all while in a situation that involves being cheek-deep in alligators.
Besides, you said yourself that robots replacing humans would likely be a couple thousand years from now.
Until then, you will need repair techs not more than 24 hours away from the unit to be repaired, and usually less than an hour away. If you go the drone route, this makes your manned ships much bigger. It's simply that you can automate the repetitive stuff pretty easily, but non-routine still takes a human brain.
All this will be a theme of an upcoming addition to the 'Space Warfare' series!
It sounds like the ideal space weapon is an inert hunk of steel shot towards the target at high speed....
You still have to find the target (requiring a sensor tech) and get the slug to where the target will be (requiring a fire-control tech), plus all the other backend they bring along, Thucydides.
Please remember that modern warships are not designed to be low-maintenance. They have large crews for DC, and they need to keep those people busy. My computer is mostly solid-state, and it doesn't need repairs (outside of software problems) very often.
A better example of what I see is a car. It generally goes how long without maintenance? Yes, there is some preventative stuff every couple months, but it's fairly minor.
I can do math on this if needed, but I'll save that for the upcoming space warfare post.
Good point that if you HAVE a large crew anyway, you may as well have them doing maintenance rather than polishing brass or twiddling thumbs.
Scott:
"Well, subs (which don't have *any* unskilled labor onboard) assign the most junior personnel (ie the least-skilled) to mess-crank for a few months. Everybody cleans spaces, and everyone does their own laundry."
Same-same on surface vessels. Butthe jobs do exist, and each man can only do so much work. So when you calculate manning levels, you have to add in an extra ten percent for basic service and upkeep jobs, evenly distributed throughout the departments and divisions. For example, on the USS Long Beach in the 1980s, it was common for a new sailor fresh out of school to do three months mess duty and then three months compartment cleaner, before he was even put on the normal watch bill.
"I assumed that you'd see multiple sensor operators just due to the 360x360 search volume, in addition to the fact that the different sensors have different profiles and tell you different pieces of information. You see, the Navy currently has a minimum of one sensor operator per sensor system. Most air-search systems have multiple operators per sensor.
...It's simply that you can automate the repetitive stuff pretty easily, but non-routine still takes a human brain.
"
Well, one might expect in the future that expert systems could help humans with data integration tasks that are now done totally by humans. But you are right that humans are in the loop for non-routine tasks -- which combat tends to routinely throw up.
Thucydides:
"It sounds like the ideal space weapon is an inert hunk of steel shot towards the target at high speed...."
Radar. Maneuvering thrusters. Next?
A better example of what I see is a car. It generally goes how long without maintenance? Yes, there is some preventative stuff every couple months, but it's fairly minor.
Let's see here: engines last about 100,000 miles before they should* be overhauled. If your average speed is 30mph, then you're talking a time between overhauls of about 3500 hours. 3500 hours is 145 days (almost 5 months). So on a ship you'd be overhauling engines, etc, every 5-6 months.
It's not that military vessels aren't designed to be low-maintenance, they're just operated a LOT more than civilians are used to thinking about. Remember that ships are in operation 24/7. That greatly increases the apparent frequency of maintenance, even though the number of hours between maintenance operations hasn't changed.
How much time do you spend on your work computer? 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. That's 2000 hours of operation per year. A naval system will rack up 2000 hours in 83 days. Therefore, you have 4-5x more maintenance to be done compared to your civilian computer.
This means you have to drag spares along with you, have a way to install spares, (not to mention have a human around to figure out which part is actually broke!), etc, etc.
*Diesel engines like the GM Duramax actually give a miles-before-overhaul number for various parts. IIRC, injectors last about 125k, even though the engine itself won't need to be rebuilt until 250k.
Airlines get into some pretty high usage rates too. They have to keep all that expensive capital equipment earning. As you would expect (once you have come to expect it) they have large maintenance and repair infrastructures. The only reason flight crews are so small is that aircraft operators can get the plane to a relevant facility quickly when an upkeep task needs to be done or a malfunction addressed. Even an urgent or emergent casualty can usually be handled somewhere close to where the plane is flying, or the necessary skills and equipment brought to the plane. Ships at sea? Not so much.
First, the engine won't be on all the time. So that 5-6 months (which is poor extrapolation, btw. Cars aren't atomic rockets) should be enough for a couple of missions.
Second, how often does my computer hardware break? For my home computer, which rarely gets turned off, the only hardware failure in about five years was a motherboard/power supply about a year ago.
Third, warships are not designed with the same standards of low maintainence that say, commercial ships are. I know there are reasons, but the biggest is simple: we will have lots of people onboard for DC. We need something for them to do. Let's have them fix stuff. Spacecraft don't need humans for that, so there's every incentive to get the people out, or as low as possible.
Part 2:
Tony, weren't you on the other side of this during the space station debates? Why the change of heart?
As for the maintainence that will have to be done, consider the following scenario:
My fleet, which is composed of a dozen drone laserstars, two command ships, and two tenders, departs Earth for Mars. Two months out, a computer fails on one of the drones. I send a guy over to replace it. Total time: 2 hours. The same happens 6 more times during the trip. Maybe some other problems, too. Still, the repair crews from the tenders get everything dealt with. Do you seriously expect me to believe that it's better to put 40 people aboard each ship (which is about the estimated minimum practical crew) than to put 80 aboard each tender?
So the traditional naval model is "Rocketpunk", but the military spacecraft of today and projected near future ones (or even alternative history ones like the orbital weapons of the Strategic Defense Initiative) are all unmanned devices which respond to human operators on the ground.
Military satellites have lots of different real and anticipated attributes, based on their roles, including changing orbits, ejecting film canisters for accurate drops on selected targets on Earth, adjusting sensors to compensate for various viewing conditions, agile electronic communications, aiming and firing various weapons systems (SDI, "Rods from God" and "Common Aero Vehicles") and so on.
The traditional space fleet is "Das Marsprojekt" with almost a thousand launches to build a fleet of ten spacecraft and dozens of subsidiary "busy bee" space pods, which ultimately support three landing craft. You could rejig it as a ten ship task force with seven manned tenders supporting three capital ships.
The modern chemical fueld space fleet for Mars is "Mars Direct", with two automated ships to support one manned vessel, using three heavy lifters to launch. As a task force, you could use this model to have two tenders to one capital ship (which is true since the unmanned ships are to support the manned vessel), a vast reduction in manpower and resources.
Byron:
"First, the engine won't be on all the time. So that 5-6 months (which is poor extrapolation, btw. Cars aren't atomic rockets) should be enough for a couple of missions."
Depends on the technological assumptions. Interstellar empire probably means constant acceleration spacecraft. If you have to motor out to a warp points in the outskirts of a solar system, or even a stargate at a planet-star lagrange point, you don't want to take several months to do it. Or, as we have been discussing in another topic, if you have a free-form type of FTL, you probably have to match vectors with the destination system and a body within that system, which could require quite a lot of delta-v, applied over a length of time.
:Second, how often does my computer hardware break? For my home computer, which rarely gets turned off, the only hardware failure in about five years was a motherboard/power supply about a year ago."
A major warship can have several hundred to a couple of thousand people's worth of computers. Ask anybody who does IT admin and maintenance in a large office building what that's like.
"Third, warships are not designed with the same standards of low maintainence that say, commercial ships are. I know there are reasons, but the biggest is simple: we will have lots of people onboard for DC. We need something for them to do. Let's have them fix stuff. Spacecraft don't need humans for that, so there's every incentive to get the people out, or as low as possible."
Who told you warships were designed with constant human maintenance in mind? Yes, there's plenty of makework for people who don't have real jobs except in combat, but the basic systems themselves are designed to be as reliable as possible. You can't have something vital breaking down in combat simply because in normal operations there's always extra bodies and time to work on it.
As far back as you want to look in history, warships have always had crews that way outnumbered merchant crews for similar size vessels. Triremes had over a hundred extra men, simply for reliable tactical maeuvering. Frigates likewise. (Merchant vessels never got as big as ships of the line, until the introduction of steam.) Steam battleships had all those extra hundreds of men to stoke more boilers, man guns, man sensors, and form damage control parties.
But none of the types of vessels mentioned were any less mechanically reliable. They just had more jobs to do. Andi n the age of steam, they had much more equipment to maintain -- from weapons and sensors themselves to extra large propulsion plants, ammunition and power feed systems, crew support equipment, etc.
"Tony, weren't you on the other side of this during the space station debates? Why the change of heart?
As for the maintainence that will have to be done, consider the following scenario:
My fleet, which is composed of a dozen drone laserstars, two command ships, and two tenders, departs Earth for Mars..."
You're forgetting the context: insterstellar empire. That means there's not just one industrial base, on one planet. And the costs of getting off planets with industrial bases is considerably cheaper than what we are facing now. Finally, the "mission control" type of management architecture simply won't work over interstellar distances. So spacecraft are going to have to be a lot more self-sufficient, resilient, and repairable.
Re: Thucydides
You're out of context. See my comments to Byron.
You're changing the subject. Yes, in an interstellar scenario the conditions change somewhat. However, we really can't speculate very much on what the changes will be. If we have FLT, who knows what else we might have, too. However, in a plausible midfuture scenario, drones will probably work. I'll wait for the post on drones to go into more detail.
What's the extra manpower going to help with? They aren't serving as propulsion to make it go faster. They aren't manning extra weapons. Sensors are the best I can think of and there's only so many operators you'll need. Damage control? Spaceships can't sink and burning comparments should be able to be vented to space.
So much depends on the hypothetical technology.
PS always copy your post before posting :)
Re: Byron and jollyreaper
The topic is named "On Interstellar Empire" and that's where I've always been with my comments. I don't care how sophisticated computers or mechanisms get, I think you will always need people to fix and maintain them, because they will be imperfect machines built be imperfect people.
The context here is why do we need so many people in the Imperial Space Navy?
Rocketpunk scenarios needed lots of manpower because ships were postulated to need lots of maintainance. The 70 man crew of "Das Marsprojekt" were changing vacuum tubes, doing astrogation by hand, running an entire ship just to carry the comms equipment to transmit to Earth and keeping lots of mechanical systems going (like a mercury vapour turbogenerator per ship for electrical power).
The four man crew of Mars Direct have solid state electronics, probably a nuclear RTG for electrical energy and an order of magnitude less mechanical "things" to fix (most of which are not active until after they land on Mars itself).
Now if Das Marsprojekt was tasked to invade Mars with three capital ships and seven tenders, we would probably have a far bigger crew to man weapons and sensors, and a correspondingly larger resource bill just to set things up. A task force using Mars Direct era technology could still have three spacecraft (a control ship and two automated warships) with 40 men, literally orders of magnitude fewer resources to devote to the project.
Tony:
In fairness, much of the work currently done by IT staff (especially in datacenters) is a consequence of the pervasiveness of commodity hardware, and most components which need replacement are tied to data storage systems, not computing grids. I don't think current commercial IT practices are a particularly good comparison.
Plus, if you have spares onboard a warcraft, they should be hot spares, not cold. The extra cost is pretty marginal, and the benefits in combat would far outweigh them.
Also note that nobody's suggesting fully-automated fleets - just unmanned drones as leading combat elements.
In the impossiboe eventthat a part must be fixed, a root will fix it. If that robot needs to be fixed then another robot can fix it. A century from now there will be no humans in the military and about (I predict) 9/10th of all industry will be automated. Humans.are.obselete. Given that space stations are impossible (the ISS is merely a spacecraft without engines- it doesn't count) there won't be any need for operators to distinguish between firend or foe in orbital traffic, what measly craft are up there will be so sparse as to be laughably easy to miss. A riobot will be able to tell better than a human anyway- continuous upgrades and programming will see to that. Nevermind that for the moment, all sopace warfare is electronic warfare, but that would just kill the whole notion of rocketpunk off completely and so I won't push the point.
No manned freight craft.
No manned exploreration craft.
No manned military craft.
Nothing manned at all.
In the impossiboe eventthat a part must be fixed, a root will fix it. If that robot needs to be fixed then another robot can fix it.
That sort of thing seems likely but there have been a great many things in futurism that have seemed likely but have not come to pass.
What are the best con arguments to the automated future?
Tony:
I have never advocated completely removing humans from the loop. What I am saying is that instead of 40 men on each vessel (which is my estimate for the minimum number of crew a long-term ship can have), we put the crew aboard the tender. If each ship needs an average of one man-hour of maintainence per day, then there's no need to put people aboard each. And I don't think that's a bad estimate for a design for that purpose.
And I know that the basic systems are designed to be reliable, but do you seriously expect me to believe that a warship could run the same systems a commercial ship has with the same number of people?
So humans have to be in space in an interstellar empire, but not soon. Isn't that sort of backwards?
Re: Thucydides and Geoffrey S H
To be honest, I find this fascination with automation and robots replacing people to be disturbing. I also think we are proceeding from totally different knowledge bases. I happen to think my knowledge base is more realistic and practical. You obviously disagree. We are pretty obviously not going to come together on this.
"To be honest, I find this fascination with automation and robots replacing people to be disturbing."
Automation has been one of the (if not the) dominant themes of the industrial age. It's also the first theme tackled (in a way) by the progenitor of modern science fiction (Frankenstein). It hasn't evolved the way we thought it would, and still has limitations we once thought easier to solve. But it's been there as a major, driving factor of both technology and literature, and for good reason.
Byron:
"If each ship needs an average of one man-hour of maintainence per day, then there's no need to put people aboard each. And I don't think that's a bad estimate for a design for that purpose."
Sorry, I can't agree with you. Sophisticated military aircraft today require dozens (in the case of the B-2, over 100) maintenance man hours per flight hour. The ships of interstellar empire are going to be used a lot more frequently and heavily than our B-2 fleet. And they will probably be a lot more complex. Knowing what we do about what has changed over the last several hundred years and what hasn't, I can't see the need for human maintenance to grow drastically less, no matter how sophisticated and reliable technology gets.
"And I know that the basic systems are designed to be reliable, but do you seriously expect me to believe that a warship could run the same systems a commercial ship has with the same number of people?"
If they were following commercial maintenance and operations standards, yes. Remember, all seamen, military or civilian, are mariners first. It's only the nature of their jobs that dictates how they operate their ships.
A civilian ship is run until something breaks, then it's taken into port, that thing is fixed, and it's run some more. All major ports have the ability to fix merchant propulsion, airco systmes, nav sensors, whatever.
A naval vessel has to be kept in top condition for fighting all of the time, and yards that can do combat system work and military propulsion plants are few and far between. Even with deployable tenders in the fleet -- and every large fleet has them -- the ship's crew is still expected to keep the ship running for all but the major repair and maintenance jobs.
"So humans have to be in space in an interstellar empire, but not soon. Isn't that sort of backwards?"
Nope. Once again, going back through history, we can see that ships didn't have large crews until empire required them to. They were first, and even up to today, mostly merchant vessels, with minimal crews. War and/or readiness for war changes that, but only for ships that fight wars. I don't see any major technological development along that's going to change that.
@Tony:
"To be honest, I find this fascination with automation and robots replacing people to be disturbing. I also think we are proceeding from totally different knowledge bases. I happen to think my knowledge base is more realistic and practical. You obviously disagree. We are pretty obviously not going to come together on this."
I'm just as disturbed by automation as you are- I really don't like the idea of losing my job to some machine that can give the impression of thinking creatively- this WILL be thousands of ears from now it really doesn't matter to us if it happens at all. I simply do not dare think that it can't happen. I couldn't live in a fully automated world if it did- I'm too wedded to the idea of man working in some wa for something and getting the reward for his work.
I've been resisting tackling your thoughts (I agree that things need repair, its just that the cynic in me feels that evntually it will be comptely automated), but in support of your argument of maintainance being necessar- space crft do not rust or sink... but they do get bombarded by micro-meteorites and solar radiation and other nasty things. Fixing that damaged radar assembley or ejecting irradiated material has to be done by someone, if not robots... Oh, and as regards a control craft in charge of a drone constellation, maybe having crew on each craft might be better- lose the control craft and the drones might become vulnerable (or at least more damaged from mundane meteorites impacts and thus more expensive to repair). In addition, going EVA to fix something is quicker(and thus less uncomfortable) if you are on the craft in the first place rather than having to suit up and tether across from the control craft.
The control craft, in all likelihood WILL be with the constellation... and thus in pratical range of the enemy group targeting the drones...
To summarise, in the short term (i.e.: up till 500 years) Ican most definately agree with you- I just don't want to be seen as the optimist here... I've made enough fanciful/romantic suggestions as it is.
Further discussion of the robotics thing is upcoming!
In poking around Orion's Arm there was some talk about how they reconcile the idea of a singularity with space opera -- in other words, if it's possible to have AI gods, what use is there for everything else?
One of the popular theories is as seed stock. The existence of multicellular life did not mean the end of unicellular life. The development of macroscopic life does not mean the microscopic is done away with. The development of intelligent tool use has seen the destruction of much of the natural world but this is not a good idea, this is a bad idea. So in terms of a healthy galactic ecology, lower levels of consciousness are necessary.
Why are they necessary? Because even for AI brains a zillion times faster and smarter than baseline humans, they're not always sure they have the best answer. They know they have one set of solutions, the way they've done it. it's effective but it's not known for sure if it's the best way. So the chance is left for others to develop their own ideas, seeing if they come up with the same answers as the higher transhumans or if they come up with something new and unexpected.
B2s may be a bad example, BTW.
My Ohio-class example required roughly 300 man-hours maintenance per day, not counting the continuous tweaking that happens on each watch. I think a long-mission-duration spaceship would require more than that, just because there are close to double the number of systems in a spaceship compared to a sub.
Hot spares are great to let you limp home to the mechanic. If the mechanic is 9 months away, you need cold spares on-hand *in addition to* your multiply-redundant vital systems (sensors, power generation-control, and life support). Just for a thought, but you'd think that the strategic systems would be massively-reliable, right? Hot-spares, plus spares in storage.
Maintenance paranoia is OK if a part failing really will kill everyone onboard. See also Apollo 13.
Hot spares are great to let you limp home to the mechanic. If the mechanic is 9 months away, you need cold spares on-hand *in addition to* your multiply-redundant vital systems (sensors, power generation-control, and life support). Just for a thought, but you'd think that the strategic systems would be massively-reliable, right? Hot-spares, plus spares in storage.
There's also the question of the ideological concerns of the polity fielding the ship. Based on what I've read, Warsaw Pact doctrine was far more rigid than for NATO forces. Pilots operated with far more constraints, any kind of innovation or creative thinking would be hammered down, etc. Now some of this may have been western propaganda, of course. But we've also seen military planning notions that were driven more by romance than pragmatism. If the military in your setting has gone for a generation or two without a serious, fate of the empire fight, it would be good to include some bad ideas they'll be saddled with going into a big war.
Yeah, I've been thinking along similar lines with my webcomic.
Due to a combination of nostalgia for the glory days of the Federation, ultranationalistic pride and a distinctly outdated understanding of space warfare (with propaganda to taste), the Earth Forces (NAGA's Space Command in particular) use distinctive and horrifically conspicuous warships for their military actions (at least the Mars Colonial Armed Forces have the sense to use a space fleet of Q-ships).
Military forces do tend to be conservative because they like to stick with what they know works. This can have pretty horrific effects if the military has not been in a serious fight for some time (the British were handed a shocking series of defeats at the beginning of the Boer War as British soldiers in fireing lines advanced against Boers sniping them from entrenchments and rifle pits...) On the positive side, it can also spark innovations as they attempt to overcome the deficits.
The former USSR used rigid conrol for a variety of reasons, both ideological, technical and what might be best described as "human factors" (peasant soldiers are not really adept at high tech or very complex plans).. This sort of mindset might also work in space warfare, since the ships will be at the far end of a logistical train. Ships might actually be treated as "fire and forget", and newer units dispatched to carry out the assault.
Stories are often more fun when the heroes have to figure out how to deal with the situation, as opposed to following doctrine by rote.
The key to a believable story is to remember that once a new technique has been tried and found out to work, people - both the original discoverers and others who heard of it - will start using it more often. If an idea is good enough, then eventually it will become the new standard doctrine that people need brilliant ideas to defeat.
Mangaka2170
I think that any spacecraft adapted for warfare will be conspicuous by definition, needing hard to conceal items like kilometer long Liniacs, massive radiator arrays for the uber powerful reactors, lots of reaction mass to manouevre in space (something a cargo ship or pod has little need of) and a large enclosure for the laser mirror/diffraction grating or lots of space to carry KKVs in their launch containers.
If a Q ship has provisions for these things, it will be far larger and more obvious than any other ship in the merchant fleet, any ship designed to normal merchant specs will have a very limited performance envelope and will probably be targetted and destroyed from several light seconds distance by the warships (if there is any serious doubt about what the target ship is, a drone can be dispatched to make a close scan and send the target data back to the laser star. If there is a real shooting war scenario, then the attacker will probably burn any quastionable target).
I think the Martians will have to think farther outside the box if they are going to fend off the agressors.
Thucydides:
"This sort of mindset might also work in space warfare, since the ships will be at the far end of a logistical train. Ships might actually be treated as "fire and forget", and newer units dispatched to carry out the assault."
You have it precisely backwards for any kind of mindset. Being at the far end of a (presumably long) logistical train would lead to conservatism in expenditure of resources. See the naval campaign associated with Guadalcanal -- conservatism in commitment of resources was notable on both sides.
@Thucydides: My thinking was this: if you have a bulk freighter (and we're talking about a ship that can push ~1.3 times its unloaded mass at a reasonable acceleration rate, especially if it takes a month to get to Earth from Mars on a good orbit), it would be a relatively simple matter of building each "cargo container" (the dimensions of which I figure would be about 120m x 30m x 30m) up as a complete weapon system (probably a laser, to avoid having to use up more space with ammunition, but the container would also hold the laser's heatsink).
At this point, all that matters is that you make sure that the mass of the "cargo containers" isn't noticeably higher than an actual container carrying fairly massive cargo like machine parts or volatiles, and cover the weapons up with discrete hull plates that can be purged at the push of a button. Additionally, this allows you to swap out weapon systems depending on the mission, and also purge destroyed or expended weapons as needed.
While your suggestion could work, compared to a warship of the type described, it would be far weaker. The general consensus is that a laserstar will be built around one big laser. A kinetistar of the type described is far more likely, however.
Pushing 1.3 times unloaded mass sounds fine, until you remember remass requirements, which will be at least comparable to everything else.
"At this point, all that matters is that you make sure that the mass of the "cargo containers" isn't noticeably higher than an actual container carrying fairly massive cargo like machine parts or volatiles, and cover the weapons up with discrete hull plates that can be purged at the push of a button. Additionally, this allows you to swap out weapon systems depending on the mission, and also purge destroyed or expended weapons as needed."
Okay everybody...homework assignment -- what policy innovation did Q-ships lead to IRL?
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