Comments on Rocketpunk Manifesto: Space Warfare III – 'Warships' in Space?

I'm tempted to necro again. 'Tis one of my...

2012-01-18T04:47:20.874-08:00

I'm tempted to necro again. 'Tis one of my favorite posts on this blog, after all.

That is not to say that I'm completely in agreement - I like my comfortable naval analogies and human crews too much, although I still dislike putting too much people aboard a ship that's going to be largely automated.

I also happen to like naval ranks much more than Army/Air Force ones, but I still feel there may be room for improvement - I keep devising a generalized rank system for one of my not-quite-settings, one that's more plausibly midfuture.

Oh, and on the subject of warship designation that's been raised here somewhere: why not look into Soviet warship designations for inspiration? They still called their cruisers cruisers(and aircraft carriers aircraft cruisers, as part of a loophole - however they did(and do) pack some serious firepower besides their air wing), but they had no destroyers or frigates or even corvettes. Instead, corvettes and smaller frigates were designated as Guard Ships(storogevoy korabl', or SKR in Russian), ASW frigates and destroyers as Anti-Submarine Ships(protivolodochnyi korabl'; a frigate was a MPK - malyi protivolodochnyi korabl', literally 'small ASW ship', and a destroyer was a BPK - bolshoi protivolodochnyi korabl', 'large ASW ship'). Yes, there ain't no submarines in space, but call them anti-shipping ships and it would work, or something along these lines. Not too original(except for the West, maybe), but it would look interesting, in my opinion at least.

And that's not getting into Soviet submarine designation, which groups subs according to size, role, armament and propulsion, and what you get in the end is something like a 'nuclear ballistic missile strategic underwater cruiser' or a 'non-nuclear cruise missile multipurpose cruiser'. Kind of like that.

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2010-10-06T11:09:33.594-07:00

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Imagine my Windows 7 laptop with 250Gb memory and ...

2010-10-05T06:06:11.270-07:00

Imagine my Windows 7 laptop with 250Gb memory and several MHz processor speed onboard the Moon Lander. In '69. Things would have been completely different, right?

Just to bookmark...

I'm really largely in agreement with you. When...

2010-08-23T20:37:42.312-07:00

I'm really largely in agreement with you. When I say robotics I don't mean high level AI. For spacecraft fighting in a 'clean' battlespace, current techlevel expert systems would probably be largely sufficient for tactical operations.

Things get much more complicated if rules of engagement considerations come into play, for which you need humans or true human level AI.

As to the control of remotes, this thread makes th...

2010-08-23T19:10:24.295-07:00

As to the control of remotes, this thread makes the assumption that they'll require a sophisticated advanced AI to combat enemy ships. I really don't think that's the case.

A KEW system will behave exactly as a guided missile does today with equivalently sophisticated software (perhaps scaled up a bit). It will also require some level of sensor suite and perhaps some com capability.

A DEW system system will require a better sensor suite due to its longer engagement range. It'll also require very good tracking and targeting systems. Once again not necessarily advanced AI.

You may also have mixed weapon systems or perhaps other functions (supplementary sensor, com, ELINT, etc.). These will tend to be specialized with perhaps a single secondary role (slaving all sensor suites together or ramming a ship with a sensor drone rather than a KEW).

There will NOT be dog-fighting since no one has the propulsive efficiency to turn and burn required for this type of combat. Combat will be single passes in which none, one, or all sides receive damage. In some cases multiple passes may occur but there will be no dog-fighting in the conventional aerial dog-fighting sense (ala Star Wars, BSG, or B5).

Think about F-14s shooting down Iraqi fighters from a range of 75 miles with Phoenix missiles. That distance would be hand-holding distance compared to what we're talking about.

Jim

Yes. Rocket propulsion is a mature technology, and...

2010-02-14T12:06:04.586-08:00

Yes. Rocket propulsion is a mature technology, and the more Realistic [TM] deep space drives combine largely mature technologies (e.g., nuclear electric).

With automation it is at least still a lot hazier where the Realistic [TM] limits are. I tend to draw them at processes that we don't even understand conceptually, such as 'high level' judgment. But this itself is pretty hazy.

OTOH, though human-level AI seems far away, improv...

2010-02-13T14:04:41.071-08:00

OTOH, though human-level AI seems far away, improvements in computing and AI (also biotech) are happening far faster than in rocketry or even lasers. Even if it's not clear where the plateau will be, assuming much better automation coupled with comparatively boring drives seems pretty plausible. "We will have better automation" is fairly certain, while having useful fusion reactors isn't.

Taking the last (and secondary) point first, comme...

2010-01-07T12:49:30.997-08:00

Taking the last (and secondary) point first, commenters mentioned acceleration as an advantage for automated craft, but I don't see it as a factor in the midfuture tech level I'm most interested in. Any high g has to come from chemfuel and can only be sustained briefly - there isn't much role for more acceleration than in traditional space launches.

On the naval force mix, I notice that the naval blog Information Dissemination has taken to calling missile cruisers 'battleships,' with the pretty clear implication that in the real strategic and operational world they have capital ship status.

On automation, this is a whole big issue. I admit that a lot of people, including me, attribute to 'ordinary' robotics capabilities well beyond what we actually have. Our deep space probes are remarkable achievements, but their autonomy is very limited, and they are 'manned' by large ground teams.

excuse the typos, sorry- accelerating JUST before ...

2010-01-06T06:46:02.235-08:00

excuse the typos, sorry- accelerating JUST before a battle was meant to be in that post. Should make more sense.

Interesting- this is almost turning into a "c...

2010-01-06T06:42:54.524-08:00

Interesting- this is almost turning into a "carriers v battleship" debate. For the record I personally think modern navies have put far too much investement into one-ship carriers (or far too little investment into large heavy surface warship groups, be they battleships or large cruisers). While I shouldn't make too close analogies between space and water, I do feel that battleships and carriers should share the modern battlespace more, and I subsequently have transposed this concept into space when I think about furture conflicts.

Distributing control vessels is a good idea, but does run into the problem, that a single well protected target might be harder to kill- losts of smaller vesseels means with each one you get you whittle donwn the force they can control- in addition to the control force now being dispersed over a wider area.

One thing I've been dwelling on for some time is whether automated human-less ships really are superior to humans. We haven't yet got full automated battlegroups in the air or on the sea yet and the human brain, for all its faults still has the largest amount of "proccessing power" known to creation. For all our fancy technology we still have nothing artificial yet that can equal it. Personally I can see mixed groups of dedicated warcraft having both human and automated "crews". The human crews could possibly due to the advantages of specialised training have roughly the same strengths of the automated vessels apart from slower reactions times, more room needed for "storage" as it were and the inablility to withstand accleration above 10gs (though that itself is not neccesarily a disadvantage as I will elaborate below).

Thus a fleet had cruisers, battleships and frigates (8 frigates are essentially a weaker but more tactically flexible battleships and 4 are the same for cruisers, the equivalent group has the same amount of firepower of the battleship or cruiser)-human crewed, accomnpied by IPBMs launched from planatary surfaces and perhaps low/high orbit depots. Mobile battlestations are also brought to provide berthing places if needed for vessels just outside the combat zone, and to provide fire support (think supporting artilliary pieces/mobile hospitals for an analogy).
This human componant is backed up by a vastly larger automated contingent of kilsats, lancer-drones and remote /computer controlled frigate to battleship versions of the fleet.

The problem with highlighting the greater acceleration of automated ships is that on a strategic lebvel this become problematic. Have your ships accelerate ahead of their hman controlers and thelightspeed lags begins to loom close- do you cut your automated battlegroup loose and rely on a risky purely automated strategy, or simply stay on your 7/8 gees course? Therefore accelerating before a battle seems to be the best option for robot ships. Which does seem to negate some of their advantages. Kinitic killing power and the ability to flypast quicker than your enemy does still however convey greater advantages. Unless there is an advantage to being slower than your opponent in space?

Welcome to the comment threads! An intermediate s...

2010-01-05T13:22:52.261-08:00

Welcome to the comment threads!

An intermediate solution to the 'kill the brains' problem would be a distributed network with a several manned control ships and a whole bunch of drones.

As to terminology, I'll admit that the classic circa 1900 terms remain clear and evocative. Even though they apply to a period that only lasted a few decades, and ended nearly 70 years ago.

Interesting ideas. ALL WILL BE ASSIMILATED. I thi...

2010-01-05T10:15:39.453-08:00

Interesting ideas.
ALL WILL BE ASSIMILATED.

I think a more traditional force of warships would be more resistant to losses on the fleet level. You kill one ship, well, it's dead, but it's just one ship. Kill the drone control ship and you knock out or put under full AI control a hundred automated ships. In either case, losing one control ship hurts the drone fleet more than losing one warship hurts that fleet.
On the other hand, assuming similar levels of technology, the drones will always perform better in every way since they're not carrying anything that's not needed in battle.

I think whether warships or droneships are dominant depends on a big bunch of assumptions. How advanced your AIs are, how important human life is, how important AI life is (obviously nobody besides the accountants will care about losing a normal AI, but what about the kind that may be considered crew), military doctrine, and economical factors.

As for ship classification... In my own universe, I've used the conventional corvettes, frigates, destroyers and so on, based on size and tonnage. I don't really like using them that much, since they lose most of their meaning as I try to avoid stretching naval roles to space... But I just can't seem to come up with a set of names to replace them. Anything I might come up with never sounds as good as the naval designations.

In the era around 1900 there were also prediction ...

2010-01-01T11:11:34.924-08:00

In the era around 1900 there were also prediction of armored 'land ships' - pictured as comparable in size to naval ships, enormously larger than tanks turned out to be.

Analogistic reasoning is nearly inevitable, which is why ships and aircraft have been the general mental model for spacecraft (as witness the term itself).

I definitely intend to post more about possible political futures as they relate to modes of conflict!

Looking back at what I wrote, I think I was descri...

2009-12-29T13:34:46.237-08:00

Looking back at what I wrote, I think I was describing jinkling laterally but using main drive engines instead of manouvering thrusters- apologies for the unclear language.
Having read these poses, I've started to become somewhat sold on the ideas of a military thgat relies on traditional; "spaceships" as it were, along with modular vehicles with a paytload and drive section, mobile stations and
From a historical point of view, the notion of aerial battleships was quite popular in the late 19th century, and even practical (in the form of airships). The along came the fighter and the idea was eventually dropped. Had technology prgressed, the notion of a large aerial craft utilising small-calibre artilliery might have been realised. While I won't go into the advantages here (in my opinion) of such a craft, historically speaking there has been a tendancy at the beginning to tranplant the previous "big thing" in military history onto the next one. As a further example , fixed wing aircraft were origionally branded as cavalry. From the viewpoint of a univerity history student, I would say that either aircraft or ships will be used as the model for early military spacecraft designs. Indeed, the Almaz stations ("shore-forts" as it were), military shuttle and orion-drive ewarship designs of the '60's already form a kind of precedent.

On the subject of new posts- as a suggestion, I had some ideas on the formation of governments on newly colonized planets in the solar system in the near future, in addition to how nations down here would react to and shape the changing political face of the solar syestem- with space warfare and trade somewhat obviously being part of that on going situtation. It would be interesting to see what the other posters would think.

'If maneuver is important' is a critical q...

2009-12-28T18:22:04.384-08:00

'If maneuver is important' is a critical question. Under Realistic [TM] tech assumptions, maneuver in the sense we picture will be hard to come by. Chemfuel has the oomph, but very limited total delta v, and high specific impulse drives have the acceleration of an oil tanker.

Keep it up for a few days and you put on some real speed, but it is more like operational mobility than our familiar image of tactical maneuver.

On the third hand, a lot may depend here on some hidden assumptions, especially regarding scale, that I plan to take up in an upcoming post.

One small point having read all this- if manouvre ...

2009-12-27T16:30:03.487-08:00

One small point having read all this- if manouvre is important (throwing off torch missiles with the help of decoys to break target lock at the last minute, avoiing unguided kinetics and forcing laser turrets to actually turn and track their next victim) it seems to me you'd need a large "ship" in the traditional sense, having the engine power to change course and manouvre at speed. A drone launched at high speed from a carrier can do little to chnage its course having an engine far inferior in performance to that of the logistics ship/carrier that launched it.

You know, thinking about it, combat spacecraft mig...

2009-07-03T16:38:46.067-07:00

You know, thinking about it, combat spacecraft might fall into two categories; space crusiers and interceptors. Space crusiers would be slow-accelerating, 'high endurence' types (of any size or role); while interceptors would be fast-accelerating, 'low endurence' types(again, of any size or role). Nick-names to distinguish between civilian and military 'space crusiers' would probably evolve over time; what they might be is anyone's guess!
Ferrell

@Citizen Joe: "At extreme closing speed, like...

2009-07-02T07:11:51.940-07:00

@Citizen Joe: "At extreme closing speed, like 30 Km/s the tugs would deploy a cloud of Lithium Deuteride pellets (normally used for fuel). The incoming pellets would be attracted to the cap ship gravity well and home in."

The capital ship gravity well would not let the pellets home in, as much as the Sun gravity well does not let the earth home in. Gravity is a lousy passive homing system (tm). Either those pellets are correctly aimed to begin with (in a shotgun pattern) or they will simply "orbit" around the capital ship, unless they were guided (via drive). Of course, if the target is orbiting a primary, the trajectory of the slugs will be more complicated, but there is no reason to think that they will eventually home on the intended target.

The forum is still there, and there may still be o...

2009-06-30T10:14:14.668-07:00

The forum is still there, and there may still be old regulars in the re-enactment sections. But in the last year or two (especially after Ray Briscoe died) the regulars in the general history area all seem to have melted away.

I wanted to get hold of Karen Lindsay, because I used and referenced her book in the work I did at Emmet (see links in the 'Mary Mary Quite Contrary' post), but with the disappearance of the regulars I've no direct way to get in touch with her!

I haven't been much on Compuserve recently, bu...

2009-06-29T20:59:20.557-07:00

I haven't been much on Compuserve recently, but the Compuserve history doesn't yet appear to be 'late'.

http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?webtag=ws-history&redirCnt=1

True. A further aspect is that the faster you'...

2009-06-29T17:44:15.244-07:00

True. A further aspect is that the faster you're going, the more damage done by an object of given size.

At ordinary interplanetary speeds, tens of km/s, objects big enough to wreck a ship are rare, and collision warning is not much of an issue. At uberfast speeds, say 1000 km/s, pretty small (and more common) objects will deliver a serious whack.

The frequency of hazard objects is actually pretty well known, or could be determined from well known data, at least for our part of the Solar System, based on the frequency of bright meteors.

Speaking of detection abilities. Assuming realspa...

2009-06-29T17:12:44.157-07:00

Speaking of detection abilities. Assuming realspace travel, there is a practical upper limit on safe speeds relative to the indigenous bodies. Space is mostly empty... key term is MOSTLY. Yes, you could send automated ships out and if that one in a million shot ends up hitting a small rock, then the mission is scrubbed, you're out some money but otherwise no big deal. If that rock instead got hit by a ship with a hundred man crew, then you got bigger problems.

That means that your upper speed, relative to the surrounding star system can't exceed your ability to detect/evade/destroy any hazards in space. Now, if the prevailing tech level allows you to detect a pebble out 10 seconds, then that same detection ability would spot a warship at days or months distant. Safe speed goes up with detection range.

Jim - Agree with you about the technical aspects o...

2009-06-29T09:55:14.162-07:00

Jim - Agree with you about the technical aspects of asteroid deflection. Using nukes to give it a bump would clearly be a delicate operation in the political as well as technical sense.

Once the techlevel and political environment makes deep space hostilities plausible, it would be hard to surprise with an asteroid/comet. We could be surprised now only because there is nothing remotely close to a military level of deep space surveillance.

Totally OT, but are you still in touch with anyone else from the late lamented Compuserve History board?

One thing about Asteroid deflection: If you have ...

2009-06-29T08:12:06.226-07:00

One thing about Asteroid deflection:

If you have decades of warning it can be done with some slow acceleration method like the gravity tug idea. This would be done with tech almost everyone in space would have.

However if the warning time is short, as is likely for a long period comet on a collisions course the plausible methods of deflection would be something like exploding a nuclear bomb to one side of the comet. This is the sort of destructive technology that would be highly restricted. So a special international organization would be wanted in these cases.

'Coast Guard' operation is plausible, sinc...

2009-06-28T21:45:32.541-07:00

'Coast Guard' operation is plausible, since this is basically a rescue operation after all.

Indeed, as you know I'm skeptical of asteroid slinging as an offensive military operation because it has such a long warning time, and is no easier to execute than a plain old nuclear strike.