Speaking of perfect fighters.....

D

DetailedTarget

Spaceman
I don't know if this theme came up before or not as I'm still relatively new here. So I thought I'd throw it out and see what the rest of you think.

I tend to be a reaslism freak in general. Somehow, despite that, WC is my all time favorite game series, and is certainly among my favorite space-based Sci-Fi as well.

Well, being into Sci-Fi natually means that I've been bombarded with the concept of space fighters (Battlestar Galactica, Star Blazers, WC, Space Above & Beyond, B5, Star Wars, etc.). However, being a science nut and reaslism freak, I naturally began to question this seemingly natural order of things.

Obviously, Star Trek goes way overboard with it's lighting effects as the Enterprise has a freakin' spotlight on it everywhere it goes, even in deep space (in TNG I swear you can sometimes even see the bulb reflecting in the hull), but many others were just as guilty as well, and that's to say nothing of the flight models, but nevermind that part right now.

B5 and SAB did a _much_ better job with lighting, but still were too brightly lit W/R/T accuracy, but it was still a TV show, and they had to make concessions I suppose.

The point of all of this is, you have only a few means of detection of enemy vessels - sound, visual, heat, RADAR/SONAR, and environemental disruption. In space, sound and SONAR are unusable. RADAR in itself is quite defeatable with structure and coating. IR too is quite defeatable with insulation. That leaves visual and environmental disruption.

Since space is rather devoid of light, especially interstellar space, why would any Navy not paint their vessels in non-reflecting flat black RADAR absorbing paint? This would make them totally invisible to normal visual ID (not to mention RADAR as well if designed properly) (oh, and that's provided they are running lights off and have no windows of course). As it is, white starships would be very hard to spot in interstellar space unless they were throwing off a lot of their own light.

The only way left to detect enemy vessels would be environmental disruption. This would require extremely fast computers, a star map if possible, lots of video sensors, and time to watch. It would turn all space naval engagements into sub-like hide and seek. The computers would need to scan for "missing" stars that are on the star chart (calculated for ship position of course), or, changes in the starfield, whether or not that area of space was mapped (ie, from a moving ship blocking or unblocking a celestial body relative to the observer).

Given the time and computer power, even with Mores law, needed to locate with these methods, the required equipment would be large I'd suspect, and power hungry. Plus you'd have to stay practically stationary during the scan.

I think that this alone means that fighters will forever be relegated to an atmospheric role only. At most maybe aerospace for orbital work and transorbit escort duty.

Think of it, with the difficulty of detecting even large cap ships, imagine how hard it'd be to find a small fighter. Add to that the fact that a fighter needs to be constantly on the move, yet couldn't move too much with such a detection system. And the power drain of said system, plus life support, plus weapons, plus armor, plus engines, plus reaction mass, plus pilot....that wouldn't be a fighter, it'd be bigger than a few C-130s in all likelihood.

Then of course there's the whole physics thing. Now matter what, you need a reaction mass to move unless you're manipulating gravity. Doing that even in a larg vessel would be hard, and in a fighter, nigh impossible. The amount of moving going on in a furball (no Kilrathi pun intended. lol), you'd need 1 hell of a lot of reaction mass. You'd use it to move, to turn, to counter previous movement, and to propel in a new direction. You'd run dry very fast and that would be very bad.

So, in short (too late huh? lol :D), I think that fighters will not make it in space outside of close planetary orbit. And even then, it'd have to be a planet kind close to it's star, like Mars on in.

What do you guys think?

And if fighters and carriers become obsolete, where do you see naval power focusing?
 
sorry just not gonna quote all that. First I think you forgot magres scanning just off the top of my head and I'm not sure by what you mean by environmental save maybe the 'wake' made my passing through space. You could also have drive plumes to spot visually wich, once noted cuts down on the electronics necessary. Also you have the opposing vessel's active scanners helping to 'paint' him. then you also have other moethods we don't have today that we come up with between now and whenever, including translight sensors wich WC has. As for paint jobs, sultural, traditional, and theological are the best reasons for ignoring common sense and using flat black.

Vessel size problem can be solved in one word, Miniturization. Consider the size of computers 10-20-30 years ago. Give us another 600 years and the entire capacity of your best desktop PC could likely fit into the size of a pentium chip. Power requirements are met by hot nukes or antimatter or something else equally efficient at generating not just relying on batteries.

as for fuel you wouldn't need much more than we use today and do remember, at least in WC's case, the fighters are drawing in fuel through the ramscoops but operating at a deficit.

Lastly it's Science-Fiction for a reason.....cause it aint real or real science all the time, hence trying to add realism usually has to stop at some point to keep it from becoming BORING.

and never forget one of the laws of anime: Space is a vacum, so there is nothing to absorb the sound effect's volume.
 
I wasn't trying to imply that a game should be made with total realism. I was just discussing the possible future of real combat in space.

As for the enemy's sensors, yes, you are correct that you can pick them up with your own passive sensors and locate them, however, that would be precicely why they'd (and you'd) run passively. Just like modern subs do. BTW - what do you mean by "magres scanning"? I'm not familiar with the term.

Something I neglected to mention was gravitational anomoly detection. Since everything has a gravitational component, you could, in theory, detect the minute amount of gravity in the area being given off be a ship. I suppose this could be analogous to a sub detecting the noise of another vessel, or being even more sensitive and detecting the ripples made by the movement of the enemy sub. However, I left that out b/c we have no idea what it would take to have an instrument that sensitive, whether or not it would be thrown off by it's own vessel or other planetary objects, and so on. It's too "far out" to be considered reasonable at this point. Speaking of which, what did you mean by wake, did you mean for an ocean vessel, or some kind of wake in space?

As for paint, we use grey on our navy ships. It's rather hard to spot grey from a distance on the open ocean. Plus, we dropped camo schemes after RADAR made it obsolete. Why try to spot the enemy, when you can just throw an AWACS up and find it with RADAR? When visual becomes important again (as it inevitably will), we'll go back to finding ways to defeat it, cultural bias aside.

Space does indeed have trace elements of hydrogen, yes. However, not _nearly_ enough for use as a fuel source. So you still have the reaction mass problem. Even if you could see your opponent plain as day, trying to make a fighter work would be a losing proposition. It would be much better to just find their cap ship and blast it with a big gun. As knock down any annoying fighters they might have with a futuristic version of a CWIS.

Even if we manage a miracle breakthrough in the production of anti-matter, it's unique storage issue would not change. Using that in a fighter would be bad I'd think. As for nuclear, yes, you could do that, but it still uses water, steam, turbines, and generators to make power. In order to make enough, they can only get so small. There is a point of diminishing returns.
 
You're trying to explain something from today's view. Just like some Dark Age guy would try to explain how Space Shuttle works. And you have the same chance to explain it correctly.
" A technology advanced enough looks like magic" or something like that. I don't remember who said it, but that pretty much explains WC technology.
And forget about reality when trying to play science fiction. It is a fiction, after all.
PS. And it's CIWS, like Close-In Weapon System.
 
<SIGH> Ok, forget it then. I said I was _not_ talking about a game, or a show, or a movie, or any kind of fiction, and twice people respond as though I was.

Whatever.

As for the rest, we understand physics well enough to know how objects move in space, how anti-matter needs to be contained (and why), just how much matter is in the relative void of space and so on.

In fact, thanks to Professer Kaku (www.mkaku.org), we are _well_ on the way to achieving a Unified Field Theory (thanks largely to string theory, which he helped to create). We know a lot more than I think you realize. So no, your analogy of a man from the middle ages trying to explain a space shuttle is not accurate.
 
Originally posted by DetailedTarget
[BIn fact, thanks to Professer Kaku (www.mkaku.org), we are _well_ on the way to achieving a Unified Field Theory (thanks largely to string theory, which he helped to create). We know a lot more than I think you realize. So no, your analogy of a man from the middle ages trying to explain a space shuttle is not accurate. [/B]
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I think you forgot the biggest point here the word THEORY. We can't prove this yet and there are many things in the universe we don't know. Don't you think it is just POSSIBLE that smart though they are human scientist guess wrong based on only a limited amount of info available??? Or perhaps you think that they are infallable? there is also the fact that you are ignoring scientific discoveries made in six or so hundred years that render your whole question pointless. It is entirely possible to find a new energy source out there beyond our little home of dirt.
Humans might very well try and be stealthy out in space but it doesn't mean all races will. And flying any distance in a capship or otherwise with passive only sensors will get you killed quickly, about as quickly as relying only on point defense weapons will.

as for magres, Magnetic Resonance Scanning. Hell just looking at the electromagnetic signature of a vessel will work
 
Why does everyone keep quoting a figure of 600 years? Are people _still_ thinking I'm talking about WC or a game of some sort?

And no, I did not forget the word Theory. You argument is basically the one religious zealots use to try to belittle scientific knowledge. You (any they) are in fact thinking of a _hypothesis_ when you are referring to a theory. They are not the same.

By their very nature, theories can _not_ be proven, ever. They can only be disproven. That is hardly a failing in them, it is merely being honest and not egotistical like the creationists.

By your thinking, Einstein would have to be wrong, or at the very least, surpassed by now since he did much of his work in the early part of the 20th century, long before we had the sophisticated measuring and observational equipment we have today (IOW, he would have had less data to work with), likewise, that would apply to all the others (DeBroglie, Plank, Schroedinger, Dirac, or going further back, Kepler, etc), but guess what? We are simply continuing to find that he (and they) was not wrong by using our much more advanced techniques. (even though many of Einsteins contemporarys thought he was out of his mind, especially toward the end)

As for "reading the EM signature of a vessel", why do you assume that there would be one in the first place? The idea of this thought exercise was a situation much like the first encounter with the Romulans in Classic Trek if you must have a fiction reference. 2 ships, gone totally silent, trying to find another ship that they think (or maybe know) is out there. IOW - nobody's moving, so no exhaust to pick up on, and everybody's passive, so nothing eminating from the vessels at all. If you try to do magres (which sounds a lot like MRI), you'd have to be active, and would be picked up by the enemy just like with RADAR, and, more importantly, there are ways to defeat such an active scan as well.

Clearly you and the others who responded have this idea of how you'd want things to work (not to mention an idea that I'm talking about WC or a game of some sort). That's fine, but, because of it, such debates like this are useless. Therefore, I'm not going to allow it to drain anymore of my time.
 
A vision of (possibly) realistic space warfare is presented in the series "Bio of a Space Tryrant" by Piers Anthony... gravitationally-correctish propulsion (although their source of power is simply a fancy term for antimatter, hes come up with a convincing way of doing it and keeps us in mind of the dangers of using this power), mostly believable weapons, realistic tactics and ship damage, etc.

As for this thread...
Detection would be made easier if a ship had to operate in several different areas of the solar system, necessitating a hull capable of handling the varying amounts of energy. The easiest way to do this is a highly reflective surface, which would keep the energy out even in closeish to the sun, but would scream "HERE I AM" to anyone nearby. Deepspace and ships on "home turf" are probably different matters entirely... detection of propellant trails might be effective, but on the whole it seems that massively powerful equipment aside we'd be reduced to running patrols with fighters (remembers half of WC1 and 2...)

Speaking of fighters, I dont think that fuel will be an issue. An increase in the speed of the exhaust by two means that you will need half as much propellant for the same accelleration, 4 times faster = a quarter as much, etc. 10 to 20 times faster and you should need nothing but internal fuel, 30 to 40 and you should need significantly less than a frame from today of the same size. If highspeed propulsion becomes feasible (theyre already working on lowscale prototypes) internal fuel may well become a very minor factor. Also keep in mind that due to not needing atmospheric flight apparatus such as wings (and the structure needed to support them!) the fighters in space will also be lighter. Finally, in running patrols very low amounts of fuel will be burned while in transit, leaving more for use in fighting and maneuvering.
 
there are many other ways of detection, there is no way that is currently known to mask all forms of electromagnetic radiation as well as the inherant magnatism/radiation from the electronics of a ship. Or hell you could track the gravitational pulls of ships (obviously would need damned sensative sensors, but it can be done)
 
Originally posted by DetailedTarget
Why does everyone keep quoting a figure of 600 years? Are people _still_ thinking I'm talking about WC or a game of some sort?
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because you are trying to agrue something that does not exist.

By their very nature, theories can _not_ be proven, ever. They can only be disproven. That is hardly a failing in them, it is merely being honest and not egotistical like the creationists.
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I didn't say it had to be wrong I said it could be. Theories can be proven correct or wrong. But you are relying on them solely and without question.
 
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