Someone asked recently what kind of weapon works well in space. This kind.
(www.defensenews.com)
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I mean, railguns would probably be more effective in space, I actually remember there was a story with an alien race making an empire with energy weapons (so possibly lasers by another name) and developed excellent shields to make them useless against them.
Then they ran into humans who had railguns....and they just smashed through their shields because they were kinetic weapons. It's always good to have a variety of options than only improve one.
Rail guns create thrust. Every shot is going to perturb your orbital vector. Super cool if that is in a direction you want to travel. But requires more reaction mass for thrust correction if not.
Lasers have no mass, therefore no thrust to the platform.
So you'd say space combat would be closer to The Expanse where it's majority missiles and defence turrets?
I believe they were using rail guns as well, at least in the second episode when the Mars ship was attacked.
they use the railgun to stay in orbit longer over the alien planet as well
Up until you were able to create gravitationally squeezed deuterium warheads to pump grasers (like in Weber's Honorverse books).
How much is a spaceship going to deflect if it fires the mass of a mortar round now at max velocity? It may not take much mass to punch a hole in another ship.
Rail guns still have the problem that the barrels and magnets wear out with every shot. And unless I miss my guess(based on my own experience with linear accelerators) they'd generate a fair bit more heat than something like this.
Not saying kinetic weaponry wouldn't have a place, but in early space combat it'd likely take the form of guided missiles which externalize most of their heat after leaving the ship.
Yeah, missiles and directed energy weapons for sure. Not just for heat but because I also imagine the engagement range for any space combat is going to be absurd. You're going to want the ability to change trajectory mid travel or be firing at relativistic speeds so that even the most cursory of random evasive manoeuvres doesn't make hitting near impossible.
Maybe a dark horse nomination for weaponized particle accelerators if someone somehow manages to get something craft portable that can launch particles at a sizable fraction of the speed of light.
There was a style of combat described where two ships were blinking in and out of existence doing short-hops in their warpspace and dropping 5kg weights at near relativistic speeds toward each other. I can't quite remember where I read it though ... it was in an SF collection.
If I consider it, the biggest factors in space combat will be detection. Seeing the other guy first before he sees you. Unless someone invents magic and energy shields actually exist, attaining parity between defense and offense is likely impossible and thus it becomes something akin to submarine warfare.
Yeah, I'd see detection as the biggest determinant too. But if directed energy weapons are the choice you have the interesting situation where they don't necessarily do catastrophic damage instantaneously, and you're providing a giant beacon to return fire at, so I wouldn't discount defence entirely. Maybe even a simple reactive defence of explosively launched optical chaff, deployed fast enough, could buy a fraction of a second to return fire and turm an engagement into a mutual loss or a millisecond game of system targeting precision/luck.
Which is where missiles could potentially have a place. Assuming you have the detection initiative you could dumb launch one or many without necessarily giving away your position, then allow them to drift far away from yourself before igniting to mask your location.bThey would be incredibly vulnerable to directed energy weapon interception, but depending on the technical capabilities of the weapons, them firing on the missile(s) might provide the safe window to disable then with a directed energy weapon of your own without suffering immediate return fire.
In terms of defense I meant armor of some variety, not so much point defense or chaff. E-war can't really be discounted either, if they're blind they're dead.
In this context I was envisioning the chaff not as a targeting disruptor like usual, but more a cloud of launched EM absorbing material functioning kinda like reactive armour on tanks. Even as it gets vaporised it's still matter instead of vacuum, choose the right elements and it can continue to absorb or deflect a significant portion of energy at the right wavelengths even as a plasma. With that it might be possible to bring down the the delta E that actually reaches the hull down to somewhere where appropriately reflective/conductive/resistant materials can maintain integrity for a fraction or a second or longer, enough for automated retaliation maybe.
Kinetic energy would have the best place against stationary targets, like mortar fire is in the modern era. Space stations and planets. You can calculate rotations and orbits, and deceleration is nearly zero in a vaccuum, so you can fire near-light railgun shots from years away, to completely kill a planet from several directions, nearly undetectable given their small size and speed.
A laser's energy would dissipate over those distances, the aggression would be obvious, but kinetic weapons could sentence a genocide to a world before the world even knows a war is declared, the politicians could still be on trading and speaking terms for years while one side knows the killing blow is already inbound.
Mutual annihilation seems incredibly easy once you control forces like that. Might be one of the reasons we're not seeing active extra terrestrial life out there.
everything wears out.
at the current level of technology, any [space]shp carrying these weapons is going to "wear out" from being shot at by railguns, way before the railgun barrels get worn out by intensive use.
Some things wear out faster than others. You can get a lot of use out of a super magnet and it doesn't have a lot of moving parts, but you need a steady supply of deionized water to keep it cool. Or else it'll arc and start melting your other components.
No one is going to call out the Halo reference? I guess it's up to me!
All fun and games until some asshole plays a smeckledoof in rock paper scissors.
You misunderstand the premise of the tech here.
If made even slightly smaller than the existing unit, these can be bolted onto most armor in the same vein as they presently do with jamming devices or reactive systems, only with more success. Jamming small drones is perfectly possible, but jamming someone is typically something you want a human operating in real time and not something you can bolt onto a tank. So present modular jamming units are unreliable since they have to be pre-set and hope you're hitting the frequency the enemy is using.
Not so with this. This is a superior counter to the small drone warfare doctrine that is rapidly developing in the Ukraine.
Smaller versions of this already exist, it's called a photonic fence and is used to wipe out mosquitoes in flight using a scanning laser to ID the species and sex of a ufo, then a more powerful laser to either flat out burn specific targets to death or just incinerate the wings and effectively cripple things.
The main problems with the photonic fence are that the places which need it don't have the infrastructure to power it, and the units get stolen otherwise 🙄
Obviously the scales involved there are negligible to humans beyond the aspects of disease vector control, but the basic premise of a DE system using IFF, identification friend or foe, is there. Meaning if you have drone vs drone swarms you can pick off only the ones you want, most simply done by considering uniform, mass produced models vs everything else.
The Brits aren't having recruitment issues that I'm aware of. That said, fair enough.
No atmosphere, no extra attenuation. Apply directly to the forehead.
Side note, although the article says the range of the device is classified, since it's visible light it's easy enough to make a guess. Effective range is most likely less than a mile, more than enough to oppress small drones out of the sky as cover for infantry. This will be everywhere once the system is is perfected for use in combat.
War drives innovation and advancement, always has, always will. The stagnation of the last half century is finally coming to an end.
I'd really like to test this against a drone coated in intumescent paint. It'd be hilarious if a billion dollar laser could be defeated by a dollars worth of goop from the 1940s.
I'd be curious how much aerodynamics would be effected by such a coating, is my first thought. If it's too slow it'll just get tagged by motion tracking. Second thought is that you're looking at a lot larger thermal load than just a blowtorch.
The various militaries have been promoting laser guns for a while. I'm guessing the guns exist and the talk that they don't exist is smoke and mirrors.
The issue with energy weapons isn't that they don't exist but that for the most part they haven't been especially practical. In particular it's obscenely difficult to make them man portable.
This is not a secret. There are public demos of anti-drone laser systems in operation: https://youtu.be/NfPcl6nAlM4?t=397 The same video mentions that the system has been successfully deployed in undisclosed live environments already.
There were also some declassified demos of anti-artillery lasers that were released several years ago. I believe they were 50KW. I can't find the video because it didn't make that much of a splash and it was years ago.
Yeah, last I heard about stuff was 15 years ago. All the claims at the time said it wasn't possible. I remember it showing up at several future weapon systems shows and displays.
We have similar problems with lightsabers.
CCP Satellites Over Maui At Time of Fires
https://www.banned.video/watch?id=65030ffa0aa7cbcccaaf405d
Google "rods from God". Literally just telephone pole sized chunks of metal dropped from orbit. Whoever holds the orbital high ground can pretty much dictate any county's terms of surrender.
Even Zucks mega bunker would be a crumbled tomb in mere minutes.
I think they meant in space like naval combat, not directed back at a planet. For stationary stuff, it seems like some variant of a bomb is a great strategy.
The Israelis also have a laser weapon to take out missiles called 'Iron Beam'. Except it doesn't work during misty days.
The Navy has something similar for counter air as well. They have for a while. But they're enormous, the size of howitzers, and have to be run off a ship's power supply.
This example is notable for being the smallest version to date to operate in a short window on target.
Well, they're Israel, right? God will make sure the weather is in their favor.
They will lawyer Him into giving them good weather.
Energy weapons are stupid. Mass drivers have no recoil and so do not create momentum redirection and also, FUCKING MISSILES.
So my nuclear-powered laser defense turrets along the US border is a viable solution? I have some letters to write...