Someone asked recently what kind of weapon works well in space. This kind.
(www.defensenews.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (46)
sorted by:
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.
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.