Are space fighters really impossible in realistic Sci Fi?

[BTA]

If you are willing to be unrealistic enough to have unlimited amounts of energy to shoot lasers at all possible places the other spaceship(s) could be... Then, why not have ESP, mind assault, destroy or interfere with the smallest but most essential parts of their technology (remotely frying the transistors in the power regulator of their engine, using telekinesis or pyrokinesis, teleportation, creation of space/time warps, creation of black holes (microscopic but precisely placed would do the job), fission/fusion of their flux capacitor or dilithium crystals, astral/ethereal projection, severing their spiritual silver cord, psychic domination, projected illusions/delusions, spells, demons, entities from other dimensions,

 

[essenmein]

Because large amounts of energy are realistic, and they are large to us but absolutely normal in space, we see them happening all over the galaxy, yet we've never seen telekinesis.

A star quake on a neutron star creates an (I think) xray pulse that would take our sun several hundred thousand years to produce an equivalent amount of energy. Energy scales in space are so obscene we're going to run out of zeros pretty quickly if we keep using the tinyest of tiny unit for energy, the joule.

 

[essenmein]

Just as a reference:
"On December 27, 2004, several satellites and telescopes from around the world detected an explosion on the surface of SGR 1806-20, a neutron star 50,000 light years away. The resulting flash of energy -- which lasted only a tenth of a second -- released more energy than the Sun emits in 150,000 years."

 

[BTA]

"Because large amounts of energy are realistic..." spaceship shoots multiple xray pulses (from their miniature artificially created neutron star power source) covering most of the locations the enemy spaceship could be by the time those pulses arrive. Enemy spaceship detects incoming xray pulses because the pulses create ripples in the spacetime continuum and those ripples affect quantum entanglements, and takes evasive action. My credibility of space combat is going through catastrophic failure event.

large amounts of energy coming from a small spaceship, no. We are still trying to figure out how mantis shrimp pack so much punch. If neutron star xray pulses were an available technology, there would be an effective countermeasure and combat itself would be obsolete. Present day technology includes smart missiles, computer viruses, EMP bombs, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Present day technology makes beating our chest, roaring and stamping our feet.. obsolete.

 

[essenmein]

Perhaps this is an issue of definition.

To me "realistic" means it fits within our known laws of physics. Since the laws of physics to my knowledge haven't changed in millions of years or since the beginning of our universe really, nuclear power and space flight for example have always been possible within those laws, before we even existed as a species. Its just taken us this long to figure out the how. So its not inconceivable that more engineering and knowledge wouldn't give us the how for much much larger energy sources and all the possibilities that opens up. We know how to make anti matter, and we know how to make fusion, we just haven't perfected it yet, and we haven't scaled it up yet, but its not unrealistic that we could.

The only reason I raised the neutron star as an example is simply to demonstrate that absolutely ridiculous energy levels are real things that exist naturally and that us as humans think we've done some big things when in reality we haven't done any thing big at all, our planet looks big to us, but you can fit 1.3 million of them inside our sun, and our sun is a small star as far as stars go.

Will we as a species ever get to where we can release a 100k years worth of output from our sun in fractions of a second? highly unlikely, but those energy levels themselves are not fictitious, where as telekinesis ESP etc are fictitious, so IMO its a straw man argument to say well if large energy is realistic then so must be ghosts. We've seen large energy sources, we orbit one, but there is no evidence for demons.

 

[Rive]

the scales of things

Sure. If a race has 3km big fighters, then ... well, I've read stories (still Sci-Fi) where the body of an intelligent specie was big as a planet, so those fighters are still acceptable somehow.

But no figters at all? No way.

 

[essenmein]

Sure. If a race has 3km big fighters, then ... well, I've read stories (still Sci-Fi) where the body of an intelligent specie was big as a planet, so those fighters are still acceptable somehow.

But no figters at all? No way.

Well you could call any flying thing with a weapon "fighter", in which case any space battle would be basically impossible without them. Need to define the term "fighter" better!

Although when faced with planet sized intelligence, those 3km things are likely the size torpedoes you need :D

Or is that a missile? not certain there is a functional difference between torpedo and missile in space?

 

[Rive]

Need to define the term "fighter" better!

Well, maybe we can define it as the smallest manned vehicle of any fleet?

not certain there is a functional difference between torpedo and missile in space?

With reference to space games, usually a torpedo is slower and beefier, while missiles are fast and agile

 

[hmmm27]

In a space battle, most munitions wouldn't be primarily destructive ; they'd be chaffers, decoys and EM pulse, and lots and lots of disposable sensors. Everything stealthed against reflection and cooled to MBR.

 

[Lren Zvsm]

I agree but just for info 10G is survivable for humans. I think it's the limit imposed on Red Bull air racers.

For about how long? Humans would not survive for long on a planet with 10x Earth's gravity, would they?

 

[Lren Zvsm]

TL;DR at bottom
It's a somewhat accepted convention that in realistic scifi space fighters should be impossible to use effectively. In general they are regarded as being easy targets that, at interstellar ranges would be unable to survive in a battlefield that employs current plausible scifi weaponry such as laser and railguns. At a glance this would seem like a reasonable assumption. Lasers travel at light speed and would only have to point at the target and at shorter distances rail projectiles move fast enough that dodging becomes impossible. But is that all there is to it? I'd take the unpopular opinion that the picture of warfare for a fighter/drone wouldn't be as bleak and clear cut as the raw science makes it seem once you start considering the realities of how those kinds of weapons might perform in real world conditions. I'd even go so far as to say that fighters/drones might actually be vital in scifi settings that are trying to accurately portray space warfare. Here's my reasoning.

The target is very small. Your gun is very big.
In Future War Stories, the author cites that a fighter craft at a range of ~239,000mi would have about 2.5 seconds to dodge an incoming laser. As such it wouldn't have enough time to evade enough shots to make it closer to a target. I think there's two problems with this suggestion. Firstly, the laser that's firing can only determine a shot based on trajectories that are 2.5 seconds old. If the fighter is always altering it's course this estimate will always be wrong and it will take 5 seconds for the firing computer to even confirm whether or not it made a hit to update it's firing solutions and try again.

Secondly, even if the fighter were traveling is a predictable straight line, would the computer be able to hit it anyways? That might seem like a simple yes, but it really isn't once you consider how far away such a small target actually is. So a laser fires at a fighter 3 yards tall 239,000mi away. Let's make it easy and say the fighter is traveling upwards at 90 degrees to the laser so the computer can use really simple trig. The fighter is also moving really slow, only 1.2m/s relative to the laser. The laser is In order for that laser to hit the target, it needs to adjust the firing mechanism on it's laser by 4X10^-7 degrees or 4 ten millionths of one degree. If the laser were 10 meters long, it would have to raise it's barrel by 4.5 x 10^-11 or 4.5 hundred trillionths of a mile, which I'm not going to covert, but it's smaller than a picometer adjustment. And that's only for adjust aim up/down.

And that's the main problem. At those ranges, the projectile isn't the limiting factor, it's the weapon firing it. At a certain point you can't make the weapon anymore precise. Even if it can adjust it's aim to ten thousandths of a degree couldn't be expected to hit a target at those ranges, even if the target was standing still relative to the gun. It doesn't matter how precise the targeting computer is at calculating since the gun will be limited by physics.

So then we have to ask, at what ranges could a large laser be expected to hit a target reliably. So let's assume it's 10 meters long, and can adjust by as little as 1/10,000 of a degree/second. At 20,000 miles which Future War Stories cited as a realistic engagement range for fighters, the gun needs to adjust by 5 millionths of one degree. Still too inaccurate.

Let's try 5,000 miles. You need to adjust by 2 hundred-thousandth of a degree.

500 miles. You're right about there at 2 ten-thousandths of a degree.

TL:DR With an incredibly ridiculously precise laser gun, firing at the easiest moving target imaginable without account for other issues, like ship vibrations, thermal expansion of the the weapon, the presence of a gravity well, and no third dimension you'd only have an effective range of ~5,000 miles. This would give fighter/drones armed with missiles a very distinct advantage as they could close distances with a larger ship from a variety of angles and fire a very large number of missiles that the targeting computer would have to deal with in addition to the fighters themselves.

And to be frank I wouldn't really expect any weapon large enough to shoot down a fighter to be reasonably expected to have more than 1/100th a degree of precision at the very most, which is just 9 miles effective range. If you can only get one-tenth a degree of precision for the weapon, you'll be able to see Luke Skywalker in his cockpit at less than a mile. At one degree of precision, an A-Wing may crash into your bridge, since your effective range is now 4700 feet.

TL;DR at bottomIt's a somewhat accepted convention that in realistic scifi space fighters should be impossible to use effectively. In general they are regarded as being easy targets that, at interstellar ranges would be unable to survive in a battlefield that employs current plausible scifi weaponry such as laser and railguns. At a glance this would seem like a reasonable assumption. Lasers travel at light speed and would only have to point at the target and at shorter distances rail projectiles move fast enough that dodging becomes impossible. But is that all there is to it? I'd take the unpopular opinion that the picture of warfare for a fighter/drone wouldn't be as bleak and clear cut as the raw science makes it seem once you start considering the realities of how those kinds of weapons might perform in real world conditions. I'd even go so far as to say that fighters/drones might actually be vital in scifi settings that are trying to accurately portray space warfare. Here's my reasoning.

The target is very small. Your gun is very big.
In Future War Stories, the author cites that a fighter craft at a range of ~239,000mi would have about 2.5 seconds to dodge an incoming laser. As such it wouldn't have enough time to evade enough shots to make it closer to a target. I think there's two problems with this suggestion. Firstly, the laser that's firing can only determine a shot based on trajectories that are 2.5 seconds old. If the fighter is always altering it's course this estimate will always be wrong and it will take 5 seconds for the firing computer to even confirm whether or not it made a hit to update it's firing solutions and try again.

Secondly, even if the fighter were traveling is a predictable straight line, would the computer be able to hit it anyways? That might seem like a simple yes, but it really isn't once you consider how far away such a small target actually is. So a laser fires at a fighter 3 yards tall 239,000mi away. Let's make it easy and say the fighter is traveling upwards at 90 degrees to the laser so the computer can use really simple trig. The fighter is also moving really slow, only 1.2m/s relative to the laser. The laser is In order for that laser to hit the target, it needs to adjust the firing mechanism on it's laser by 4X10^-7 degrees or 4 ten millionths of one degree. If the laser were 10 meters long, it would have to raise it's barrel by 4.5 x 10^-11 or 4.5 hundred trillionths of a mile, which I'm not going to covert, but it's smaller than a picometer adjustment. And that's only for adjust aim up/down.

And that's the main problem. At those ranges, the projectile isn't the limiting factor, it's the weapon firing it. At a certain point you can't make the weapon anymore precise. Even if it can adjust it's aim to ten thousandths of a degree couldn't be expected to hit a target at those ranges, even if the target was standing still relative to the gun. It doesn't matter how precise the targeting computer is at calculating since the gun will be limited by physics.

So then we have to ask, at what ranges could a large laser be expected to hit a target reliably. So let's assume it's 10 meters long, and can adjust by as little as 1/10,000 of a degree/second. At 20,000 miles which Future War Stories cited as a realistic engagement range for fighters, the gun needs to adjust by 5 millionths of one degree. Still too inaccurate.

Let's try 5,000 miles. You need to adjust by 2 hundred-thousandth of a degree.

500 miles. You're right about there at 2 ten-thousandths of a degree.

TL:DR With an incredibly ridiculously precise laser gun, firing at the easiest moving target imaginable without account for other issues, like ship vibrations, thermal expansion of the the weapon, the presence of a gravity well, and no third dimension you'd only have an effective range of ~5,000 miles. This would give fighter/drones armed with missiles a very distinct advantage as they could close distances with a larger ship from a variety of angles and fire a very large number of missiles that the targeting computer would have to deal with in addition to the fighters themselves.

And to be frank I wouldn't really expect any weapon large enough to shoot down a fighter to be reasonably expected to have more than 1/100th a degree of precision at the very most, which is just 9 miles effective range. If you can only get one-tenth a degree of precision for the weapon, you'll be able to see Luke Skywalker in his cockpit at less than a mile. At one degree of precision, an A-Wing may crash into your bridge, since your effective range is now 4700 feet.

 

[Lren Zvsm]

Why not scrap the laser and projectiles and rely on self-guided missiles? Could that work, or does that scheme also have fatal flaws?

 

[Lren Zvsm]

I agree but just for info 10G is survivable for humans. I think it's the limit imposed on Red Bull air racers.

But for how long could a human survive 10 g's?

 

[member 656954]

While I found Jay Allan's first "Blood on the Stars" novel, 'Duel in the Dark', compelling, the space fighters aspect became annoying (and esp. in the subsequent books as the tactics were entirely repetitive). In the series, 3km++ mainline battleships are both protected and attacked by small manned fighters, some of which are configured for "plasma torpedoes", others of which are merely designed to dog fight the opposition fighters. The concept and tactics was essentially a naval battle from WWII, with little consideration for "it being in space". Issues that arose, included:

• Capital ship point defenses being lasers. Which missed. A lot! The obvious defensive weapon, some kind of kinetic grapeshot, was entirely ignored.
• Fighters with lasers as their weapon for dog fights, aimed by humans, moving at tenths percentage light speed. You'd be lucky to hit a planet in those circumstances, let alone another fighter!
  
• The fighters were fantastically maneuverable, jinking madly, with no real consideration for momentum or even how to apply sufficient thrust in three dimensions to redirect their trajectory.
• Fuel! This totally bugged me. These little craft were zipping about for hours on end, at multi-gee accelerations - every novel had 10G and often 12G bursts - and were jigging this way and that, but only ever seemed to run out of fuel after the main crisis had passed. Besides which, what powered them anyway?
  
• Human brain superior to AI. This also bugged me...and does most novels where "humanity has something special" that overcomes terrible odds. Anyway, it didn't make sense because a fighter, piloted by a fast-thinking disposable brain, would have huge advantages in the type of 3D engagement you'd find in the depths of space.
• The plasma torpedo. Each fighter could only carry a couple (or 4, can't recall exactly, but it wasn't many) and attaching them was slow work (huh? Who designed that?!?) and made the fighter sluggish (again, who designed them). Then the fighter (bomber, really) had to get within a set distance to fire because the torpedo turned from some physical form into plasma but once it did that, it's trajectory was fixed. It seemed a silly constraint when the kinetic energy of a reasonably heavy torpedo would have done a huge amount of damage all by itself.

Finally, in Allan's universe, we have artificial gravity. So... Set your capital ship up so that it travels in a massively repulsive gravitational gradient. Then those pesky fighters and their plasma torpedoes can't hit you, even if they can catch you. (Bobby Adair's "Freedoms Fire" series has something along these lines, it's a terrific set of books!)

So, if you decide to write fighters into your novel, consider that you'll need a lot of constraints for them to make any sense at all.

 

[Vagn]

0

TL;DR at bottomIt's a somewhat accepted convention that in realistic scifi space fighters should be impossible to use effectively. In general they are regarded as being easy targets that, at interstellar ranges would be unable to survive in a battlefield that employs current plausible scifi weaponry such as laser and railguns. At a glance this would seem like a reasonable assumption. Lasers travel at light speed and would only have to point at the target and at shorter distances rail projectiles move fast enough that dodging becomes impossible. But is that all there is to it? I'd take the unpopular opinion that the picture of warfare for a fighter/drone wouldn't be as bleak and clear cut as the raw science makes it seem once you start considering the realities of how those kinds of weapons might perform in real world conditions. I'd even go so far as to say that fighters/drones might actually be vital in scifi settings that are trying to accurately portray space warfare. Here's my reasoning.

The target is very small. Your gun is very big.
In Future War Stories, the author cites that a fighter craft at a range of ~239,000mi would have about 2.5 seconds to dodge an incoming laser. As such it wouldn't have enough time to evade enough shots to make it closer to a target. I think there's two problems with this suggestion. Firstly, the laser that's firing can only determine a shot based on trajectories that are 2.5 seconds old. If the fighter is always altering it's course this estimate will always be wrong and it will take 5 seconds for the firing computer to even confirm whether or not it made a hit to update it's firing solutions and try again.

Secondly, even if the fighter were traveling is a predictable straight line, would the computer be able to hit it anyways? That might seem like a simple yes, but it really isn't once you consider how far away such a small target actually is. So a laser fires at a fighter 3 yards tall 239,000mi away. Let's make it easy and say the fighter is traveling upwards at 90 degrees to the laser so the computer can use really simple trig. The fighter is also moving really slow, only 1.2m/s relative to the laser. The laser is In order for that laser to hit the target, it needs to adjust the firing mechanism on it's laser by 4X10^-7 degrees or 4 ten millionths of one degree. If the laser were 10 meters long, it would have to raise it's barrel by 4.5 x 10^-11 or 4.5 hundred trillionths of a mile, which I'm not going to covert, but it's smaller than a picometer adjustment. And that's only for adjust aim up/down.

And that's the main problem. At those ranges, the projectile isn't the limiting factor, it's the weapon firing it. At a certain point you can't make the weapon anymore precise. Even if it can adjust it's aim to ten thousandths of a degree couldn't be expected to hit a target at those ranges, even if the target was standing still relative to the gun. It doesn't matter how precise the targeting computer is at calculating since the gun will be limited by physics.

So then we have to ask, at what ranges could a large laser be expected to hit a target reliably. So let's assume it's 10 meters long, and can adjust by as little as 1/10,000 of a degree/second. At 20,000 miles which Future War Stories cited as a realistic engagement range for fighters, the gun needs to adjust by 5 millionths of one degree. Still too inaccurate.

Let's try 5,000 miles. You need to adjust by 2 hundred-thousandth of a degree.

500 miles. You're right about there at 2 ten-thousandths of a degree.

TL:DR With an incredibly ridiculously precise laser gun, firing at the easiest moving target imaginable without account for other issues, like ship vibrations, thermal expansion of the the weapon, the presence of a gravity well, and no third dimension you'd only have an effective range of ~5,000 miles. This would give fighter/drones armed with missiles a very distinct advantage as they could close distances with a larger ship from a variety of angles and fire a very large number of missiles that the targeting computer would have to deal with in addition to the fighters themselves.

And to be frank I wouldn't really expect any weapon large enough to shoot down a fighter to be reasonably expected to have more than 1/100th a degree of precision at the very most, which is just 9 miles effective range. If you can only get one-tenth a degree of precision for the weapon, you'll be able to see Luke Skywalker in his cockpit at less than a mile. At one degree of precision, an A-Wing may crash into your bridge, since your effective range is now 4700 feet.

I'm not sure the numbers here hold out. 4.5x10^-11x 1 mile is ~72 nm, which is well within the typical stroke of a piezoelectric actuator, and could even be achieved by microstepping a stepper motor. Such fine adjustments can already be performed under high radiation, UHV environments at synchrotrons.
Piezoelectric actuators can easily have sub-nm resolution, which at a distance of 10 m would correspond to a nominal angular resolution of <10^-8 degrees. Synchrotron beamline components frequently have angular resolutions of the order of 10s of nrad (~10^-6 degrees) over distances of ~100 mm, so an angular change of 1x10^-7 degrees over 10 m is not that unreasonable.

 

[GTOM]

They can have their place in Hard Sf.
In orbital combat, their range is enough, and with short range missiles, they pretty much able to take out bigger targets.
Or they might have antimatter fuel.

 

[GTOM]

0
I'm not sure the numbers here hold out. 4.5x10^-11x 1 mile is ~72 nm, which is well within the typical stroke of a piezoelectric actuator, and could even be achieved by microstepping a stepper motor. Such fine adjustments can already be performed under high radiation, UHV environments at synchrotrons.
Piezoelectric actuators can easily have sub-nm resolution, which at a distance of 10 m would correspond to a nominal angular resolution of <10^-8 degrees. Synchrotron beamline components frequently have angular resolutions of the order of 10s of nrad (~10^-6 degrees) over distances of ~100 mm, so an angular change of 1x10^-7 degrees over 10 m is not that unreasonable.

Due to heat stress on laser focusing equipment, i doubt they will be extremely accurate.

 

[BWV]

Why did fighter planes and carriers become the dominant naval weapons? Carriers provide longer range than gunned ships - but the Earth's atmosphere and curvature put limits on gun ranges not applicable to space. Also, one can imagine missiles fully replacing fighter planes and smaller, more nimble ships replacing carriers. In either case, this stems from the reality that offensive weapon capabilities trump any defensive technologies available for large vessels. Carrier-based fighters and small missile firing ships accomplish the same function - dispersing targets. So if there is some killer defensive tech - say super-powerful force fields, then large ships might just slug it out with one another like WW1 battleships. But in the absence of that, then it makes sense to disperse the ships. Maybe interstellar travel requires a huge ship, then fighters would absolutely make sense to extend force beyond the range at which the mothership would be at risk. But manned fighters would make no sense - why waste space and energy for life support and limit maneuverability to what a human could survive?

 

[GTOM]

Why did fighter planes and carriers become the dominant naval weapons? Carriers provide longer range than gunned ships - but the Earth's atmosphere and curvature put limits on gun ranges not applicable to space. Also, one can imagine missiles fully replacing fighter planes and smaller, more nimble ships replacing carriers. In either case, this stems from the reality that offensive weapon capabilities trump any defensive technologies available for large vessels. Carrier-based fighters and small missile firing ships accomplish the same function - dispersing targets. So if there is some killer defensive tech - say super-powerful force fields, then large ships might just slug it out with one another like WW1 battleships. But in the absence of that, then it makes sense to disperse the ships. Maybe interstellar travel requires a huge ship, then fighters would absolutely make sense to extend force beyond the range at which the mothership would be at risk. But manned fighters would make no sense - why waste space and energy for life support and limit maneuverability to what a human could survive?

Because in some situations, human level intelligence, decision making is needed. It is possible that no reliable wide band ftl comm, or enemy can take out, jam sats that transmits signals beyond horizont.
With some transhumanism, a human pilot could withstand bigger G forces.

 

[BWV]

Because in some situations, human level intelligence, decision making is needed. It is possible that no reliable wide band ftl comm, or enemy can take out, jam sats that transmits signals beyond horizont.
With some transhumanism, a human pilot could withstand bigger G forces.

then have one human whom can make those decisions escort the fighters in a hard-to-detect escort ship

 

[Drakkith]

I don't foresee a time where we have space combat with drones but they don't have the capability of being fully autonomous even in a com-zero (communications-zero) situation. Things like target selection and formation-keeping don't require communications, so assuming that drones are given appropriate objectives (go here and destroy target, patrol this region and engage anything matching without friendly IFF, etc) then communications may not strictly be necessary. Communications back to a mothership certainly aren't necessary.

Of course, there are other ways of communicating than radio or microwaves. WW2 pilots often got along just fine using hand signals, so something like a set of signal lights that can rapidly blink out binary signals would serve drones just fine in terms of tactical communication. Lasers could serve the same purpose for longer range comms, and are much harder to jam.

At worst they'd be about equal with human pilots who also don't have communications. They'd simply go about fulfilling whatever their immediate objectives are, just like pilots already do.

Because in some situations, human level intelligence, decision making is needed.

Can you give a realistic example? Remember that things like friendly fire incidents or hitting the wrong targets already happen in real life, so the goal isn't to have perfect decision making, just to make the number of these incidents as low as reasonably possible.

 

[GTOM]

I don't foresee a time where we have space combat with drones but they don't have the capability of being fully autonomous even in a com-zero (communications-zero) situation. Things like target selection and formation-keeping don't require communications, so assuming that drones are given appropriate objectives (go here and destroy target, patrol this region and engage anything matching without friendly IFF, etc) then communications may not strictly be necessary. Communications back to a mothership certainly aren't necessary.

Of course, there are other ways of communicating than radio or microwaves. WW2 pilots often got along just fine using hand signals, so something like a set of signal lights that can rapidly blink out binary signals would serve drones just fine in terms of tactical communication. Lasers could serve the same purpose for longer range comms, and are much harder to jam.

At worst they'd be about equal with human pilots who also don't have communications. They'd simply go about fulfilling whatever their immediate objectives are, just like pilots already do.Can you give a realistic example? Remember that things like friendly fire incidents or hitting the wrong targets already happen in real life, so the goal isn't to have perfect decision making, just to make the number of these incidents as low as reasonably possible.

The fighters are sent to make a small rebel colony surrender with minimal amount of damage/civilian casualties possible. A bunch of missiles can be sent to take out large lasers, then fighters search and destroy targets in low orbit.

 

[Drakkith]

The fighters are sent to make a small rebel colony surrender with minimal amount of damage/civilian casualties possible. A bunch of missiles can be sent to take out large lasers, then fighters search and destroy targets in low orbit.

So once the fighters/drones are launched, where is the human decision making needed?

 

[GTOM]

So once the fighters/drones are launched, where is the human decision making needed?

Like when to fire and when not, if civilan infrastructure nearby. What kind of weapons should be used to minimize damage to colony.

 

[Drakkith]

Like when to fire and when not, if civilan infrastructure nearby. What kind of weapons should be used to minimize damage to colony.

What infrastructure? I thought the targets were in orbit.

If the targets are obviously warships/fighters, then target selection and firing is trivial.
If the targets are using civilian ships and equipment that's been repurposed for military use then things change, but this is a situation that is already difficult for human pilots.

 

[GTOM]

What infrastructure? I thought the targets were in orbit.

If the targets are obviously warships/fighters, then target selection and firing is trivial.
If the targets are using civilian ships and equipment that's been repurposed for military use then things change, but this is a situation that is already difficult for human pilots.

I thought about attacking ground targets on a Mars or Moon like place or on an asteroid mine.

 

[valenumr]

TL;DR at bottomIt's a somewhat accepted convention that in realistic scifi space fighters should be impossible to use effectively. In general they are regarded as being easy targets that, at interstellar ranges would be unable to survive in a battlefield that employs current plausible scifi weaponry such as laser and railguns. At a glance this would seem like a reasonable assumption. Lasers travel at light speed and would only have to point at the target and at shorter distances rail projectiles move fast enough that dodging becomes impossible. But is that all there is to it? I'd take the unpopular opinion that the picture of warfare for a fighter/drone wouldn't be as bleak and clear cut as the raw science makes it seem once you start considering the realities of how those kinds of weapons might perform in real world conditions. I'd even go so far as to say that fighters/drones might actually be vital in scifi settings that are trying to accurately portray space warfare. Here's my reasoning.

The target is very small. Your gun is very big.
In Future War Stories, the author cites that a fighter craft at a range of ~239,000mi would have about 2.5 seconds to dodge an incoming laser. As such it wouldn't have enough time to evade enough shots to make it closer to a target. I think there's two problems with this suggestion. Firstly, the laser that's firing can only determine a shot based on trajectories that are 2.5 seconds old. If the fighter is always altering it's course this estimate will always be wrong and it will take 5 seconds for the firing computer to even confirm whether or not it made a hit to update it's firing solutions and try again.

Secondly, even if the fighter were traveling is a predictable straight line, would the computer be able to hit it anyways? That might seem like a simple yes, but it really isn't once you consider how far away such a small target actually is. So a laser fires at a fighter 3 yards tall 239,000mi away. Let's make it easy and say the fighter is traveling upwards at 90 degrees to the laser so the computer can use really simple trig. The fighter is also moving really slow, only 1.2m/s relative to the laser. The laser is In order for that laser to hit the target, it needs to adjust the firing mechanism on it's laser by 4X10^-7 degrees or 4 ten millionths of one degree. If the laser were 10 meters long, it would have to raise it's barrel by 4.5 x 10^-11 or 4.5 hundred trillionths of a mile, which I'm not going to covert, but it's smaller than a picometer adjustment. And that's only for adjust aim up/down.

And that's the main problem. At those ranges, the projectile isn't the limiting factor, it's the weapon firing it. At a certain point you can't make the weapon anymore precise. Even if it can adjust it's aim to ten thousandths of a degree couldn't be expected to hit a target at those ranges, even if the target was standing still relative to the gun. It doesn't matter how precise the targeting computer is at calculating since the gun will be limited by physics.

So then we have to ask, at what ranges could a large laser be expected to hit a target reliably. So let's assume it's 10 meters long, and can adjust by as little as 1/10,000 of a degree/second. At 20,000 miles which Future War Stories cited as a realistic engagement range for fighters, the gun needs to adjust by 5 millionths of one degree. Still too inaccurate.

Let's try 5,000 miles. You need to adjust by 2 hundred-thousandth of a degree.

500 miles. You're right about there at 2 ten-thousandths of a degree.

TL:DR With an incredibly ridiculously precise laser gun, firing at the easiest moving target imaginable without account for other issues, like ship vibrations, thermal expansion of the the weapon, the presence of a gravity well, and no third dimension you'd only have an effective range of ~5,000 miles. This would give fighter/drones armed with missiles a very distinct advantage as they could close distances with a larger ship from a variety of angles and fire a very large number of missiles that the targeting computer would have to deal with in addition to the fighters themselves.

And to be frank I wouldn't really expect any weapon large enough to shoot down a fighter to be reasonably expected to have more than 1/100th a degree of precision at the very most, which is just 9 miles effective range. If you can only get one-tenth a degree of precision for the weapon, you'll be able to see Luke Skywalker in his cockpit at less than a mile. At one degree of precision, an A-Wing may crash into your bridge, since your effective range is now 4700 feet.

Lets not forget that you can only know what the target was actually doing a few seconds ago, in you're example. If you fire a laser at the expected position of the target assuming it is in uniform motion, that is probably fine, it can be compensated for. But by the time you get your firing solution, the target may have already changed course.

 

[Drakkith]

I thought about attacking ground targets on a Mars or Moon like place or on an asteroid mine.

Recon, select targets, assign targets to various strikes, send out the drones on strikes. No human intervention needed once the drones are launched. Weapons and targets are pre-selected to minimize civilian casualties.

 

[GTOM]

Recon, select targets, assign targets to various strikes, send out the drones on strikes. No human intervention needed once the drones are launched. Weapons and targets are pre-selected to minimize civilian casualties.

Anti matter powered fighters can travel million kms. How to adapt to shifting situations with no human squadron leaders?

 

[f95toli]

Anti matter powered fighters can travel million kms. How to adapt to shifting situations with no human squadron leaders?

if you need a human involved because of the the comms lag you can just put them on an escort ship far from the action. You certainly wouldn't want them on a fighter.
Note that the latest generation of fighter aircraft (F-35 etc) could very well be the last, we are already in a situation where drones are carrying out a lot (most?) of the missions and drones for aerial combat are already being tested (AFAIK successfully), not having to worry about a pilot if a major advantage in a high-g turn. Hence, it is very likely that the next generation of combat aircraft will be unmanned, If that is the case then it would be very unlikely that military tech in the far future will directly involve humans in combat roles, we are way too soft and squishy...

 

[Drakkith]

Anti matter powered fighters can travel million kms. How to adapt to shifting situations with no human squadron leaders?

Hold on. Look at the way fighters work in the real world. They are sent out on specific missions with very limited scope such as strike missions, ground support, air superiority, CAP, etc. These all have very clear objectives and engagement rules that must be followed. The pilots themselves don't decide what to do if the situation changes drastically, they await orders from their superiors. If no such orders are forthcoming, perhaps due to communications issues, they usually abort their mission.

An objective like "make a rebel colony surrender with minimal casualties" is not a tactical objective, it's an operational or strategic one that's far above what either a drone or a pilot would ever have to deal with. These are handled by people, not computers, typically generals/admirals and their staff, possibly with overseeing civilian authorities. A reasonable issue a drone would run into is having to decide which targets are real vs fake, searching for a target that's not where it's supposed to be, or navigating to a target in the midst of enemy opposition.

 

[GTOM]

if you need a human involved because of the the comms lag you can just put them on an escort ship far from the action. You certainly wouldn't want them on a fighter.
Note that the latest generation of fighter aircraft (F-35 etc) could very well be the last, we are already in a situation where drones are carrying out a lot (most?) of the missions and drones for aerial combat are already being tested (AFAIK successfully), not having to worry about a pilot if a major advantage in a high-g turn. Hence, it is very likely that the next generation of combat aircraft will be unmanned, If that is the case then it would be very unlikely that military tech in the far future will directly involve humans in combat roles, we are way too soft and squishy...

Sure there will be no problem with unmanned planes, when Iran could down a drone with jamming, and key infrastructure like a pipeline could have been hacked :P
In Ghost in the shell, the major is a human although only her brain is orgainc, she is definitally not soft.

 

[GTOM]

Hold on. Look at the way fighters work in the real world. They are sent out on specific missions with very limited scope such as strike missions, ground support, air superiority, CAP, etc. These all have very clear objectives and engagement rules that must be followed. The pilots themselves don't decide what to do if the situation changes drastically, they await orders from their superiors. If no such orders are forthcoming, perhaps due to communications issues, they usually abort their mission.

An objective like "make a rebel colony surrender with minimal casualties" is not a tactical objective, it's an operational or strategic one that's far above what either a drone or a pilot would ever have to deal with. These are handled by people, not computers, typically generals/admirals and their staff, possibly with overseeing civilian authorities. A reasonable issue a drone would run into is having to decide which targets are real vs fake, searching for a target that's not where it's supposed to be, or navigating to a target in the midst of enemy opposition.

In the story i plan, the one who actually man a fighter is a high ranking person who want to be present at action and don't trust remote control. When his ship is basically the same as drone fighters, that means safety, they don't know which ship is the ultimate target.

 

[f95toli]

Sure there will be no problem with unmanned planes, when Iran could down a drone with jamming, and key infrastructure like a pipeline could have been hacked :P
In Ghost in the shell, the major is a human although only her brain is orgainc, she is definitally not soft.

Of course there are problems, but it is presumably still better than a captured pilot. Also, remember that the current generation of drones are not very autonomous, they are more or less constantly remote controlled (there is a pilot sitting in a shed somewhere doing the flying) . The drones that are now being developed (being tested, I don't think any have been deployed) should be "clever' enough to carry out st least simple instructions even without an active command link. If you are talking about tech in the far future there is very good reason to believe that AI will be capable of carrying out quite complex actions, but (hopefully,) with humans giving the high level orders.

There is nothing wrong with hard sci fi stories about humans in combat, but the only way to make it "realistic" is to come up with some convoluted reason for why AI can't be used (which is usually done by referring to past wars where ai/robots became self-aware and tried to kill all humans...)

 

[Starboy674]

TL;DR at bottomIt's a somewhat accepted convention that in realistic scifi space fighters should be impossible to use effectively. In general they are regarded as being easy targets that, at interstellar ranges would be unable to survive in a battlefield that employs current plausible scifi weaponry such as laser and railguns. At a glance this would seem like a reasonable assumption. Lasers travel at light speed and would only have to point at the target and at shorter distances rail projectiles move fast enough that dodging becomes impossible. But is that all there is to it? I'd take the unpopular opinion that the picture of warfare for a fighter/drone wouldn't be as bleak and clear cut as the raw science makes it seem once you start considering the realities of how those kinds of weapons might perform in real world conditions. I'd even go so far as to say that fighters/drones might actually be vital in scifi settings that are trying to accurately portray space warfare. Here's my reasoning.

The target is very small. Your gun is very big.
In Future War Stories, the author cites that a fighter craft at a range of ~239,000mi would have about 2.5 seconds to dodge an incoming laser. As such it wouldn't have enough time to evade enough shots to make it closer to a target. I think there's two problems with this suggestion. Firstly, the laser that's firing can only determine a shot based on trajectories that are 2.5 seconds old. If the fighter is always altering it's course this estimate will always be wrong and it will take 5 seconds for the firing computer to even confirm whether or not it made a hit to update it's firing solutions and try again.

Secondly, even if the fighter were traveling is a predictable straight line, would the computer be able to hit it anyways? That might seem like a simple yes, but it really isn't once you consider how far away such a small target actually is. So a laser fires at a fighter 3 yards tall 239,000mi away. Let's make it easy and say the fighter is traveling upwards at 90 degrees to the laser so the computer can use really simple trig. The fighter is also moving really slow, only 1.2m/s relative to the laser. The laser is In order for that laser to hit the target, it needs to adjust the firing mechanism on it's laser by 4X10^-7 degrees or 4 ten millionths of one degree. If the laser were 10 meters long, it would have to raise it's barrel by 4.5 x 10^-11 or 4.5 hundred trillionths of a mile, which I'm not going to covert, but it's smaller than a picometer adjustment. And that's only for adjust aim up/down.

And that's the main problem. At those ranges, the projectile isn't the limiting factor, it's the weapon firing it. At a certain point you can't make the weapon anymore precise. Even if it can adjust it's aim to ten thousandths of a degree couldn't be expected to hit a target at those ranges, even if the target was standing still relative to the gun. It doesn't matter how precise the targeting computer is at calculating since the gun will be limited by physics.

So then we have to ask, at what ranges could a large laser be expected to hit a target reliably. So let's assume it's 10 meters long, and can adjust by as little as 1/10,000 of a degree/second. At 20,000 miles which Future War Stories cited as a realistic engagement range for fighters, the gun needs to adjust by 5 millionths of one degree. Still too inaccurate.

Let's try 5,000 miles. You need to adjust by 2 hundred-thousandth of a degree.

500 miles. You're right about there at 2 ten-thousandths of a degree.

TL:DR With an incredibly ridiculously precise laser gun, firing at the easiest moving target imaginable without account for other issues, like ship vibrations, thermal expansion of the the weapon, the presence of a gravity well, and no third dimension you'd only have an effective range of ~5,000 miles. This would give fighter/drones armed with missiles a very distinct advantage as they could close distances with a larger ship from a variety of angles and fire a very large number of missiles that the targeting computer would have to deal with in addition to the fighters themselves.

And to be frank I wouldn't really expect any weapon large enough to shoot down a fighter to be reasonably expected to have more than 1/100th a degree of precision at the very most, which is just 9 miles effective range. If you can only get one-tenth a degree of precision for the weapon, you'll be able to see Luke Skywalker in his cockpit at less than a mile. At one degree of precision, an A-Wing may crash into your bridge, since your effective range is now 4700 feet.

Nope you won't see the lasers and hear the explosions

 

[Drakkith]

Just FYI, the United States already has a (defunct) laser weapon capable of taking down ICBM's from 370 miles out. So I'd guess that aiming the weapon won't be the limiting factor unless you're target is beyond at least a few thousand miles.

My lower-middle range amateur telescope mount can reliably move my telescope by roughly an arcsecond, or 1/360th of a degree. I would expect a future laser weapon to be able to track to at least as accurate as 1/1000th. That's less than a 3x improvement over some low cost amateur equipment using a worm gear and stepper motors.

What's more of a concern for the range of a laser weapon is probably the beam width at the target. Lasers spread out over range just like any other light source, just not as quickly.

 

[valenumr]

Nope you won't see the lasers and hear the explosions

Hmmm, I guess mostly when we think of seeing lasers, it is just scattering of light off of the atmosphere or some smoke to enhance, much like hearing sound waves is the rapid expansion of air creating waves in a medium. But perhaps seeing and hearing will just happen at the last moment, of the observer has the laser pointer at their face and are in a pressurized environment.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

There is nothing wrong with hard sci fi stories about humans in combat, but the only way to make it "realistic" is to come up with some convoluted reason for why AI can't be used (which is usually done by referring to past wars where ai/robots became self-aware and tried to kill all humans...)

Or you just ignore the issue of 'AI has to be in control' and go with the 'humans as soldiers' story. Most readers won't pin your plot to the wall for it, esp. in sci fi where a lot of the attraction of such novels is to picture yourself as the hero protagonist, swatting the bad guys with the proton cannon attached to right arm of your combat skel.

Also, we're expendable in the 'AI as overlords' future, so why wouldn't we fighting the wars? You think an AI is gunna get their (metaphorical) hands dirty engaging in that type of dangerous behavior?

 

[f95toli]

Also, we're expendable in the 'AI as overlords' future, so why wouldn't we fighting the wars? You think an AI is gunna get their (metaphorical) hands dirty engaging in that type of dangerous behavior?

i wasn't referring to "self aware" AI, just the level of AI that already exist or can be expected to exist in the next 10-20 years or so (at the level of a self driving car). There is no reason for why you would need something more sophisticated if all you need it do is to control a fighter craft of some sort in space.
This level of AI is relatively rare in books, and stories that do include AI controlled equipment (say the books by Iain M. Banks or Alastair Reynolds) tend to make the AI's self aware even when it makes no sense from a functional point of view. The only reason for this is of course that you need to have protagonist to write about; it is hard to get the reader to care about a drone controlled by a regular computer.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

The only reason for this is of course that you need to have protagonist to write about; it is hard to get the reader to care about a drone controlled by a regular computer.

Yep, we're agreed on that, @f95toli, but your constraint seems unlikely: "just the level of AI that already exist or can be expected to exist in the next 10-20 years or so" in an environment with space fighters. That raises more questions in the reader's mind than self-aware AI not bothering to be the targeting system for whatever reason.

I've used both self-aware and somewhat less so AI in one of my novels, but humans still 'man the guns' in terms of strategic decision making on the warships. My feeling is that so long as I write interesting characters, keep the scenario self-consistent, and move the action along at a reasonable clip, readers will generally forgive little niggles like why there are humans involved at all (and one of the ships, a freighter, is almost fully autonomous, there is only two human crew). Probably, I'll include fully AI-run ships at some point, but they'll be foils to the humans, because as we both appear to feel, that's the point of the story, after all

 

[Nik_2213]

A couple of thoughts: These space-war lasers seem assumed to be pulsed, the optical equivalent of gun-fire, or SW mega-ships having crew feed munitions to their turrets...
'Continuous' beam weapons would be 'fire, then aim'. Technically much harder, wasteful, but difficult to dodge...

Um, having watched gamers battle the near-AIs in 'first-person shooters', I must wonder if such 'bots' would suit the 'brains' of the many missile types an attacker must throw at an AI defense...

 

[Melbourne Guy]

I'm still struggling with the definition of "realistic Sci Fi" in the OP's title, because that seems able to accommodate anything the author can throw at it, but @Nik_2213, your assumption of pulsed lasers is a common one in the space warfare genre, mostly, I find, because it loads up the narrative with more tension than a continuous beam when fighting small, nimble craft.

Um, having watched gamers battle the near-AIs in 'first-person shooters', I must wonder if such 'bots' would suit the 'brains' of the many missile types an attacker must throw at an AI defense...

Are those FPS games really 'near-AIs' though? And is my interpretation of your comment correct: you're saying humans are better than bots in these games?

 

[Drakkith]

Um, having watched gamers battle the near-AIs in 'first-person shooters', I must wonder if such 'bots' would suit the 'brains' of the many missile types an attacker must throw at an AI defense...

Virtually nothing in a video game can be applied to real life. The AI (and I use AI in the loosest possible sense of the term) is extremely limited and designed to give the player a fair challenge. So no how matter how good or bad they appear to be, they are designed for a video game and nothing else.

 

[Rive]

Virtually nothing in a video game can be applied to real life.

Exactly. To start with, the scripts of those bots are based on the objects around: in real life the starting point is, that what objects are around?
Also, the allocated resources. Those bots are just part of a game, a dozen or so (in case of space genree: maybe some dozen, up to maybe a hundred or two) running around as a background task of the game, while a combat AI would run alone on its hardware.
Very different, in every aspect.

 

[f95toli]

Note also what happened when Alphastar from Deepmind learned to play Starcraft...
This was despite the fact that the interaction time was artificially limited and -as far as I remember- it was only allowed to do one thing at a time, which obviously wouldn't be the case if the goal was just to create a system that could win with no restrictions .

Another -possibly more relevant example- would be the results from DARPA's Alphadogfight trials last year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_AlphaDogfight
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2020-08-07

It is worth pointing out that even in this case there were restrictions in that the AI was simulating flying a F-16. The current generation of aircraft are designed for human pilot, a purpose-built AI controlled drone meant for dogfighting could be designed very differently and could also sustain high g-forces for an extended period of time.
The same obviously applies to a spacefighter.

 

[Jojomanrul3z]

Not impossible, stupid. Why would you build a fighter jet designed to maneuver in space and dogfight upclose and personal? Space is big and there is no cover in space, the enemy you are fighting whoever they may be can already see you coming before you can even take a shot and they already have a railgun slug or missile heading straight to you before you even know it and even if you get closer and survive the main weapons yoi still got to worry about their CQC/defensive weapons like Point Defenese Cannons.

Basically, space combat will take place in great distances like 100,000 km to 1,000,000 km or more because of the effective range of weapons being limited but you can still see your enemy you just got to get close to make sure your railgun slugs or missiles doesn't miss the enemy ship.

Realistic space fighters would look more like the rocinante or morrigan class patrol destroyer because they are not fighter jets they are small ships providing fire support from different directions, and not dogfight like the X-wing and colonial viper. Even if you accomplish to conduct a dogfight in space its basically suicide not just because of the weapons firing up close, but the fuel you waste maneuvering and dodging shots and then there's the G-force you got to deal with that puts so much stress on the pilot or crew. Maneuver too fast, you get lots of G-forces and too much G-forces could either knock out the crew or potentially kill them.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

Wow, tell us what you really think, @Jojomanrul3z

Seriously, you're making a lot of assertions that can be contested, we're in the sci-fi forum, after all. But I note you're advocating missiles in space, asserting that they are workable. I literally am wondering about missiles in space for my latest novel, which is a military space opera. Surely, your arguments against space fighters apply to them, too? Why would they work when fighters won't?

 

[Jojomanrul3z]

Wow, tell us what you really think, @Jojomanrul3z

Seriously, you're making a lot of assertions that can be contested, we're in the sci-fi forum, after all. But I note you're advocating missiles in space, asserting that they are workable. I literally am wondering about missiles in space for my latest novel, which is a military space opera. Surely, your arguments against space fighters apply to them, too? Why would they work when fighters won't?

Missiles work because they have no pilots. When a ship has a pilot the ship is limited to how much G-force their crew or pilot can take. Missiles don't have that limitation meaning they can maneuver and accelerate faster without turning the crew into paste.

Plus the question being asked is are fighters impossible in a realistic sci-fi so that's my answer.

 

[Drakkith]

Missiles work because they have no pilots. When a ship has a pilot the ship is limited to how much G-force their crew or pilot can take. Missiles don't have that limitation meaning they can maneuver and accelerate faster without turning the crew into paste.

While this is all correct, we already use missiles and piloted fighters, so it's not nearly as simple as you're implying. One major, major limitation to both fighters and missiles in space combat is fuel. Unlike missiles used in the atmosphere that burn all their fuel very quickly after launch and then use the air to maneuver, missiles in space MUST use fuel for any maneuvering. This puts a pretty strict limitation on them in terms of effective range. Put simply, the longer the range is, the less fuel the target has to burn to force a large burn of the missile. And the faster the closing velocity the more this is exacerbated.

Fighters have similar problems in addition to requiring enough fuel to make it back to their mothership/carrier/base and having more mass in the first place.

I'm not convinced either are 'impossible' in space combat, but both have serious limitations at this time.

 

[BWV]

While this is all correct, we already use missiles and piloted fighters, so it's not nearly as simple as you're implying. One major, major limitation to both fighters and missiles in space combat is fuel. Unlike missiles used in the atmosphere that burn all their fuel very quickly after launch and then use the air to maneuver, missiles in space MUST use fuel for any maneuvering. This puts a pretty strict limitation on them in terms of effective range. Put simply, the longer the range is, the less fuel the target has to burn to force a large burn of the missile. And the faster the closing velocity the more this is exacerbated.

Fighters have similar problems in addition to requiring enough fuel to make it back to their mothership/carrier/base and having more mass in the first place.

I'm not convinced either are 'impossible' in space combat, but both have serious limitations at this time.

Interesting point - one option you never see in space operas is the initial acceleration utilizing energy from the launch vessel - rail gun or whatever. If you accelerate the missile with a shipboard rail gun then you only need fuel for maneuver - same with a fighter (but the g-forces for a human pilot would place a constraint - so an other argument for drone / AI fighters)