Discussion Solving the problems of space combat in Orbiter

[Linguofreak]

That is like saying that a radiator wouldn't work if you put a color and polarizing filter and a long tube in front of it. You might lose some efficiency, but it still works.

It would actually work fairly well, but it wouldn't produce the same effects as a laser. You see, for one, all the photons in a laser are in phase with each other, which your arrangement can't do. For another, something has to happen to the energy the filter and tube prevent from escaping. Generally, that energy will cause the filter and tube to heat up to the temperature of the radiator (or a bit less, considering that they'll be letting some of the radiation from the radiator through), at which point they will let off the same blackbody spectrum as the radiator. So you'll still get a blackbody spectrum eminating in all directions, just as if you had the radiator there by itself.

If you want to let off just one frequency in one direction, you'll have to refrigerate the tube and filter assembly. Refrigeration requires energy. You have to generate that energy somehow, and any inefficiency in generating that energy will add to the amount of heat you have to get rid of.

The stimulation at the chosen frequencies of the maser might make up for the polarization inefficiencies and frequency change to make it practical, but it might not. If it gives off light (energy) and is powered from the energy of a hot object, it cools the object.

Not if sending the energy away from the object by that method requires more energy from a battery or an outside power source than it sends away.

Also, in the specific case of that Brin novel, the environment is hotter than the ship you're trying to cool. So you can't use the thermal energy of the ship to provide power for your cooling mechanism.

Also the laser ice cube is not a real object. Laser beams diverge significantly at a distance equal to its initial beam diameter squared.

Proportional to beam diameter squared, not equal. Wavelength is also a factor in diffraction.

This is due to quantum effects. If you apply quantum effects to the ice cube, you will find that the molecules in it aren't perfectly still even at absolute zero. The fact remains that the entropy is very low.

Its going to get spread out across space-time curves and quantum changes.

And as I mentioned before, it will also heat up and be scattered by anything it hits, but, in that case, as well as this, that involves what happens to it later, not the process involved in creating the beam.

 

[Eagle]

Generally, that energy will cause the filter and tube to heat up to the temperature of the radiator (or a bit less, considering that they'll be letting some of the radiation from the radiator through), at which point they will let off the same blackbody spectrum as the radiator. So you'll still get a blackbody spectrum eminating in all directions, just as if you had the radiator there by itself.

I just meant an ideal theoretical filter that reflects back the energies not passed. Its not something that can be built in reality, just a thought experiment. Multiple polarization filters can be used to restrict phase as well.

Also, in the specific case of that Brin novel, the environment is hotter than the ship you're trying to cool. So you can't use the thermal energy of the ship to provide power for your cooling mechanism.

I think the book specifically said that the laser needed to be pointed not at the Sun (that is cool empty sky). That doesn't work if you get deep enough into the atmosphere to recieve sigificant radiation in all directions.

Proportional to beam diameter squared, not equal. Wavelength is also a factor in diffraction.

You are correct, I said it wrong.

This is due to quantum effects. If you apply quantum effects to the ice cube, you will find that the molecules in it aren't perfectly still even at absolute zero. The fact remains that the entropy is very low.

We're going to have to cite sources to find out who is right here. I'll look for what I can, send me what you have.


-----Post Added-----

But how far in the future are we thinking, now? Given values which would be considered realistic delta-V margins, it's impractical to sit along one of those routes, and then match velocities with anyone who happens to come along in order to board and plunder. And if you see a vessel sitting stationary along one of these routes, you know they're up to no good.

Relativistic maturity. As in significant fractions of c can be achieved.

And I said nothing about sitting along routes or pulling asside and boarding a ship piracy. I said their probable route is known without specificly knowing where the ship is. That is more than enough information to intercept.

They were still not "sacked," and considering that it's the AF Chief of Staff who said that, he most definitely did not get "sacked." Your orginial statement is still incorrect.

Chief of Staff General McPeak resigned over the incident. At that high level of government nobody is 'fired' they resign.

Frank Spinner, Wang's civilian attorney, argued that USAF Chief of Staff General Merrill McPeak, a career fighter pilot, had made clear that he did not want Wickson and May punished for their actions in the shootdown. Cited as evidence for this was a Los Angeles Times report, published also in the European Stars and Stripes newspaper on June 18, 1994 that stated that McPeak "strongly opposed" court-martial action for Wickson or May. Pilkington stated that he had heard rumors that McPeak had said something to that effect, but could not confirm if they were true or not

Legally because the persons in question were acquitted of charges they could not forcibly be removed from service. The new Chief of Staff, General Fogleman used the strongest measure available to him. The measures made promotion very difficult for the effected.

Wickson resigned and May retired from the USAF soon after Fogleman's investigation was completed.[74] Lawrence Tracy retired immediately after Wang's court-martial on an early (15-year) retirement option.[75] As of May 2005 Jim Wang was still serving in the USAF but remained at the rank of Captain, having been denied promotion.[76] Interviewed in 2005 about the shootdown, Tracy stated, "Jim (Wang) and all of us at first were held up as scapegoats. I think that was to cover up for the pilots. They had their fangs out. They wanted to kill something because it had been ages since an F-15 had shot anything down. We were held accountable for their actions."[77]
Andrus retired from the USAF in 1995, Pilkington in 1996, Emery in 1997, and Santarelli in 1998, all at the same rank they held at the time of the shootdown, except Emery, who retired as a brigadier general. Richardson was promoted to brigadier general on July 1, 1999 and retired on September 1, 2001. Dallager was appointed as superintendent of the USAF Academy in June 2000 and was promoted to lieutenant general on August 1 of the same year. Dallager's appointment and promotion were criticized by observers because of his involvement in the controversial shootdown after-actions and refusal to testify for the senate investigation. Dallager retired on September 1, 2003, but at the rank of major general.[78]

I'm sorry if my oversimplification mislead you. The fact that remains is that because of this incident the pilots and AWACS commander left service and a the Chief of Staff of the Airforce resigned.

A computer can react faster than a human and, when it comes to controlling the vessel, perform more precise maneuvers. They can only consider what they're programmed to, yes, but if you make the considerations for when to abort and when not to sufficiently broad it will be an acceptable decision-maker.

Yes, computers can make decisions very fast. However, when you get a few light-seconds out your decision window gets large enough that a (computer-assisted) human can manage the situation as well if not better.

Additionally in the interplanetary case, noncombatant ships will be on extremely predictable trajectories (either drifting or low-ISP constant thrust) and any suspicious deviation therefrom without accompanying transmissions could easily be justification for action of some kind.

In most cases yes, but people will do weird things and weird things happen. So it is important to have other options available than to kill everyone.

I think we can both agree that "fighters" in the traditional, modern sense will not exist in the space theatre of war. What you're describing is more of a forward command vessel, for tactical decisions but not for any direct fighting, which can make sense in some circumstances.

We agree here.

 

[Hielor]

And I said nothing about sitting along routes or pulling asside and boarding a ship piracy. I said their probable route is known without specificly knowing where the ship is. That is more than enough information to intercept.

I never said that vessels couldn't intercept others. Just that it would be very obvious if someone was coming to intercept you. The difference between someone coming to intercept you and someone just doing normal freighter things would be very obvious.

Chief of Staff General McPeak resigned over the incident. At that high level of government nobody is 'fired' they resign.
...
I'm sorry if my oversimplification mislead you. The fact that remains is that because of this incident the pilots and AWACS commander left service and a the Chief of Staff of the Airforce resigned.

What is your source for McPeak resigning over this incident? I can find nothing on Wikipedia saying that the incident had anything to do with his resignation. And as we all know, if it's not on Wikipedia, it isn't true.

Yes, computers can make decisions very fast. However, when you get a few light-seconds out your decision window gets large enough that a (computer-assisted) human can manage the situation as well if not better.

I'm not sure I see what you're saying here. Are you saying that humans need to be within a few light-seconds of the combat at all times? I don't see why. Even if there is a possibility that the target is not a hostile, the only decision that the human needs to make is "go" or "abort" which can be made with a relatively large window.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a human to be involved directly in the combat, once combat has started. I've been primarily talking about combat. You've been primarily talking about avoiding combat for various moral reasons. They are two different matters.

In a strictly combat situation, humans will have no place in the nitty-gritty details, because they simple won't have the reaction speed. They will be in tactical and strategic roles, which require more reasoning and creativity than computers can do.

The situation you have been talking about (intercepting a potentially hostile vessel) is not a strictly combat situation. Different situations require different solutions.

In most cases yes, but people will do weird things and weird things happen. So it is important to have other options available than to kill everyone.

Depends on the culture. During the Cold War the Soviet military apparently felt that that was a reasonable option. I'm not saying that that's the correct way of doing things, I'm just pointing out that there are cultural considerations as to what's important and what isn't.

 

[Eagle]

I never said that vessels couldn't intercept others. Just that it would be very obvious if someone was coming to intercept you. The difference between someone coming to intercept you and someone just doing normal freighter things would be very obvious.

Possibly. But if your goal is just to kill a target along a path you might be able to sneak something small in. Maybe a missile or lots of ball bearings. You may need to have the launching craft make some obsuring maneuvers and only be on the launch trajectory just long enough to launch ordinance. Maybe even make it look like the ship was maneuvering to intercept a decoy craft.

What is your source for McPeak resigning over this incident? I can find nothing on Wikipedia saying that the incident had anything to do with his resignation. And as we all know, if it's not on Wikipedia, it isn't true.

I appear to have made a mistake. General McPeak was already at the end of his term. It appears he completed his term normally. I may have been confused him with Gen Fogleman who retired in protest due to disagreements regarding prosecuting the commander in charge of the housing facility during Khobar Towers Bombing. Do we agree on the particulars of the situation enough to analyze it? I brought it up just to make a point that friendly fire is a big deal. It may be enough of a problem to override technical factors.

Even if there is a possibility that the target is not a hostile, the only decision that the human needs to make is "go" or "abort" which can be made with a relatively large window.

That is exactly what I'm suggesting. But how big is the decision window? An hour? Day? Week? Year? The answer depends upon how long you have between identification and engagement/weapons release. Of course weapons release can be stalled for a while. It may tend to matter if the ship isn't far from engaging you too.

 

[Hielor]

Possibly. But if your goal is just to kill a target along a path you might be able to sneak something small in. Maybe a missile or lots of ball bearings. You may need to have the launching craft make some obsuring maneuvers and only be on the launch trajectory just long enough to launch ordinance. Maybe even make it look like the ship was maneuvering to intercept a decoy craft.

The problem with unguided simple ordnance (such as ball bearings) is that if the target craft detects it at all, they could make a simple burn of very low delta-v and dodge it. In fact, in a society where dV is cheap, it may even be common practice to occasionally make random burns, especially if the sensors detect that a vessel was on an intercept course, even if it was only on that intercept course for a small period of time.

I appear to have made a mistake. General McPeak was already at the end of his term. It appears he completed his term normally. I may have been confused him with Gen Fogleman who retired in protest due to disagreements regarding prosecuting the commander in charge of the housing facility during Khobar Towers Bombing. Do we agree on the particulars of the situation enough to analyze it? I brought it up just to make a point that friendly fire is a big deal. It may be enough of a problem to override technical factors.

Yes, friendly fire is a big deal, and unfortunately there's no way to completely eliminate it in the real world--as that example shows, even having a human in the cockpit doesn't stop it.

What will probably happen in the future history of space combat is that some new fancy computer-controlled system will spring up and come into widespread usage and report hundreds of successes and be widely celebrated. And then it'll have one friendly-fire incident and there will be a huge and far-reaching overhaul of the system, even though the single friendly-fire incident is but a small fraction of the total uses.

At least, that's how things will work if the modern world is any indicator at all.

 

[Andy44]

Well, it depends on the kind of war and the political climate, like I said before. If it's a huge, short war between near-equal peers , like WWII, then friendly fire incidents won't matter so much. But if it's a superpower involved in numerous protracted small wars and counter insurgencies against technologically primitive foes, like the US has been for the last 50 years, then friendly fire means more. The public in the US has come to expect near-perfection from its armed forces, with almost no casualties, since the '91 Gulf War, and this makes friendly fire seem much more deadly and unacceptable.

 

[Andy44]

Before this thread becomes necrofied, I wanted to keep it from dying, since it started me thinking about stuff.

It has occurred to me that all this business of spaceships maneuvering and fighting like a "space navy" is just so much sci-fi to us, not just because of the tech level involved, but because of the way that space missions are operated today.

The space shuttle orbiter cannot just change its orbit willy-nilly, at least not drastically, without the ground team planning for it ahead of time. Add to that the limited delta-V and overall dependence on the ground and tracking stations (and TDRS) and you see that space operations are not even close to the way a ship or an airplane is operated.

Maybe if we wanted to simulate space war in Orbiter )or any other sim) we have to start with simulating the way spacecraft are actually operated. Unlike Orbiter, where we always know the exact orbit state of all the objects, real life has a lag in the cycle and a reliance on mission controllers for orbit updates. Start doing combat maneuvers, and you suddenly break all your comm links and have to spend time finding everything again.

 

[Eagle]

The space shuttle orbiter cannot just change its orbit willy-nilly, at least not drastically, without the ground team planning for it ahead of time. Add to that the limited delta-V and overall dependence on the ground and tracking stations (and TDRS) and you see that space operations are not even close to the way a ship or an airplane is operated.

Maybe if we wanted to simulate space war in Orbiter )or any other sim) we have to start with simulating the way spacecraft are actually operated. Unlike Orbiter, where we always know the exact orbit state of all the objects, real life has a lag in the cycle and a reliance on mission controllers for orbit updates. Start doing combat maneuvers, and you suddenly break all your comm links and have to spend time finding everything again.

A good idea of where you are before a burn + accelerometers + space sextant + computer can probably help a lot. You might have to settle for a lower level of precision but I don't think its above modern technology to deduce.

Navigational stars are easy enough to identify by a computer so cardinal directions aren't difficult, changes in their relative angles can triangulate...tetrahedrate?..pyramidate? your location to within a lightyear. Recalculating your velocity from scratch is only really possible if you're near some planets or something you know the orbit of, failsafe accelerometers is probably the way to go.

The only thing else is to know what gravity field you're in, if its familiar territory your computer likely has an idea. At the very least you should be able to estimate a star's gravity well by its spectral type. Maybe identify and generate estimates for its planets when you get closer.

 

[Frogisis]

A different approach to implementing this might be to first ask ourselves what kind of combat space missions would be fun and exciting to fly, and then determine what the technology and capabilities would realistically need to be, based on that. I know we're all gearheads and care about realism, but I'm also confident in guessing that the whole impetus for this thread is that we think a real-physics space combat sim would be awesome.
If we want variety and richness in the missions and opponents, I think something far in the future would be the way to go - Centuries from now, at least. That way, not only would there be a believable range of targets all across the solar system, you could also have a high-performance ship that would allow you to get the most out of whatever spaceflight skills you've learned, and let everyone experiment and play around to see what kind of tactics and maneuvers work in different situations, as opposed to being locked into a single trajectory by your puny chemical engines. No one knows how real spaceships would actually maneuver and fight, but if we gave some virtual ones realistic weapons and a good amount of delta-V, we could help find out.
Furthermore, since the ship you're piloting is entirely in your hands, there's no reason to say it isn't already controlled by an "AI" - letting us have a compromise between realistic ship sizes and capabilities, and the one-man fighters that everyone thinks are so neat: A large and powerful ship could certainly pull many Gs if the only "crew" is the AI you're playing the part of. Maybe having to wait for authorization or orders from a human back aboard a "booster" vessel or on a planet could add tension and drama to the missions, as well.
Beyond that, I think just playing around with different parameters or weapons systems until we find something balanced and fun would be the way to develop it...
Just brainstorming some missions:
-Fight your way from the moon to the Earth and nuke five cities.
-Starting from Ganymede, intercept a Mars-bound ship launching from Europa.
-Seed a debris feild around a planet while avoiding missiles launched from the surface. (Or intercept enemy ships trying the same)
-Fly to then destroy asteroid mining operations (or space colonies) at a LaGrange point.
-Take on a massive battleship or space-station.
-Destroy a GPS network.
-Protect/destroy something huge (experimental starship? Relativistic Bomb!?) until/before it accelerates to a speed where it can't be stopped.
I can easily imagine ways to spin each one of these so they're made technically, politically, or economically impractical, but with enough imagination I'm sure we could come up with a suite of space technologies that would make for the widest variety of fun, challenging missions.

As far as implementing it in Orbiter, I'd imagine there'd be a need for lots of new instrument MFDs and maybe even HUDs in addition to the nuts and bolts of the combat model... What about something that projects the orbits of your targets on the HUD, or lights up incoming missiles and railgun shells so your laser can hit them? Or a "Dogfight MFD" that helps you adjust your relative velocity to your target so your missiles are more likely to make it there, or something similar... That telescope MFD would be neat for actually letting you see what you're shooting at... Maybe even record some new "combat" ATS sounds to add some color.

On the other hand, given how enormous an undertaking all this would be, something very simple along the lines of "launch a shuttle and shoot a laser at something" might be what's feasible.

 

[Andy44]

Navigational stars are easy enough to identify by a computer so cardinal directions aren't difficult, changes in their relative angles can triangulate...tetrahedrate?..pyramidate? your location to within a lightyear.

If one light year is good enough, than you're already talking about technology levels far, far advanced from what we have now, and perhaps self-contained navigation ("astrogation" for Star Frontiers fans) is much more practicle.

You and Frogisis and others are talking about Heinlein/Pournelle-style space navies with fantastically high Isp and thrust, and even interstellar capabilities.

I'm talking about current tech, or at most day-after-tomorrow technology. Mostly chemical propulsion, maybe a few NTRs or rudimentary fusion, limited delta-V, and mostly unmanned platforms. The contested "area" of space would be near-Earth space (LEO to GEO) and cislunar space in most scenarios in my head. Interplanetary war is also possible, but only if there is something on other bodies worth the expense of building and sending weapons systems there.

While I realize that satellites being beaned by ASAT missiles seems boring, it is also realistic and could happen right this minute. In a conflict between two spacefaring nations, there will be an attempt by either side to use space to gain an advantage while preventing its opponent from doing the same. In addition, if the war is limited, there will be an attempt to restrain from fouling useful orbits with debris or otherwise spoiling the use of space after the conflict ends.

This can be simulated much easier, providing Orbiter can also simulate the comm links and command and control problem, and like the wargames run by the US Navy in the 1930s, which accurately developed carrier tactics later used against Japan, we can more easily judge the fidelity of the wargame by comparing with known real life tech and news events.

Perhaps this is not "fun" enough, though, and I understand why it would sound boring to most Orbinauts. And perhaps Orbiter is not the best platform for this sort of thing, either; Satellite Tool Kit or similar might be better at this sort of thing.

 

[mjl1966]

Way back in 1999 I tried to come up with realistic space combat tactics and the reality, as best as I could determine, is that local orbit combat really isn't feasible unless the contesting parties are hightly cooperative. (This was back when finding stuff on the Internet about Hohmann transfer orbits and such was a little harder...)

As anybody who has ever docked with the ISS can attest, intercepting anything in orbit is very very hard. At the same time, changing orbital parameters is very very easy. I can cost you hours and hours of realignment/resync with 20 seconds of thrust. Not that you need time to figure it out, but you need time to get there. In fact, the fewer times I move, the harder it gets for you. You have no choice but to wait until we rendezvous. I can FUBAR it at will. I promise you, with the tools we have right not in Orbiter, I can always stay far far away from you. If I know where you are, I can avoid you very easily and by huge gaps of distance. Kepler ensures that no matter how fancy you get with your AI, engines, navigation or anything else, I will always be able to stay away from you. Even if you can adjust your orbit with some fancy continual burn, I can dodge you with short intermittent ones and you'll run out of fuel way before I do. Unlike aerial combat, where aircraft attributes overcome atmospheric attributes, the driving force in orbital mechanics is gravity, and all ships are overwhelmed by it. Put another way, the vast majority of maneuvering force comes from the orbit itself, not the ship. Hot air balloon combat would have a better chance. The only possible exception is EI. If you know where I'm going to re-enter and can get there at the same time, I'm stuck. But that's a one-time exception. Maybe.

So, the first defense against orbital attack is fuel and rockets. Something coming after your space station? Delta V yourself outta' the way. Then point and laugh. A lot.

So, if we stipulate, for the moment, that traditional kinetic differential weaponry isn't going to work because we simply can't get to the target, then we have to step back and look at the objective from a whole new angle.

And the objective is power projection. Somebody mentioned lines of communication earlier. This implies interdiction, one element of power projection. Overall, what is the military objective here? Somebody else mentioned that the McGuffin here is the planet itself. Orbiting is nice, but growing crops and mining resources is the real prize. Can't do that in orbit. The role space serves, then, is simply the conduit through which military force travels to get where it counts: on the ground. Real force projection is not going to be in the form of overcoming any orbital assets; it's going to be in the form of bombardment and troop landings. (Yeh, we're talking about interstellar war here, which is not a concern, but a good study.) The questions become two: Can I stop them? Can I stop them in the orbital environment? Don't know the answer to question 1. The answer to question 2 is: no. I can plot their inbound orbit for years and tey can still whip me with MIRVs, random suborbital delivery vehicles or any number of easy-to-think-of "get out of the way" tactics. Once I get under 120, the fight is sub-orbital - not our sandbox.

Back to the more practical, power projection on a local scale is about spaceborne assets which support terrestrial operations: spy satellites, communication satellites, space stations and other "parked" goodies.

Which brings us back to orbital warfare. Ultimately, it's not going to be about destruction as much as functional interdiction. Blind them, turn them off, scramble the hard drive - that sort of thing. And none of that needs to involve anybody flying anything because it's an engineering excercise which in no way requires people in spaceships. It would all be handled by JPL type facilities.

Now, having said all this, how interesting that there is a project underway to equip vehicles with weaponry in the Orbiter environment. You fellas figure out how to get those weapons on target in the orbital combat environment as I've describe it - well, that would be exciting stuff, and probably of great interest to many outside our little community.

-MJL

 

[Sky Captain]

So, the first defense against orbital attack is fuel and rockets. Something coming after your space station? Delta V yourself outta' the way. Then point and laugh. A lot.

This why I think dominated weaponry in space combat will be laser and particle beam based. If you have powerful laser then no need to bother with interception, you can just zap your targets with the speed of light. In near Earth orbital space it would mean you need to get within line of sight of your target to strike. In interplanetary combat depending of how advanced the laser technology is it might be possible to have effective combat ranges up to several light seconds - far beyond of what would be reliably possible with missiles.

 

[mjl1966]

This why I think dominated weaponry in space combat will be laser and particle beam based. If you have powerful laser then no need to bother with interception, you can just zap your targets with the speed of light. In near Earth orbital space it would mean you need to get within line of sight of your target to strike. In interplanetary combat depending of how advanced the laser technology is it might be possible to have effective combat ranges up to several light seconds - far beyond of what would be reliably possible with missiles.

Agreed, but energy weps bring up other questions. We're still talking about a lot of distance here and light energy, in any form, diminishes exponentially with distance. How much power do we need for such a weapon? It is going to need to have a looooong reach because of the orbital dynamics problem we're trying to overcome in the first place. How much mass will power generation require? Will the laser itself generate thrust that we have to worry about?

When it comes to a local space fight, Star Wars had it right.

But this really only cuts the problem down a bit. If I'm below your horizon and can stay there, you're still out of luck. Playing "keep away" gets a little harder, but I wonder if it's just a matter of degree rather than a defeat of the tactic.

While we still have challenges for the local fight, what we certainly have with Eweps is a solution for the interstellar invasion problem. Beam stations can now be set up in an orbital lattice that will truly ruin the day of any incoming Vegan warships.

-MJL

 

[Eagle]

Will the laser itself generate thrust that we have to worry about?

1 Newton of thrust for every 300 Megawatts of beam power. (beam power = input power * efficiency)

Satellites can already be disabled by Megawatt and larger lasers, but kinetic intercept guarantees a kill (assuming the target doesn't change orbit).

 

[Frogisis]

But this really only cuts the problem down a bit. If I'm below your horizon and can stay there, you're still out of luck. Playing "keep away" gets a little harder, but I wonder if it's just a matter of degree rather than a defeat of the tactic.
-MJL

That is exactly what I think would be challenging and fun. If I'm chasing an enemy ship around a planet and he's below my horizon, I can lower my orbit to try to catch up with him, or I can raise my orbit and hope that when he comes around the other side of the planet I can zap him again. If either of us tried to deploy probes to create a sensor network that could see around the planet, the other one of us would shoot it down, so it becomes a guessing game about what the enemy might do. I could leave missiles in one orbit and set them to activate and chase my opponent while I move to another one, but if he sees the missiles before they see him, or is too far away when they activate, he'll be able to shoot them down, and the same goes for me.

Has anyone seen this site?: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3t.html This section starts off a discussion (repository? essay?) on this exact topic, and you can use the little white bars at the top and bottom to advance to the next section. It's billed as a resource for SF writers so the focus is on what's theoretically possible with advanced technology instead of with current spacecraft, but it covers a lot of this same ground, and is at least a thought-provoking read.

 

[Hielor]

When it comes to a local space fight, Star Wars had it right.

As pointed out in this thread, the odds of a "local space fight" are very low to begin with, and even if there were such a fight, there would be no fighters involved--it would all be with larger vessels. We already established earlier that fighters are worthless. Especially if you have laser weaponry, a turret with a laser could easily track and destroy a fighter.

Moreover, star wars uses "star wars physics."

Star Wars has nothing right about space combat.

 

[Eagle]

To make it extra fun, duck around Jupiter or Saturn and their moons. Big thing to get around and lots of places to hide and most moons are small enough to land otherwise space only craft.

Of course both vessels would need drives that don't leave a nice 'I was here, jetting this way' smoke trail.

 

[mjl1966]

As pointed out in this thread, the odds of a "local space fight" are very low to begin with, and even if there were such a fight, there would be no fighters involved--it would all be with larger vessels. We already established earlier that fighters are worthless. Especially if you have laser weaponry, a turret with a laser could easily track and destroy a fighter.

Moreover, star wars uses "star wars physics."

Star Wars has nothing right about space combat.

The precision of my allusion is lacking. I was referring specifcally to the use of energy weapons. As for tactical maneuvering, no, Star Wars is pure fantasy. Sad consequence of knowing something about orbital mechanics is it really takes the fun out of those massive battle scenes. ME: "No way they would ever get that close." GF:"Shut up and enjoy the fireworks." :lol:

---------- Post added at 06:09 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:01 PM ----------

Getting back to the main thrust of the topic. (no pun intended.):

Can we use orbiter to experiment with space combat tactics? Sure. Even if we theorize that orbital mechanics will preclude tactical maneuvering, we can and should still use the platform to develop and test possible solutions. The exploration itself would be well worth the trouble.

Some things already mentioned that could be implemented in the Orbiter environment include sensor probes, dormant weapons and, of course, energy weps. Everything we need is here except for hit detection, which is trivial coding. (for guys like Schweiger who know how to code things like Orbiter.)

Even though it's the least likely to succeed, I think local orbital combat would still be the most interesting to explore. What are the real problems? What can we try to overcome them? How effective are our solutions? What do we learn in the process?

The paradigm of orbital travel is fuel efficiency, so right now we do everything at peri apo and nodes. What happens when we start increasing thrust vectors, fuel loads and design ships to modify orbital parms at other points besides these three? Just trying to answer these questions and testing the solutions I think would be very interesting. It can't be done, but trying will be a lot of fun. And, who knows, maybe I'm totally wrong. Sure would be cool if I was.

-MJL

---------- Post added at 04:37 PM ---------- Previous post was Yesterday at 06:09 PM ----------

Orbiter as is depends on scenarios that include objects ahead of time. It doesn't look like it would (or should for its current purpose) have an instancing routing to create objects on the spot. Projectiles need to spawn with initial vectors and all the physics being applied. energy weps need to be spawned and ray tracing and hit detection. And so on.

-MJL

 

[Eagle]

Orbiter as is depends on scenarios that include objects ahead of time. It doesn't look like it would (or should for its current purpose) have an instancing routing to create objects on the spot. Projectiles need to spawn with initial vectors and all the physics being applied. energy weps need to be spawned and ray tracing and hit detection. And so on.

-MJL

The adding a new vessel to a running simulation is very fast if:1)There is already a vessel of the same class which preloaded its mesh and textures, 2) The vessel initialization is relatively short.

Dummy projectiles should have very little built in code besides collision detection, more advanced missiles should probably be preloaded onto hard points of vessels for realism anyways.

 

[Hielor]

---------- Post added at 04:37 PM ---------- Previous post was Yesterday at 06:09 PM ----------

Orbiter as is depends on scenarios that include objects ahead of time. It doesn't look like it would (or should for its current purpose) have an instancing routing to create objects on the spot. Projectiles need to spawn with initial vectors and all the physics being applied. energy weps need to be spawned and ray tracing and hit detection. And so on.

-MJL

What do you mean? It's trivially easy for an addon to spawn a vessel during a simulation.