![]() If you come upon a starfighter with some big, spherical bulbs near the midsection, they are probably whopping big CMGs and the thing will be able to point its guns at you wherever you go. With some big CMGs, a spacecraft could flip end-for-end in a matter of seconds or less. So I think gyroscopes (“CMGs,” in the spacecraft lingo) would be a better way to go – they could invisibly live entirely within the space fighter hull, and wouldn’t need to be mounted on any long booms (which would increase the radar, visible, and physical cross-section of the fighter) to get the most torque on the craft. Either way, concealing the attitude maneuvers of the space fighter would be important to gain a tactical advantage. Attitude maneuvers would be critical to point the main engine of a space fighter to set up for a burn, or to point the weapons systems at an enemy. The fast ways to do that are to fire an off-center thruster or to tilt a gyroscope around to generate a torque. Second, there are only a few ways to maneuver the attitude of a spacecraft around – to point it in a new direction. No, around a planet, the tactical advantage in a battle would be determined by orbit dynamics: which ship is in a lower (and faster) orbit than which who has a circular orbit and who has gone for an ellipse relative rendezvous trajectories that look like winding spirals rather than straight lines. Another is that combat in orbit would be very different from combat in “deep space,” which is what you probably think of as how space combat should be – where a spacecraft thrusts one way, and then keeps going that way forever. One implication of rocket propulsion is that there will be relatively long periods during which Newtonian physics govern the motions of dogfighting spacecraft, punctuated by relatively short periods of maneuvering. However, the greater speed from burning a chemical, nuclear, or antimatter rocket in a single maneuver is likely a better tactical option. The only other major option is a propulsion system like ion engines or solar sails, which produce a very low amount of thrust over a very long time. (Of course, once our ships maneuver towards those unguarded orbits, they will be easily observed – and potentially countered.)įirst, pending a major development in propulsion technology, combat spacecraft would likely get around the same way the Apollo spacecraft went to the Moon and back: with orbit changes effected by discrete main-engine burns. It also means that strategy is not as hopeless when we finally get to the Bugger homeworld: the enemy ships will be concentrated into certain orbits, leaving some avenues of attack guarded and some open. So, it would actually make sense to build space defense platforms in certain orbits, to point high-power radar-reflection surveillance satellites at certain empty reaches of space, or even to mine parts of the void. At any given point in time, there are only so many routes from here to Mars that will leave our imperialist forces enough fuel and energy to put down the colonists’ revolt. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. ![]() ![]() In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. What it got right is the essentially three-dimensional nature of space combat, and how that would be fundamentally different from land, sea, and air combat. How would space combat actually go?įirst, let me point out something that Ender’s Game got right and something it got wrong. But suppose we get out there, go terraform Mars, and the Martian colonists actually revolt. We have the fighter-plane engagements of Star Wars, the subdued, two-dimensional naval combat in Star Trek, the Newtonian planes of Battlestar Galactica, the staggeringly furious energy exchanges of the combat wasps in Peter Hamilton’s books, and the use of antimatter rocket engines themselves as weapons in other sci-fi. ![]() I had a discussion recently with friends about the various depictions of space combat in science fiction movies, TV shows, and books.
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