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"Space Navies" - articles by Stephen den Beste
I just ran across this series of articles on his blog, and thought some
of you might be interested. Links: http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entrie...ceNavies.shtml and http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entrie...eNavies2.shtml The opening paragraphs of the second article (the one that first caught my eye) a So if the characteristics of ships and weapons dictate strategy and tactics used in naval encounters, then what would be the critical characteristics of space warships which would be critical? It depends entirely on what assumptions you make. In most of science fiction, it's convenient to toss the known laws of physics out the window, to a greater or lesser extent, and once you do that the door is wide open and anything can result. My intent is to try to stay more realistic. So I will assume that space navies would still be bound by such tiresome limitations as conservation of momentum, the theory of relativity, and the laws of thermodynamics. I will assume no major changes in our understanding of the universe. That means no "faster than light" drives, no "space warp" or "inertialess" drives, no "subspace" or "hyperspace", and so on. -- Reed |
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"Space Navies" - articles by Stephen den Beste
So if the characteristics of ships and weapons dictate strategy and
tactics used in naval encounters, then what would be the critical characteristics of space warships which would be critical? A space thinker I think highly of once speculated that since space is a medium with no drag or resistance, life-sized but hollow decoys might enter into the picture. -- Regards, Mike Combs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely. Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable - the best site is "somewhere else entirely." Gerard O'Neill - "The High Frontier" |
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"Space Navies" - articles by Stephen den Beste
Reed Snellenberger wrote:
I just ran across this series of articles on his blog, and thought some of you might be interested. Links: http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entrie...ceNavies.shtml and http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entrie...eNavies2.shtml He should stick to politics, the bulk of both pages is aptly described by the site title, 'clueless'. D. -- Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh. |
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"Space Navies" - articles by Stephen den Beste
Assuming we use only known/ understood physics, space navies would be boring
and generally weak things, and no fun to join. Even with efficient reaction drives, their range would be so limited that "manuevers" would look like slow-motion chess matches. And what would be the point, at the kind of accellerations we can visualize achieving , no ships would ever get into shooting range of any worthwhile or understood weapons unless they both conspired to do so. Low-energy transfer orbits or higher-energy intercepts would still take days to months to get anywhere useful, then they'd have to repeat the long trip to ge back, shoudl they survive a battle. And the scales of movement we're talking about mean flight times would take so long the ships would have to be autonomous or remotely-piloted, because live crews would run out of consumables way before the ship could really be effective. Yep, forget live crew, that M-5 computer is the way to go;-) Anything resembling a space fleet, until we make some sort of physics breakthru, will of necessity be strictly an orbital force, most likely a bombardment component (using something like the THOR system) and an intercept/ CAP element to stop the other guys from doing the same thing. None of these need live crews. They'd just be sophistcated satellites. |
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