Space combat is not limited to long range battles, before humans can be so advance as to battle at those distance, you have much more chance of fighting within the Earth's Sphere, and certainly a lot more chance when there's tons of colonies up there. Also, going from between asteroids in the asteroid belt is not going to take months or days.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Our current understanding of physics does not allow for spacecraft at reasonable power levels to stay hidden in space for tactically or strategically useful lengths of time. As soon as a ship is spotted via infrared scan, you can point telescopes at it and actually see it. Then it doesn't matter what sort of shenanigans it tries to pull with heatsinks and the like -- you already know where it is anyway. Given how long travel times are in space (it takes a couple days just to cross the Earth Sphere -- getting between planets takes months even under ideal conditions), you're not going to be able to "hide" long enough for it to matter.
While the fact that a stealth"ier" machine is still going to be advantageous in combat.
Don't forget the simple reasoning that the solar system has a lot of things that gets pretty hot when they are under the sun, so infra red imaging is not going to be as useful as you think.
You can try to create a map of all the objects, but the sheer quantity of those things and the inherently unstable orbits of a lot of them is going to be the computation of orbit like hell.
Trying to spot anything not moving naturaly is much less likely to work when you have tons of civilian ships as well. We already have tons of radars scanning our sky, and a non-stealth passenger plane can disappear with little trace, think again for your hope of humanity's ability to create a perfect scan system.
Spotting a new dot is easy under infrared, but at the same time, you will get tons of new dots if you try to scan the whole solar system, or even just the near Earth objects.
The Chelyabinsk meteor is a typical "in your face" example for people thinking there's no stealth in space.
BTW pointing your telescope to the general direction where you see an infrared signal is not going to help much if your target is a 20m tall mech, seriously, most astronomy enthusiast can tell you this much. All those super large telescopes we have on Earth now can't even see the landing ship base of the Apollo missions on the moon, all of our Earth orbiting telecopes including the Hubble cannot see those as well. And having something that big on your battleship is not really going to help much if the enemy is pointing a large laser to your general direction.(where it focuses and burns your CCD in due time)
The whole "no stealth" theory is build on the following assumptions, which are pretty poorly defined:
1) the solar system can be mapped and easily loaded from a database for comparison, and there will not be tons of ships flying around at the time, which is pretty improbable.
2) all systems are ideal designs of their best possible function, not their practicability. Like a carnot cycle model used on an external combustion engine in a hurricane.
3) you won't get shot at while you are scanning for the enemies, so you have all the time on your side, unlikely.
4) all signals can and will be picked up by all parts of your ship, and there's no blind spots. Nope, you don't get armour and sensors on the same spot, or your sensors gets damage real easily be debris.
5) there's no need to use lens on your telescope, or that your ship can be of humungous size that ultra behemoth telescopes takes almost no impact in combat strength, highly unlikely.
6) enemy will not even try to be stealthy in all aspects, and they are simply just going to give you straight signals telling you how massive, how powerful, how large they are, and they won't fake heat signals at all.
7) the propulsion heat signals they have recorded for say, 60 years, is a good indication of military designs of a complete different tech level that can emphasize stealth instead of efficiency. Which is actually not preferred in the last 60 years of rocket development because the rockets can only bearly bring human to space, not for combat, and do not need to be stealthy at all, but hey, this must be what they will be designing 600 years from now as well, yeah, heat signals are going to give us all the info and there's no way one can fool us, right?
Simply put, its the ideal situation for the sensors, and not a practical situation at all.
The first shot will be what's important.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:A disguised warship is not the same thing as a stealth craft. It might have the same effect in that it allows you to "hide" to a certain extent, but it's not going to fool anyone if a random civilian vessel starts acting like a warship. A warship that's disguised is good for ambushing a target and getting off a free shot; a warship that's stealth is a significant and continuous tactical and strategic advantage.
That's not to mention that disguising your warships as civilian vessels is likely to have serious political consequences that a stealth warship doesn't need to worry about. There's a reason why international law requires all lawful combatants to be readily identifiable as such from a distance. Once you start mixing fighters in with civilians, things get ugly fast.
Especially you will be facing not one, but a lot of targets that you have no idea if they are friend or foe.
And having an array of mechs that your telescope can't really see at about 1 lightsecond away all pointing their lasers to you while you are still pondering the 10 lightsecond away mothership is a civilian ship or not is not going to help either.
And four hours is plenty of time to destroy you have a powerful enough laser shot out a few light seconds away, before you enough know you engaged in combat.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Four hours is plenty of time when it takes days to get anywhere. The sort of search you're describing isn't meant for combat operations, it's meant to identify ships before anyone starts shooting. Once you've positively identified a potential hostile, you point a telescope at it and follow it that way. It's not like you only get a position update on a target once every four hours. Also worth pointing out is that that's searching for a passive vessel -- one that's just sitting in orbit or coasting to a destination. Once they actually do anything (like accelerate or fire a weapon), they immediately become much easier to see.
Laser warfare is like this, when you see it, its too late.
If you can't identify your enemy fast enough, you don't go into evasive action quick enough, and your armour is not going to withstand the laser from a ship with that kind of travelling ability, which means it got immense power.
Good enough if you can't see them with a 10m diameter telescope.(which the whole thing with the aiming mechanism is likely 20m in diameter ball, and it is not going to cover all sides of your ship, you need at least 2 on a small ship)Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:When I'm talking about one-man space fighters, I'm talking about spacecraft that act like modern-day fighters -- they launch only for combat and return to a base or aircraft carrier otherwise. Large numbers of cheap warships with small (possibly even one-man, but that's unlikely -- guy's gotta sleep sometime) crews are entirely viable in space -- as long as they're capable of deploying on extended missions, rather than having the extremely limited endurance of atmospheric fighter craft. The problem isn't with "warships that are small", the problem is with "strike craft that launch, fight, and immediately return to base".
As far as stealth, well... I suppose you're technically correct in that smaller ships are, in theory, more stealthy than larger ships... but being twice as stealthy as not-at-all-stealthy is still being not-at-all-stealthy.
Good luck in your mass efficiency.
Use Carbon nano-tube capacitors, dump waste heat by shooting it away so you can only see strange heating patterns that are hard to trace to my ship.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Photon drives are ludicrously power-intensive. Even if you're concealing your drive trail, how are you going to keep your power plant from giving you away? (For reference, a perfectly-efficient photon drive would require three hundred megawatts of power for one Newton of thrust. Even if you could build one big enough to provide viable performance on a warship, your power plant would be making you glow brightly enough to be seen from the next solar system over.
Strange is bad, but here I am using it to refer to faking a pattern that does not look like a spaceship of that mass.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Strange is bad. Strange makes military sensor techs say "hey, what the hell is that? Let me take a closer look..." at which point you're caught. Making your heat signature look odd isn't going to help you avoid attention -- quite the opposite, in fact.
That is the problem of this assumption.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:If you've got a crew compartment on that thing, you've still got a temperature several hundred degrees higher than the cosmic background, just to keep your crew from freezing to death. It's easy to see spaceships even when they're not accelerating -- exotic "stealth drives" aren't going to fix that.
The logical fallacy on this "no stealth" chain of thought is that it ignores the actual heat signal given out by a crew.
A single human heat flux is about 100W(and surface area of human is about 1~2m^2, so 50~100W/m^2), you don't really need much more than that to keep a human warm. With a heat shield and evenly distribute the heat on the surface of a humanoid mech that is about 10 times in height, thus 100 times in surface area, you get about 0.5~1W/m^2, which, on Earth's orbit, the Sun is giving every single object a whooping 1400W/m^2.
And remember, you have civilian ships here and there, likely in hundreds if not thousands.(the further distance out your develop, the more resources you can get and the more civilian ships there will be).
With much more debris around reflecting a lot of randomly attributed heat sources.
I seriously don't think the human heat source is going to be a problem compared to the Sun.
And hidding inside a fake asteroid skin is all I need for cover-up from the Sun.
That is why you need fighter class, not huge battleships, for stealth.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:If the stealthier ship is still incredibly easy to see with minimal effort, then no, that doesn't hold true. As an analogy, imagine that I'm standing in the middle of an empty, brightly lit room. Really easy to spot, right? Now imagine that I'm curled in a ball on the floor, occupying the smallest possible space. I've significantly reduced my visual signature! I must be pretty hard to spot now, right? Except that no, I'm still really easy to spot, because there's no way to hide in an empty, brightly-lit room. That's what space is like.
You need really large telescopes to see them even if you can catch a heat signal, and they can be pretty hard to distinguish from civilian ships, debris and meterorites if you don't have a pretty humonguous telescope system that is already comparable in size with the fighters, just to see the general shape of it.
Try to calculate the static electricity build up of the system, then a 100 man(or robots that are moving around) of about 75kg@ on average, and see how much motion a 75000ton ship will get, while moving your turrets along in a really really small angle.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:This is patently nonsense. It's fairly simple to isolate a turret and stabilize its aim without physically separating it from the rest of the ship.
And get that angle, calculate the flucturation at 1,000km, 10,000km, 100,000km and 300,000km.
The ship's computer is not going to be able to predict all the movements since they are random and not precise in nature. So it cannot do an autocorrection.
And your ship would have to be doing evasive motion(or I can target and shoot you from much further away without predicting your path), so you can't really really have it isolated without being a sitting duck.
They also cannot be reused, and the efficiency here I'am talking about is the mass ratio of the payload.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:That's true of everything in space. Missiles are more efficient than the alternative, though, since a) they don't have to worry about returning to base after they fight, like a space fighter would, and b) they don't have squishy people that can't handle hard acceleration riding inside. That means they have better performance than any manned craft, which is why they're preferable.
If you use missiles, you need it to be either really fast and rams into your target(or at least get close enough to do whatever damage its warhead can perform) or you need it to be able to do evasive actions, both needing large amounts of propellant, unless you go the extra mile to get an AMBAC missile system.
That is untrue, Infrared countermeasure is not only cheap but already in use nowadays.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Decoys only work in settings like Gundam that have a "sensors don't work very well" handwave. Any decoy good enough to fool an enemy target would basically be just as expensive as a real ship anyway, which defeats the purpose of a decoy as a cheap sacrificial lamb.
There's also actual technology being developed to use lasers to fake a heat signal pattern to an infrared sensor.
Check DIRCM.
Of course this is given to enhance an infrared signal, and all you need is a system like DIRCM on your decoys, and they will be relatively cheap.
BTW, getting enough mass and a similar thrust propulsion system on a decoy usually is not going to be expensive either.
Mass is usually not really a problem in space if you just want to find it, and launching mass out to a selected orbit is also quite simple. Since they just need to arrive on the same time, you can have them launch in much higher acceleration systems like a rail gun, and only use a limited propellant tank with a cheap propulsion alternative to make it give out a similar infrared signal, the same speed and similar profile.
A mothership with 80 small crafts can do different strength missions at different times.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:See what I said earlier about "small warships" (reasonable) vs "space fighters" (not reasonable). You can be a full-sized warship without being a giant behemoth battleship.
You can have 10 8-unit teams at 10 locations, or 8 10-unit teams at 8 locations, or 2 40-units teams at 2 locations.
5 warships can get to 5 locations, max.
Using a WWII warship tonnage as a sample, if my fleet is around 100kton total.
I can have 80 100ton mechs, and my carrier is 60kton with supplies, with 4 8kton destroyers as escorts.(BTW, since I don't really need a long runway, my carrier can be 10 smaller supply ships as well)
Or you can have a 2 battleship fleet each weighting 50kton, or maybe 10 10kton destroyers.
But obviously you don't have stealth, is less flexible, not very likely survivable since your mobility will be lower than mechs, yet there's not really a limiting factor in getting the mechs to have less attack range(sensors on the mechs are smaller, but your ships are bigger)
In fact, the "supplies ships"/"carrier" can be just living quaters and supply/repair systems that give out really little signal by themselves. (If tech level is advanced enough, the supplies/repair system can be mostly automated and minimize human factor, thus much more stealthy)
Strap on your bed to a mech(or mechs so pilots can live together on the journey), get to the battlefield, dump the living quaters, fight, retrieve quaters and return.
If you lose, those will be pretty useless anyway.
If you win, you have all your time to retrieve them.
If you need to retreat, scattering is much easier than running away as a single ship, just make sure you dumped the living quaters far enough away so you still have time to retrieve it.
The problem of the missile is listed up there.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:(For those not reading the link, "point A1" is that small, cheap space fighters will be able to carry weapons capable of destroying large, expensive warships.) The counterpoint to that is simple: send a missile instead. Missiles have better performance in basically every way -- they don't have to reserve fuel for a return trip, they don't have to worry about injuring or killing a pilot into goo when they accelerate at 50 g, and computer reaction times are simply better than human ones. The only things humans are better at is making judgment calls over things like whether or not to fire in the first place -- which the missile tech back on your warship with his finger on the "fire" button is just as capable of doing as any pilot in a space fighter.
Missiles are good in the atmosphere, but are pretty bad in space.
Missiles are not going to perform much better if you don't have a similar cost strapped to it.
Since all your propulsion systems, computers are pretty much the same as your small crafts in space.
This is unlike the decoy, where they are designed to be shot at, the missiles are supposed to hit their target, meaning they need to avoid being shot at.
Yes, it maybe able to do 50g, but your mass ratio is going to be extremely poor.
And if you are talking about space combat, remote control missiles are not going to give you good results when your enemy can decide to shoot you at 1 lightsecond, while your missile tech with his finger on the fire button will not be able to know this until a second later, while the signal s/he send out will not reach the missile until another second later. Your 2 second delay is not a good start in combat, and will only get worse the further it goes.
Nope, you missiles are simply going to have real trouble finding out a small target if not even your mothership can do so. And the mechs can decide to shoot at the missile when it gets closer and is noticeable, while your missile has to wait for a delayed signal from your mothership to shoot.Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:You're contradicting yourself here. Either there aren't any defenses against lasers (in which case, I can laser you quite handily from my warship instead of having to send a fighter out to do it), or deployable ice clouds can block long-range lasers (in which case my missile with a laser warhead can get around them faster and cheaper than your fighters can anyway).
If its a full AMBAC drone, its not going to do much better without a pilot. The computers are not really likely to be able to take higher-gs than humans if you need them to be really advanced, think of a laptop that accidentally fell on the ground from 1~2m high, you can pretty much say goodbye to it, but a human falling from the same height is not going to receive much damage. You can build tons of buffer to lessen the g to the laptop, but a military grade laptop with a pentium class processor that can withstand 1m fall is like a brick and much bigger, and those buffers cannot withstand a continuous g-force.
Even if they can be on much higher gs, the inherent problem is still about the mass-ratio problem.
And if you don't think of the return trip and just accelerated to a high speed so you don't get hit, you either ram into the enemy or you zip right pass giving you a really short window of attack.
And your economic efficiency will be extremely low, because your strategy rely on dumping tons of battle ready drones as missiles.
Oh, and it will be pretty obvious which one is the human pilot if you have the remote controller sit in one of your missiles, that particular one will send out much more signals, and the movement will be really different unless you give up the spec of the robotic ones.