The need for war ships in our solar system

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vrabinec

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In a semi-near future world in which we inhabit Earth, Mars, and Europa, is it a stretch to have a need for armored spaceships? Just seems like you'd need more planets with different governments who might be at odds with each other before you got to building spaceships for war.
 

Higgins

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In a semi-near future world in which we inhabit Earth, Mars, and Europa, is it a stretch to have a need for armored spaceships? Just seems like you'd need more planets with different governments who might be at odds with each other before you got to building spaceships for war.

You might need powerful ships on call to take care of ships in distress or pirates. I'm not sure armor would help as much as powerful engines.
 

Lhun

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Heh, you answered your own question.
Seriously, there's no way to answer that, it'd depend on politics, and history shows that even few/small countries can find reason to go to war if they want to. The one thing to note though is that armed spaceships are effectively doomsday weapons with the capability to easily wipe out most of the population of a planet. So you'd have a MAD scenario like you had during the cold war, and not open naval warfare like you had during the imperial era on earth.
 

quixote100104

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Heh, you answered your own question.
Seriously, there's no way to answer that, it'd depend on politics, and history shows that even few/small countries can find reason to go to war if they want to. The one thing to note though is that armed spaceships are effectively doomsday weapons with the capability to easily wipe out most of the population of a planet. So you'd have a MAD scenario like you had during the cold war, and not open naval warfare like you had during the imperial era on earth.
Even given that assumption, some ship on ship action would be anticipated, both as a counter-measure aginast 'enemy' ships attacking a country or it's colonies from space and to allo ships to defend themselves from each other.
 

RichardB

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In a semi-near future world in which we inhabit Earth, Mars, and Europa, is it a stretch to have a need for armored spaceships? Just seems like you'd need more planets with different governments who might be at odds with each other before you got to building spaceships for war.

Warships have always existed for one of two reasons: to project power to a land area or to ensure dominance of a sea area. Think about which reason or both gives rise to warships in your story. It's good that you're thinking about this other than just saying "armored spaceships are cool".
 

dgiharris

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There are extremely strong parallels between space colonies, space warfare ,and the space environment in general and Naval Colonies, Naval warfare, and the Naval environment in general.

99 times out of a 100, merely replace boat with space craft, colony with planet, undiscovered planet with undiscovered country.

Study some naval and colonial history, and answers and scenarios should jump out at you.

Mel...
 
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quixote100104

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There are extremely strong parallels between space colonies, space warfare ,and the space environment in general and Naval Colonies, Naval warfare, and the Naval environment in general.

99 times out of a 100, merely replace boat with space craft, colony with planet, undiscovered planet with undiscovered country.

Study some naval and colonial history, and answers and scenarios should jump out at you.

Mel...

Indeed. And as the original Star Trek attempted to address, Napoleonic history can be a better metaphor than modern, depending on the speed of your drives and comms. It's very reasonable to assume that, even in one system, journeys could take months at a time with the ships largely out of contact in any practical sense. Captains under such circumstances would have greater independance and latitude than those with a higher HQ within easy reach.
 

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Indeed. And as the original Star Trek attempted to address, Napoleonic history can be a better metaphor than modern, depending on the speed of your drives and comms. It's very reasonable to assume that, even in one system, journeys could take months at a time with the ships largely out of contact in any practical sense. Captains under such circumstances would have greater independance and latitude than those with a higher HQ within easy reach.

Of course you could fix some of that with a good ship commanding AI technology. And then (according to many SF scenarios), the AI gets ideas of its own and you end up having to go after the AI ships with your ships. Realistically (IMHO), the AI will win just by being willing to fight forever, but they might compromise since presumably their demands are simply for autonomy and cooperation...I mean that's what I'd want if I were an AI spaceship.
 
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SPMiller

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Science fiction writers often fail to understand the cost in energy and resources of getting hardware into space. No sane nation would risk nontrivial spacecraft in combat; they're simply too valuable, and this will likely always be true because the escape velocity of the planets in our solar system isn't going to change.

Even if there were spacecraft designed for combat, they wouldn't be crewed in general: the maintenance of human life in space is outrageously resource-intensive and would place unreasonable limitations on the duration and nature of combat missions. Artificial intelligence would be the likely solution. No life support means smaller ships with less mass which means less fuel consumption which means longer missions which means higher mission success rate, etc..

For the same reason, armor on spacecraft would be irrelevant. If your spacecraft gets hit by any nontrivial weapon, it won't survive, so what's the point? Not only that, but armor of any sort will add mass. Relative velocity is a superior quality (consider a rough analogy, for example, in the history of bombers in World War 2).

Unlike in Earth's atmosphere, friction is not an issue. Momentum, however, is. Should your craft ever wish to change direction, that's going to cost fuel. Depending on how drastic you want the change to be, it may cost a lot of fuel.

Only in the very far future would large quantities of armored, crewed spacecraft even begin to be a remote possibility.
 
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Dommo

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Read the realistic space warfare thread. In a nutshell a few big treatises of space warfare will always be present and need to be acknowledged.

1. Fighters wouldn't exist for several reasons, but which can be noted in the space warfare thread.
2. Anyone who can build a ship can destroy a world because at relativistic velocities a 1000 ton ship would literally liquefy the crust of any world. Thus ships would likely NEVER be owned by individuals, and would likely only be owned by nations, or possibly very large companies.
3. You can't truly hide in space via stealth, the only way to hide is by disguise, or by decoy.
4. There's a large likelihood of people not living on planets if space warfare is common as the presence of relativistic kill vehicles would make any static, or relatively static target extremely vulnerable.
5. Armor is irrelevant.
6. Minimizing heat output is critical, as all sensing done will probably use passive sensors that would detect the heat output of your ship. Minimizing this output may make it possible to get closer to whatever system you're attacking before the enemy can react.
7. Combat actions would take months if not years. Just to get to like half of light speed it would take a few weeks of acceleration at 1 g.
8. Ships would either be automated entirely(AI controlled), or would have very small crews relative to the ship size(e.g. a battleship a mile long having 30 guys on board). This is because mass is everything. The less you dedicate to life support the better, and computers would allow for better performing ships.

Look up the space warfare thread. It's got all sorts of good stuff in there.
 

MelancholyMan

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There's a rumor we're getting close...
There are extremely strong parallels between space colonies, space warfare ,and the space environment in general and Naval Colonies, Naval warfare, and the Naval environment in general.

99 times out of a 100, merely replace boat with space craft, colony with planet, undiscovered planet with undiscovered country.

Study some naval and colonial history, and answers and scenarios should jump out at you.

Mel...

Considering physics as we understand it:

While there may be parallels between earth colonies and space colonies, there are virtually no parallels between naval warfare and space warfare. When operating in a fictionless environment under the force of gravity you must forget everything you know, or think you know, about how bodies interact. Space warfare would be slow, boring, and very deadly. After the first engagment any sane power would eliminate people from the ships since all it takes is a pin-hole leak to kill the entire crew. All the fighting would be done remotely and with autonomous or semi-autonomous robots.

But an even more salient point is, why would anyone even choose to fight in space? The idea of a blockade is nonsense. Space is just too large and gravity is going to constantly be shifting the position of the blockade. The only thing that makes sense is interdiction and due to limitations in energy and acceleration, would be impossible unless the mission were known about and planned months, if not years in advance.

Like today, wars among space colonies would be fought over resources, whether oil, spice, wood, gold, uranium, or whatever. I makes much more sense, and is many orders of magnitude cheaper, to do the bulk of the fighting on planets.

Which is why I like Sci-Fi. We're not bound by the limitations of known physics. We can introduce whatever we want and then see where that takes us.
 

Dommo

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The thing is melancholy, is that if I knew a planet had just mineral resources I wanted(e.g. it's mostly an inhospitable rock), I'd just send a half dozen small RKV's and literally destroy everything on the planet. Then I'd just drop my mining operation in after the fact.

There would be no reason to fight planet side, when I can literally annihilate worlds at the flick of a switch. Unless the planet is valuable for some other reason, or I actually want the planet in a relatively "pristine" state, I'm just going lay waste to it. It's cheaper and more economical.
 

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In a semi-near future world in which we inhabit Earth, Mars, and Europa, is it a stretch to have a need for armored spaceships? Just seems like you'd need more planets with different governments who might be at odds with each other before you got to building spaceships for war.

All depends on how your story colonizes space. Are we all one big happy family? Are the planets at odds? Are the countries/alliances on Earth at odds? Are there rebellions or pirates? Is there an alien threat, or a space race for outer moons and planetoids?

Even if we're at peace, the fact is, once and a while there might be an out of control transport ship or cargo freighter that needs to be blown up or captured in space before it hits a mining base, or the planet's atmosphere. I mean, if let's say you have nuclear powered system ships, then you want SOMEBODY catching it before it blows up in the atmosphere of a planet.
 
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