Interesting article and he knows his stuff. I just object to the use of science fiction to describe the media referenced. There is little science involved in any of these space battles so the shows are just fantasy. True science fiction does not even need to be futuristic, just deal with real, or projected scientific subjects or discovery.

At the range of directed energy weapons, such weapons cannot miss, basically. A small craft can't get into range. Nothing can hide, either. All power is radiated to space.

I think space battles in general would be a lot different then what games and such imagine them to be, probably more about predicting a targets orbital trajectory and throwing ordinance out into an intersecting orbital path that coincides with that target. Probably be quite boring actually.

It was called The Warriors.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...intiLesson.jpg

If you have never watched Space: Above and Beyond you should check it out. ;)

If that's the one in which the Kzin are a attacking an "unarmed" ship and only a human would think of turning his drive into a weapon, then it's not the one I was thinking of. The story I'm remembering happened as I described. No reaction drive, no real maneuverability. Just a big piece of metal dropped behind, and a flash of light months later. Very tame, very believable.

[edit] It might have been 'The Ethics of Madness', but if so my memory in this case is quiet faulty.

Chiggy Von Richtofen!


Ugh, the Kzinti...are they Pact or Fleet now? :hmmm:

Actually the Bussard Ramjet you described is a form of reaction drive.

Never read 'The Ethics of Madness', but the incident you described sounded a lot like 'The Warriors'. Probably just Niven copying himself.

Protector was the Niven novel.

Sorry.
I'll only put these silly posts in unimportant topics, like the American Election, health care, overpopulation, not topics that everyone's talking about: What will the military hardware be 300 years from now when I'm dead?

The Ethics of Madness does have a ramscoop chase but it ends with both ships colliding at the end (the pursuer has his life support system fried and sets to autopilot to collide with his opponent's ship). It is probably Protector that Steve is thinking about...

Does an incident like that happen in Protector? It's only been thirty years since I read them. I probably still have them all in my collection, but I still have a bunch of boxes to unpack, and I've run out of shelf space.

Again a platform for launching fighter planes is just one single role for a carrier, but there are others. The primary one is as a mobile base from which to mount expeditions or provide support to new or existing colonies. A role that I think would serve well in space given the distances involved.

That makes sense. Also, in space, Aircraft carriers might be able to play an effective anti-ship role?

Also, we would need small, heavily armed stealth ships for attacking commerce!

Personally I think the role of aircraft carrier would be rolled (pardon the pun) into the role of battleship, cruiser and destroyer. Since manoeuvrability is taken out of the equation then you'd want something that is capable of doing everything needed for a long cruise. Putting down 'Marines' on a hostile planet, check, protecting cargo vessels, check, providing a gunboat for diplomacy, check, humanitarian crisis, check.
Furthermore, since communications will be sporadic, these vessels will become their own nations in a sea of isolation, the captain/admiral/commodore/Legate will make decisions that will affect the homeworld without being able to check with them first. Perhaps that will require a group of diplomats or representatives of the homeworld to be on board? Likewise you'll need scientists and medical staff. So it's going to be a big ship, but if you're not needing to do the Kessel run then why worry about the size? Heck, you could go really crazy and just use a planet or a Dyson sphere.

Far more problematic than you might imagine...

In other words:
http://imageshack.us/a/img405/8233/u...dthesearet.jpg

A carrier for craft that can enter an atmosphere makes sense, but they would not be needed as combat craft. FO selects target, weapon is deorbited to precise coords. Boom.

Fighters in space are silly, sadly. Fun, but silly.

I'll bet he's thinking more like:
http://www.fanboy.com/archive-images...ear1_Title.jpg

I'm a bit fuzzy on Protector, since it's been quite a while since I read it (though not thirty years, obviously), but IIRC it had a battle between the protagonists and pursuing Pak ships which includes the use of tactics similar to what you mention.

Aircraft carriers in space would be about as good as cargo freighters, unless they're the sort that can conduct trans-Atmospheric operations like the AeroSpace Fighters in BattleTech. As for 'stealth ships', those seem to be out of the realm of realistic physics at this point.

I'm not quite so sure, we already have radar reduction materials, sound isn't going to be a problem, and heat dampeners would be simple enough to fit, and to escape visual detection, well you could probably just paint the thing black, or use refraction to bend light around the ship.
The primary problem comes with the reduction of the radar reductive material through collisions with micro-meteors and other small debris which nullifies its usefulness, but if a way is found around that then certainly stealth space vessels are a practical possibility, of course they would be primarily ambush vessels since their drive systems would be detectable in use, a bit like the 'tail-pipe' of Changs Bird of Prey. I think that any stealth technology though would find a better use in mines, depending on the level of defence that ships of the future have against micro-meteors and space debris it wouldn't even need to contain explosives, just enough mass to cause damage when the fast moving vessel collides with it.

Of course there is the possibility of sensor systems which are under development at the moment making things like radar obsolete, but whenever a detection system is developed, it is likely that a counter to it will be under development, from Window to ECM to Stealth.

Oberon you should read the link I posted in my last post:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_htm...ealth_In_Space