More or less, with the kind of weapons that can reach a spacecraft from an appreciable distance, stealth is going to be everything. The moment you're hit, you can write off whatever got hit barring a miracle, not the least because that compromises your stealth enough to know exactly where you're going to be for a follow-up attack. Large ships are sitting ducks - sure, you might last a while defending yourself against missiles, but if you can see it from a planet, you can use all of that planet's resources to overwhelm and destroy it.
A big thing that article misses is that removing heat is very difficult in space. The best you can do outside of waiting for black-body radiation to do the job (while you slowly roast) is eject some concentrated heat, in water, maybe, or ideally some metal. Either way, that's a hell of a lot of extra mass to carry around and shield from radar. Combat ships are not going to have this capability, because manueverability is a much better tactical option. Heat weapons (particle guns, probably, and on the off chance they can get to close enough range, focusable radar) are going to be quite attractive for this reason.
Now you have lots of small, stealthy ships cooking each other in very quiet battles. They're going to have the best radar systems and computers we can put on them. They're not going to be manned by humans, because that adds lots of extra weight for life support, living space, and sanity-guards. It would also be horribly cruel - no one wants to die being broiled alive. The exception might be very expensive but vital stealth-outposts that provide a safeguard against the fleet being compromised by hacking or the like.
What are they actually for, though? Let's go with classic rebel uprising on mars. We're discounting nanophages and relativistic weapons, because at that point anyone can destroy anyone else without absurd defensive capability. We could put extra weapons on the ships for a ground strike, but that would decrease their combat readiness against other vessels. And since the planetary defenses -are- the other vessels, we don't really need to anyway. A second wave of stealth-warheads or weapons platforms would probably be sent instead, after that side has become the clear victor and a path has been cleared. It would be trivial to disable a lot of the SAM-style defenses we have now from orbit, or for that matter the laser-defense systems that are likely to be commonplace in this example. That's a huge reason why space-based weapons were banned.
Against a well-equipped counter-defense platform (which would include powerful lasers, possibly electronic warfare drones, and a laser communications system back to whoever is guiding the thing), ground based defenses don't stand a chance. These would be saved until after they've been disabled (theoretically) by orbital or moon-based defenses. They'd be highly shielded and top-secret locations. A few would contain swarms of tagging drones, too small to be realistically detected (or to contain appreciable weaponry), but with a small amount of internal guidance to get a ping off of a CD platform's hull. Other defense systems would then take pot-shots aiming at its predicted location from as safe a distance as possible. Ideally this would happen fast enough to be effective. Either way, the ground-based defenses would activate once the bombs started falling, and whatever CD platforms remain would do their best to help them along.
That's my theories anyway.
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Topic: How would space combat really work? (Read 7622 times)