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[EnigmaticHat]

Just a thought, but couldn't you eliminate recoil in space by detaching your ship from the weapon directly before firing?

Aka: aim your disposable gun at the enemy, detach it, then fire.  You can make the most stupidly powerful ballistic weapon imaginable and not worry about it pushing or turning your ship (planet?), as firing would just throw your disposable gun away from you really fast.  There's the problem of losing your gun out in space every time you fire, but you could either design it to be retrieved or keep spare guns.

[Helgoland]

If you retrieve it you're once again stuck with its momentum.

[misko27]

If you retrieve it you're once again stuck with its momentum.

But not in a battle situation. Although it would probably still be better to just make new ones, unless you were really short on materials.

[Azated]

If you retrieve it you're once again stuck with its momentum.

But not in a battle situation. Although it would probably still be better to just make new ones, unless you were really short on materials.

You could always equip it with a small engine and a home-seeking setup. Once it fires, it's lost a significant portion of its weight so the engine would actually work. It'll slowly float its way back to the ship for rearming in the next engagement.

[Flare]

Active (that is sending something out) sensors don't stand a chance at spotting something coming at them at a significant portion of light speed - there's basically no time left after the sensor is done detecting, because while the radar is travelling back, so is the blob.

We're obviously operating with a different sense of scale here. The projectile travelling at 0.75c is still not 1c. If we have a sensor net a light month away, and additional sensor spheres inside of this one light-month, detection and the planning of counter measures would have enough time to take place.

And tungsten is only because it was mentioned before - something less dense would of course be harder to spot via radar, but necessarily need to be larger to carry the same amount of energy at a given speed.
What's that about antimatter? Aren't you confusing some stuff there?

Something less dense would also make it incredibly HUGE when it weighs 100 tons compared to something like lead or zirconium. Radar close-in would only fail because it has to bounce back after the waves hit the projectile meaning at best. Without factoring in the time it take to compute, the detection speed moves at roughly half the speed of light, but it's message once sent will move faster than the projectile itself. Detection in space is incredibly easy. We can spot stars hundreds of light years away, their planets and moons, and give a picture of what's inside of the galactic core from this end of the galaxy.

As for the anti-matter, it's a measurement of how much energy is produced when the object hits something that stops it. One gram of anti-matter annihilating itself is the equivalent of around 3 Hiroshima bombs. When something goes above 0.75c, the weight of the hull hitting the atmosphere, or anything that stops it hard, is going to produce a significant portion of its own weight converted into anti-matter. It is at ~86% the speed of light that the mass of the projectile at rest might as well all be anti-matter. It doesn't really matter what you make this material out of, it just needs to be nominally solid. Heck, a sizeable glob of playdough travelling at 0.75c and hitting earth would be catastrophic. Even a one hundred ton Styrofoam block will create a more or less indistinguishable explosion going that those speeds give or take a few hydrogens bombs here and there.

[Seamas]

Do you think belligerents would bother to clean up the sea of pointy space junk left over after a massive battle?   Only if the scrap value was high enough, I should think, but there's no guarantee that it would be.  And then wouldn't it become a collision liability for FTL ships or just plain high-speed space travel through those aging battlefields?

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, I was the original one to say tungsten, and I did it just because it's cool.  Most or all of the slug's mass is going to annihilate within a hundredth of a second of hitting the atmosphere, which will probably blow it right the fuck off the planet, and it doesn't matter what it's made of.

It's just styrofoam isn't very cool.

Can the gun not be terrestrial?  You might be talking earthquakes and shit from the recoil, maybe even disrupting the orbit if it's small enough, but judging by our solar system uninhabited planets with no atmosphere aren't exactly a commodity.

[Flare]

It's just styrofoam isn't very cool.

Wiping out a metropolis because someone threw out a Styrofoam coffee cup during high-speed running-battle can be quite humorous.

Can the gun not be terrestrial?  You might be talking earthquakes and shit from the recoil, maybe even disrupting the orbit if it's small enough, but judging by our solar system uninhabited planets with no atmosphere aren't exactly a commodity.

Well, when we're talking about massive construction, I think a viable alternative to the giant ass railgun would be a sabot-type energy or projectile missile powered by it's own explosion. For the projectile thing, I guess it would be like an Orion star ship depending on the number of charges it has.

Edit: I actually have a better idea. Instead of using charges, why not just install single use railguns on giant asteroids? The weight of the rock, the railgun, and likely dead weight to stabilize the thing ought to give it enough omph when the projectile is activated. Since it's a single use weapon, there would be no need to have any weight dedicated to keeping the thing in one piece for a second shot. The power that you can shove into the projectile would likely be astronomically higher than something that's designed to shoot multiple rounds, allowing the mechanics of the machine much more leeway in transmitting that power to the projectile itself. A asteroid, missile, or even something thrown at the enemy as cruising speed of the vessel can be powered by an explosion that power a one use generator that powers the one use rails. Not only would it give the projectile a lot of kick, it would also look spectacular.

[Eagleon]

Don't overestimate the power of radar. If we could detect a stealth bomber from across the planet, that's still only about 12k kilometers. Similar shielding is mostly a matter of geometry. If you can make a weapon that can launch that much mass at that speed, you can manage some carbon fiber composite to cover it, and that's not even counting on more advanced metamaterials which could make it literally invisible.

Mars is more like 71,950k kilometers away, at absolute minimum, or four light minutes. A relativistic weapon would have to be launched from much further. The asteroid belt would be a good platform for an explosive-launched projectile, and that's eight light minutes away (again, at minimum), 20 AU (a butt-load of kilometers) in circumference. It would provide lots of interferences to mess with the data further. Pluto is 5.5 light hours, I think it was. That's less than five and a half hours to scramble something to intersect something that could be coming from any direction, since once you're working with relativistic weapons at that distance, pushing a kuiper belt object closer would be trivial, and that's if you're not launching from further. At that circumference you're looking at 245 AU of coverage. If you want that five and a half hour coverage from any direction (a defense against other systems), you'd need to cover 427 square AUs with sensors if my math is right, and from larger distances, faster projectiles get a lot easier to launch, so you'd have less warning on a faster moving object. Something like this would probably eclipse a Dyson sphere in difficulty in maintenance and power support alone, since you'd probably have to set off a couple of nukes for each radar pulse to have any chance of detecting a shielded weapon.

For that matter, telescopes aren't much better equipped. You have exposure times limiting the distance at which they're useful, which isn't something you can really hand-wave away except with very, very large telescopes. Maybe possible with lighter-weight nanomaterials as collectors, I admit, but it's still going to be huge. You need to aim the telescopes at each useful arc-n of space (second, millisecond, whatever depending on aperture size) You probably want to make three big spherical ones, because every celestial body is going to provide an ever-expanding conical blindspot otherwise, particularly the sun. You need at least two looking at the same object at pretty good distances apart to reliably determine speed. Then you need to process an unimaginable amount of data compared to what we can do now, filter out artifacts, decide on the distance of any object apparently fast enough to pose a threat (we can't ignore so much as a speck of dust floating past one of the telescopes nearby), and finally filter out all of the false positives by doing it again a couple of times just to be sure it wasn't a prank. Add to it that visible stealth (which isn't terribly difficult, we have a pigment now that absorbs 99.9 percent visible light), and it gets even harder. It's not as hopeless for this, maybe, because we don't really know what sort of computers we'll have available at this point, but you still have the same problem of scrambling something fast enough once you do see a projectile coming.
 
TLDR: Space is beeg, and if anyone gets relativistic weapons, we're probably toast.

[Scoops Novel]

Hence, if we ever get relativistic, we'd better go the whole way. How would you handle it? Do your utmost to lock it down while sending as many colony ships out as possible? On that note, what will we have by the point we get ftl in our system? Would terraforing be an easier affair?

[DJ]

I'm in the space marine camp. Except I don't think they'd be boarding it, but rather attaching themselves to the outside of the hull and going crazy with blowtorches. It basically guarantees that the most critical systems will be destroyed and can thus be a lot more damaging than projectiles or beams. And sure, drones could also do the job, but humans will likely be cheaper.

[Flare]

Hence, if we ever get relativistic, we'd better go the whole way. How would you handle it? Do your utmost to lock it down while sending as many colony ships out as possible? On that note, what will we have by the point we get ftl in our system? Would terraforing be an easier affair?

I'd personally try to not make as much noise as possible and hope other powers in the universe overlook this area.

In the time we create ftl, we might have already gone full on with cybernetics already. I don't think Ghost in the Shell really understood just how big of a jump unlocking the hardware of the mind was. When we are able to add physical parts to our existing brain, we would no longer be bound the physical since we could always just keep adding onto.
I guess it's like one of those laws, like "the copies that make better copies of themselves will be the ones making more copies" of biology. In this case I guess the law would be "those that can alter their minds better will be in the best position to alter their minds even further". If we are like desktops, then we would have been installing cutting edge technology/(our tools) in conjunction with our 50,000 year old motherboard/brain. I guess we'd turn into more accurate Von Neumon machines at that point, one of our main purposes then becoming how many computers can I incorporate to my mind with the power of all the other computers I've already incorporated into it. It's very easy to see how this would become and exponential process, and if we see this through an optimistic lens, it might not have a any foreseeable limit precisely because it would be our ingenuity and technical savvy that's also being exponentially increased.

[Helgoland]

And sure, drones could also do the job, but humans will likely be cheaper.

The humans themselves? Sure, but even today the main reason for drones is PR - dead soldiers only look good if they're from the other side. Plus in space you're looking at keeping these humans alive, in contrast to just powering up a drone once you're close enough to your target.

Idea for overcoming detection systems: How about blinding them? Fire the styrofoam cup and send along a thunderstorm of radiation of all imaginable frequencies, making detection of the cup about as easy as spotting a firefly flying in front of the headlights of a truck twenty miles away.

[Flare]

Idea for overcoming detection systems: How about blinding them? Fire the styrofoam cup and send along a thunderstorm of radiation of all imaginable frequencies, making detection of the cup about as easy as spotting a firefly flying in front of the headlights of a truck twenty miles away.

The main problem with this is that radiation dissipates quite quickly, inverse square law IIRC, or something like that. Generally not very applicable when you're emitting it at a point beyond solar system range. Heck if we can produce radiation powerful enough to scramble the sensors in another system lightyears away, why are we bothering with the coffee cup anyway?

[ashton1993]

Funnily enough I've been writing an essay on this subject for Cracked: the best analogy I could conceive was that combat in space will be much like a series of drive-by shootings with jet-powered, 18-wheeled, trucks on ice.