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[beorn080]

Another factor of boarding could be rather simple really: PoWs, supplies such as ammunition, weapons, food, bedding, fuel. The intelligence that could be gotten out of torture could be quite valuable as well. You could also perhaps use the ship if it were still marginally functional as a trojan horse. Picture sending a small team on a suicide mission, piloting into the enemy shipyard with the emergency beacons going, and plowing ahead hailing to get repairs..only to keep on going and take out a major facility with a head on collision (possibly escaping in pods, but where's the glory in that). Remember Star Wars, where they stole an imperial shuttle in order to get down to the surface of Endor's moon as well. There are many uses.

Do real ships actaully have self-destruct mechanisms? Has there ever been an instance in human history where this has happened?

Ah yes, the fire ship maneuver. Capture some enemy ships, lock their courses into an enemy harbor, leave a couple of guys on to steer till the last minute, set the thing on fire, and watch enemy fleets burn. This was during the days of wooden ships mind you.

[ductape]

assuming that it is cheaper to simply build a new ship from resources than to board and reuse an enemy ship is based on the assumption that resources and energy are cheap and freely available. This may have been true in 1940, this is not at all true in 2009.

Cheap energy is a thing of the past, we are simply running on fumes right now. We have already mined most of the easy to get at minerals. Most iron and steel today is made from recycled materials. Peak oil, blah blah blah is a main factor also.

Finite resources is always a reality no matter what situation you are in. Whether the crunch is realized or not is a matter of relative perspective. Fact is human life is very short, and so is our sight. If you lived 10,000 years, it would look very different...

only 2% of the worlds desert is natural, the rest was created by humanity. The entire middle east was a forest which was burned during the bronze age in the smelters. That wasn't too long ago, cheap energy goes fast.

All the same is true on a galactic level, it's not how much there is but how much there is available right now.

[SHAD0Wdump]

Space=More planets to tap from

Also by then we could* find other methods of energy production,even free energy might be discovered for all we'd know.


*Stressed as I'm not saying it will happen,I don't know the future more than you do.

[Drakale]

Can't believe I majored in physics to discuss this shit in forums. xD

I dont get it, are we too stupid for you? Sorry if i misread that but it sound a little offensive. I happen to enjoy those kind of dicussions.

Besides, even the minimal difference in speed is enough to cause it. Newton still remains a nice approximation and voids any need for any fancier computation, but ships will be zooming around at much faster speeds, specially during approach, which is when they are faster and further away from each other, which yeah, just goes to say they wont be fighting from a long distance.

I respectfully disagree, with a known speed and orientation any time dilatation effect can easily be computed by current physics, as you should know. Once you know the target velocity and direction there is no unknown except what correction the pilot can do to his trajectory in the time from the itinial measurement to the weapon impact. I do not understand why relativistic effects would make targetting impossible at large(say 10 000+ km) distances. If there is a weapon that is still effective at those distance,  I am unsure about that.

[Eagleon]

Imagine a real world carrier, packed with tactical nuclear missiles and planes, plus a small screen of destroyers. There's just no viable way of boarding it. And there is hardly any reason to - important documents can be destroyed by the crew(in the disabled/damaged ship being boarded scenario), and usually the commander can scuttle his ship anyway.

I have two words for this argument: Nerve gas. It ain't pretty, but generally the kind of person that wants to get ahold of the enemy's tactical nukes doesn't really care about war crime charges. You could send in a high-altitude bomber and drop canisters that would detonate just above the ships. Dead in the water, or at least massively crippled.

The same could be done in space. Launch a large volley of radar-shielded missiles designed to pierce into areas with ventilation, perhaps leaving behind some sort of expanding sealant foam in the breaches to keep atmosphere intact if you wanted it usable immediately. Some of them will get through if the ship doesn't have a crazy amount of interception capability. Release gas, wait for the ship to either scuttle or stop responding, then release something that neutralizes the gas.

It probably wouldn't be perfect, since depending on how the ship is designed they could seal off sections that are contaminated, but that presents its own problem. Unless they have the capability to neutralize the toxins on-board (which is by no means guaranteed, as there are a lot of things that could be used) mobility through the ship could be crippled, and its actions rendered less effective.

[ductape]

Space=More planets to tap from

Also by then we could* find other methods of energy production,even free energy might be discovered for all we'd know.


*Stressed as I'm not saying it will happen,I don't know the future more than you do.

TANSTAAFL

[Il Palazzo]

Realistic space battles = Joe Haldeman's Forever War.

[Smitehappy]

I honestly think discussing how future space combat tactics work is the equivilent of Robert E. Lee discussing the inner mechanics of modern air combat.

We can't even get anything anywhere in the Solar System without slingshotting it around something, let alone a fleet of battleships. Hell, my guess is by the time we even have the ability to have giant space armadas romping around the Sol system we'll probally have weapons that would render them utterally useless. Maybe any sort of fleet operations will go the way of Rank and File rifle combat.

I say we all put the hypotheticals aside and enjoy what seems to be a cool game.

[ductape]

what game?

 

[Yanlin]

Realistic space combat: Doesn't happen.

/thread

[RAM]

Wouldn't the boarders be robots? You could launch a hundred nukes at the enemy ship and destroy it, then sift through the wreckage. Or you could launch 200 robots at a ship, have enough of them get through to disable the control systems, then examine a mostly functional ship to look for enemy design principals, technology, weaknesses, whatever... You don't need to make your entire armed forces boarders, but having a few could provide invaluable information...

At great distances, minor random accelerations can make aiming impossible. Pretty much anything that can be used as a weapon can also be used as an engine, the chances are good that the speed of the weapons is proportional to the speed of the ships. I would expect that missiles, basically ships with more engines, would be a practical weapon. Missiles might just get close enough to use a one-shot laser, they might try to ram the target and explode. If they can get to the target then boarding should be possible, maybe not generally practical, but certainly worth trying once in a while...

That made me think of including such a mechanism in my next fortress. There will be a final room in the farthest block of the fort. There will be guards stationed inside. As soon as the enemy reaches the room, a designated worker pulls the lever in the room, collapsing a great many supports throughout the complex, and opening up gates holding back massive amounts of water, magma, and demons.

make it a support, who's collapse allows water magma skeletal carp onto a pressure plate. That way the building destroyers who allowed the enemy past your doors will trigger the self destruct themselves, even if something, such as cowardice elvishness, happens to the designated worker...

[Darkone]

You only launch 100 nukes so that one of them gets trhough point defenses. It only takes one hit to destroy a ship. No material we know of can withstand point contact with a 20 megaton blast. The ammount of lulz in this thread is incredible. Before I go further, let me point out to whoever used it as a source on lasers, projectrho/"Atomic Rocket" is probably one of the greatest sites ever made. You all really need to go read it before talking about realistic

Lasers: Anything in the higher frequencies is perfectly tight beamed at long range. In fact, just for gratuitous lulz -- I'm sorry -- I worked out the effectiveness of a CRASER, or cosmic ray laser. tl;dr this weapon has targetting data limited range. Firing from the sun, it could snipe the hairs off a human head. This is with ONLY a 4 meter radius reflector. Of course, UVRASERs, XRASERs, and GRASERs are less effective, but all are capable of multi-light second damage. In fact, many times you want a LESS foxused beam, as it means you can hit a target even if that target has moved, as well as you don't need to keep the laser on target for as long.

Nukes vs Pod: If you can hit it with a nuke, you cannot nessicarily hit it with a pod. Nukes are small. They can have accelerations  no human would survive. By very nature of their size they are extremely difficult targets, and require far less thrust to accelerate.

Army vs boarders: If you oponent employs boarders, you employ marines. That is, assuming, that a lightly armeored and fragile, yet large object can ever reach your ship.

Disabling: Yes, this is an effective idea. By boarder any non-vaporized wrecks, you can gain insight into technology and many other things.

Onship combat: First of all, its rather easy to scuttle a space ship. Drop the safeties on the reactor. Second, you cannot employ gas against a compartmentalized target. They can suck it out, or more likely, they're wearing suits.

Mass: The mass of an anti-personnel weapon is neglibable compared to that of even a SMALL ship-to-ship weapon.

Anyways, on topic; The game looks like it will be plenty of fun. Want to try it when it comes out.

[Soulwynd]

Can't believe I majored in physics to discuss this shit in forums. xD

I dont get it, are we too stupid for you? Sorry if i misread that but it sound a little offensive. I happen to enjoy those kind of dicussions.

Oh, I didn't mean it that way. It's because it's comes up over and over in more than one forum and it's sort of tiresome, as it's the only physics related discussion I end up getting in nowadays.

I respectfully disagree, with a known speed and orientation any time dilatation effect can easily be computed by current physics, as you should know. Once you know the target velocity and direction there is no unknown except what correction the pilot can do to his trajectory in the time from the itinial measurement to the weapon impact. I do not understand why relativistic effects would make targetting impossible at large(say 10 000+ km) distances. If there is a weapon that is still effective at those distance,  I am unsure about that.

You see, they are precise, including lorentz which I quoted. The problem is you are assuming you know every variable, which you don't. When putting satellites in orbit or doing other similar crap, we know where we want the satellite to be, what delays we will have to use for communication, etc. The effects on them are near minimal as well, but...  In the case of space ships combat, what you have is the perceived position, velocity and direction. Those will already be in the past, and furthermore distorted by lorentz which is affected by acceleration at the detected ship's timeframe, which you can't possible know as you haven't perceived it yet, so you need an approximation based on previous motions to undo the lorentz rotation and from there try to determine where the hell it really is, assuming it hasn't changed accelerations again. It's possible to get a good area out of it and shoot there, yes, it's not impossible, just hard, and possibly a waste of energy (assuming lasers). Course, if you can develop some AI that can recognize patterns well enough and maybe some crazy FTL sensors, you can get past that.

And I was thinking about something more in the range of 300k-1000k km. They'd have to be zipping around way too fast at 10k km range for it to become a problem.



As for the boarding subject, I at least never said it was viable as a main tactic. I think it's more feasible as a stealth tactic, some how, more by having a spy board the ship way before any battle, which wouldn't be called boarding to begin with, and after the battle to salvage things.

[woose1]

I think it's more feasible as a stealth tactic, some how, more by having a spy board the ship way before any battle, which wouldn't be called boarding to begin with, and after the battle to salvage things.

Didn't we have something invented back in the 40's called a radar?
...And fuck aluminum coating, it's the future, dammit!

[Sean Mirrsen]

A radar has a drawback. It's a mighty flippin' missile magnet, in addition to being a very obviously protruding part of a ship, and therefore vulnerable to aforementioned precision laser strikes.