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[Soulwynd]

If you can hit it with a nuke, you can hit it with a thousand boarding pods and capture it.

[Sean Mirrsen]

You can have boarding that's not handwaved. A shuttle boarding a severely damaged ship is perfectly realistic - what little crew remains at that point can easily be dispatched and the boarding party can take control until repair&refit replaces them with a normal crew. The shuttle can then return - presumably empty. A specialized ship boarding an intact ship is reasonable - presuming the specialized ship posesses enough forces to overcome the crew, a skeleton crew can remain and control the ship during combat. Boarding is only handwaved in games for balance reasons - you'd rarely build ships that can only capture one ship before they have to be recycled or refitted.

And for the record, of all games in existence, Derek Smart's Battlecruiser Millenium did simulate boarding correctly.

[Yanlin]

See, boarding is extremely stupid.

You have an army. So do they. They will shoot your army. They probably fortified their ship against that. If they have massive cannons, they probably have anti personnel turrets inside the ship. You wont be able to logically capture it. A boarding pod wouldn't make much sense. A hit does not guarantee a boarding. It has to hit in specific places.

A more logical way would be a ship attaching itself to another ship and pounding a hole through the hull.

But then... They will just blow you to smithereens before you can approach close enough. Not to mention they're probably not alone.

As a tactical choice, boarding makes ZERO SENSE. Only a handwave can save it. Like special ships designed for boarding that have extra shielding if in boarding mode. Then the question arises, why not do some engineering and outfit all the ships like that?

In a game about MAKING the ships... Boarding is not a viable strategy. Taking over a ship is far more costly than building another ship. Or 5 for that matter.

[Soulwynd]

You see, the more space and manpower someone wastes trying to make a ship protected against boarding the less space and manpower it will have for... anything else... Specially in space. The mass of a ship is not a minimal issue and for a battle ship, you want to use every little bit of it to survive and kill other ships.

Take real ships in the real ocean. How many military vessels have any anti-boarding system... besides giving the crew weapons... None. Take world war 2, how did the british acquire one of the german ciphers? By fucking BOARDING a ship. Now take any war time, what is it that people require the most and soon becomes not available? Resources. Mostly metal. You can say, omg, I have a planet full of people to give me resources! So what? It's also full of people who probably don't give a shit about your war and just want to go on with their lives and survive, and even so, resources wouldn't last that long. So what do you do? You smack ships until they are nearly down and capture them. Tada, materials.

Simply sending a boarding team to try to capture a ship, is indeed stupid, but boarding has it's logical and tactical uses, by capturing intel/devices if the boarding ship is stealthy enough, and recovering ships before you actually explode it.

[Sean Mirrsen]

(ninja'd; this is a response to Yanlin)
I disagree. While "boarding pods" indeed make little sense (actually I can't remember a game that uses them), a shuttle or a ship attaching itself to the target ship and "injecting" a specialized team of heavy soldiers into it makes sense. As far as having battleships in space makes sense, anyways. A team specifically trained to overtake ships will have: a) heavy shields to protect against turrets, b) heavy weaponry to blast holes through the internal walls, c) a crack team of electricians and hackers that can disable the ship's security and open all doors.

For approaching the ship to be captured, several ways exist. Some are even used in games - like disabling the ship prior to approaching (I distinctly remember battleships blowing pesky raiders off their hull in one of the homeworld games) or taking out the turrets that can arc in that direction. You can also employ some Stealth In Space and sneak up on the target. And don't forget settings that have teleporters.

As for cost... let's see. A normal ship would have massive armor that protects it equally from all directions, it would be bristling with weapons, it would have specialized internal defence teams and automated defences against takeover, and quite possibly a lot more stuff. A ship designed to board other ships will be small, it will have most of its armor on the front and "bottom" (unless it's a ramming boarder, in which case only the front), it'll likely have no weapons, and it won't have any additional defence mechanisms, because it's quite literally PACKED with heavy troopers trained for combat inside ship corridors. Therefore, it'll be a lot cheaper than your average combat ship, and costs to refit it between boarding operations would be fairly low.

[Rilder]

I'd think boarding would be reserved until after the battle, where you have salvage ships coming in to fix up your disabled ships, rescue ships nabbing escape pods (of enemy and ally) Depending on the size of the battle theirs  probably at least a few disabled enemy ships about so send in a few marine ships to liberate them then send the salvage ships to repair them and get them up and ready for the next battle.

(As for games that have boarding SotS and Star Trek Armada 2 have it)

[Drakale]

Anyway realism have little place in space battle, a perfectly realist space battle would happen at astronomical distance and would be waged by extremely superior artificial intelligence, able to make a decision in a billionth of a second. I prefer a fun game with concessions to the rule of cool, and boarding a ship with hardened space marines is pretty much the very definition of cool.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I concur. Realistic space battles would be boring. However, realistic and sensible go different ways here. I would suspect that due to the exact same premise - "realistic space battles are boring" - the real space battles will be anything but the "realistic" type. It would make sense for computer-guided ships to pound away at each other from millions of kilometers, but humans won't like it. Even if all combat in space will eventually be done by robots, they will be programmed to make use of all the space tropes in existence. Dogfighting, space friction, "Space Is An Ocean", etc. Just so the fights look cool and can be shown on TV.

[Rilder]

I concur. Realistic space battles would be boring. However, realistic and sensible go different ways here. I would suspect that due to the exact same premise - "realistic space battles are boring" - the real space battles will be anything but the "realistic" type. It would make sense for computer-guided ships to pound away at each other from millions of kilometers, but humans won't like it. Even if all combat in space will eventually be done by robots, they will be programmed to make use of all the space tropes in existence. Dogfighting, space friction, "Space Is An Ocean", etc. Just so the fights look cool and can be shown on TV.

Or the robots will just kill each other and the planet borne leaders will have some Propaganda made up depicting all the space tropes in existance.

[Soulwynd]

Eh, space battles wouldn't be across astronomical distances. Time dilation (What your sensors pick is not where it actually is, specially if it's moving fast and if you're also moving fast it would also affect it) and random movements, wouldn't be impossible to hit anything that was too far away. It would be probably closer to any air battles that take place irl, at a decent radar range or even visual range.

But this all reminds me of one of macross episodes where they ram SDF1 into one of their ships and open the front bay doors and blast the ship from the inside. And yes, macross has lots of boarding (realistic and not) examples for an space battle anime.

[Drakale]

Eh, space battles wouldn't be across astronomical distances. Time dilation (What your sensors pick is not where it actually is, specially if it's moving fast and if you're also moving fast it would also affect it) and random movements, wouldn't be impossible to hit anything that was too far away. It would be probably closer to any air battles that take place irl, at a decent radar range or even visual range.

But this all reminds me of one of macross episodes where they ram SDF1 into one of their ships and open the front bay doors and blast the ship from the inside. And yes, macross has lots of boarding (realistic and not) examples for an space battle anime.

If you are refering to time dilatation, unless the two ships are travelling at relativistic speed one in relation to another, the amount of error due to the different time scales would be minimal. I'm not 100% certain, but in the case the ships ARE moving at relativistic speeds I would bet both ship would indeed be unable to hit each other due to uncertainty and all that. So they would have to make year long maneuvers to decently match their speed, unless they use an unknown physic phenomenon to change velocity.

If you are refering to the time lapse between the measurement of a target position, at the speed of light, and the moment a shot is fired(I'm assuming laser based), it is very doable at a few light-seconds distance with some trajectory calculation, remember that a massive ship can only modify it's trajectory so much in that short time-frame. And a light-second is about 300 000 km. So yeah, thats somewhat more than modern air battles.

[Sean Mirrsen]

That's presuming long-focus lasers ever become so advanced to keep the beam coherent at those ranges. In normal circumstances, a laser is a laser. At such large distances, a laser becomes a squirtgun. And conventional weaponry travels a lot slower. No, I think battles will never be fought across more than one light-second, unless you have some sort of planetkiller weapon that targets a planet or a station orbiting it.

[Drakale]

@ Sean

Yeah good point, I do not know much about laser dissipation at large distance, I assumed that it was physically possible to have a coherent beam stay somewhat focused at a few light-second distance, but i might be very wrong. Even if the weapon was something like a railgun with a pretty high speed like 0.1c, the effective distance could still be greather than a thousand km.

EDIT: Found a pretty amazing page that have some good information. Might not be 100% accurate, but it seem to support the idea of long range operation for lasers.
http://projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html#laser

[Soulwynd]

Some effects of special relativity are relative to the speed of light, not to two observers. Remember that even satellites in orbit suffer from these effects and they are at a very small speed compared to light...

So if it's a chase or an encounter, they will be most likely moving fast enough to suffer quite a bit of relativistic effects to one another. Most likely lorentz alone, which was a pain in the ass when I was in college, would keep you from telling for sure where the ship was, specially if it was doing random motions.

They could probably shoot around the probable area, but might be a waste of energy, since the laser has to be strong enough to do some damage. I think that the most likely to exist space weapons would be missiles. Those would work perfectly even through very long range. You just give one an initial hard impulse and it would only maneuver once close enough to avoid any perception distortions.

[Yanlin]

You see, the more space and manpower someone wastes trying to make a ship protected against boarding the less space and manpower it will have for... anything else... Specially in space. The mass of a ship is not a minimal issue and for a battle ship, you want to use every little bit of it to survive and kill other ships.

Take real ships in the real ocean. How many military vessels have any anti-boarding system... besides giving the crew weapons... None. Take world war 2, how did the british acquire one of the german ciphers? By fucking BOARDING a ship. Now take any war time, what is it that people require the most and soon becomes not available? Resources. Mostly metal. You can say, omg, I have a planet full of people to give me resources! So what? It's also full of people who probably don't give a shit about your war and just want to go on with their lives and survive, and even so, resources wouldn't last that long. So what do you do? You smack ships until they are nearly down and capture them. Tada, materials.

Simply sending a boarding team to try to capture a ship, is indeed stupid, but boarding has it's logical and tactical uses, by capturing intel/devices if the boarding ship is stealthy enough, and recovering ships before you actually explode it.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsAnOcean

Your logic does not apply in space.

Ships now-days are impossible to board. Warships that is. Go ahead. Nothing short of landing special forces on it will work. You're better off destroying it anyway. Good luck landing a chooper with all the AA guns on it.

The shuttle idea wouldn't work either. Even the heaviest of shields cannot withstand an army and a huge number of defense turrets. Don't forget that if the threat of boarding becomes real, suddenly, you'll have anti boarding squads. Thus negating the need to board. It's a waste for both sides if boarding is impossible.

Of course, if you can disable the ship, that's a whole different story. EMP or something. You do the handwaving.

It would be easy to defeat them as they would probably rely on electricity and computers for even their most basic systems. Hell even pistols will probably use that. Maybe non computerized pistols are useless compared to the computerized ones.

Bam. Boarding possible.

Discussion over. Happy?