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[Sean Mirrsen]

Yes.

What you're describing is escalation of warfare. It all boils down to what you are prepared to do to achieve your goal. You employ boarding shuttles - the enemy employs point defences - you add armor and precision guns to shuttles - the enemy adds turrets to all corridors in ships - you give your boarding teams heavy armor and shields - the enemy makes pop-up turrets that shoot from behind - you add electricians and hackers to your teams to disable turrets - the enemy adds heavy defence teams to ships - you add power-armor units to boarding teams - the enemy installs blastproof doors and reinforces walls on the ships - you invent EMP bombs to disable ships before entering - the enemy protects electronics with Faraday cages - you research organic acids to overcome metallic barriers - the enemy invents acid-resistant alloys - you ditch the heavy team concept and attack the ships with swarms of multipurpose robot drones that kill the crew and bypass all defences - the enemy employs EMP weapons to disable them - you upgrade your robots to optic fiber circuitry - the enemy redesigns the ships to jettison invaded areas - you employ kinetic kill weapons to surgically remove the control bridge before attacking - the enemy alters bridge design to prevent instant kills - you drop the shuttle concept and introduce ramming boarders to attack big ships - the enemy redesigns the ships to be thin and flat, so the rammers have no effect - etc, etc, etc. If a game is going on at the beginning of this juggling game (as is usual with many 4X games), boarding is justified - noone has simply thought of all those countermeasures yet.

[Yanlin]

Yes.

What you're describing is escalation of warfare. It all boils down to what you are prepared to do to achieve your goal. You employ boarding shuttles - the enemy employs point defences - you add armor and precision guns to shuttles - the enemy adds turrets to all corridors in ships - you give your boarding teams heavy armor and shields - the enemy makes pop-up turrets that shoot from behind - you add electricians and hackers to your teams to disable turrets - the enemy adds heavy defence teams to ships - you add power-armor units to boarding teams - the enemy installs blastproof doors and reinforces walls on the ships - you invent EMP bombs to disable ships before entering - the enemy protects electronics with Faraday cages - you research organic acids to overcome metallic barriers - the enemy invents acid-resistant alloys - you ditch the heavy team concept and attack the ships with swarms of multipurpose robot drones that kill the crew and bypass all defences - the enemy employs EMP weapons to disable them - you upgrade your robots to optic fiber circuitry - the enemy redesigns the ships to jettison invaded areas - you employ kinetic kill weapons to surgically remove the control bridge before attacking - the enemy alters bridge design to prevent instant kills - you drop the shuttle concept and introduce ramming boarders to attack big ships - the enemy redesigns the ships to be thin and flat, so the rammers have no effect - etc, etc, etc. If a game is going on at the beginning of this juggling game (as is usual with many 4X games), boarding is justified - noone has simply thought of all those countermeasures yet.

The problem is time and money. At some point, it becomes far easier to just destroy ships than to board them. Much cheaper too. What could possibly be so worthwhile when you can just build 3 ships just as good as the one you want to board with the same money? Not to mention repairs and shit.

[beorn080]

Research, captives, astrogation data. Kinda hard to pick up prisoners in space.

Sometimes the fleet your attacking has been designed for fleet battles with massive ships, and ram and board tactics with smaller ships designed to penetrate deep and deploy armored troops internally can be an extremely useful surprise tactic. Next time there will be defenses in place, but if its the big battle to end the war, next time doesn't really matter.

[Jreengus]

Of course any realistic space ship would have a means of defending itself against boarding, air pumps. You are going to need air pumps of some kind in a ship to keep reasonable air flow and ass soon as an enemy boards these can be used to suck air out of the area the enemy is in. And of course if the enemy uses space suits this will either mean using tons of storage space for space suits or greatly limiting the number of people that can board. The defenders wont be limited by this as they can pump air back into any room they want before engaging. And of course if this ship is so invaluable that it is worth capturing I'm sure it will come with a self-destruct device meaning you'd be better off destroying it and trying to salvage what you can than boarding and finding that what you wanted has been completely destroyed through precisely placed explosives.

[Sean Mirrsen]

It will take the enemy some time to upgrade his ships. If you discovered a tactic that allows you to have one expensive ship drive up to the enemy's expensive ship and do something that makes you own both ships, then each such ship you make will net you three or four enemy ships before being shot down. And cost? What cost? Compared to the price of heavy-duty reactive armor, a dozen gigawatt omnilasers and seventy metric carp-tons of antimatter torpedoes, your dinky raider ship is a drop in the bucket. It's only going to come out more expensive if you start scaling things up or going for small targets.

Relating to real life - yeah, modern battleships and aircraft carriers are nigh impervious to boarding. But suppose you do find a way - like a supercavitating jumper submarine that rams itself into the hull above the waterline and has several dozen specnaz elites jump out and wreak havok? No matter how you build it, the cost of that submarine will never even compare to the price of the carrier. It's a no-lose scenario, especially considering that you still have the option of just blowing the ship up if the boarding operation fails.

(edit: ninja'd)

Yes, that's a perfectly good plan of defending against boarding. But unless the goal of the boarding is to gather information, it's not going to do much. And if you do need to sneak in and get information, you're likely not going to be doing it amidst a battle, and even then you're going to try and be discreet about it. Like, hiding the ramming ship amidst a dozen real torpedoes.

[Drakale]

And of course if this ship is so invaluable that it is worth capturing I'm sure it will come with a self-destruct device meaning you'd be better off destroying it and trying to salvage what you can than boarding and finding that what you wanted has been completely destroyed through precisely placed explosives.

That's a good point, but only true on ships with a strong chain of command, or completely computer operated. Otherwise the crew itself will either disable it, or surrender to avoid the automatic the self-destruction mecanism.

[Neonivek]

Let me guess. You watched the L4D intro and thought it was entirely cinematic and had nothing to do with gameplay?

Link to the intro in case you didn't watch it.

From what I saw, it showed some good and bad tactics. Teaser trailered the various ships and formations.

Sure, not up to L4D level, but it's not just a cinematic trailer like the kind you see with Final Fantasy and Devil May Cry.

No I watched Gratuitous Space Battles that was just an action replay without really going into the depth of the actual gameplay.

It is the equivilant of showing off a Strategy game by seeing random units fire at eachother (which coincidently is exactly what this video shown). Which is what I meant.

[Sean Mirrsen]

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.

[Il Palazzo]

Yeah, the video shows probably all the eye candy there will be, without explaining the gameplay at all. But then, the introductory paragraph tells you all about that.
The video also hints that it'll use all the unrealistic but fun space combat tropes.

(I understand that this thread doubles up as the new "realistic space combat thread"?)
I'm sorry but I have to say that boarding is just silly, even from today's perspective.(but it's still cool, of course)
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. Should you manage to capture this carrier against all odds, what would you do with it? It was built with a completely different technology than your carriers, meaning, you'd have to erect an entire factory to manufacture and repair every one of the gazzilion parts that it's made of. Using it up for resources is not worth the hassle of towing it back to port and dismantling either. It's so much cheaper to just use the raw resources that your industry provides.
In the case of space combat, it's still the same, only on a larger scale.

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.

The satellites suffer(or rather suffer less) from the gravity well's influence. Time flows slower near massive objects, as proposed in general relativity. It's got nothing to do with the orbital speed and lorentz transformations of special relativity.
Lorentz equations are actually very precise, there's no uncertainity in them. All you need to tell where the target is, is a good computer to do the math for you.
Note that ships fighting at relativistic speeds are just so unlikely.

[Jreengus]

And of course if this ship is so invaluable that it is worth capturing I'm sure it will come with a self-destruct device meaning you'd be better off destroying it and trying to salvage what you can than boarding and finding that what you wanted has been completely destroyed through precisely placed explosives.

That's a good point, but only true on ships with a strong chain of command, or completely computer operated. Otherwise the crew itself will either disable it, or surrender to avoid the automatic the self-destruction mecanism.

All it would take would be one brainwashed person with the controls. If you put them on as say a janitor no-one would know.

[Tilla]

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?

[Il Palazzo]

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

Bismarck and probably a thousand other ships that were damaged beyond hope were scuttled by their crew.

[Soulwynd]

Discussion over.

No. The discussion goes on, hopefully without half-assed sophistical attempts to end it.

The problem is time and money. At some point, it becomes far easier to just destroy ships than to board them. Much cheaper too. What could possibly be so worthwhile when you can just build 3 ships just as good as the one you want to board with the same money? Not to mention repairs and shit.

Oh, gimme a break. A GBU-15 costs roughly the same a soldier does after a couple years. And that's one shitty small stock bomb. If you take a tomahawk, each is over half a million dollars.

The satellites suffer(or rather suffer less) from the gravity well's influence. Time flows slower near massive objects, as proposed in general relativity. It's got nothing to do with the orbital speed and lorentz transformations of special relativity.
Lorentz equations are actually very precise, there's no uncertainity in them. All you need to tell where the target is, is a good computer to do the math for you.
Note that ships fighting at relativistic speeds are just so unlikely.

We went over this before in another post. It takes in both gravity and speed. *sighs and shakes his head* Can't believe I majored in physics to discuss this shit in forums. xD  Anyway, yeah, there's another thread on that. 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.

[Jreengus]

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.

Their codes were out of date, they only got let through to lure them into a trap. Any halfway intelligent commander would give each ship captain a code unique to their ship which they have to broadcast before coming anywhere near docking. And as for interrogation, chance are each captain would also have a code which means "let me come closer then 'discover' I'm an enemy." By giving the enemy this code they could seem to have succumbed to torture/accepted bribes and maintain plausible deniability (sp?) in the face of future punishments for giving out the wrong code. As for PoWs/supplies the whole air pump method combined with other fairly easy to design defensive methods would mean that the amount of supplies you would gain would be less than the number of extra supplies you could have taken on by dropping your boarding equipment and the massive casualties wouldn't be worth the PoWs. And of course there's still that janitor waiting to below anything remotely usable up if he detects a threat.

[woose1]

janitor waiting to below anything remotely usable up if he detects a threat.

Hah! I love stealing misspelled words.

Looks like a stolen idea. From a certain Japanese game developer. Damn companies stealing indie gamers ideas.