Anti-ship flail in space? - Page 4 - OG Myth-Weavers

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Anti-ship flail in space?

   
Hmm... melee weapons in ship to ship space combat...

1- Forcefields. Let's say you need hard shell fields for travel in space because there's lots of dust up there, and at any significant percentage of lightspeed, a fist sized chunk of rock will collide with more power than your average nuclear bomb. In fact, if you're fast enough, your ship will be surrounded by a nuclear firestorm as every hydrogen molecule it encounters undergoes fission from hitting your hull. As such, it may not be *possible* for missile weapons to pack enough punch to do real damage- these ships withstand nukes the way a modern battlecruiser withstands waves in the ocean.

2- Relativistic Engines are too big for conventional missiles, and what's the point of firing weapons if the target casually outpaces them?

3- Same deal for onboard projectile launchers- remember, that whole "equal but opposite reaction" thing? A railgun puts as much energy back at you than it launches into the enemy. You can counter it a number of ways, sure, but it's still a lot of energy being put into attacks that could miss, especially when dealing with relativistic combat speeds.

4- Back to the forcefield integrity. If it's integral to ship durability, it may come to pass that the only valid military strategy in space combat is to hit their shields hard enough to deplete the power supply. At which point, they go from supertech to ordinary (relatively) squishy metal that can't survive the rigors of space travel.


This recipe puts you in a situation where most conventional weapons are useless, and nonconventionals cost more power than is worth using. Melee weapons have the advantage of requiring time to get to maximum power, which reduces immediate strain on the ship generating the power. Then, once they are at maximum energy (re: inertia), as long as you're smart you can redirect that energy with minimal loss, making it possible to miss several shots without actually wasting all that energy like you would with a railgun. Sure, you waste some, but not all.

What you end up with is melee weapons as the only valid strategy because projectiles are rendered moot by the nature of near-light combat (and, by definition, vessels which can survive near light transit speeds). Only battleships are fast enough to keep up with other battleships, and only battleships have engines powerful enough to generate energy necessary to damage other ships.

Now... I'm sure there would be stationary weapons powerful enough to be in play... but for mobile combat, it may be melee is the only viable means to direct enough destructive energy efficiently and reliably enough to actually cause damage.

It may be unwieldy and dangerous to the ships themselves, but if there's no other valid method to wage war, then we'll learn to wage war with melee weapons yet again.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Penchant View Post
It literally is a guided missile, but you likely mean a missile with a warhead. Guided warheads are easy to destroy or render inoperable. An inert mass has the benefit of being effective until it is utterly destroyed. If youve got a fifty ton chunk of space rock aimed at your ship and the engine driving it is on the other side you have to pulverize the thing before it impacts. A warhead you just need to detonate it or damage the mechanism to remove the threat.
Explosive warheads are optional. Modern missile defense systems that use guided interceptors are kinetic-kill. Attaching engines to a giant mass and sending it in a collision course is functionally the same thing and requires a similar amount of computing power, so a system capable of disabling the guidance on a conventional missile (built-in or remotely-guided) is also going to be able to defeat the weaponized Rok.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobcloclimar View Post
Explosive warheads are optional. Modern missile defense systems that use guided interceptors are kinetic-kill. Attaching engines to a giant mass and sending it in a collision course is functionally the same thing and requires a similar amount of computing power, so a system capable of disabling the guidance on a conventional missile (built-in or remotely-guided) is also going to be able to defeat the weaponized Rok.
The advantage of a weaponized Rock is that the rock itself is more difficult/requires more energy to destroy than a smaller inert warhead at higher speeds. Again, this is aimed more at larger less maneuverable craft. The rock itself provides significantly greater shielding to the mechanisms driving it than a smaller faster projectile, and the costs are lower for a weaponized rock since the propulsion system doesn't have to be as small.

That requires larger engines, which could just as easily be placed on the missile. So there's a tradeoff: Given the same amount of energy in the propulsion system, the delta-V goes up as the square of the reduction in mass, which makes the smaller warhead much, much more difficult to hit than the Rok.

The Rok, of course, is big enough to hold teeming swarms of mobile fungusoids, which may ultimately be more effective than anything directly fired at the target

Possible reasons for space flail in SF setting:
- stealth: battleships might have special sensors to detect conventional weapons, making stealth impossible for ships with such weapons
- impactor is made of a costly material like adamantium or vibranium to overcome shields, so a recovery mechanism would make sense
- shields might block bullets by vaporising them, a tactic that doesn't work as well on larger impactors, even if they are moving slower

Wouldn't any kind of energy shield be a more effective melee weapon than just about anything?

Just up the shields and engage ramming speed.

Since energy shields as usually represented in SF don't currently exist, it is rather hard to predict.

And do you mean Star Trek shields or Star Wars shields? Without a setting specified, its beyond conjecture because there is no frame of reference.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Black_Valor View Post
Wouldn't any kind of energy shield be a more effective melee weapon than just about anything?

Just up the shields and engage ramming speed.
Simple: They use melee weapons for the same reason people punch each other with their fists rather than their hearts. Namely: one's a convenient tool that you can survive if you lose. The other, you need to continue living.

The problem with bouncing energy shields off each other is they tend to collapse both fields, and then the ships encounter each other at a significant percentage of the speed of light. Boom.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bbender View Post
Since energy shields as usually represented in SF don't currently exist, it is rather hard to predict.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Penchant View Post
And do you mean Star Trek shields or Star Wars shields? Without a setting specified, its beyond conjecture because there is no frame of reference.
Space ships as represented in SF don't exist, either, so it's rather a moot point. The advantage of fiction is you can make up whatever you like. As long as it holds to internal logic, you're golden.

Quote:
Originally Posted by TanaNari View Post
The problem with bouncing energy shields off each other is they tend to collapse both fields, and then the ships encounter each other at a significant percentage of the speed of light. Boom.
Or the fields have an interaction like lasers and the Hol(t)zman(n) effect in Dune - and the latter is an excellent reason to use a "slower" giant mass over a fast penetrator.




 

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