New answers tagged space-combat
4
You can't see out when it's active.
David Weber's Honor Harrington series touched on this a bit with grav wedges: if you tried to look through a grav wedge, it was basically impossible to get any kind of targeting information because any sensor readings were so distorted they were useless. It was handwaved that the defender could see through it via knowing ...
0
You can't "project" gravity far
TL;DR if you can only generate gravity inside a machine, but not outside, you still get offensive capabilities, but defense is much harder.
Make para-gravity a dipole like magnetism is. Magnetic fields lose strength in a distance-cubed manner once you are outside of the generator. If you can't cause a significant ...
0
If you really think about it, this shielding follows the same core principles of any sci-fi shield system. You just need to play with numbers a bit, but overall, you have multiple shield generators spread around the ship, each protecting certain sections. The fact that you use the same technology for attacking those shields simplifies things.
In a situation ...
0
There is one way to defeat gravity. You can use anti-gravity. This is produced by exotic matter. It creates a negative curvature instead of a positive curvature given bu=y normal matter. Exotic matter (energy) is involved in the Casimir effect. but there the effect is electromagnetic in Nature. It has a negative curvature effect also though if you apply it ...
3
I really like the way this subject is treated in Jack Campbell "The Lost Fleet" series,
So to make it short, you do have force fields and missiles you can accelerate to relativistivistic speed (+ separate wormhole technology for changing star system), but essentially your ships are cruising at around .1 c and engage in fractions of a second since ...
5
The really good ship defense against those weapons would be really fast really random moving. But that isn't even an issue, as there wouldn't be any ship battles using this technology, or there wouldn't be any civilizations.
This is M.A.D. scenario.
When someone's flotilla defeat is assured, they'll scatter and accelerate several dozen moons at their leisure ...
6
Fire a paragravity generator
The problem is that there are many gravity wells that attract and repel, allowing things that are going at respectable speeds of C to be knocked out of the way. Space it big, so likely the objects fired will not hit, even if the change in direction is small. It's like hitting a single straw with a magnetic needle over a kilometer ...
3
Para-Gravitic Jamming/disruption
It turns out that if you overlap paragravitic fields without 'aligning' them first, strange things can happen and, worst case, a destructive gravitic resonance can build up.
The more paragravitic projectors you have, the more complex the potential field interplay is and the more computational power you need to keep the ...
0
As Nosajimki says it is incredibly wasteful to project a bubble like shield around an object as a defense. Point defense also doesn't work if your opponent is firing lasers or missiles at relativistic speed because you won't have time to detect the incoming attack and launch counter measures. With that in mind I think a plausible defense could be something ...
19
Slapping aside a inbound projectile usually takes more energy than it took to accelerate it
If you try to slap aside a projectile once it gets too close to your ship, it means you need to slap it aside at relativistic speeds to make it miss. So if you have a 100m ship and you try to slap aside a projectile that is 100m away, you have to push it just as hard ...
3
The way to defeat point defenses is to throw more at them than they can handle. Against shields, the attacker is in the advantage. A shield has only a very short distance in which to change an incoming objects trajectory, while the attacker can accellerate its missiles for a long time.
To red shift lasers, you need just as much energy as the laser looses. So ...
10
Energy budgets
Paragravity is scifi but you can easily calculate energy budgets. Let us say a 5 kg bowling ball is incoming at 0.95 c. It has 225 petajoules of energy. To bring it to a halt, your deflectors need to expend that much energy and that is regardless of how they work. You have specified that the paragravity deflectors require energy.
In your ...
3
This was originally a comment but I now think it may also provide an answer, so here it is...
The only way I can see how to blueshift a laser by a point-source gravity field is by shooting the laser, and then accelerating the point-source in front of the laser beam along its journey. The laser constantly "falls" into the gravity well and blueshifts,...
1
Rockets.
Not the question asked, which was answered by PCMan.
Rockets impart no thrust to your ship if they are not attached when the rocket motor starts up.
Propellant is used more efficiently than with a cannon.
The top speed of a rocket is the speed of light. Rockets can accelerate as long as they have propellant.
Rockets can steer.
The reason for ...
1
Coilguns
Instead of railguns I would recommend coilguns. One uses contact and magnetic forces (more or less), while the other is fully magnetic. On Earth they sometimes try to make the barrel a vacuum, letting the bullet pierce something as it shoots out the barrel. This'll reduce drag to the bullet and damage to the barrel. But you're in space. There is a ...
5
In terms of heat, the cannon will leave less heat in the ship, as the extreme greater part of the heat will leave with the combustion gasses of the propellant. The only heat that remains is the tiny amount that transferred from the propellant to the mechanism (breech, barrel) of the cannon in the very brief fraction of a moment that it is actually firing.
By ...
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