you would need to absolutely saturate an area to do so and make them a projectile mine of some sort. There is also the problem of making sure they are not able to be targeted.
Range in Space Combat
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I think that the TL; DR of the OP would probably be, dont expect lasers to be able to reliably hit any fast moving target further away than from here to the moon (1.25 light seconds) and 1/10th that for kinetic weapons if they move at 1/10th the speed of light.
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Uhm no. If you see the laser being fired, it has reached you. That's literally what light speed means.
Rather than "missile" I think it should be "guided weapon". You've made a good point about how anything unguided is pretty useless given the distances in space unless you want to bombard a planet. i.e. Drones would also be a good option. These drones in turn could however make good use of lasers or guns and other ballisitc weapons.
So carriers to launch drones, fighters and missiles is something that you'd likely see in space combat.
To defend against those fighters, drones and missiles bigger ships will likely be forced to bring point defense. That could be lasers, but guns and (smaller, possibly unguided) missiles would work just as well. It would probably be Rail- or Gauss-guns instead of explosion propelled projectiles though.
In fact, since explosions are far less effective in space (as there's no air to transmit the shockwave), kinetic weapons would likely be used more than missiles.
Best use for missiles would probably be to use them for a stealth approach. As you said yourself, dodging an attack in space is pretty simple, if you know it's coming. But planetary orbits are full of junk. If you pretend your projectile is just another piece of space junk and you only accelerate in the last few kms, you are much more likely to hit or at least force your enemy into an uncomfortable evasive maneuvre.
You've also forgotten one important point: Intelligence. Finding out where your enemy is, would not be trivial at all, if that enemy is 1-2 light minutes away from you. And using active sensors (like radar) would be foolish. That's the same as telling your enemy for free where you are. And he'll learn it long before you get any information back (since the signal has to bounce back first).
So most likely space battles would also include some element of using sensor drones (at least to emit the radar signal - you can still receive it yourself) and trying to shoot down the enemy sensor drones.
.....no they're not. Energy released is energy released. End of. Many such weapons are MORE dangerous in space, as they won't 'waste' that energy by dumping it all immediately into a relatively dense gas (an atmosphere), superheating it, and then propagating through it. The atmosphere can essentially act like a gaseous ablative armour, bleeding off energy and heavily degrading efficient delivery of that energy to your enemies.
A nuke in space instead results in the same energy release, which propagates through the void as a massive pulse of radiation. You just see a flash of light.... presumably very momentarily, if you're close enough.
Guided kinetics are likely to be developed. The size of slugs are very likely to be large enough to allow for missle-like guided componets.
Question: with regards to guided weapons like missiles...
...what are the complications (if any) that would arise from the acceleration of the missile and the speed of its detection hardware?
As in, if we were to treat space missiles realistically, what kind of detection would it use, and would we have a situation where the missile is literally outpacing its own ability to detect the target? Likewise, what kind of counters would exist against that detection and how effective might they be?
...what are the complications (if any) that would arise from the acceleration of the missile and the speed of its detection hardware?
As in, if we were to treat space missiles realistically, what kind of detection would it use, and would we have a situation where the missile is literally outpacing its own ability to detect the target? Likewise, what kind of counters would exist against that detection and how effective might they be?
Sure, at which point it would be a missile. I mean, if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck... why wouldn't it be a duck? You are talking about a missile with a rapid launch system, like a railgun boosted kinetic impactor (no warhead) missile.
Yeah. In space the only way for munitions to be guided is for them to be able to provide their own thrust. That makes them a missile. It doesn't matter if you're launching them like a shell or slug from a railgun or something. It does present a problem however, since a missile is going to be inherently more fragile than a solid munition - muzzle velocity can be vastly lower as a result because the speed at which you could launch a ballistic projectile would obliterate a guided one. If there's a large enough difference between the maximum muzzle velocity you can achieve with a missile instead of ballistics, the benefit of guidance may be lost as the projectile arrives too slow for its guidance to matter, or is too slow to prevent being intercepted.
You could only have guided shells and slugs in an atmosphere, where you can manipulate the medium they're travelling through in order to maneuver, and not have to be a missile.
I am hardly a physicist, just a sci fi hobbyist, so I dont honestly know good answers for that question...
But I will say that hiding a spaceship in space is going to be extremely difficult. On earth we can hide against radar sigantures, and sight with special paints and what not, but heat is easier to hide on earth than in space. The air around a jet may be cold by out standards and the heat of its exhaust hot, allowing for heat seeking missles, but in the infrared, starships would glow bright. It would be very challenging to mask the heat signature of a crewed spaceship against the void of space. Likewise, a missile that is using any sort of propellant would find it very tough to hide.
I imagine missiles would deploy a multiple warheads, flares to blind enemy sensors, other ECM to blind other types of sensors, but the ship would have access to more powerful sensors and systems of its own, possibly deploying a net of drones to boost detection and provide safe plaforms for active sensors without making the ship itself a blindingly obvious target.
I imagine that it would all be very complicated and the interaction of counter measures and detection and point defense would all happen in miliseconds in which the missiles enter the optimal range for the anti missile defenses and try to force through, and that very sophisticated computers and agorithims would be used.
But all that already happens today, with our own weapons, so yeah, who knows.
Missles have stuff inside of them, and usually explode due to it. This would be a slug. With a jet.
you know they made bullets like that? it would still be an unguided missile, called a rocket.
If we really want to get into the semantics, anything projected by a force is a missile. But for the sake most games, a mass without explosives is a kinetic, and a mass stuffed with explosives is a missile. I think it gets particularly tricky when you have exploding slugs, but for that reason they are usually special and specifically named.
Either case, looking forward to a future with guided kinetics.
It's a shame Stellaris doesn't feature possible reduction in damage or accuracy with distance and so these realistic effects can't be modeled. It would be nice to have kinetic weapons have a fixed damage while accuracy quickly drops to 0 while lasers have their damage and accuracy both drop off with distance, but at a much slower rate.
I suppose this could be modeled relatively well by just giving kinetic weapons (and plasma) a fixed range of say 25 and no or low tracking, lasers and lances a fixed 50 range and moderate tracking, and have missiles be special for having 100 range and good tracking. Though ship computers would need to be modified so the AI doesn't make designs that try to stay outside the range of their weaponry.
I suppose this could be modeled relatively well by just giving kinetic weapons (and plasma) a fixed range of say 25 and no or low tracking, lasers and lances a fixed 50 range and moderate tracking, and have missiles be special for having 100 range and good tracking. Though ship computers would need to be modified so the AI doesn't make designs that try to stay outside the range of their weaponry.
What would really be cool is if we could have a missile duel at long range, like a few shots, then
1) if both parties want to get close, they would duke it out with energy and kinetic, too close for missiles
2} If one party wants to close, the other is trying to dodge, away, you would stay in medium range where lasers and missiles work but kinetic is ineffective
3} if both sides try to keep far away, the missile duel would continue and neighter side could use lasers or kinetics
obviously, stellaris never planned or attempted any realism in modelling space combat, instead, properties of weapons and protection options are defined by considerations of "game balance", "fairness", and "fun", only using the widely known monickers like "laser", "kinetic weapon", "missile", shield and armour to impart sci-fi flavour to what is essentially "main weapons line A tied to 1st research tree" and "main weapons line B ties to 3rd research tree"
a game that actually models different space weapons is CoaDE, and it's designers and players explored a great many options and weapon designs vs each other and vs different sorts of ship armour (they don't have shields irl)
a game that actually models different space weapons is CoaDE, and it's designers and players explored a great many options and weapon designs vs each other and vs different sorts of ship armour (they don't have shields irl)
The hard speed limit on an object traveling relative to something else is the speed of light. This means that I cannot travel, relative to your position, faster than light can. When it comes to missile detection, the missile will never be traveling relative to its target faster than the speed of light. Thus, speed will not be an issue when it comes to detection, only velocity.
No, that’s not at all how that works.
A missile is a device that gets its speed from its own rocket motor or something similar and uses maneuvering controls to change its trajectory, whether the guidance that directs the controls is internal to the device or received from a controlling station (e.g., the firing warship). A “rocket” (in this case) is basically the same as the missile above, but it doesn’t have any maneuvering controls (except at most for stabilization). A ballistic slug doesn’t provide its own motive force and is instead fired from a mass driver-style barrel (missiles and rockets would be launched from warships by a type of mass driver, but that would simply be to move them away from the warship before they lighted their very powerful (i.e., damaging) drives).
Missiles and torpedoes don’t have to carry an explosive warhead to be extremely damaging to a targeted ship – their extreme speed and mass on impact is plenty disruptive, and would be classified as kinetic in nature. The slug from a mass driver-style cannon would have a hard time carrying an explosive device, never mind any type of engine, maneuvering controls, or guidance system/radio receiver, due to literally billions of gravities of acceleration being applied (for less than a millisecond) to it when fired.
Probably just get it out of your head (and Stellaris should do the same) that any of these weapons are using explosives.
I want comment on this, not to disagree, but clarify on this point.
1) Focusing on a point. This is how you would keep your beam focused if you knew exactly how far your enemy is, which presumably you would, You dont shoot in a strait parallel beam of light rather you start with a wide beam and angle it so it gets smaller and smaller over distance until it his a focal point, then starts spreading out again. Best way to visualize this is if you have played with a magnifying glass, if you put the magnifing glass just far enough away, you could start a fire with it, by getting the kindling right at the fixed focal point. It would be necessary to have sci fi tech that would allow you to use variable curves on your laser's len so you could focus your beam properly at a given distance. But this isn't exactly easy. Again, sci fi, but changing the focus point on a beam on the fly so that it focuses on the correct point to hit a target would be challenging and you would actually introduce a new way to miss your shots, if target range isn't clear because of target stealth. If the target is hard to properly aim at, and you aren't clear exactly how far it is, you could well lose some power to your lasers because they might not be correctly focused. If the target is further or closer than the focal point of your beam, then the effect of beam will be spread out over larger area.
In sci fi we see lasers that travel purely parallel and keep nice and tight forever, but in real life, if you are using a focused beam to hit your target, instead of a perfectly parrallel beam which would work across any distance, you will have problems with regards to getting the focus point properly adjusted every time you make a shot, but perfectly parallel beams like we normally think of when we talk lasers (like a laser pointer) would just not work across long distance because they would spread out.
2) Why diameter matters. You could hit mars, or power a solar sail across the solar system, if you start with a laser that is kilometers wide. The size of the beam, or mirror used to power the laser plays a big role. Yes you could properly vaporize a rock on mars with a mirror several kilometers wide, curved to microns worth of precision to properly focus for that exact distance, but a warship can probably only fit lens of so much aperture. You won't see anything past a few meters, and the larger the lens, the more tricky it becomes to adjust it for different focus points. With a lens of "only" one meter of width, hitting a rock mars would be just as hard as seeing a rock on mars with a telescope of only 1 meter width lens. Basically impossible. If you think about how fuzzy things look through your average hobbiest telescope, that same fuzziness would apply to any beam projected through a lens of simular size.
I hope that helps explains a little about how optics would work, because honestly the above is about my limit on how much I understand it.
Another question regarding accelerating missiles, in how far would the sudden acceleration (that at least a ship-launcher would need to give) possibly damage components of the projectile?