14 ms·

Aircraft Carriers in Space

101 points by stargazer-3 14y ago

sown 14y ago
Reading the first couple of questions makes me think about how people of the late, late 18th century thought similarly about air ships and how air power would turn out to be. H.G. Wells wrote a book called "Clipper In The Clouds" and it also used navy themes influencing how people thought it would go.
- reitzensteinm 14y ago
  Anyone interested in this kind of thing should really check out the Hardcore History episode on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan: http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-42---(BLITZ)-Logical-Insanity/Second%20World%20War-World%20War%20Two-World%20War%20One http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-42---(BLITZ... It explores the history of air power as well, including the massively inflated early expectations that sound basically like modern nuclear war.
SparrowOS 14y ago
God says... unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed: and she knew no man. And it was a custom in Israel, 11:40 That the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year. 12:1 And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together, and went northward, and said unto Jephthah, Wherefore passedst thou over to fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? we will burn thine house upon thee with fire. 12:2 And Jephthah said unto them, I and my people were at great strife with the children of Ammon; and when I called you, ye delivered me not out of their hands. 12:3 And when I saw that ye delivered me not, I put my life in my hands, and passed over against the children of Ammon, and the LORD delivered them into my hand: wherefore then are ye come up unto me this day, to fight against me? 12:4 Then Jephthah gathered together all the men of Gilead, and fought with Ephraim: and the men of Gilead smote Ephraim, because they said, Ye Gileadites are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites, and among the Manassites. ---- That's from the Bible, picked with a quantum random number. God's talk is for a refined palette. You just enjoy His company. This is about disjoint facts. Women brought along, burning with fire and Jeps. As often as not, there is no unified message, just bits that please. Perhaps, it's about the world nations wanting to join together as one like Starship Troopers. Battlestar Galactica has fugatives, doesn't it? I don't watch.
csense 14y ago
From the article: > For a ship in the water, drag increases as the cube of speed...As your speed increases, your drag increases exponentially... He's being inconsistent. I've actually heard this a lot lately -- people will say something is "increasing exponentially" (i.e. has a curve of the form f(x) = k*b^x) when they really mean a much looser condition like "accelerating" (positive second derivative, which might be an exponential curve, but also might be one of many other curves, e.g. any polynomial of degree >= 2 with nonnegative coefficients). It's almost as bad as people who talk about the "least common denominator," but that's a rant for another post.
- natrius 14y ago
  I'm tempted to say that it's good enough for something where the reader won't need to do actual math with the information. He's just trying to get across the point that the drag increases faster than linearly. "Increases polynomially" would be more correct, but would get the message across to fewer readers. "Exponentially" is inaccurate, but conveys the message more accurately than any other phrasing that readily comes to mind.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    >I'm tempted to say that it's good enough And I'm tempted to say that what distinguishes math from most other forms of expression is precision, and if you're not going to be precise, you should avoid blatantly mathematical language.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      Okay, you don't get to say "cube" or "exponentially". Rewrite those sentences, then.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
The interesting thing about warfare portrayed in fiction is that it's not only a very idealized model of warfare but it tends to be based on a zeitgeist which is easily decades if not centuries out of date. For example, modern naval warfare, setting aside aircraft even, is of the sort where the combatants generally fire missiles at each other across the horizon (or would be, if there was any significant amount of naval warfare between first world powers). However, in scifi space battles you have warfare which tends to look more like naval battles in the 17th century than anything else. Inaccurate weapons. Point blank ranges. Etc. That sort of warfare was obsolete over a century ago. And even the close cousin in the form of long but still within visual range battleship battles were very rare even during WWII and terribly obsolete after that (the Falklands war being a decent example). The idea that a laser at a range where the enemy is visible with the naked eye is going to miss is ridiculous. Similarly, the idea that any missile fired would not be guided, or that a guided missile would miss at such close ranges, is equally ridiculous. But, SciFi isn't about predicting the future so much as it is about setting up a premise with which to tell a story, so I can forgive these shortcomings.
- Swizec 14y ago
  I would like to think that in the future battles will have to be fought at short range because everyone's scrambling technology will be so advanced the missile needs to get there before it can be made to miss its targets. For instance.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - kibwen 14y ago
    We may not even need guided missiles in future warfare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun "The United States Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division demonstrated an 8 MJ rail gun firing 3.2 kg projectiles in October 2006 as a prototype of a 64 MJ weapon to be deployed aboard Navy warships. [ ... ] Such weapons are expected to be powerful enough to do a little more damage than a BGM-109 Tomahawk missile at a fraction of the projectile cost. [ ... ] Its expected performance is a muzzle velocity over 5,800 m/s, accurate enough to hit a 5 metre target over 200 nmi (370 km) away while firing at 10 shots per minute." I'm sure that these hypothetical railgun projectiles have some method of in-flight correction, but we haven't forgotten how to do trigonometry since WWI. :)
javert 14y ago
From the title, I thought he was going to say: In the future, aircraft carriers will be space ships, not naval ships. The aircraft will fly down from the carrier to conventional enemy airspace, then return to the carrier in space. From what I know, that would actually solve some of the problems that current aircraft carriers are coming up against as enemy defense systems are currently evolving. I assume it would introduce some major new problems too, but I haven't checked the math. Anyway, it's a cool idea for a sci-fi story.
- dsr_ 14y ago
  An aircraft which is running out of fuel can generally glide a fair ways before landing. It's rather difficult to gain substantial amounts of altitude that way. Even before that, an aircraft which intends to return to a low-orbit base needs more fuel in reserve, which means that ranges are shorter and aircraft are comparatively heavier than their ground-based brethren. Nor is getting to "ground" from orbit free. You need to cancel your orbital velocity, or most of it, in order to manage a sustainable atmospheric re-entry. Sure, you can use parachutes later in the process, but they don't work in vacuum.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
robomartin 14y ago
If we do have battles in space it will be clear evidence that humanity has failed.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Humans will build colonies off-Earth. And there will be wars there. There will be poverty. There will be starvation. There will be crime. Humans are imperfect beings. This won't mean we've failed, it just means we're imperfect.
  - TeMPOraL 14y ago
    > it just means we're imperfect. And it also means we failed to fix that.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      Maybe it can't be done. I'm serious. The strategy of parasitism is the one strategy that has been around almost since the beginning of life on Earth. Any evolved system which is as efficient as possible is necessarily vulnerable to parasites and so constantly changing and adapting to repel parasites is considered to be one of the most important -- possibly the most important -- of evolutionary drivers. But parasitical behaviour is fractal. It doesn't just happen to organisms, it happens in social structures too. Sociopathology is a high successful minority strategy and so will always handsomely reward whoever rediscovers it once it has been defeated. And just as you can see the whole history of sexual reproduction as a response to parasitic organisms, you can see the rise and elaboration of civilisation as a response to parasitic social behaviour. It will never go away. (There's also the fact that we evolved as predators, and predators basically live in a strictly zero-sum world vs other members of their own species -- which has irreversibly shaped us to see things in those terms).
- johnrgrace 14y ago
  I can't think of a period when humans have NOT been a war with eachother. I'm sure when we get into space for real the wars will come with us.
jff 14y ago
I'm continually amused by the space battles in Star Trek. Two ships pull up within a few ship-lengths of each other, then lob torpedoes and phaser beams at each other. I seem to remember seeing in the old series something about how the phasers really get fired: Kirk gives the order, the weapons guy on the bridge presses a button, a buzzer or something sounds down in the "phaser room", and a guy down there presses yet another button which does the actual shooting. Similarly for torpedoes, except I seem to remember seeing them manually loading torpedoes into the tubes like it's a 1940s U-boat or something. Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime" has some very interesting space battles, based around the single conceit of "bobbles": impenetrable force shields which essentially separate their contents from the universe (and from time) for a pre-selected length of time. Space battles then become a tricky game of trying to catch your opponent when he's un-bobbled, while at the same time avoiding the bobbled nukes and other weapons he has strewn around when you were last bobbled.
- Angostura 14y ago
  Not to mention how the oposing force's crafts are always orientated in the same plane. Very rarely do you get someone attacking from 'above' I've never seen the Enterprise upside down, as ~I recall.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Generally, yes, though there are a few exceptions. Here's a good example from the series finale of The Next Generation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UspfD7SW5Ns http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UspfD7SW5Ns
  - mwill 14y ago
    This idea made me fall in love with Enders Game. I'm interested to see how they handle it in the movie.
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    If I recall right, Kirk maneuvered vertically in the Wrath of Khan. A quick google search points out Spock saying, "His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking."
cousin_it 14y ago
Gwern Branwen has a well-researched essay about more realistic space warfare: http://www.gwern.net/Colder%20Wars http://www.gwern.net/Colder%20Wars . His main conclusions are that planets have overpowered detection and defense capabilities against ships, but are underpowered against asteroids flung at relativistic speeds.
vacri 14y ago
The article reminds me that in the early 90s there were a pair of games - Elite and Frontier - which had realistic movement in space. The first half of every battle was spent in time dilation (you wouldn't want real time) while you and your opponent accelerated to generally match vectors. As for the 'carriers in space' thing that he thinks is incorrect, it's at odds with the rest of what he says. While he does defend his point with a function of sea carriers providing the interface between sea and air, that's not all they do. The aircraft carrier doesn't function as a battleship, the fighter aircraft do. The carrier functions as a support ship, an auxilliary, to the craft doing the fighting. Same in space. The large support carrier gets to hold the supplies, living quarters, extra fuel and so on, and the small craft contain the bare necessities for waging battle without having to lug around needless support slowing them down (remember also he talks of issues regarding mass and agility). I'm not saying that it's viable, just that there's more to a carrier than 'sea/air interface'.
- jessriedel 14y ago
  But the author's point is that the carrier size (as a fraction of total naval resources) concentrated in a single ship only makes sense when you need economies of scale for building a sea/air interface. And that heavy concentration in an ultimately vunerable place like the carrier is a defining feature of naval warfare. If we could launch single air planes from tiny cruisers efficiently, there would no carriers and naval strategy would be completely different. There aren't similar economies of scale for supplies, living quarters, extra fuel, and so on.
  - vacri 14y ago
    There aren't similar economies of scale for supplies, living quarters, extra fuel, and so on. There are - carriers have things like post offices and cinemas, which you don't get on smaller craft.
- z303 14y ago
  Elite was released in 1984 and did not have realistic movement (Oolite, an open source game in the same vein is well worth checking out ). I think you are talking about Frontier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters
lnanek2 14y ago
SF is entertainment. It isn't really surprising it neglects things like officers spending time managing and doing paperwork in favor of always being on watch, or avoiding issues of supplying the ships, and other topics. They aren't fun entertainment.
MaggieL 14y ago
See David Weber's "Honorverse" stories. (Yes, they eventually gain carriers, but it's plausible)
CodeMage 14y ago
I'm surprised that in all this discussion nobody even mentioned David Weber's Honor Harrington series. He tries to make his space battles as realistic as possible.
mfenniak 14y ago
I recommend the Honor Harrington novels for "plausible" Sci-Fi combat scenarios. Over the series of novels, the style of space combat changes dramatically multiple times as factions develop new technology, strategies, and tactics. They're quite a fun read.
- Flemlord 14y ago
  Highly recommended. They're also available for free in electronic form at the publisher's site. http://www.baen.com/series_list.asp?letter=H http://www.baen.com/series_list.asp?letter=H
  - protomyth 14y ago
    You can buy the later hardcovers and get a CD with the entire series on it. I do recommend Baen for books because they sell at pocket book prices and have no DRM.
- jamieb 14y ago
  Well the science was deliberately concocted to allow for the recreation of naval sail sea battles (ships that can only shoot "broadsides" because of the physics of the propulsion system, for example), but it was so well done that I didn't care (in fact is was rather fun).
nradov 14y ago
The definitive source for information about realistic spaceship combat is the Atomic Rockets web site. The webmaster set it up specifically to help authors get it right, since those are the type of SciFi books he likes to read. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php
jamieb 14y ago
Its a movie! Its all about the story! Galactica and Star Wars have "fighter planes" purely so that the narrative can have "Heros" and "Loose Cannons". Could Kara Thrace have had her mysterious journey if she was in a 100-crew missile cruiser? Could farm-boy-done-good take out the death star in even the millenium falcon - and would we care? And then there is Galactica itself: the lost ship, the fortress in the wilderness. I'm sure my literary friends could tell me the specific term for the narrative role it plays the way I can tell you which Design Pattern accept(foo) belongs too. I saw Ron Moore's GDC talk and nothing in Galactica was by accident except Boomer being a Cylon.

101 points by stargazer-3 14y ago

sown 14y ago

Reading the first couple of questions makes me think about how people of the late, late 18th century thought similarly about air ships and how air power would turn out to be. H.G. Wells wrote a book called "Clipper In The Clouds" and it also used navy themes influencing how people thought it would go.

reitzensteinm 14y ago
Anyone interested in this kind of thing should really check out the Hardcore History episode on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan: http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-42---(BLITZ)-Logical-Insanity/Second%20World%20War-World%20War%20Two-World%20War%20One http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-42---(BLITZ... It explores the history of air power as well, including the massively inflated early expectations that sound basically like modern nuclear war.

SparrowOS 14y ago

God says... unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed: and she knew no man. And it was a custom in Israel, 11:40 That the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year. 12:1 And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together, and went northward, and said unto Jephthah, Wherefore passedst thou over to fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? we will burn thine house upon thee with fire. 12:2 And Jephthah said unto them, I and my people were at great strife with the children of Ammon; and when I called you, ye delivered me not out of their hands. 12:3 And when I saw that ye delivered me not, I put my life in my hands, and passed over against the children of Ammon, and the LORD delivered them into my hand: wherefore then are ye come up unto me this day, to fight against me? 12:4 Then Jephthah gathered together all the men of Gilead, and fought with Ephraim: and the men of Gilead smote Ephraim, because they said, Ye Gileadites are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites, and among the Manassites. ---- That's from the Bible, picked with a quantum random number. God's talk is for a refined palette. You just enjoy His company. This is about disjoint facts. Women brought along, burning with fire and Jeps. As often as not, there is no unified message, just bits that please. Perhaps, it's about the world nations wanting to join together as one like Starship Troopers. Battlestar Galactica has fugatives, doesn't it? I don't watch.

csense 14y ago

From the article: > For a ship in the water, drag increases as the cube of speed...As your speed increases, your drag increases exponentially... He's being inconsistent. I've actually heard this a lot lately -- people will say something is "increasing exponentially" (i.e. has a curve of the form f(x) = k*b^x) when they really mean a much looser condition like "accelerating" (positive second derivative, which might be an exponential curve, but also might be one of many other curves, e.g. any polynomial of degree >= 2 with nonnegative coefficients). It's almost as bad as people who talk about the "least common denominator," but that's a rant for another post.

natrius 14y ago
I'm tempted to say that it's good enough for something where the reader won't need to do actual math with the information. He's just trying to get across the point that the drag increases faster than linearly. "Increases polynomially" would be more correct, but would get the message across to fewer readers. "Exponentially" is inaccurate, but conveys the message more accurately than any other phrasing that readily comes to mind.
- hollerith 14y ago
  >I'm tempted to say that it's good enough And I'm tempted to say that what distinguishes math from most other forms of expression is precision, and if you're not going to be precise, you should avoid blatantly mathematical language.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    Okay, you don't get to say "cube" or "exponentially". Rewrite those sentences, then.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

The interesting thing about warfare portrayed in fiction is that it's not only a very idealized model of warfare but it tends to be based on a zeitgeist which is easily decades if not centuries out of date. For example, modern naval warfare, setting aside aircraft even, is of the sort where the combatants generally fire missiles at each other across the horizon (or would be, if there was any significant amount of naval warfare between first world powers). However, in scifi space battles you have warfare which tends to look more like naval battles in the 17th century than anything else. Inaccurate weapons. Point blank ranges. Etc. That sort of warfare was obsolete over a century ago. And even the close cousin in the form of long but still within visual range battleship battles were very rare even during WWII and terribly obsolete after that (the Falklands war being a decent example). The idea that a laser at a range where the enemy is visible with the naked eye is going to miss is ridiculous. Similarly, the idea that any missile fired would not be guided, or that a guided missile would miss at such close ranges, is equally ridiculous. But, SciFi isn't about predicting the future so much as it is about setting up a premise with which to tell a story, so I can forgive these shortcomings.

Swizec 14y ago
I would like to think that in the future battles will have to be fought at short range because everyone's scrambling technology will be so advanced the missile needs to get there before it can be made to miss its targets. For instance.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- kibwen 14y ago
  We may not even need guided missiles in future warfare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun "The United States Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division demonstrated an 8 MJ rail gun firing 3.2 kg projectiles in October 2006 as a prototype of a 64 MJ weapon to be deployed aboard Navy warships. [ ... ] Such weapons are expected to be powerful enough to do a little more damage than a BGM-109 Tomahawk missile at a fraction of the projectile cost. [ ... ] Its expected performance is a muzzle velocity over 5,800 m/s, accurate enough to hit a 5 metre target over 200 nmi (370 km) away while firing at 10 shots per minute." I'm sure that these hypothetical railgun projectiles have some method of in-flight correction, but we haven't forgotten how to do trigonometry since WWI. :)

javert 14y ago

From the title, I thought he was going to say: In the future, aircraft carriers will be space ships, not naval ships. The aircraft will fly down from the carrier to conventional enemy airspace, then return to the carrier in space. From what I know, that would actually solve some of the problems that current aircraft carriers are coming up against as enemy defense systems are currently evolving. I assume it would introduce some major new problems too, but I haven't checked the math. Anyway, it's a cool idea for a sci-fi story.

dsr_ 14y ago
An aircraft which is running out of fuel can generally glide a fair ways before landing. It's rather difficult to gain substantial amounts of altitude that way. Even before that, an aircraft which intends to return to a low-orbit base needs more fuel in reserve, which means that ranges are shorter and aircraft are comparatively heavier than their ground-based brethren. Nor is getting to "ground" from orbit free. You need to cancel your orbital velocity, or most of it, in order to manage a sustainable atmospheric re-entry. Sure, you can use parachutes later in the process, but they don't work in vacuum.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

robomartin 14y ago

If we do have battles in space it will be clear evidence that humanity has failed.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Humans will build colonies off-Earth. And there will be wars there. There will be poverty. There will be starvation. There will be crime. Humans are imperfect beings. This won't mean we've failed, it just means we're imperfect.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  > it just means we're imperfect. And it also means we failed to fix that.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    Maybe it can't be done. I'm serious. The strategy of parasitism is the one strategy that has been around almost since the beginning of life on Earth. Any evolved system which is as efficient as possible is necessarily vulnerable to parasites and so constantly changing and adapting to repel parasites is considered to be one of the most important -- possibly the most important -- of evolutionary drivers. But parasitical behaviour is fractal. It doesn't just happen to organisms, it happens in social structures too. Sociopathology is a high successful minority strategy and so will always handsomely reward whoever rediscovers it once it has been defeated. And just as you can see the whole history of sexual reproduction as a response to parasitic organisms, you can see the rise and elaboration of civilisation as a response to parasitic social behaviour. It will never go away. (There's also the fact that we evolved as predators, and predators basically live in a strictly zero-sum world vs other members of their own species -- which has irreversibly shaped us to see things in those terms).
johnrgrace 14y ago
I can't think of a period when humans have NOT been a war with eachother. I'm sure when we get into space for real the wars will come with us.

jff 14y ago

I'm continually amused by the space battles in Star Trek. Two ships pull up within a few ship-lengths of each other, then lob torpedoes and phaser beams at each other. I seem to remember seeing in the old series something about how the phasers really get fired: Kirk gives the order, the weapons guy on the bridge presses a button, a buzzer or something sounds down in the "phaser room", and a guy down there presses yet another button which does the actual shooting. Similarly for torpedoes, except I seem to remember seeing them manually loading torpedoes into the tubes like it's a 1940s U-boat or something. Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime" has some very interesting space battles, based around the single conceit of "bobbles": impenetrable force shields which essentially separate their contents from the universe (and from time) for a pre-selected length of time. Space battles then become a tricky game of trying to catch your opponent when he's un-bobbled, while at the same time avoiding the bobbled nukes and other weapons he has strewn around when you were last bobbled.

Angostura 14y ago
Not to mention how the oposing force's crafts are always orientated in the same plane. Very rarely do you get someone attacking from 'above' I've never seen the Enterprise upside down, as ~I recall.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Generally, yes, though there are a few exceptions. Here's a good example from the series finale of The Next Generation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UspfD7SW5Ns http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UspfD7SW5Ns
- mwill 14y ago
  This idea made me fall in love with Enders Game. I'm interested to see how they handle it in the movie.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  If I recall right, Kirk maneuvered vertically in the Wrath of Khan. A quick google search points out Spock saying, "His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking."

cousin_it 14y ago

Gwern Branwen has a well-researched essay about more realistic space warfare: http://www.gwern.net/Colder%20Wars http://www.gwern.net/Colder%20Wars . His main conclusions are that planets have overpowered detection and defense capabilities against ships, but are underpowered against asteroids flung at relativistic speeds.

vacri 14y ago

The article reminds me that in the early 90s there were a pair of games - Elite and Frontier - which had realistic movement in space. The first half of every battle was spent in time dilation (you wouldn't want real time) while you and your opponent accelerated to generally match vectors. As for the 'carriers in space' thing that he thinks is incorrect, it's at odds with the rest of what he says. While he does defend his point with a function of sea carriers providing the interface between sea and air, that's not all they do. The aircraft carrier doesn't function as a battleship, the fighter aircraft do. The carrier functions as a support ship, an auxilliary, to the craft doing the fighting. Same in space. The large support carrier gets to hold the supplies, living quarters, extra fuel and so on, and the small craft contain the bare necessities for waging battle without having to lug around needless support slowing them down (remember also he talks of issues regarding mass and agility). I'm not saying that it's viable, just that there's more to a carrier than 'sea/air interface'.

jessriedel 14y ago
But the author's point is that the carrier size (as a fraction of total naval resources) concentrated in a single ship only makes sense when you need economies of scale for building a sea/air interface. And that heavy concentration in an ultimately vunerable place like the carrier is a defining feature of naval warfare. If we could launch single air planes from tiny cruisers efficiently, there would no carriers and naval strategy would be completely different. There aren't similar economies of scale for supplies, living quarters, extra fuel, and so on.
- vacri 14y ago
  There aren't similar economies of scale for supplies, living quarters, extra fuel, and so on. There are - carriers have things like post offices and cinemas, which you don't get on smaller craft.
z303 14y ago
Elite was released in 1984 and did not have realistic movement (Oolite, an open source game in the same vein is well worth checking out ). I think you are talking about Frontier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters

lnanek2 14y ago

SF is entertainment. It isn't really surprising it neglects things like officers spending time managing and doing paperwork in favor of always being on watch, or avoiding issues of supplying the ships, and other topics. They aren't fun entertainment.

MaggieL 14y ago

See David Weber's "Honorverse" stories. (Yes, they eventually gain carriers, but it's plausible)

CodeMage 14y ago

I'm surprised that in all this discussion nobody even mentioned David Weber's Honor Harrington series. He tries to make his space battles as realistic as possible.

mfenniak 14y ago

I recommend the Honor Harrington novels for "plausible" Sci-Fi combat scenarios. Over the series of novels, the style of space combat changes dramatically multiple times as factions develop new technology, strategies, and tactics. They're quite a fun read.

Flemlord 14y ago
Highly recommended. They're also available for free in electronic form at the publisher's site. http://www.baen.com/series_list.asp?letter=H http://www.baen.com/series_list.asp?letter=H
- protomyth 14y ago
  You can buy the later hardcovers and get a CD with the entire series on it. I do recommend Baen for books because they sell at pocket book prices and have no DRM.
jamieb 14y ago
Well the science was deliberately concocted to allow for the recreation of naval sail sea battles (ships that can only shoot "broadsides" because of the physics of the propulsion system, for example), but it was so well done that I didn't care (in fact is was rather fun).

nradov 14y ago

The definitive source for information about realistic spaceship combat is the Atomic Rockets web site. The webmaster set it up specifically to help authors get it right, since those are the type of SciFi books he likes to read. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php

jamieb 14y ago

Its a movie! Its all about the story! Galactica and Star Wars have "fighter planes" purely so that the narrative can have "Heros" and "Loose Cannons". Could Kara Thrace have had her mysterious journey if she was in a 100-crew missile cruiser? Could farm-boy-done-good take out the death star in even the millenium falcon - and would we care? And then there is Galactica itself: the lost ship, the fortress in the wilderness. I'm sure my literary friends could tell me the specific term for the narrative role it plays the way I can tell you which Design Pattern accept(foo) belongs too. I saw Ron Moore's GDC talk and nothing in Galactica was by accident except Boomer being a Cylon.