Worlds of Design: The Problem with Space Navies, Part 1

How would “space navies” even work?
starship-2027579_1280.jpg

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

A Change of Space​

When I write a Worlds of Design column about worldbuilding I usually think in terms of fantasy rather than science fiction. Today I have a sci-fi topic, how “space navies” are likely to work.

In this discussion I assume a sci-fi setting is the default. This is not as “locked in” as the default fantasy setting (Spelljammer comes to mind), so there are lots of sci-fi situations where something would change the circumstances. (See Is There a Default Sci-Fi Setting?)

As a reminder, I favor believability in my tabletop role-playing games, much as many people do when they read a novel. The “rule of cool” is rarely applied in my games (that is, “if it’s cool, use it”). How you play your games is up to you, of course.

Nuke it From Orbit, the Only Way to be Sure​

Land-based forces are sitting ducks. When the enemy fleet has control of your local solar system space, in most science fiction milieux, the defenders of the system are doomed. Simply put, there’s rarely a good reason to put large numbers of troops on a planet, thereby putting them in harms way and causing significant loss of life on both sides.

This point of view is antithetical to many fiction writers. Think of how many science-fiction stories, especially military science fiction, are about ground forces fighting on planets in the distant future. Frequently, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense; the authors do it anyway in order to provide personal stories of heroism and cleverness. But that doesn’t make it believable.

Non-mobile orbital defenses suffer similarly; they can be crushed by kinetic energy attacks. It doesn't matter how big your “orbital fort” is, even the size of a Death Star, if it can’t maneuver smartly, then it’s going to be destroyed by a competent enemy fleet without much risk to themselves. If you imagine what it would be like on earth to be bombarded by a bunch of (aimed and accelerated) small asteroids or comets, you get the general idea here.

One reason large land/planet-based Armed Forces might make sense is when the attackers are unwilling to “burn off” the planet, or at least to subject it to very damaging bombardment. Whether that burning off is from nuclear weapons or, more practically, from the kinetic energy of large high-speed objects propelled toward the planet, does not matter significantly, because there is no practical defense. So if it’s humans against aliens who don’t care whether we die, ground defenses don’t make sense.

If the attackers are unwilling to bombard a planet, then it will be necessary for attacker ground forces to invade, and defending ground-based forces make some sense. Though without control of outer space, they’d be like WW II forces whose opponents have air supremacy, not merely superiority.

Star Wars Lied​

The second antithetical assertion to make about sci-fi combat is that starfighters are unnecessary. They exist because “World War II in outer space” is much easier to relate to than the much more realistic and terrifying world of combat in a zero-gravity vacuum.

For movies like Star Wars, starfighters make it easy for the audience to focus on a specific pilots in the chaotic mess of combat, complete with “guns” and dogfighting. (But often without wingmen!) Yet dogfighting went out of fashion during WW II (in favor of boom and zoom), and the original F4 Phantoms of the Vietnam War days had no guns because designers (prematurely) thought that all air fighting would be done with long range missiles. More than 50 years later, it’s mostly all missiles.

Functionally, there is rarely a place for fighters in space combat. How do they damage the big ships without destroying themselves? Why don’t you just use unmanned, possibly autonomous, missiles fired from large ships, not manned fighters, that can crash into their targets? And if there are fighters in space, they will certainly not look like jets. With no air in outer space, and large ships unlikely to descend into atmosphere, the most efficient ship shape is a roughshod sphere. But spheres rarely look cool. Star Wars streamlining especially doesn’t make sense, as warships can slowly float anywhere in atmosphere, and won’t meet much of the atmospheric resistance that requires streamlined hulls.

And carriers? In the real world, aircraft carriers were distinct from other vessels because a full flight deck was required. This won’t be true in airless, weightless outer space. So even if starfighters are somehow functional, any sufficiently large ship will be able to carry some, and no ship needs to be entirely devoted to fighters.

In function, there is no analogy to air(plane) power in outer space. Airplanes (in WW II and today) are much cheaper than large ships, much faster, but of limited duration before they need to return to a base. Yet they can destroy an enormous ship with bombs, torpedoes, missiles. In the modern world we have air, sea, and land power. In space we only have land power and space power (equivalent to sea power, but more, well, powerful).

The ongoing sci-fi series Ascent to Empire by David Weber and Richard Fox presents a possible justification for carriers, though not fighter carriers per se. Interstellar drives require a 450 meter wide “fan.” So interstellar ships are very large and expensive. This means starships are limited to a few merchants and liners, and to faster-than-light carriers (perhaps as fabulously expensive as fleet carriers today except there are a lot more planets to pay to build them). The carriers are heavily armed and armored, but also carry large warships attached and launched in solar system space (no interstellar drives, making them more efficient weapons platforms).

Space Is BIG​

Space is big. Really big. “Guns” are unlikely to be used instead of missiles, though that’s heavily technology dependent. (“Guns” as in anything where the “projectile” is not self-propelled and probably not self-guided.)

In WW II, offensive weapons at sea were projectiles from guns, bombs dropped by planes, and torpedoes. The analogy for the latter two in space is missiles, likely guided missiles since an unguided missile is as likely to miss as a projectile. Missiles can be as large as the largest object a warship can carry.

In space, anything that cannot change direction during travel is likely to miss by many miles as its target maneuvers. Even fast-as-light lasers (or “blasters”) take time to get to a target at spatial distances (e.g. one-and-a-third seconds for moonlight to reach the nearby earth, eight-and-a-third minutes from the sun to earth). Air-to-air missiles today can fly more than a hundred miles, and it will be far more where gravity is absent as missiles can coast without expending fuel.

Similarly, detection of incoming enemy ships is likely to be very short-ranged, in spatial terms, like near the outer planetary orbit of a star system, or less. That’s still enormous coverage. This makes defense of your systems problematic. If you don’t know where the enemy is, even vaguely, how can you place your mobile defenses? At worst, one large enemy force can bounce around among your systems and you won’t be able to defend any of them sufficiently.

Space is BIG and defenders do well to plan accordingly – less trying to “patrol space” and more trying to defend planets by keeping their bases close to home. We'll pick up this discussion with three more ways a realistic space navy would operate in the next article.

Your Turn: Do you prefer “WW II in space" or more realistic combat for your sci-fi campaigns?
 

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Lewis Pulsipher

Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio

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Fundamentally, within real world known physics, lasers and missiles are about the only real ways to do it.
And lasers have one big problem. Distance. Lasers disperse over distance. If you fire normal green laser from Earth to Moon, with beam diameter at source 0,005m, it would have diameter of 100km when it reaches moon. And while energy is same at source and end point, it is so spread out at end, it doesn't do any damage. You need high power and big aperture to do any damage over large distances ( we are talking continous GW of power, or at least high MW, with 30-100m apertures). Detection is fairly easy in space, even very long distance ones. But most engagement ranges would start at few thousand kilometers since it gives you enough time to react defensively and lasers and missiles are still viable as offensive weapons. Come to close, you loose maneuvering time. Too far, lasers disperse too much and projectiles take too long. And in that scenario, fighters are less viable. How much fuel can they carry to traverse distance, attack, and come back?

Scariest things in that scenario would be RKV. Relativistic kill vehicles. Solid projectiles that are speed up to fraction of C. Depending on mass and speed, you can pretty fast get into kiloton explosions. 100kg at 0.003C give around 10 kiloton (on par with tactical nuke). And scary part is, if you can calculate trajectory of target, you can shoot it from tens of thousands of kilometers and it will reach it before it's crew has time to react.
 

And in that scenario, fighters are less viable. How much fuel can they carry to traverse distance, attack, and come back?
In that scenario, autonomous RKVs probably fill essentially the same role fighters do now.

Despite the vulnerability of planets to bombardment, defense probably has certain edges. The system can be seeded with passive unmanned sentries that would be nigh impossible to detect once they cool to near the background radiation. If they're cheap enough, they can be deployed in such numbers that nothing can enter the system undetected, maybe even attacked by these space mines (possibly each carrying a one-shot laser or other weapon powered by an explosion that destroys the weapon but provides it with enough momentary juice to do real damage).

The problem of getting enough energy and a large enough aperture to power an effective long-range laser is also eased tremendously by taking it off a spaceship and putting it on an asteroid. If the platform is unmanned, then concerns like radiation exposure and survivability don't matter nearly as much.

Unless we're dealing with a really alien psychology, you don't need to obliterate the incoming enemy, you only need to make the cost of winning higher than the victory is worth.
 

Which is why STA has secondary characters. The player with the Doc can grab some junior engineer and keep the player busy. Or a Security goon and go on the boarding party. My last campaign, everyone had their favorite Secondary Characters... so, even with a 7-player party, nobody was out of the action in combat. We did have two science officers passing targeting data to two weapons officers in one fight. One for torpedoes, one for phasers...


The thing is, while a given player doesn't "own" a secondary cast character, in practice, they're often left to specific players, and rapidly become a part of the player's approach to adventures. Which is also how we ended up with 3 additional medical officers and 3 additional Engineers. And 3 yeomen. But no additional ship-drivers.

That 7 player group had more than a dozen SCCs. Not a one of them used as an NPC by me.
The Captain was a PC, her Yeoman was an NPC, and was also the COB.
I have heard so many good things about Star Trek Adventures. I got to play a couple of sessions of it and REALLY enjoyed it. Next time it comes on sale somewhere, I think I'll dive in.
 

I have heard so many good things about Star Trek Adventures. I got to play a couple of sessions of it and REALLY enjoyed it. Next time it comes on sale somewhere, I think I'll dive in.
I'll note also: the budget for SCC's in a given adventure is ship-set; I basically stopped counting because it didn't matter as much as keeping relevant characters available... and only once did it go above a cruiser's rating.
Also, in one campaign, a PC died; he opted to take his favorite SCC and add the missing stats/disciplines points and continue on as was.
Dune makes even more use of secondary characters...
 

I have heard so many good things about Star Trek Adventures. I got to play a couple of sessions of it and REALLY enjoyed it. Next time it comes on sale somewhere, I think I'll dive in.
I haven't had the opportunity to play it myself, but I have the 1e rules and I've seen some actual plays (Geek & Sundry had one before they collapsed and most of that particular crew moved to AltHaven). It seems very Star Trek-y, with the primary focus being on mid-era Star Trek (TNG/DS9/VOY). If that's what you want to play, and if the GM has the proper mindset to run that sort of thing, it seems great. But I think it will implode spectacularly if everyone isn't on board with what's going on.
 

I haven't had the opportunity to play it myself, but I have the 1e rules and I've seen some actual plays (Geek & Sundry had one before they collapsed and most of that particular crew moved to AltHaven). It seems very Star Trek-y, with the primary focus being on mid-era Star Trek (TNG/DS9/VOY). If that's what you want to play, and if the GM has the proper mindset to run that sort of thing, it seems great. But I think it will implode spectacularly if everyone isn't on board with what's going on.
If the GM is on the ball, one can run it in any era. I've run TOS, Disco, and post-DS9 campaigns, it's not a big issue.

It does work when players opt to not use stored metacurrency; momentum thus either buys traits or info, and all rolls are 2d20, plus helper 1d20 and ship/computer 1d20, both using their stats. It's hard mode; and essentially, the Captain's Log system does just that.

If the GM isn't grasping it, it does fall apart.

If a player or two isn't familiar with the Genre of Space Opera, they're going to struggle, yes. If they're not familiar with the given timeline era and its tech, the GM may have to adjust their ideas a bit or explain the unusually high difficulty. My last campaign did have a player whose only reference was ST 2008. No problems in the Disco S2 setting we were using; two more of the 7 had only TNG and DS9 experience; they very quickly decided to watch a few choice TOS eps...
 

Which is why STA has secondary characters. The player with the Doc can grab some junior engineer and keep the player busy. Or a Security goon and go on the boarding party. My last campaign, everyone had their favorite Secondary Characters... so, even with a 7-player party, nobody was out of the action in combat. We did have two science officers passing targeting data to two weapons officers in one fight. One for torpedoes, one for phasers...
Oh yeah, I've played a ton of STA and as someone who's GMed a lot and also played in games where there were secondary characters, I don't mind doing that. However, I've encountered plenty of players who really don't and want to focus on their primary character.
 

If the GM is on the ball, one can run it in any era. I've run TOS, Disco, and post-DS9 campaigns, it's not a big issue.
Sure, I mostly meant that since 1e was published in 2017, just before Discovery came along, TNG-era is sort of the assumed default of the book with TOS and Enterprise as options. But it works fine in any era.
It does work when players opt to not use stored metacurrency; momentum thus either buys traits or info, and all rolls are 2d20, plus helper 1d20 and ship/computer 1d20, both using their stats. It's hard mode; and essentially, the Captain's Log system does just that.

If the GM isn't grasping it, it does fall apart.

If a player or two isn't familiar with the Genre of Space Opera, they're going to struggle, yes. If they're not familiar with the given timeline era and its tech, the GM may have to adjust their ideas a bit or explain the unusually high difficulty. My last campaign did have a player whose only reference was ST 2008. No problems in the Disco S2 setting we were using; two more of the 7 had only TNG and DS9 experience; they very quickly decided to watch a few choice TOS eps...
The thing is that Star Trek is kind of distinct in its genre. If you try to play it as Star Wars or, Q forbid, D&D, things will go wrong. You need to have that exploration/sense of wonder thing going on, with the occasional morality play, diplomacy or action-oriented scenarios.
 


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