Worlds of Design: The Problem with Space Navies, Part 2

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.
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I confess that I am a big fan of naval history (the topic of my long ago doctoral dissertation is “Aircraft and the Royal Navy 1908 to 1919”), so I have some bias. Certainly if you work at it, you can deliberately make up science-fiction settings where ground forces and space fighters make sense. Glen Cook (known especially for the Black Company books) wrote a science fiction series (The Starfishers Trilogy) where he crafted the setting to enable spaceships to operate analogously to WW II submarines! You can do that kind of thing for fighters and aircraft carriers, if you really try.

Picking up where we left off, here’s three more issues to consider when launching your space armada.

Automation​

Automated aerial adjuncts to modern fighters are part of all plans for real-world sixth generation fighters. How well this will work out is unknown, but in the long run we may have fighters that have no crew, unlike the starfighters of science fiction. In effect, a starfighter is just a big, guided missile with good onboard intelligence.

Jack Campbell in his novels of the “Lost Fleet” presents a scenario of an automated fleet going rogue that represents the fear anyone ought to have of providing broad autonomy to artificial intelligence (think Terminator movies). Yet where automation can be used at less-than-human-intelligence, it will be. You won’t have giant warships with tens of thousands of crew because so much will be automated.

Boarding and Ramming​

Given that space is BIG, and that weapons tend to become more destructive over time, boarding is pretty unlikely. You can arrange a setting specifically to enable this (perhaps through Star-Trek like “transporters”). But in any likely situation, no boarding.

Historically, boarding action depended on the efficacy of whatever counted as “guns” on warships. When rowed ancient galleys had no “guns” but arrows or the occasional ballista/catapult, ramming was often preferred. But most of the time battles came down to boarding, a sort of land battle at sea. When artillery became more destructive in the Age of Sail, boarding was an activity after the enemy had surrendered, owing to artillery damage. Pirates relied on boarding because they didn’t have much artillery, but neither did their victims – and the pirates made sure to have a lot more men in their typically small, fast, shallow-draft ships.

Ramming was necessary when it was virtually the only way that a ship could damage another. But in outer space why would you ram the enemy when you can nail them with a big missile and avoid damage to your ship? Quite apart from the difficulty of hitting an enemy ship (again, space is BIG). Ramming scored hits at sea because water ships are hard to maneuver at the best of times, and all actions were at close quarters. Spaceships will be more maneuverable and combat ranges will likely be very far.

Bigger is Not Better​

Science fiction is littered with “10 mile long spaceships” and other monstrosities. Yes, bigger can be better up to a point - the point at which you’re putting too many of your eggs in one basket and too much of your effort into defending your very large ships. Moreover, very large ships would normally cost more to move around in terms of energy and other supplies. And if you have too few ships, you cannot cover all your responsibilities. If starfighters are a viable danger for large ships, then having a few large ships is less wise than having more but smaller ships. It’s another case where the “rule of cool” may take precedence, that is, super large ships are cool. (Let’s not even talk about the Death Stars.)

Any mobile platform like a tank or plane or (space)ship is a compromise amongst mobility, offensive capability, and defensibility/survivability. At some point ships that are too big (or too small) won’t compromise well. Ships should be large enough to serve their missions, and no larger.

Games these days are a compromise between realism and what looks cool (on screen and in other media). Game designers and world builders do well to consider both.

Your Turn: How realistic are your space navies?

 

[Jeffzilla]

In the future, we shouldn’t expect our instincts of violence to diminish, but it is sensible to think that we’d show the same restraints as we do now.

I have a difficult time with this premise. It’s difficult to cite specific examples without invoking real-world politics and risking the ire of this site’s fantastic moderation team, so I’ll only say that global cooperation and commitment to international order seem to follow cycles. I think I can also safely say that we’ve seen nuclear weapons regimes and arms agreements which once seemed foundational to world order scrapped just in the last couple of decades, and that ‘the restraints we have’ today aren’t even as strong as they were twenty years ago, although I work in aerospace and understand that this is as much because some aspects of those agreements have been superseded by new technology as it is that for geopolitical reasons several major global powers simply didn’t want to comply with them any longer. On a somewhat related note, a modern developed country just announced that it’s exiting the treaty on antipersonnel land mines this year, in 2025. If that trendline continues we’ll have even fewer constraints upon the way that wars are conducted in another twenty years than we do today— let alone two hundred or two thousand or twenty thousand years in the future. So I guess what I’m really saying is that at a time when international conventions are literally on the wane— right now— and in an era when we’ve seen several nations violate old norms of international conduct and then shrug off any blowback with impunity, even to the point of becoming pariah states or experiencing total separation from global financial networks— it seems like an anachronism to point to the world order created between the 1940s and 1990s and suggest that it’s reasonable to assume that baselines of behavior which that order established but which aren’t even being observed in their entirety today will continue unbroken into both foreseeable and distant futures. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to assume anything at all about the future. And one of the things that I really love about good science fiction is that it often finds ways to challenge those assumptions, anyway.

 

[Laurefindel]

I have a difficult time with this premise. It’s difficult to cite specific examples without invoking real-world politics and risking the ire of this site’s fantastic moderation team, so I’ll only say that global cooperation and commitment to international order seem to follow cycles. I think I can also safely say that we’ve seen nuclear weapons regimes and arms agreements which once seemed foundational to world order scrapped just in the last couple of decades, and that ‘the restraints we have’ today aren’t even as strong as they were twenty years ago, although I work in aerospace and understand that this is as much because some aspects of those agreements have been superseded by new technology as it is that for geopolitical reasons several major global powers simply didn’t want to comply with them any longer. On a somewhat related note, a modern developed country just announced that it’s exiting the treaty on antipersonnel land mines this year, in 2025. If that trendline continues we’ll have even fewer constraints upon the way that wars are conducted in another twenty years than we do today— let alone two hundred or two thousand or twenty thousand years in the future. So I guess what I’m really saying is that at a time when international conventions are literally on the wane— right now— and in an era when we’ve seen several nations violate old norms of international conduct and then shrug off any blowback with impunity, even to the point of becoming pariah states or experiencing total separation from global financial networks— it seems like an anachronism to point to the world order created between the 1940s and 1990s and suggest that it’s reasonable to assume that baselines of behavior which that order established but which aren’t even being observed in their entirety today will continue unbroken into both foreseeable and distant futures. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to assume anything at all about the future. And one of the things that I really love about good science fiction is that it often finds ways to challenge those assumptions, anyway.

I’m with you about good sci-fi challenging assumptions. I think it’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to answer the OP’s question.

As for the rest, I agree not to do into real world’s politics and let it be.

 

[Joerg Baumgartner]

In SF role-playing games, fleet encounters serve as a reminder of sovereign or projected power of some faction or authority, usually strong enough to quench murder-hobo behavior.

Most routine player character interaction with space navies will be with border control (possibly sealing offensive weaponry as a prerequisite for entry), mandatory pilot transfer for system entry (possibly backed up by marines able to de-activate the bridge), and/or customs control checking for contraband and unpaid fines or arrest warrants. While the player vessel(s) might out-gun the inspection vessel(s), typically the inspection vessels will have some higher fire-power back-up, although possibly not within immediate reach. Still, the typical assumption is that whatever detachment of the space navy either in place or sent in retribution will be too tough for the player vessel to survive in direct confrontation. A hit-and-run operation or a false flag or stealth insertion might still be possible with some risk during retreat.

Player-controlled (or -inhabited) vessels might take on military supply contracts or participate in personnel transport or evacuation.

Another typical navy encounter would be a battlefield aftermath - salvage activities (possibly humanitarian), intel-gathering.

Space navies (or the authorities behind them) might hire independent contractors or enlist them for special operations. Depending on the setting, the player characters may be veterans with reservist status or susceptible to general mobilization (or taxable for avoidance thereof).

A party might undergo basic or advanced military training, possibly as draftees, possibly as infiltrators, possibly even as a mission reward to acquire new or improved abilities. Their vessel might be pressed into auxiliary forces, (temporarily) equipped with military upgrades. Or they might gain access to surplus military vessels capable of commercial activities as reserve units, possibly with the hard-ware requiring activation codes sent along with the orders, and/or overrides for critical situations resulting in subsequent martial court oversight. (And of course all manner of illegal overrides to bypass that kind of oversight...)

A typical literary theme but a lot harder to put into role-playing is participation of the protagonists in cutting-edge military research and development. Field-testing prototypes is about the closest adventure that may result from such activity, the rest falls more into manor-development activities.

Player characters in charge of at least a manor or a local settlement or base might be wielding a (typically small) navy themselves, possibly also in charge of supply, replacement, recruitment, training and expenses. Manorial administration is mostly a chore ideally happening in the background, but creating role-playing activities in the nature of missions - gathering intel, diplomacy and supply deals, development activities and trouble-shooting, rescue or ransom missions, policing (including putting out bounties or bounty hunting), and directing a navy can be similar - employing a command staff that deals with minutia while pestering you for more supplies or improvements, or more ships or stationary defenses, or even bases, yards etc.
Both Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 are such manorial settings.

With all science-fiction, there are setting questions that need to be answered first before you can answer how (internally) realistic your navy (and setting in general) can be.

Of course, you can skip these questions and go straight to option 5, all rule of cool. If you enjoy more consistent settings, some of this world building should be addressed.

What does the presence of civilization in space look like?
Does most of the population live on planets and larger moons, or is there a sprawling civilization of space habitats (artificial stations, O'Neill cylinders, hollowed out asteroids)?
Do spaceships routinely land on planets, or do they dock at orbital transfer stations instead, transshipping to orbital shuttles or beanstalks? Do they carry their own drop shuttles?

What is the nature of the civilization (or organization) that maintains the navy?
Does the navy represent and get funded by a sovereign (or colonial) government? Does it hire out its services?
Where and whom does the navy recruit? What are the required qualifications for personnel, how much training and schooling is done by the navy?
Does it own or control its construction and maintenance yards, its supply lines? Does it provide civic amenities (housing, schooling, medical care, jobs) for its personnel and next of kin?

The Human Factor
What roles does human (or otherwise sophont) personnel and/or crew play in naval operations? To what degree is the navy automated?
While clearly a parody, think of the robot fights in The Ice Pirates from 1984 for a possible role of humans merely in repair and remote command functions.
What is the naval doctrine on acceptable losses?

Space weaponry and protective systems
Space is big, and projecting destructive force across huge distances, possibly with sensor lags in the range of minutes or hours due to speed of light limitations, creates targeting challenges.
Are there defensive measures other than massive and/or ablative armor? Having worked with lasers in lab scale, the formation of ablation plasma at the impact site counteracts the penetration of a laser pulse, distributing quite a bit of the incoming energy to the adjacent surface. The incoming photons may be chosen to optimal interaction with the target armor material, or they may be chosen for maximum penetration and weaker interaction with the target armor material while still meaningfully interacting with the targeted systems' material.
Is there some kind of shield technology, perhaps plasma held in place by projectors? If there is, can it be maintained indeterminately while there is energy, and what are the energy demands?

Is space combat attritional on the ships or are plasma clouds the typical result?
How lethal is space combat? How typical are catastrophic failures (rupture of fusion bottles, warp core breaks) in space combat? How long can a battered vessel keep fighting, how long can crew trapped on a battered vessel survive and possibly repair enough to relocate to a yard?
The original Battlestar Galactica showed the scene where the middle of three Cylon fighters in tight formation turns into a plasma cloud at least twice per episode (in addition to the repeating intro). Fighter pilots expect to be able to fly through the plasma cloud after their beam weapon hit, without any care for remaining debris. Important characters might manage to eject from their fighter before it turns into a plasma cloud.
There might be a naval doctrine for such glass cannons. It certainly applies to unmanned missiles (although one might argue that an on-board AI may qualify as a kamikaze pilot, even if only a clone from a backed-up system).
Another question of doctrine is the totality of war and cost-profit considerations for the necessary strength to avoid conquest/hostile occupation or annihilation.
Do naval battles resemble World of Warcraft strike team functions - close order tanks too powerful to ignore but too hard to destroy immediately, and basically unarmored ranged damage dealers remaining away from enemy lines, or do they rather resemble Starcraft's zerg rushes with cheap, easily replaceable light units and a lot of unit attrition?
Do the repair cost of damaged units surpass their replacement cost? Does the same go for crew or high-tech payload? What is the actual cost of saturation attacks?
If the civilization values individuality, do they have a form of back-up of the individuality of their military personnel? Is the military (predominantly) crewed by androids or clones with copies of the individual consciousness (or, in Cherryh's Union fleet or the Star Wars Clone Wars, adult clone bodies with mass-produced specialized consciousness)?
How much body enhancement do individuals in the military undergo? Are they even recognizable as members of their species, or are we talking about cyborgs or ships' avatars?

Modes of FTL traffic and communication
Probably the core question for the setting design. What kind of craft can use what kind of FTL traffic?
Babylon 5 half-heartedly uses gates into hyperspace used by civilian transports while giving military vessels with sufficient energy generation the ability to open hyperspace windows. Hyperspace itself is shown as a realm topologically connected to normal space, but with fog-like phenomena that limit detection range. There are civilizations that can rendezvous or hide in hyperspace, possibly even colonize it.
C.J. Cherryh's Union/Alliance space has a hyperspace drive that requires a (known) target mass to align the transitioning vessel's vector to, resulting in re-appearance in an approach vector to that mass outside of a "hyper-limit" that prevents hyperspace transitions. The hyper-drives in Traveller appear to work on a similar assumption. Cherryh also allows aborted hyper-drive transition to consume kinetic energy on the approach vector, and as an advanced use of the hyper-drive short jumps only a few parsecs out of the system. No key-holes, but somewhat predictable vectors of approach and departure.
Depending on whether there is a hyper-limit and the actual extent of it, in-system hyperspace traffic might be desirable. Gas giants possibly orbit outside of the solar limit and provide their own anchoring mass. Gas giant positions might alter the nature of the anchoring mass.
If there is something like a hyper-limit, there might be technologies to interdict hyper transit and to interrupt hyperspace traffic into a defined region of space. Sufficiently advanced technology might allow the creation of pockets in Space-Time with limited access interfaces.
Settings with keyhole technologies (or passive assist for hyperspace traffic) might use these to isolate a portion of their real-estate from the rest of the universe. Space traffic in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan universe uses a network of paired jump coordinates with specific gravitational characteristics, although its early expansion into space used slower-than-light generation ships e.g. to establish Beta Colony. Such jump junction coordinates keep getting mapped and explored, and may become in-operational or might be subject to cycles of activity (e.g. three-body conformations).
There may be (often restricted) applications of keyhole jump technology that allows the exit coordinates of a jump to deviate from the official keyhole by some distance, or that allows artificial keyholes to be placed either independently from other keyholes or as a parasite for alternative exit points. The jump network in the games of the (early, at least) X-series works with paired gates and an (initially experimental) jump drive allowing departure to a gate (or buoy) coordinate from anywhere.

How important is inertia?
Does the setting have artificial gravity control? If so, how focussed, how small, how finely tune-able? At what kind of energy cost?
Many computer space games impose speed limits on the vessels in the simulation relative to the local inertial system. They tend to ignore the rocket equation (although they tend to still provide some jet-engine aesthetic), suggesting some form of reaction-less drive, possibly interacting with local dark matter or some other unobtainium.
Elite, the ancestor of these games, used a vector-based inertial simulation and highly efficient yet still fuel-thirsty reaction drives.

What is the purpose of the navy?
System protection against raiders and invaders?
Power projection and patrols along the trade lanes?
Travel interdiction - blockades, hunting smugglers, attacks on logistical routes?
Escort duty?
Picket duty (hold vs. light aggression while reporting, retreat from strong aggression and reporting)
Clearing the system of uncontrolled rocks and wreckage?
Exploration and observation of other navies?

 

[Joerg Baumgartner]

I decided to vote "a balance of realistic and cool". While I grew up and lived in a naval port (Kiel, Germany) for most of my life, I never served in the navy (or any other sort of military), and only rarely worked as a contractor on naval facilities or ship-yards. That means I am rather ignorant of actual life and service in a navy beyond first hand accounts and whatever literature, infotainment and entertainment provides in the way of second-hand and fictional accounts.

I have played space fleet simulations, including board games like Starfire, Fasa's Leviathan or a prototype in Sandy Petersen's Hyperspace setting, and computer games with fleet management like Homeworld or the empire-building portion of Egosoft's X-universe fielding largely "AI"-run units in tactical combat defending against game-engine run opponents.

As a GM, I have used known settings like Star Wars, 40K or pastiches thereof. Putting a single space vessel in player hands can be harder than having to coordinate a bunch of player-controlled vessels or even wings through a potential or actual conflict with regard to giving fair spotlight time to the players.

As a world/setting builder, I aim for a medium-hard not quite transhuman space opera setting with either limited interaction with other advanced technological species or significant integration of alien species and technologies. Rather than humans with colorful make-up, foam latex or silicone attachments to represent alien species I will take modified humanity by engineered or generational adaptation to different environments.

 

[overgeeked]

Realism has almost no place in the kinds of entertainment I like.

 

[Hussar]

Any mobile platform like a tank or plane or (space)ship is a compromise amongst mobility, offensive capability, and defensibility/survivability. At some point ships that are too big (or too small) won’t compromise well. Ships should be large enough to serve their missions, and no larger.

Again, not to sound like a broke record here, but, so much of this depends on the assumptions of the setting.

The notion of mobility, for example, depends on how things are actually traveling. If you have anti-gravity effects, then size no longer is realistically a limit. Or, another example, is the Allistar Reynold's series where the various space faring factions have the ability to weaponize stars. At that point, any notion of "realism" is off in the corner sobbing quietly to itself. The various factions may as well be gods at that point.

Even at the Star Trek level, the sheer amount of options available is insane. Bombard a planet? Why bother? Kidnap a few of the locals, do a bit of jiggery pokery with genetics, and plant a gene bomb in the population that goes off in about six or seven generations, completely wiping out the population, or rendering the population infertile or mutating them Genestealer style and converting the planet.

The Alien franchise posits a sort of bioweapon approach like this. Or are we positing berserkers a la Saberhagen where you have a faction that pummels space faring races back into the stone ages? Borg? Heck, Gundam (my daughters have just discovered the shows and are on a massive binge watch) where you don't really have aliens at all, and all the action is within a single star system?

On and on. Giant, ring world ships, mobile dyson spheres? I mean, at that point, you have a mobile base that is so large that it's passage would destabilize the orbits of the planets in the system. The options really are endless.

 

[dragoner]

Plausibility and Play-ability is what I shot for in Kosmic/Solis People of the Sun, also design elements like big fonts. Both I have been complimented on so I hit my mark. It's a great value.

 

[Hussar]

Another thought I had about space navies.

Physics are going to play such a huge role. The presumption that an enemy could approach from any direction depends so much on how the ships move. In something like Star Wars or Star Trek, where the ships effectively "teleport" to a location, sure, that's going to mean that ships can approach from any direction. OTOH, if you actually have to account for orbital mechanics and whatnot, planets should have days, weeks, even months of warning of an approaching ship and, because of orbital mechanics, the path of that ship is easily calculated. Meaning that an approaching fleet may be meeting several weeks/months worth of "chaff" thrown up in the path, traveling at nearly relativistic speeds.

Basically, all this has to be hammered out at the outset.

 

[talien]

Another thought I had about space navies.

Physics are going to play such a huge role. The presumption that an enemy could approach from any direction depends so much on how the ships move. In something like Star Wars or Star Trek, where the ships effectively "teleport" to a location, sure, that's going to mean that ships can approach from any direction. OTOH, if you actually have to account for orbital mechanics and whatnot, planets should have days, weeks, even months of warning of an approaching ship and, because of orbital mechanics, the path of that ship is easily calculated. Meaning that an approaching fleet may be meeting several weeks/months worth of "chaff" thrown up in the path, traveling at nearly relativistic speeds.

Basically, all this has to be hammered out at the outset.

This never gets old:

 

[Jeffzilla]

This never gets old:

View attachment 415720

A classic.

This is another reason why I love the way ship encounters are presented in the Expanse. A ship using thrust to turn 90 degrees will actually keep flying sideways in the same direction until its main drive gains enough momentum to start propelling it in the new direction, and even then the ship will initially be moving diagonally relative to its facing. So not only is a ship's facing in space completely random, but also the direction of its travel might or might not match that facing.