Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8082824" data-attributes="member: 16814">No, a missile's main limit to velocity is their power envelop.  Air resistance is a factor, but not the main one in space.  The time that a sprint missile burns is very limited -- available fuel is the primary limiter on engagement ranges for terrestrial missiles.  If you burn all your fuel to reach high V, you don't have much left to maneuver on final approach (missiles terrestrially use control surfaces against the air to maneuver, you need to use fuel in space do to the same and have thrusters appropriately positioned).  If you're carrying fuel for final approach, you have less for initial launch and your overall V will be lower due to the increased mass load of the fuel during boost.The other problem you're ignoring here is the evasion of the target.  If I launch a missile at a target, and the target is maneuvering, the missile has to anticipate a massive area of space depending on it's flight time because you're dealing with a volume that rapidly expands due to the nature of space -- I might be moving at 4k m/s in direction X, but you've already assumed that at launch, so whatever thrust I have available at the moment of launch is from a origin reference point -- slowing opens the volume as much as increasing speed along the original vector.  Add in Y and Z and the available volume can be huge.  The missile must not only boost to a high enough V to be the kinetic kill vehicle you're imagining, it must also have enough delta-V to be able to course correct across that entire volume. The other other problem is that missiles are fragile kills -- they cannot have a lot of mass or else they won't be able to boost or have enough delta V for final maneuvers so a hard hit will both disable and deflect it.  If you do this early enough, the dV from point-defense will result in a miss from the main vehicle.  And, the volume problem that the missile has works in reverse for the point defense -- they know where the missile needs to be to score a hit, and where it is now, and what pathways are available to connect those two within the missile's dV budgets.  The point defense problem against space missiles, at least the kinds you're postulating here, is pretty favorable to the defender.  And, if I score a counter-strike, having armor might very well mean that I survive contact with debris.  Under your restrictions, having armor certainly won't be the limiter on my maneuverability -- that being the frailty of the crew.  As such, having armor with glacis-style angles can work very well even against high-V, low mass projectiles.And, heat seeking in space is kinda, well, not very effective.  Unless my engines are pointed at you, their radiation is masked by the bulk of my ship.  Radar is, by far, the best control method for missile in space at the tech level you're talking about.  I mean, heat-seekers terrestrially have a low hit-percentage for anything other than rear-aspect engagements, except at big dumb targets like airliners.  I imagine that heat seeking space missile will be introduced to some pretty interesting counter-measures -- after all, if high velocity missiles are a thing, so are really bright IR decoys deployed and burning as bright as the drive on my ship -- at least for a enough seconds to distract a heat seeking missile for long enough to make it's dV budget not align with the target anymore.Marine vessels discarded armor because we stopped getting into close range gun fights.  It wasn't that pentrators become better, it's that they didn't need to be able to constantly surviving strikes.  The reason we don't externally armor naval vessels is not supporting your arguments.As for beam weaponry, lasers are heat transfer devices.  If you don't see the immediate danger of large amounts of added heat to a spaceship, and think that lasers are only cutting tools, then you need another think.</blockquote>

Verification