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With regards to 3D movement and positioning in space...

Spacecraft attitude determination and control is complicated, and involves a lot of math. I'm currently taking a class on it!

For all intents and purposes, the 2D abstraction is entirely adequate for simulating space warfare for a wargame.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:


A flattened pyramid could engage with all batteries forward, no batteries aft, and 1/4 to 1/2 batteries to any given side. A flattened shape reduces its profile to incoming fire.

That doesn't sound too dissimilar to a Star Destroyer!

 Stux wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:


A flattened pyramid could engage with all batteries forward, no batteries aft, and 1/4 to 1/2 batteries to any given side. A flattened shape reduces its profile to incoming fire.

That doesn't sound too dissimilar to a Star Destroyer!

cause it's not, the star destroyer design is actually pretty close to the perfect design for a space warship.

but eyah I agree trying to track down "who was the first" is pretty pointless. and it'll always lead to dissappointment, 40K (as well as star wars) is more an amalgamation of ideas from differant sources, and 40k isn't even subtle about it. but thats what makes em work. Sometimes things that work well eneugh by themselves are taken to the next level when you combine them.. kinda like choclate and peanut better!

No, a Star Destroyer is a rather stupid design for space combat

But it fits the Imperial design that is more about intimidation than actual fighting (same as the AT-AT)

Stux wrote:

 kodos wrote:

Than the design of space battleship is off most of time anyway as the most effective design would be a cube or sphere (Perry Rhodan says hello)

Is that for general space faring though? Would it still hold true for space combat?

for general space combat, general space faring can use a standard design

Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
I would argue with this. I think a flattened pyramid would be the most effective design.

A cube or sphere necessitates half or more of your batteries being out of engagement arc at any given time. Sizing is driven by weapon and drive system requirements; most everything else fits in between.

A flattened pyramid could engage with all batteries forward, no batteries aft, and 1/4 to 1/2 batteries to any given side. A flattened shape reduces its profile to incoming fire.

The problem are not weapons but thrusters

to be highly manoeuvrable in space you need engines with the same power in all directions or weapons that can fire 3D 360°

a pyramid would work too but misses engines and would lose against a cube which could outmanoeuvre it.

Which shape is going to work best entirely depends on the details of weapons/targeting/armor/thrusters. This means you can basically set the rules such that you can tell whatever story you wanted too.

Star Wars space combat is WWII Pacific Theater. Warhammer is Napoleonic broadsides. Jack Campbell, mentioned earlier, wanted to tell stories about how making tactical decisions on ships moving at .2 C is really hard, so the rules of his setting reflect that. None of them reflect reality, because that isn't the goal.

If you want realistic space combat, it is likely going to look something like The Expanse, with ships firing off missiles that can make one hit kills and trying to maneuver and use point defences weapons to defeat said missiles.

If you want to argue about what would be the best set up in a given setting, you need to be really clear about the rules of the setting first. A pyramid makes sense if you have forward firing battery weapons. A sphere would make more sense if you have Star Trek style weapons that can fire from a range of points in an direction.

Even in computer games few ever use realistic physics - I think from memory that the only one I know of that really came close in a big way was Nexus Jupiter Incident. They had the whole lot from alien ships with Starwars style movement, to alien spheres and orbs through to your thrusters in all directions ships and even ships with spinning habitat rings for gravity generation.

It was a really well put together game that, sadly, never got a huge following.



Also even it was tricky in 3D and Homeworld, the king of space RTS in general, mostly still runs on 2D (most of the maps don't make heavy use of 3D aspects).

Now with VR taking off that could be the first time we might see a real 3D space sim that could do it because the 3D interface allows for a much more complex interface system, though it might be a while before it matures to a point where its developed - many that I see are still basically 2D style games or 3D action games - basically similar to regular PC games just with a different input and output

The whole concept of using guns (ir unguided projectiles or even energy weapons) in a space battle is flawed anyways.
It's only there because readers already know what a gun does and the writer wants to focus on the important part of the story instead of going on a multi-page offshoot about space battle
tactics.
With the distances (and therefore travel times) involved, any battleship would only have to keep changing course randomly a tiny bit and be virtually invincible to such weapons.

Instead you would probably only use guided, autonomous weapons (like we already do in todays air combat) and have them impact or explode the other ship. Or mount your guns onto that guided weapon... In that regard the fighters of StarWars probably make more sense than the enormous battleships they also use for some reason. But then why do they put pilots inside when the droids can fly them just fine...

HMint wrote:The whole concept of using guns (ir unguided projectiles or even energy weapons) in a space battle is flawed anyways.
It's only there because readers already know what a gun does and the writer wants to focus on the important part of the story instead of going on a multi-page offshoot about space battle
tactics.
With the distances (and therefore travel times) involved, any battleship would only have to keep changing course randomly a tiny bit and be virtually invincible to such weapons.

Instead you would probably only use guided, autonomous weapons (like we already do in todays air combat) and have them impact or explode the other ship. Or mount your guns onto that guided weapon... In that regard the fighters of StarWars probably make more sense than the enormous battleships they also use for some reason. But then why do they put pilots inside when the droids can fly them just fine...

Fighters are not actually practical space combat vehicles, because that's not how space vehicle dynamics works.

A projectile weapon also isn't infeasible. Tactically, range of engagement is dictated by the range at which you can hit the target; ergo if projectile weapons are the norm, then the engagement range will be such that projectile weapons can hit.

I actually think projectile weapons are a good idea for void warfare. Metallic slugs are deadly, cheap, accurate, and easy to fire lots of. And with good targeting, there's no reason they can't shoot very, very far. Also, they're mass friendly compared to almost everything else, short of lasers.

babelfish wrote:Which shape is going to work best entirely depends on the details of weapons/targeting/armor/thrusters. This means you can basically set the rules such that you can tell whatever story you wanted too.

Star Wars space combat is WWII Pacific Theater. Warhammer is Napoleonic broadsides. Jack Campbell, mentioned earlier, wanted to tell stories about how making tactical decisions on ships moving at .2 C is really hard, so the rules of his setting reflect that. None of them reflect reality, because that isn't the goal.

If you want realistic space combat, it is likely going to look something like The Expanse, with ships firing off missiles that can make one hit kills and trying to maneuver and use point defences weapons to defeat said missiles.

If you want to argue about what would be the best set up in a given setting, you need to be really clear about the rules of the setting first. A pyramid makes sense if you have forward firing battery weapons. A sphere would make more sense if you have Star Trek style weapons that can fire from a range of points in an direction.

The Expanse isn't particularly more realistic than other portrayals of space combat. I don't know how war will be fought in space, but to be honest it probably won't involve "ships". Maybe a cubesat with a .22.

I've never been honestly impressed with "hard" science fiction. It never actually seems that realistic, in part because reality is much less fun. Also, reality involves a lot of math. I'm an aerospace engineer; and one thing I've noticed is that really hard sci-fi isn't really very fun. I would much rather read a book about big space ships shooting colorful lasers and maneuvering like a WWI naval battle than read sci-fi that goes into gratuitous detail about accurate modelling the rotation of a brick-shaped spacecraft. At some point, concessions to unreality have to be made to make a book fun, and it's easy to make those concessions in orbital mechanics and in attitude control, because the math is very complex and adds nothing meaningful to the story.



And if we want to speculate about how space combat with ships will be fought, the naval abstraction isn't particularly bad, since key relationships that govern naval tactics and architecture do generally hold.

kodos wrote:No, a Star Destroyer is a rather stupid design for space combat

But it fits the Imperial design that is more about intimidation than actual fighting (same as the AT-AT)

Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
I would argue with this. I think a flattened pyramid would be the most effective design.

A cube or sphere necessitates half or more of your batteries being out of engagement arc at any given time. Sizing is driven by weapon and drive system requirements; most everything else fits in between.

A flattened pyramid could engage with all batteries forward, no batteries aft, and 1/4 to 1/2 batteries to any given side. A flattened shape reduces its profile to incoming fire.

The problem are not weapons but thrusters

to be highly manoeuvrable in space you need engines with the same power in all directions or weapons that can fire 3D 360°

a pyramid would work too but misses engines and would lose against a cube which could outmanoeuvre it.

I'm not sure what you mean by it misses engines.

A spaceship has only one set of main engines. You don't want more sets; because that's useless mass you've added; and mass is an exponential penalty to you spacecraft. You'd rather turn with your ADCS then fire your one set of main engines to perform a maneuver.

While a pyramid ship has a higher moment of inertia than an equal-volume cuboid spaceship, I also sincerely doubt that at potential space combat ranges being circle-strafed is a serious concern. You'd have to go hilariously fast to just keep pace with a vehicle turning on point, and you'd be burning an extreme amount of fuel to make your trajectory an arc about the inner ship. In short, the cubeship can't get into the pyramid's rear arc.

However, a flattened pyramid has more surface area, and therefore less armor in equivalent mass. A cube would have thicker armor, a pyramid would have more firepower. Though it you're going to go for a cube, go for a sphere, it's just a better cube.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:


I'm not sure what you mean by it misses engines.

A spaceship has only one set of main engines. You don't want more sets; because that's useless mass you've added; and mass is an exponential penalty to you spacecraft. You'd rather turn with your ADCS then fire your one set of main engines to perform a maneuver

Yeah you need to turn and that is the problem.

eg with one set of main engines on a pyramid design flying towards an enemy and slow down right before him instead of passing by would mean to turn 180° negate the thrust with the main engines, turn back 180° and fire your weapons.

to be manoeuvrable in space you need equal strong engines to all sides. If you don't have them you need to turn your main engines 180 each time you want to change direction as you would keep moving the original way by just turning the ship 90°

taking the Star Destroyer, those ships can move one direction and cannot manoeuvre (the can only turn around their own centre) . A manoeuvrable enemy would sit in their back and fire without being harmed as the SD is not able to compensate the movement fast enough

A cube/sphere design with engines on all sides would be able to move fast enough to evade missiles or gun projectiles while still keep fireing. A design with just one main engine would not.

But this for combat only, if you want the ship to do something else, like traveling at high speed, one with just one set of main engines is better. That is were the Fighter idea in Space comes from as a design that can do all things is impossible and dedicated vessels to fight and to travel would be needed.

(but fighters in Star Wars are designed and move like they are always in atmosphere on a planet and never in space)

Something to consider is many, many spacecraft in Sci-Fi settings are not only capable of landing/taking off from the surface of a planet but do so regularly. For those, aerodynamics matter.

Cube seems pointless when a sphere (perhaps elongated) would do the same thing but better.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
Yeah there's a lot of very early/classic space exploration where the ships are very much like real world ships in space - a bit like that Treasure Island animation that was made a shortwhile back (I think by Disney).

You mean treasure planet from 2002?

 Peregrine wrote:
BFG is real-world sailing ships in space, so BFG copies the real-life broadside weapons of those ships.

BFG makes for a better pre-Dreadnought "wet" naval game than it does a space naval game.

As for more realistic games, there's Ad Astra Games' Attack Vector, in which momentum, fuel capacity (and the improvement in acceleration as reaction mass is expended), the differences between semi-guided projectiles, missiles and lasers and heat sink capacity are all of vital importance. "circle-strafing" is actually a possible tactic, in a way - it's more useful with more than one attacker, IIRC. Or Children of a Dead Earth if you prefer a computer game.

All those people talking about engines and shapes etc need to look at Babylon 5 Starfuries, these were designed with help from actual NASA engineers to be highly manoeuvrable attack craft. Engines pointing in all directions to get the ship into position, stop, rotate, and get the weapons onto target.

 kodos wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:


I'm not sure what you mean by it misses engines.

A spaceship has only one set of main engines. You don't want more sets; because that's useless mass you've added; and mass is an exponential penalty to you spacecraft. You'd rather turn with your ADCS then fire your one set of main engines to perform a maneuver

Yeah you need to turn and that is the problem.

eg with one set of main engines on a pyramid design flying towards an enemy and slow down right before him instead of passing by would mean to turn 180° negate the thrust with the main engines, turn back 180° and fire your weapons.

to be manoeuvrable in space you need equal strong engines to all sides. If you don't have them you need to turn your main engines 180 each time you want to change direction as you would keep moving the original way by just turning the ship 90°

taking the Star Destroyer, those ships can move one direction and cannot manoeuvre (the can only turn around their own centre) . A manoeuvrable enemy would sit in their back and fire without being harmed as the SD is not able to compensate the movement fast enough

A cube/sphere design with engines on all sides would be able to move fast enough to evade missiles or gun projectiles while still keep fireing. A design with just one main engine would not.

But this for combat only, if you want the ship to do something else, like traveling at high speed, one with just one set of main engines is better. That is were the Fighter idea in Space comes from as a design that can do all things is impossible and dedicated vessels to fight and to travel would be needed.

(but fighters in Star Wars are designed and move like they are always in atmosphere on a planet and never in space)

You would not want 6 sets of primary engines pointing in each direction. As I said, that's mass and volume, a fairly large amount of it, that you're not using. You probably won't use your main engines in a space battle anyway. The most you're going to use your 5 extra sets of big engines for is to fire them periodically to try to dodge incoming salvos, which I don't think is a good idea since I would question if it's in your mass budget.

Nor would you "fly towards and enemy and slow down before him [and turn around]". To catch up to someone ahead of you in your orbit, you actually burn retrograde first and then burn prograde when you arrive. This drops your semimajor axis, so you pass on a shorter, more elliptic orbit, and make it to the meeting point faster, then speed back up when you arrive to get back in your previous orbit. If you're ahead and want to drop back, you burn prograde into a bigger orbit, and burn retrograde when you get to the meeting point.


Finally, you can't move and sit on top of a ship like that. You can work out the geometery yourself, but it's pretty much impossible to run a circle around a ship at distances beyond collision distance. In addition, you'll be burning main engine fuel the whole time to run such a circle, while the they're using fuel from their ADCS and their reaction wheels. That's a losing contest.

 Rolsheen wrote:
All those people talking about engines and shapes etc need to look at Babylon 5 Starfuries, these were designed with help from actual NASA engineers to be highly manoeuvrable attack craft. Engines pointing in all directions to get the ship into position, stop, rotate, and get the weapons onto target.

My understanding is that is not the case; rather that JMS claimed on AOL in 1995 that they "received a number of inquiries from folks associated with NASA about the prospect of perhaps someday actually building working Starfuries, mainly as the space industry equivilent to fork lifts and heavy loaders, able to function just as the ones in the show function." (archive.org link).

As of 2009, this had gone no further: 2009 interview

Also, it didn't have "engines pointing in all directions"; it had four large main engines pointing back, and several sets of manoeuvring thrusters to rotate the spacecraft; to slow down, the ship would have had to turn round and fire its main engines in "reverse". Mind you, so would all their large ships, and they never approached B5 ass-backward. Must've done the deceleration burn off-camera and then turned round again.

Not that I think a SD is necessarily a good design, but I don't think you want to be behind a spaceship's main engines. It's basically a free fusion cannon pointed at you while you're flying into hot plasma radiation hell.
Plus, it's far too easy for any ship to just fire a cloud of junk behind it and let inertia do the rest - kinetic energy's a bitch. If you're really nasty, make it junk that explodes on proximity and make it dirty.

I don't actually think space combat is suited for large capital ships other than carriers TBH. They'll be too cumbersome and it's much easier to make lightweight, manouvrable and devastating weaponry regardless of the armour than it is to make armour both strong and lightweight enough to be of use.

Bran Dawri wrote:
Not that I think a SD is necessarily a good design, but I don't think you want to be behind a spaceship's main engines. It's basically a free fusion cannon pointed at you while you're flying into hot plasma radiation hell.
Plus, it's far too easy for any ship to just fire a cloud of junk behind it and let inertia do the rest - kinetic energy's a bitch. If you're really nasty, make it junk that explodes on proximity and make it dirty.

I don't actually think space combat is suited for large capital ships other than carriers TBH. They'll be too cumbersome and it's much easier to make lightweight, manouvrable and devastating weaponry regardless of the armour than it is to make armour both strong and lightweight enough to be of use.

I disagree.

It's definitely easier to make a brick than it is to make a maneuverable, light object.

Maneuvering takes fuel; the more you want to do and the amount of fuel you need goes up drastically. And you need low ISP high thrust motors for maneuvers on the time frame of a battle, which means you're needing fuel to move the next maneuver's fuel problem gets way worse.

By comparison, an armored brick will cost more to move itself than an unarmored brick, but if you're not trying to dodge, you can both cut of a huge amount of fuel [and thus a huge amount of tankage volume that needs to be armored, and the fuel to move that fuel], and you can sit there, trade fire, and then use your more efficient motors more suited to continuous burn transfers to leave.

Also, the logistics of spaceflight basically say that fighters aren't really an option; use missiles instead if you want something guided.

Carriers are rather pointless, because space fighters themselves are rather pointless. Missiles are more useful. the only benefit space fighters have over missiles is that the audience is more interested in fighter pilots than missile warheads.

 Delvarus Centurion wrote:

Drager wrote:
Real naval ships.

That was lame.

Lame? No other sci fi had star ship which focused on broadsides for its main weapons.
I mean,the answer was obvious but its not lame. Its awesome

Yeah, I wasn't necessarily thinking of fighters with pilots. Drone/missile/rocks with thrusters carriers was what I had in mind.

The OP actually asks an interesting question. Sci-fi as a real genre took off in the late 19th century, but was obsessed with actual advances in technology (and some complete fantasy), but wasn't yet interested in recreating history in space.

By the time of Verne and Well, turrets were the most important naval weapons, and the broadside was clearly obsolete. So... the question is a good one: who brought back the broadside? there were good reasons for the broadside in the age of sail, but I'm struggling to think of why that would exist in a sci-fi universe.

I'd guess it was one of the pulp authors of the 30s-50s. Things like boarding actions make more sense in a universe without accurate, powerful gunnery. It was a "rule of cool" convention.

 Polonius wrote:
The OP actually asks an interesting question. Sci-fi as a real genre took off in the late 19th century, but was obsessed with actual advances in technology (and some complete fantasy), but wasn't yet interested in recreating history in space.

By the time of Verne and Well, turrets were the most important naval weapons, and the broadside was clearly obsolete. So... the question is a good one: who brought back the broadside? there were good reasons for the broadside in the age of sail, but I'm struggling to think of why that would exist in a sci-fi universe.

I'd guess it was one of the pulp authors of the 30s-50s. Things like boarding actions make more sense in a universe without accurate, powerful gunnery. It was a "rule of cool" convention.

The same pressure that created the broadside in the age of sail would create "broadsides" in space. Poor lethality per shot, light volumetric and mass penalties per gun.

Turrets allow you to use the same set of guns in either of your broadsides, saving you the mass and volume cost of the second gun at the expense of the mass and volume cost of the turret. If your guns are light and small, but you need a lot of them, it's more efficient to skip the turret and put extra guns on your ship pointing the other way.

The other pressure that created the broadside was that ships needed to be longer than they were wide to sail. Spacecraft don't have to be, so you could conceivably have a forward facing "broadside".

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
The same pressure that created the broadside in the age of sail would create "broadsides" in space. Poor lethality per shot, light volumetric and mass penalties per gun.

Well... only sort of though. something like the star destroyer has a huge advantage of pure broadsides. It can fire (essentially) most of it's guns forward, and still fire half to either port or starboard, although admittedly few would be able to fire underneath the ship.

I guess that's similar to a pure broadsides, but some of the media really has the classic "can only shoot to the right or left" type of broadsides. BFG has it just to create interesting game states.

 Polonius wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
The same pressure that created the broadside in the age of sail would create "broadsides" in space. Poor lethality per shot, light volumetric and mass penalties per gun.

Well... only sort of though. something like the star destroyer has a huge advantage of pure broadsides. It can fire (essentially) most of it's guns forward, and still fire half to either port or starboard, although admittedly few would be able to fire underneath the ship.

I guess that's similar to a pure broadsides, but some of the media really has the classic "can only shoot to the right or left" type of broadsides. BFG has it just to create interesting game states.

Theoretically, with evenly distributed guns [nothing is keeping guns off your keel], you would have 50% firepower up and down, 50% firepower left and right, and 100% firepower forward. Assuming it's symmetric, there are some narrow bands where you only have 25% power, but it's easy to roll out of those.

Also, 40k ships have both turrets and broadsides, plus torpedo arrays in the bow-chase position.

The placement of torpedoes in the bow chase is an interesting arrangement. A torpedo spread fired forces your enemy to either face towards or away from you, losing the power of their broadside guns. They're not ideal chase guns, but an opening salvo before the battle that keeps your enemy facing you head on while your battle line turns to bring your heavy batteries to bear could present a reasonable advantage.

If you want to get into more in-depth science with your fiction this site is the go-to:


http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

I would also add that broadsides greatly increase the odds of hits through shear volume of fire.
We have largely replaced that kind of shooting with phalanx cannons.

Mass weapons would be an issue in space since it would act as a very strong thruster.
Energy weapons cause heat both sending and receiving which is the #1 enemy in space (how do you get rid of the heat? Radiate it off which is limited)).

 Flinty wrote:
The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell has a really nice.representation of space.combat at relativistic speeds and solar system scales. Deals with 3D issues and ultra high closing speeds.

Hell yeah they do. It's an excellent depiction of why starships have to be like Age of Sail ships to make a tabletop game interesting, rather than two fleets travelling for hours to pass each other in two seconds of violence.

 AegisGrimm wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell has a really nice.representation of space.combat at relativistic speeds and solar system scales. Deals with 3D issues and ultra high closing speeds.

Hell yeah they do. It's an excellent depiction of why starships have to be like Age of Sail ships to make a tabletop game interesting, rather than two fleets travelling for hours to pass each other in two seconds of violence.

That is indeed where the The Lost Fleet provides an excellent example of how such a style of space combat would play out. Space combat was very much a game of positioning and target focus where actual firing passes happened in a fraction of a second, the culmination of battlegroups being able to see each other from very long distances and in-universe combat speed being limited to about .2C above which relativistic distortion and computer limitations made hitting anything go from difficult to nearly impossible. And it took into account how much time and energy would be needed to alter course, come around, and re-engage after making that brief pass.

If the enemy was also doing the same and not trying to run, in which case you're moving at high speeds in the absolute wrong direction, making the ∆v to turn around and pursue absolutely hideous.When you've already accelerated to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, changing directions and accelerating along a different vector is not a short or simple prospect.

The problem some posters in this thread are having is that they are jumping straight to spherical cows. Sure, a cube is a great design is you can supply 6x equally powerful engine arrays, but most fictious settings don't present that kind of wundertek.

 Bookwrack wrote:

That is indeed where the The Lost Fleet provides an excellent example of how such a style of space combat would play out. Space combat was very much a game of positioning and target focus where actual firing passes happened in a fraction of a second, the culmination of battlegroups being able to see each other from very long distances and in-universe combat speed being limited to about .2C above which relativistic distortion and computer limitations made hitting anything go from difficult to nearly impossible. And it took into account how much time and energy would be needed to alter course, come around, and re-engage after making that brief pass.

If the enemy was also doing the same and not trying to run, in which case you're moving at high speeds in the absolute wrong direction, making the ∆v to turn around and pursue absolutely hideous.When you've already accelerated to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, changing directions and accelerating along a different vector is not a short or simple prospect.

The problem some posters in this thread are having is that they are jumping straight to spherical cows. Sure, a cube is a great design is you can supply 6x equally powerful engine arrays, but most fictious settings don't present that kind of wundertek.

Getting to .2c under your own power is considerably more wundertek than 6 sets of equally powerful engines. .2c is about 60 million m/s.

I could build you a spacecraft with 6 sets of engines using COTS parts today, and you could have it flying on a rocket in under a year. It's just inefficient to have 6 sets of main engines when you can have one and rotate your spacecraft to point that one set in the right direction.

 Bookwrack wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell has a really nice.representation of space.combat at relativistic speeds and solar system scales. Deals with 3D issues and ultra high closing speeds.

Hell yeah they do. It's an excellent depiction of why starships have to be like Age of Sail ships to make a tabletop game interesting, rather than two fleets travelling for hours to pass each other in two seconds of violence.

That is indeed where the The Lost Fleet provides an excellent example of how such a style of space combat would play out. Space combat was very much a game of positioning and target focus where actual firing passes happened in a fraction of a second, the culmination of battlegroups being able to see each other from very long distances and in-universe combat speed being limited to about .2C above which relativistic distortion and computer limitations made hitting anything go from difficult to nearly impossible. And it took into account how much time and energy would be needed to alter course, come around, and re-engage after making that brief pass.

If the enemy was also doing the same and not trying to run, in which case you're moving at high speeds in the absolute wrong direction, making the ∆v to turn around and pursue absolutely hideous.When you've already accelerated to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, changing directions and accelerating along a different vector is not a short or simple prospect.

The problem some posters in this thread are having is that they are jumping straight to spherical cows. Sure, a cube is a great design is you can supply 6x equally powerful engine arrays, but most fictious settings don't present that kind of wundertek.

0.2c is a very strange cutoff point, considering that it only results in a Lorentz factor of ~1.02 if the other ship is travelling at a velocity much smaller than c (if both ships are travelling at 0.2c directly at each other, this would increase to ~1.08). So the computers on this ship which can reach relativistic speeds (presumably faster velocities than 0.2c and still able to navigate to moving objects such as stars and planets) cannot handle a time dilation of more than 0.02-0.08 seconds per second or a length contraction of more than 0.02-0.08m per metre?

 Bookwrack wrote:
[The reason why the initial question is a stupid one and there is no real answer is because unless you have a perfectly spherical warship, you are always going to have a port side and a starboard side, a fore and an aft,, and for space faring ships, a topside and a belly. So the first time someone anywhere wrote about an armed space warship, you would've had port and starboard firing armament.
.

Unless the first guy doesn't base his ship warfare on sailing ships age and does something else like put weapons on front or even on top/bottom with 360 degree turrets ;-)

tneva82 wrote:

 Bookwrack wrote:
[The reason why the initial question is a stupid one and there is no real answer is because unless you have a perfectly spherical warship, you are always going to have a port side and a starboard side, a fore and an aft,, and for space faring ships, a topside and a belly. So the first time someone anywhere wrote about an armed space warship, you would've had port and starboard firing armament.
.

Unless the first guy doesn't base his ship warfare on sailing ships age and does something else like put weapons on front or even on top/bottom with 360 degree turrets ;-)

Since top/bottom is a meaningless distinction in space, a ship with top/bottom guns could also be said to have guns on its sides. its just a matter of perspective.


Anyway, when I envision a futuristic space warship. Assuming it doesn't just become a huge square or sphere with guns everywhere, I think a typical design might be something that looks vaguely like someone took two WW2 battleships and stuck them together at the keels.

So you'd have tubular hull with a roughly oval cross section. Each flat side of the ship would have ball turrets that could rotate to face straight up and to either side. The guns would have overlapping fields of fire to the sides and front of the ship, which would lead to the ship turning that side to the enemy. Combat to the top and bottom would be avoided as the guns on the far side could not contribute.

Thanks to how movement in space works, any ship can rapidly re-orientate its facing to bring its fields of fire to optimal orientation.