Lasers fill a very specific niche in space warfare, and that is of precision destruction of weakly armored systems at long distances. Lasers still useful at long ranges, though. Unfortunately, nothing aside from missiles will likely ever get that close, and even then, they will likely be within close focus ranges for milliseconds at most. On the other hand, at very close ranges, where diffraction is not an issue, lasers outperform projectiles easily. Whereas hypervelocity projectiles cause spallations and cave in armor effectively, laser ablation is poor, with energy wasted to vaporization, radiation, and heat conduction to surrounding armor. Laser ablation is simply less effective at causing damage than projectile impacts. When comparing hypervelocity projectile impact research with laser ablation research, one discovers a stark contrast in their efficacy. Lasers are notoriously low efficiency compared to projectile weapons. Badly. The power of lasers in space drops painfully fast with distance, and frequency doubling only ameliorates the issue slightly. So lasers are the king of the battle space, right? Next misconception, wouldn’t lasers dominate the battle space? Lasers do not suffer from many of the inaccuracy problems that projectile weapons do, and move at the speed of light, so they are literally impossible to dodge. Note the multiple holes near the glowing radiators, indicating the bulkhead was penetrated there. The silvery armor up front is the remains of the Whipple shield. In game, the systems ended up surprisingly balanced, with neither being a dominant strategy, with either being more effective in certain situations, and weaker in others. In the end, it turns out the Rocket Equation governs just how effective missiles and point defense systems are. A hundred-missile salvo is sure to overwhelm any point defense system, but the amount of mass this requires the launching ship to take on is enormous, and will kill its mass ratio. Missiles, on the other hand, are also limited by mass. Power consumption is limited by radiator mass actually, as simply slapping down more nuclear reactors is easy, but trying to deal with the added mass of all the radiators needed to cool those reactors is much more difficult. This power limitation is what prevents these point defense systems from being impervious to missile salvos. ![]() Conventional guns suffer from low muzzle velocities, and high muzzle velocities are crucial to intercepting missiles coming at you at greater than 1 km/s. There is a finite amount of power to use when firing, except for conventional guns. Point defense systems, railguns, coilguns, conventional guns, or even lasers, are power limited in this exchange. Yet we begin to see the limitations of each system. The Whipple shield is mostly vaporized, and the inner bulkhead is glowing orange-hot. A gunship immediately after suffering a nuclear missile salvo. Indeed, enormous salvos of missiles are effective at overwhelming CIWS systems, and they are in game as well. This isn’t to suggest that missiles are useless. As suggested in an earlier blog post, military strategists are even beginning to suggest the development of CIWS systems may bring naval warfare full circle, all the way back to World War I battleship warfare. CIWS point defense systems are already starting to shift the balance away from missile strikes. ![]() Indefinitely extrapolating this trend would lead one to conclude warfare will soon be nothing but people sitting in their spacecrafts launching missiles at one another.īut this is not true. ATGWs are already starting to upend tank warfare, and Anti-ship missiles are doing something similar to naval warfare. There is a prevailing hypothesis that missiles will soon be the only relevant weapon on the battle space, and it is likely borne out of current trends in modern warfare. Wouldn’t missiles dominate the battle space, being fired from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away? Wouldn’t actual exchange of projectile weapons never happen in reality? Now then, on to the first real misconception. The missiles are indicated by the red interface dots, because they are so far away that you’ll never see them until the brief instant when they’re right on top of you. Point defenses firing at a salvo of incoming missiles. It is possible through a series of hypothetical technologies or techniques, but it won’t be possible for any reasonable spacecraft under reasonable mass and cost restraints. Zeroth misconception, no, there won’t be stealth in space, let alone in combat. In the process, we’ll go through the moment to moment of space warfare itself. I see a lot of misconceptions about space in general, and space warfare in specific, so today I’ll go ahead and debunk some.
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