|
Post by samchiu2000 on Oct 29, 2017 11:35:35 GMT
Glad to see my thread led to a such high quality conversation Just one question: how heavy will these pellet gun are? Either the 12 km/s or 300km/s one. For my micro missile horde is still my favorite, followed by laser. I got u fam. Let's take matterbeams advanced 0.01c pellet gun. The projectiles are 2mm wide so let's assume a 3mm wide inner barrel. 20 Coils per meter for an 90m barrel. The needed thickness of the coil reproduce 25T at the center is 0.12cm. But we want an 25T average throughout the barrel. Using 1cm wires should be enough. Each coil weighs at around 32.5g. We need 58.5kg of BSCCO, plus an 1cm wide barrel made out of CNT weighting 40kg. The problems arrise with cooling system. At 99% (Very optimistic) efficiency and 1GW input we get 10NW waste heat. The heat pumps, radiators etc. Would most likely have an performance of 1kW/kg. Which means that this system needs roughly 10.1t of equipment. If you go with a more realistic efficiency you get 50t. That sound impressive for a 0.01c EM gun Maybe i shall rethink about the importance of EM gun in space warfare.
|
|
|
Post by Enderminion on Oct 29, 2017 15:19:12 GMT
ahhh Well, if its powerful enough to get carbon atoms up to near C, I'm sure they can have an electron neutralizing device at the end of the barrel to make the beam a neutral particle beam. Imagine something, If you have 12kg projectile moving at 0.99c, how well will it react if an 1g objects collides with it? Proton electron collision will cause your beam to atleast spread out at a few kilometers per second. which is typically less then what it would have spread out by, I read on Atomic rockets the Neutral Beams could get spread down to ~3-4 milirads, 20x more then lasers and less then that of a GAU-8 at 5 milirads
|
|
|
Post by Kerr on Oct 29, 2017 15:26:37 GMT
Imagine something, If you have 12kg projectile moving at 0.99c, how well will it react if an 1g objects collides with it? Proton electron collision will cause your beam to atleast spread out at a few kilometers per second. which is typically less then what it would have spread out by, I read on Atomic rockets the Neutral Beams could get spread down to ~3-4 milirads, 20x more then lasers and less then that of a GAU-8 at 5 milirads I never disagreed on that, but is still pretty bad compared to even an IR Laser.
|
|
|
Post by Kerr on Oct 29, 2017 15:26:54 GMT
Missiles have an distinct advantage over lasers and EM Guns in actual combat, you don't have to engage your enemy directly. Would you risk your live to get a few lucky shots with your laser if missiles can do the job without endangering you and your crew? Missile Warheads can come in several flavours. KKV: Keep it simple stupid. Flak: Hit me if you can. Nuclear: Everyone loves the smell of molten hulls in the morning. Casaba: Crude particle accelerator powered by nuclear destruction Mirror: It would be a pity if your 500GW FEL would just gather just. Missile delta-v becomes less relevant as ship delta-v increases, if you want to destroy that quick missile boat moving at 435km/s relative to you, you wouldn't use an missile with a delta-v of +435km/s, but use missiles as kirklin mines. For those who don't know what a kirklin mine is, they are some objects which just happen to be in the way of the ship, Preferbly cold and coated to be "stealthy", to use the ships velocity against them, which is a reason why hydrogen steamer could remain viable even with nuclear pulse/fusion propulsion. The more important factor is often how small you can make your missile. At sufficiently high tech levels your PDW weapons will be capable of nearly instantly elimating any thread. Against kinetic PDW's cross-section is important, if you make your missile twice as long but half as wide your survibility just doubled. This also applies somewhat to Laser PDW's. But usually more important is how light you can make your missile. If your armored missiles weights 50% more than their light/non armored missile then they have to survive 50% to pay of the increase in mass. The thing that limits the minimum size of a missile is it sensory and computing equipment. The later can be partially fixed by using a network with the other missiles to maximize computional power. The former depends on how good can a sensor become and what kind of target you have. But something as low as 5kg can work, even if it a bit hard. Casaba Howitzer Warhead could remove the need of micromissiles by instead supplying long-ranged spears of nuclear fire. Example: matterbeam futuristic Casaba Howitzer: Efficiency: 20% Directivity: 0.1mrad Energy: 830TJ Yield: 1MT Matterbeam used the "Laser Weapon Calculator" with the following results against aluminium: 10Mm: 20m diameter, 291mm (Penetration) 50Mm: 100m diameter, 2.33mm After using the calculator I saw something... odd, 30419MW/cmΒ² Armor rating for aluminium, I am no Luke Campbell, but I think Aluminium can't survive 300TW/mΒ² or whatever armor rating means. So I have gone to Luke Campbells Laser Calculator. With the following results. 100Mm: 200m diameter, 6.1m Alumnium, 50cm CNT. 300Mm: 600m diameter, 0.74m Alumnium, 6.56cm CNT. The results show that the Casaba Howitzer is actually more long-ranged than expected. (Matterbeam, history repeats itself.) What does that means? In the endless discussions with matterbeam back in the day he suggested that the futuristic Casaba Howitzer could mass as low as 250kg. Let's assume a world where Fusion propulsion is widespread, lasers hit the light-lag limit and can produce hundreds of gigawatt of power for Dreadnaughts (~100kt). Torch Missiles massing at about 500kg carrying 200kg fuel and 300km/s of Dv will be able to carry an 1MT Casaba Warhead, using maximum focus the warhead will cover an area of 0.28kmΒ², the target is an laser star with 5cm CNT armor. The beam will travel 30-20s to the target. The ship has enough time to dodge the beam with its powerful engines, problem is, the missile isn't alone and dozens of other casabas covered every direction with nuclear fire. The momment the beam hits the entire armor, every turret, every radiator not in the ships shadow is vaporized. The inner compartments survived due to the armor, but the plasma created from the armor damaged many crucial system. The Laser star is unable to fight on, nor to move, nor to sustain life support for the surviving crew members much longer.
|
|
|
Post by The Astronomer on Oct 29, 2017 15:30:45 GMT
Missiles have an distinct advantage over lasers and EM Guns in actual combat, you don't have to engage your enemy directly. Would you risk your live to get a few lucky shots with your laser if missiles can do the job without endangering you and your crew? No. More is better, so consider sticking weapons in front of a missile, and turn it into a drone!Anyways, with drones you can use lasers and EM guns without risking your crew lives if your ships are not controlled by Skynet TM. They're also useful at intercepting incoming missiles.
|
|
|
Post by Kerr on Oct 29, 2017 15:52:12 GMT
Missiles have an distinct advantage over lasers and EM Guns in actual combat, you don't have to engage your enemy directly. Would you risk your live to get a few lucky shots with your laser if missiles can do the job without endangering you and your crew? No. More is better, so consider sticking weapons in front of a missile, and turn it into a drone!Anyways, with drones you can use lasers and EM guns without risking your crew lives if your ships are not controlled by Skynet TM. They're also useful at intercepting incoming missiles. Covered laser drones with mirror missiles. What sounds more effective? An drone equiped with a 5MW laser plus reactor, or an simple mirror relaying 5GW from the ship? Because drones are not listed I always assumed that "missiles" also covering drones. Also, the distinction between drones and missiles can get a bit messy. And with our glorius transsapient overlords controlling the ships, would you risk damaging or destroying your new expensive ship instead of launching some dirt cheap missiles?
|
|
|
Post by ππππππππππ on Oct 29, 2017 19:41:06 GMT
[honestly, the best space weapon is a ship with the best of all of them to counter all threats and not just have one system to beat all, as there is always a way to counter one type of weapon system> "SIT THEY ARE LAUNCHING NUKES COVERED IN A METER OF GRAPHITE AEROGEL AND OUR LASERS WONT KILL IT IN TIME" "thats why we have railguns, you dumbass!!!" "SIR, their nukes now have advanced anti railgun armour!" "Well launch some flak missiles at it then" ... "SIR, THEY HAVE LAUNCHED A SWARM OF 500 NUKES WITH 10 METERS OF VANADIUM CHROMIUM STEEL ARMOUR ON EACH ONE! WHAT DO WE DO???" "uuh... launch the 100 dollar drone I have sitting in the back and hope they all swarm towards it because they forgot to make it not target drones..." "sir... how the fuck did that work" "I honestly don't know... Russian bias?' 1) Different weapons do different things well. In my previous post I identified where lasers excel (everything except bunker busting and submarine hunting) and where they're found lacking. 2) Graphite aerogel wasn't that effective AFAIK. And ingame anti-laser armour heavily leans on maximum ablation speed, which isn't credible. According to the game, rubber laser armour would last equally long against 75 MW/mΒ² and 75 GW/mΒ², which is ridiculous. I'm aware laser ablation doesn't scale linear with power (I made several posts about it), but pumping orders of magnitude more energy into a target should result in at least slightly faster ablation. 3) Lasers are really effective against a wide variety of targets, and if your facing bunkers on an airless world, then you can smash your laser drones into them at a high velocity. A few tons at a dozen km/s will crack most bunkers. This would relegate missiles to an anti-submarine role. 12 AMU means the mass of 12 protons, not 12 kilograms
|
|
|
Post by bigbombr on Oct 29, 2017 19:55:04 GMT
1) Different weapons do different things well. In my previous post I identified where lasers excel (everything except bunker busting and submarine hunting) and where they're found lacking. 2) Graphite aerogel wasn't that effective AFAIK. And ingame anti-laser armour heavily leans on maximum ablation speed, which isn't credible. According to the game, rubber laser armour would last equally long against 75 MW/mΒ² and 75 GW/mΒ², which is ridiculous. I'm aware laser ablation doesn't scale linear with power (I made several posts about it), but pumping orders of magnitude more energy into a target should result in at least slightly faster ablation. 3) Lasers are really effective against a wide variety of targets, and if your facing bunkers on an airless world, then you can smash your laser drones into them at a high velocity. A few tons at a dozen km/s will crack most bunkers. This would relegate missiles to an anti-submarine role. 12 AMU means the mass of 12 protons, not 12 kilograms I think you responded to the wrong comment?
|
|
|
Post by Kerr on Oct 29, 2017 19:59:47 GMT
1) Different weapons do different things well. In my previous post I identified where lasers excel (everything except bunker busting and submarine hunting) and where they're found lacking. 2) Graphite aerogel wasn't that effective AFAIK. And ingame anti-laser armour heavily leans on maximum ablation speed, which isn't credible. According to the game, rubber laser armour would last equally long against 75 MW/mΒ² and 75 GW/mΒ², which is ridiculous. I'm aware laser ablation doesn't scale linear with power (I made several posts about it), but pumping orders of magnitude more energy into a target should result in at least slightlyΒ faster ablation. 3) Lasers are really effective against a wide variety of targets, and if your facing bunkers on an airless world, then you can smash your laser drones into them at a high velocity. A few tons at a dozen km/s will crack most bunkers. This would relegate missiles to an anti-submarine role. 12 AMU means the mass of 12 protons, not 12 kilograms ... It was meant to put the 12 AMU into macroscopic terms. I know that 12 AMU is 11.28 GeV
|
|
|
Post by matterbeam on Oct 30, 2017 0:06:15 GMT
Doesn't that assume that the energy is instantly coupled into the entire projectile? Isn't it more likely that only the front will ablated? And that it's plasma shields it from further plasma collision. I mean you get a high density region of iron plasma which should deflect the plasma shield by the electrostatic repulsion. Between impact and total vaporization, less than 3.3 microseconds. For comparison, a nuclear warhead detonates on microsecond timescales. The vaporized iron doesn't just fly apart instantaneously. For several microseconds, it sits as a collection of atoms of increasing temperature and pressure. As it hits more plasma on its path, the kinetic energy upon impact builds up without being transmitted very far - this just increases the temperature of the front of the projectile more and more. A few microseconds pass, and the iron cloud starts expanding beyond its original dimensions. This opens up paths for plasma to hit the remaining non-ablated iron. This heats it up and breaks it apart, and so forth, until the projectile is a pancake of superheated iron interacting with the magnetic field. You are correct that energy will be wasted superheating the front of the projectile. But the difference is between the projectile vaporizing in 3.3 microseconds or blowing apart and vaporizing in 10 microseconds - negligible for our purposes. The iron heated to a plasma has an overall neutral charge. It won't deflect the surrounding plasma - electrostatic repulsion is not involved.
|
|
|
Post by matterbeam on Oct 30, 2017 0:15:20 GMT
1) Different weapons do different things well. In my previous post I identified where lasers excel (everything except bunker busting and submarine hunting) and where they're found lacking. 2) Graphite aerogel wasn't that effective AFAIK. And ingame anti-laser armour heavily leans on maximum ablation speed, which isn't credible. According to the game, rubber laser armour would last equally long against 75 MW/mΒ² and 75 GW/mΒ², which is ridiculous. I'm aware laser ablation doesn't scale linear with power (I made several posts about it), but pumping orders of magnitude more energy into a target should result in at least slightly faster ablation. 3) Lasers are really effective against a wide variety of targets, and if your facing bunkers on an airless world, then you can smash your laser drones into them at a high velocity. A few tons at a dozen km/s will crack most bunkers. This would relegate missiles to an anti-submarine role. 1) Correct. 2) You want the highest vaporization energy to mass ratio. Carbon beats everything. Laser ablation rates actually increases more than linearly with. As the intensity increases, the target material reaches higher and higher temperature before it can dissipate as a plasma. This means you are creating pockets of very high temperature and pressure plasma in the center of the laser strike's crater. High temperature means that the laser's energy is being effectively conducted and radiated into the surrounding material, and high pressure can exceed the yield strength of the material and start gouging it out in chunks. This is much more efficient in terms of laser power per penetration rate than having to fully vaporize the target materials. 3) Rock has low compressive strength. Intense laser beams can break it apart and rip out big craters from the ground using the effect described above - habitats on airless worlds won't be protected for long, as lasers can dig their way through! So, if anything, lasers are more powerful than their power ratings suggest.
|
|
|
Post by ππππππππππ on Oct 30, 2017 0:28:06 GMT
1) Different weapons do different things well. In my previous post I identified where lasers excel (everything except bunker busting and submarine hunting) and where they're found lacking. 2) Graphite aerogel wasn't that effective AFAIK. And ingame anti-laser armour heavily leans on maximum ablation speed, which isn't credible. According to the game, rubber laser armour would last equally long against 75 MW/mΒ² and 75 GW/mΒ², which is ridiculous. I'm aware laser ablation doesn't scale linear with power (I made several posts about it), but pumping orders of magnitude more energy into a target should result in at least slightly faster ablation. 3) Lasers are really effective against a wide variety of targets, and if your facing bunkers on an airless world, then you can smash your laser drones into them at a high velocity. A few tons at a dozen km/s will crack most bunkers. This would relegate missiles to an anti-submarine role. 1) Correct. 2) You want the highest vaporization energy to mass ratio. Carbon beats everything. Laser ablation rates actually increases more than linearly with. As the intensity increases, the target material reaches higher and higher temperature before it can dissipate as a plasma. This means you are creating pockets of very high temperature and pressure plasma in the center of the laser strike's crater. High temperature means that the laser's energy is being effectively conducted and radiated into the surrounding material, and high pressure can exceed the yield strength of the material and start gouging it out in chunks. This is much more efficient in terms of laser power per penetration rate than having to fully vaporize the target materials. 3) Rock has low compressive strength. Intense laser beams can break it apart and rip out big craters from the ground using the effect described above - habitats on airless worlds won't be protected for long, as lasers can dig their way through! So, if anything, lasers are more powerful than their power ratings suggest. about the third one... If they were smart, they would sit under a 10 centimeter pool of mercury, which, although expensive, would easily stop any ablative laser attack as the laser would have to vaporise the entire pool to begin getting at the rock.
|
|
|
Post by matterbeam on Oct 30, 2017 0:35:51 GMT
Missiles have an distinct advantage over lasers and EM Guns in actual combat, you don't have to engage your enemy directly. Would you risk your live to get a few lucky shots with your laser if missiles can do the job without endangering you and your crew? Missile Warheads can come in several flavours. KKV: Keep it simple stupid. Flak: Hit me if you can. Nuclear: Everyone loves the smell of molten hulls in the morning. Casaba: Crude particle accelerator powered by nuclear destruction Mirror: It would be a pity if your 500GW FEL would just gather just. Missile delta-v becomes less relevant as ship delta-v increases, if you want to destroy that quick missile boat moving at 435km/s relative to you, you wouldn't use an missile with a delta-v of +435km/s, but use missiles as kirklin mines. For those who don't know what a kirklin mine is, they are some objects which just happen to be in the way of the ship, Preferbly cold and coated to be "stealthy", to use the ships velocity against them, which is a reason why hydrogen steamer could remain viable even with nuclear pulse/fusion propulsion. The more important factor is often how small you can make your missile. At sufficiently high tech levels your PDW weapons will be capable of nearly instantly elimating any thread. Against kinetic PDW's cross-section is important, if you make your missile twice as long but half as wide your survibility just doubled. This also applies somewhat to Laser PDW's. But usually more important is how light you can make your missile. If your armored missiles weights 50% more than their light/non armored missile then they have to survive 50% to pay of the increase in mass. The thing that limits the minimum size of a missile is it sensory and computing equipment. The later can be partially fixed by using a network with the other missiles to maximize computional power. The former depends on how good can a sensor become and what kind of target you have. But something as low as 5kg can work, even if it a bit hard. Casaba Howitzer Warhead could remove the need of micromissiles by instead supplying long-ranged spears of nuclear fire. Example: matterbeam futuristic Casaba Howitzer: Efficiency: 20% Directivity: 0.1mrad Energy: 830TJ Yield: 1MT Matterbeam used the "Laser Weapon Calculator" with the following results against aluminium: 10Mm: 20m diameter, 291mm (Penetration) 50Mm: 100m diameter, 2.33mm After using the calculator I saw something... odd, 30419MW/cmΒ² Armor rating for aluminium, I am no Luke Campbell, but I think Aluminium can't survive 300TW/mΒ² or whatever armor rating means. So I have gone to Luke Campbells Laser Calculator. With the following results. 100Mm: 200m diameter, 6.1m Alumnium, 50cm CNT. 300Mm: 600m diameter, 0.74m Alumnium, 6.56cm CNT. The results show that the Casaba Howitzer is actually more long-ranged than expected. (Matterbeam, history repeats itself.) What does that means? In the endless discussions with matterbeam back in the day he suggested that the futuristic Casaba Howitzer could mass as low as 250kg. Let's assume a world where Fusion propulsion is widespread, lasers hit the light-lag limit and can produce hundreds of gigawatt of power for Dreadnaughts (~100kt). Torch Missiles massing at about 500kg carrying 200kg fuel and 300km/s of Dv will be able to carry an 1MT Casaba Warhead, using maximum focus the warhead will cover an area of 0.28kmΒ², the target is an laser star with 5cm CNT armor. The beam will travel 30-20s to the target. The ship has enough time to dodge the beam with its powerful engines, problem is, the missile isn't alone and dozens of other casabas covered every direction with nuclear fire. The momment the beam hits the entire armor, every turret, every radiator not in the ships shadow is vaporized. The inner compartments survived due to the armor, but the plasma created from the armor damaged many crucial system. The Laser star is unable to fight on, nor to move, nor to sustain life support for the surviving crew members much longer. Missiles only have utility in conventional space warfare if their propulsion systems are cheap enough to throw by the dozen at the enemy, and yet effective enough to produce an acceleration and deltaV that will catch a target. That's a big caveat that depends on the world you are building. Kinetic PDW won't try to shoot down missiles using bullets as is depicted in the game and as occurs in real life CIWS guns. They will deploy large plates into the path of the missiles, like a mobile Whipple shield. These plate drones are essentially anti-missile-missiles. Reducing the cross section area of your projectiles is not helpful here - you need to increase your terminal defense avoidance deltaV and lateral acceleration instead. I'm not sure what the armor rating is - sadly, even the wayback machine version of the laser weapon calculator is gone. If I had to estimate armor rating, I would add up the heat capacity times vaporization temperature, the heat of fusion, the heat of vaporization, and produce a MJ/kg rating for the material. Divide the beam power by the MJ/kg rating and you get volume of material vaporized, then divide by the spot size and you get the penetration depth achieved. This is extremely rough though, and doesn't take into account the mechanical stresses mentioned above. In the setting you described, you necessarily imply that you have very strong magnetic fields to handle fusion propulsion. This magnets technology can be employed to create a quadrupole lens for the casaba howitzer. The extreme field strength means that even if the quadrupole lens is placed some distance away from the nuclear charge so as to not be immediately destroyed, the wide particle beam can be focused. This will drastically increase the effective range of a Casaba Howitzer.
|
|
|
Post by newageofpower on Oct 30, 2017 1:46:03 GMT
As drive tech becomes progressively more powerful, so do weapons. This should be a maxim somewhere...
|
|
|
Post by dichebach on Oct 30, 2017 4:33:11 GMT
An interesting thread, though 13 pages is too much for me to parse at present. I have not played the game enough to get into the fray in terms of "what weapon systems" seem particularly effective. A quick glance at the thread suggests to me that that is the main theme of the discussion, and the possibly unusual argument I'd like to make is that: The question posted in the OP is different. "What will become the main dominant of future space battle?" Even assuming that the simulation is accurate (which is a fair foundational assumption) tech, and seat of the pants tactics based on tech can only ever answer part of such a question. Tech, and the tactical opportunities and constraints it affords inform such questions, but history suggests that the answers to such questions emerge from how social entities--if not specific leaders--appraise and act on those opportunities and constraints. Social entities and specific leaders are always primarily explicable (though not completely explicable) in terms of their developmental context. To select one recent period characterized by tremendous innovation and change, and also a great variety of warfare: the flintlock and the myriad types of cannon were crucial to how wars in mid 18th through mid 19th centuries were fought (a period that includes the American Revolutionary War, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812. But the nature of these technologies, and the common doctrines that pervaded is insufficient to understand the variety of wars of the period. To gain an understanding one must delve into the meat of history in all its subtleties, paradoxes and (in hindsight) apparent lapses of rationality by nearly everyone in positions of authority. Take for example, the "Ferguson Rifle". This was a breach-loading design, possibly the very first practically useful one and certainly one of the very first to be used in military service. At the time, almost all firearms (including small arms and cannon) were muzzle loaded: charge, packing and shot were rammed down the barrel of the weapon from the muzzle. This placed a hard cap on the fastest possible reload time of such weapons, thus a hard cap on how fast even the most crack veteran regiments could unleash salvos. New recruits were slower, but not dramatically so, and with sufficient drill and one battle under their belt, most soldiers could rapidly achieve "maximal" rate of fire. Muzzle loaders had many effects that rippled through how combat unfolded and how wars were fought, but among the other notable factors: the necessity of ramming the projectile and charge down the barrel made rifling impractical. Rifled muskets were uncommon, thought not exactly rare, and were in fact the preferred weapon among most frontier dwellers where killing an adversary or critter with a single shot and at considerable range were appealing goals. But for a regiment of soldiers, the much slower rate of reloading did not _seem_ to most military thinkers at the time to be a reasonable tradeoff for the increased accuracy afforded by rifling. The other factor of note was that a muzzle-loaded weapon was best reloaded from a standing or at most a kneeling posture. Loading one while prone throughout the entire loading cycle was more or less impossible and indeed, even performing the ramming and priming latter stages of the cycle while prone was problematic. The guns were designed to be loaded with the muzzle upright and doing it any other way posed a risk of a misfire or worse. The Ferguson Rifle (and breach loaders in general) did not suffer several of these deficiencies. Because of the charge was added and the fact there was no need to ram the load down the barrel, the weapon could be reloaded almost as easily from a prone or semi-prone position as from a standing posture. Also, rifled barrels would have been much more feasible for a weapon like the Ferguson, though I'm not certain if those were a part of the actual weapon in its limited prototype use in the American Revolutionary War (ARW). As the wiki explains As a point of comparison, the Brown Bess muzzle loader (which was the most common weapon used in the ARW) could only manage 3 to 4 rounds per minute. Now we are all gamers who have the benefit of hindsight and even if you are not a student of 19th and 20th century warfare, we are all probably aware at least in vague terms that (a) high accuracy at long range, i.e., rifled barrels; and (b) higher rates of fire, are almost universally desirable in warfare. Nonetheless, the Ferguson Rifle saw only very limited action in the ARW. As far as I'm aware, breach loaders of various designs crop up at various points throughout the 19th century and their impact was repeatedly the same: treated as an expensive novelty and regarded with incredulity. It was not until the American Civil War and the Sharps Repeating rifle that the clear battlefield dominance of the breach loader became clear and from that point on the muzzle loader was obsolete, and avoided by all war planners and war fighters ever since. Had British leadership been sensible, rational and at least marginally receptive to innovation in the 1770s, they might have recognized the tremendous potential of small units of Ferguson rifle equipped sniper/skirmishers and equipped enough of them to deploy them as supplements to standard musket and grenadier units and moreover, adopt some of the "less honorable" tactical doctrines of ambush, hit-and-run and sniping which the rebels used to great effect. One would presume that the British Empire, quite possible the greatest empire the world had ever seen up to that point (and arguably still to this day given their language and much of their core culture have become the language and culture of the Internet! ) would have the good sense to adapt its doctrines or rather its dogmas, as well as its logistics, tactics and strategy in a rational way. Fighting the Colonial rebellion in the same way they had fought in the Seven Years War, or any other conventional war in Europe seems pretty foolish from our perspective, but that is what they did and that, quite simply is why they lost. They showed up expecting a largely deforested agrarian landscape, with ample roads and abundant small communities dotting the landscape at short intervals and where massive cavalry charges and "set-piece" battles like those which prevailed in the battlefields of Prussia in the preceding years would determine the outcome of the war. The war they found was not what they came prepared to fight and they got bogged down and eventually lost. All of this to say: I believe that what COADE has done is to provide us with an invaluable model of how one critical aspect of near-future space warfare--or at least ship-to-ship combat off Earth--might be opportuned and constrained by technology. This is a laudable contribution both to gamer culture, to gaming and to history and military science. I'm disappointed to see the game has not drawn more attention than it seems to have drawn. But for all the edification and entertainment it offers, I don't think the game is (in its present form) sufficient to judge "the main dominant of future space battle?" So much will depend on the financial factors that finally click and compel the very first business enterprises of dramatic scale, meaning profits so impressive that they are a watershed in history and will subsequently be identified as the beginning of a new, rapid and frenetic Space Rush in which myriad players on Earth scramble to get their piece of the loot from outer space. In order to stay true to its objective: to produce a simulation of space combat that was not misled by any specific "vision" the game has achieved its goal, but also failed to address likely or tenable broader contexts. I became aware of this game based on a response in a thread I started in a forum full of old crusty Grognards of questionable ilk, and here is what the person who brought COADE into the discussion had to say at one point: Having played the game a good bit now, I think that is a very fair and accurate synthesis, and I hope no one regards it, or the position I'm taking as criticism, much less undue criticism of COADE. The game is delightful, well-made, remarkable! Moreover, it has dutifully fulfilled its objective: to model space-based combat with as conservative and hard-science fiction as possible. But the nitty-gritty details of space combat, or rather one model of them which makes as few assumptions as possible about broader context, are only part of the scope for answering what will be the future dominant in space warfare.
|
|