Define what you mean, please. Do you mean a tactical or strategic englobement? As in, an "englobement" in a battle, or cutting off an enemy planet by controlling all of the gravity wells that surround it?

In the case of the former, it's pretty difficult, especially since there isn't a movement penalty to accuracy, and in the case of the latter, of course you could get that in Sins.

Oh, you can determine how long a battle will last. If you have intelligence on the enemy warship's thrust plume luminosity, you can estimate both power and exhaust velocity. By comparing this to the enemy's known velocity, you can estimate how much the ship masses. If you have a modicum of intel on the enemy's ship classes, then you'll have a rough guesstimate of the ship's "mass ratio", i.e. how much propellant for how much "everything else" mass (using an example of mass ratio=3, then that means for every pound of payload, structure, powerplant, weapons, whatever, you've got two pounds of propellant).

Using that, you can get a rough estimate of the enemy's "delta-v", which is the degree to which the ship can change it's velocity, and thus alter course. Using that, you can get a rough estimate of how long the ship can last before it no longer has enough delta-v to return home.

All with math that we have today. As for the idea that space combat would be something like Trafalgar or maneuver making a difference, I humbly present the idea that it would, if anything, more resemble the combats between battleships during the days when the battleship, and not the aircraft carrier, ruled the seas.

As an aside, you speak of "jump out to repair or jump to another system to hide". This is impossible with our current understanding of physics, as there is no known way to create a method to exceed the speed of light, which would be required for what you suggest with that statement. In a real-life space combat scenario, there's only one decision to make before combat: Do I commit, or do I not? Once you make that decision, you're stuck with it; velocities of the ships involved and the likely lethality of realistic weapons designs compared to the durability of realistic armor makes it such that any hit will be lethal.

And of course a ship couldn't build........I should stop before I say something stupid. A plausible, military warship of the "near mid-future", to take a term from a blog I enjoy reading, wouldn't be able to build another version of itself. Note that there were ideas suggested involving a ship copying itself as a method exploration. Such devices were called "Von Neumann Probes" or "Von Neumann Machines". A weaponized version would be likely be termed a "Berzerker", after the series of novels with the same concept (weaponized Von Neumann Machines).

My position on "auto-repair ships", is that for a game, it's more or less a necessity. This is because if there isn't an auto-repair function, then repairing ships becomes a tedious chore for the player; it's not a fun mechanic for most people. For a story, on the other hand, there's a few reasons, probably more than I could think of.

Personally, I think it's very likely that a small manufacturing/repair facility would be included on a warship, to facilitate the replacement of sensitive components. Things like screws, bolts, nuts, can all be manufactured off-site and delivered when docked, while certain other things, like, say, plumbing of any kind, electrical wiring, and microchips, may need to be produced in-situ aboard the ship.

As for how a ship self-repair system works, generally, you're not going to get an explanation in the story, and IMO, it's better that way. Because then it shows the author isn't dumb enough to make something completely ridiculous up and say "that's how it works", even if it would never, ever work. Alternately, it might be because the author has the information inserted into a glossary or several appendices in the book, or perhaps a supplementary sourcebook.

In the case of Sins, it's game mechanics with an in-universe reasoning. The exception, of course, being the 3D movement. Note that Sins isn't meant to provide a space simulator, but rather a space-based real-time strategy experience. An excellent space simulator would be Vega Strike, or Orbiter (both are open-source or freeware), as both model numerous details in a highly realistic manner.

Also, it isn't unreasonable to think that space travel for the foreseeable future would look somewhat like naval travel today. The difference is that instead of a fixed point, you have a fixed orbit. You plot your own orbit versus that of your destinations, and then figure out what you need to get there within a certain time frame. A "spacelane" would simply be the fastest and most economical route; i.e., lowest mass ratio for the highest time you could monetarily afford.

There would be some parallels, like planetary orbits being analagous to national coastal regions, and interplanetary space being "the open sea", while asteroids and moons are somewhat similar to islands, with the moon systems of the gas giants being comparable to large archipelagos.

There's parallels, but that's really all they are.

Therein lies the confusion. I'm not talking about a galactic, or even interstellar-scale political entity. I'm talking, at most, solar-scale. What I'm talking about has to do with something that could plausibly occur within the next few centuries to the end of the millenium. So far, FTL travel, which would be a requirement for a galaxy-spanning empire, is not in the cards. Even a large interstellar empire would be unable to exist, as you'd never be able to talk to someone in a timely fashion.

As an example, if you and I were communicating between the Solar System and Alpha Centauri, with one of us at each, this post would take nearly four and a half years to reach you! And the reply would take another four and a half years, with the result being that, from my perspective, your reply took a grand total of nearly nine years to arrive. This alone is what, IMO, makes a cohesive interstellar empire an impossibility. Physics as are currently understood makes no possibility for a mechanism by which we might travel or communicate at superluminal velocities.

That's not to say that physics forbids this, just that it offers no method by which it might be accomplished. There are several highly theoretical ideas regarding such actions, but they require certain provisos that we aren't sure even exist.

WOW - its going to take me 9 yrs to reach the end of your reply

Instead of quoting you, I'll address you point-by-point. This way it doesn't take so much space.

1. Well, I did say that it is completely possible (and, as you noted, possibly desirable) to blockade a planet. However, I find that a blockade will only really happen in the average game of Sins if you've got a planet that's "phase laned into a corner", where there's only one or two phase lanes out, and the enemy captures the planets that are on the other side of those lanes.

Of course, such only works if, say, the two other worlds are minimally connected, so that it's easier to bypass the planet you control, and more-or-less "starve it out".

2. Oh, it could very well be a "battle outcome". If you chase down the enemy, and force them to either use more delta-v than they planned for and introduce the possibility that they won't be going home (either due to body bags or outta gas), then it's quite possible that the enemy ship would simply break off. Discretion is the better part of valour, as the saying goes.

3. Jutland and Trafalgar are not the same. For one, they used two very different technologies, and had different threats that they had to counter. Furthermore, battles in the era of Trafalgar could very easily suffer communications breakdowns, and the entire battle hinged on a "battle line".

In contrast, battleships during the "Jutland" era only traveled in formation; once they entered combat, the broke up, and instead moved side-on to the enemy to present the largest number of guns possible.

On a side note, I've noted that the space combat tactics in the Mass Effect 'verse hinge on the inverse of old battleship tactics; crossing the T. The difference is, that the historical precedent was to bring your broadside against the enemy's prow or stern; this minimized return fire and maximized the ordnance you could put downrange. In ME, however, it's the opposite; you want to align your much more powerful prow gun against the enemy's broadside since their side guns are much less powerful.

4. Then my mistake; I was under the impression that we had a duality of Sins supply lines/RL plausible space combat going. And of course we have to assume FTL tech of some level for Sins; it's part of the "canon" that it exists!

Incidentally, Phase Lanes offer an in-universe reason for the vastly smaller scale. Instead of displaying orbital models and correct distances in "realspace", it shows the relations of stellar and planetary bodies from the "reference frame" of Phase Space.

5. In the case of Sins, we really don't need to know how or why the ships can repair themselves. All we need to know is that they do, and how fast they can do it. It's like applying thermodynamics to weird scifi magitech; you consider the object a "black box", and simply account for the energy that goes into, and out of, the device.

6a. Truthfully, I've either not played or forgot about those games.

6b. The thing about spacelanes, however, is that in a scientifically accurate and plausible setting, a "spacelane" is just an orbital route you take that's fastest for the amount of delta-v you can put in your tanks and that your engine(s) can manage. It's more-or-less an abstract item; it doesn't really exist.

Of course, things get very different when you have FTL, because there are quite a few that would actually form a "network" of "routes". For example, EVE Online's Jump Gates, X3's Jump Gates, and Warhammer 40,000's Warp travel (Warp travel is actually more freeform, but depending on where you're at, you can have areas of the Immaterium that are calmer or have a "tide" that speeds (or slows!) you along). 40K Warp travel is less tangible, but that has more to do with the method of Warp travel initiation than with the actual system.

7. Well, we assume that FTL exist for almost every scifi game because it usually does. Homeworld, for example, has Hyperspace, Sins has Phase Space, I don't happen to know what Starshatter has, and Star Ruler is actually Newtonian in full (which pretty much means if you could actually clock the speeds, they'd probably exceed the speed of light).

There are some games that don't have FTL. I don't think that any of the Civilization games have it, and you can go from Stone Age to Space Age in those. Personally, I'd love to see a game that doesn't have FTL. It absolutely couldn't be a multiplayer game, and would have to be singleplayer in order to model the effects of relativity and all, but I think I'd rather enjoy a singleplayer space sim game like that.

An RT4X like Sins, though, would be unplayable unless you had time compression, which, again, limits it to singleplayer.

Note that Forever War has some kind of borderline FTL. A good book without FTL is Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. Very interesting. I personally am intending to purchase a few more books in the series (Revelation Space is only the 1st one), because it's hooked me quite a bit, to the point where I'm considering writing a piece involving a war between the different worlds and moons of a star system settled by STL colony ship.

In the case of the topic of the discussion, as I said above, I was under the impression we were talking about supply lines in Sins, and plausible future space warfare, at the same time.

On supply lines in Sins, have you considered that perhaps it's already implemented in an incredibly abstract manner? For example, the fleet supply tax represents the allocation of resources to deploy and operate larger fleets. Trade routes could also represent equipment and munition distribution routes for cargo ships. Culture bonuses, with the exception of the Advent, also could be argued as an abstraction of a supply line.

For example, the TEC gains antimatter regen bonuses in their culture. This could be said to be a fleet of antimatter tankers supplying the ships with additional antimatter as they go through it. In the same way, Vasari warships gaining a damage bonus could be explained as munition ships resupplying the magazines of warships, allowing said warships to expend munitions much more rapidly because of the steady supply.

When a force assaults a foreign territory, they always run the risk of making the same mistakes Hannibal did during the First Punic War. Warfare isn't going to change very much just because it moves into space.

And that's where you're wrong. The entire dynamic becomes instantly different. For example, supplies.

You don't need supply bases, because for large-scale interplanetary warfare, ships could very well be large, disposable, kinetic-kill buses.

Pretty much, build a body, strap a rocket and remass tanks onto it, slap some nuclear warheads into a couple of missile launchers, and send it on its way.

If the missiles don't get the target, then the ridiculously high velocity missile bus will, by virtue of slamming into the target at velocities that make the US Navy's experimental railgun look like it crawls along at a snail's pace.

There's two main monster factors about space that make it vastly different.

1. The enormous distances involved.
2. The enormous velocities involved.

As an example, if you built a WWII-era battleship analogue for space warfare (complete with big heavy guns and all), it would be turned to scrap in short order by the equivalent of a big rock.

Here's why:

1. Conventional gunnery technology (i.e. gunpowder and variations thereof) are inadequate for space warfare. The time between firing and the projectile leaving the barrel allows a target to move as much as three miles, depending on relative velocities.

2. The sheer distances involved also means that any kinetic weapon system that isn't self-propelled (a la a rocket motor) is inadequate. As an example, the Navy's experimental railgun mentioned above would fire a slug that would literally take hours to cross the distance between the moon and Earth. A missile would have a somewhat-mitigated but similar problem.

However, a missile has the supreme advantage of self-guidance. A railgun slug does not.

Note that anything moving at a velocity of equal to or greater than 3 kilometers per second (a little less than 2 miles per second) will release energy equivalent to it's weight in TNT.

In other words, if I throw a two-pound rock at you with a velocity of 3 km/s, it will have the same kinetic energy (and probably do similar damage levels) to a 2-pound stick of TNT.

@Destraex- I'll be addressing you're post later today, though I'll note that Vasari Phase Gates aren't jump gates; the units don't actually pass through them, and they don't work on an interstellar level, which is a commonly accepted facet of most depictions of a jumpgate.

You will always need supplies, they will be different supplies, but supplies none the less. Just because conventional weaponry isn't practical doesn't mean you won't need some kind of supply line. Controlling a system then attacking a nearby system has the exact same ramifications, retreat to a nearby friendly system for resupply.

I think ships will end up being more free roaming like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers on Earth. Expendable isn't how I operate, it generally doesn't make sense to build equipment that is always expendable, if anything space dictates that stuff has to be able to last.

Assuming ships will be moving at such speeds, and it isn't like there can't be targeting computers capable of calculating of velocity of the target. Do you really think commanders aren't going to get fairly close to the enemy?

I'm just gonna pop in with: The whole supply thing here is already abstractly in with ship slots and supply techs. Anything else is pretty much way beyond the shown realism of Sins.

I've bolded several parts, and will address them in sequence.

1. I'm not talking about Sins-style warfare or anything to do with FTL when I talk about the future of space combat. For a realistic view of plausible future space warfare does not include Faster-Than-Light travel. Thus, the only "systems" are groups of stations, or the lunar systems of the gas giants.

2. It makes perfect sense to build a total-war vehicle that is capable of being completely expendable. For a limited warfare system, you'll rather obviously want a human in the loop at some point, and so a manned warship that is well equipped, armed, and armored would be the ideal system.

On a side note, if you can build a platform that can be used in an expendable manner with no loss to performance and cost, and said platform can (and probably will) "scrag" your extremely-expensive reusable platform, then I win, both militarily and economically.

3. First off, you need to define what "fairly close" is. It's a frustratingly vague term. Secondly, I absolutely expect that a commander will likely be averse to closing to certain distances, depending on the weapons involved. The biggest reason is that while you can now more accurately direct your own firepower onto the enemy, so can the enemy do to you.

Other reasons include the fact that, at certain distances with laser weapons (likely to be the most prevalent, and a laser weapon won't require a supply chain for realistic, and feasible, combat durations), combat effectively becomes a "mutual eyeball-frying contest", to once again shamelessly steal a term from a blog I enjoy.

There's also a flaw in your statement "Assuming ships will be moving at such speeds,...".

The kinds of velocities I envision are on the order of several tens of kilometers/second between two ships. What that means is that, when viewed from the perspective of either combatant, closing velocities are on the order of 10+ km/s. This isn't so unreasonable as you think; a nuclear thermal rocket that was designed and developed in the 1960s could easily provide that kind of velocity, with only a modicum of water or liquid hydrogen as reaction mass.

Also keep in mind that a futuristic propulsion system, like say, an antimatter rocket, would be capable of boosting to much higher velocities. A pure antimatter rocket, where only equal parts AM+matter are used, has an exhaust velocity of one third the speed of light.

Give it a mass ratio of, oh, say around, 2.71, and it's "delta-v" (the degree to which it can alter it's velocity), becomes 33% of lightspeed. Note that 2.71 is approximately equal to "e", or the natural logarithm. And, that any rocket with a mass ratio equal to e has a delta-v equal to the exhaust velocity of the rocket.

I was actually intending to mention that in my post on how the culture mechanics could possibly represent abstracted supply lines, but it slipped my mind.

Ultimately, of course, this mechanic works in Sins very well, and will likely stay the way it is.

Of course it depends on the weapons involved, but it is not like ships are going to shooting at each other from opposite ends of a solar system. By that logic, carrier warfare would be more viable than traditional naval warfare.

I completely and totally disagree with expendable weapons like that, any warship needs to be able to have at least one reliable weapons system that is unlikely to run out of ammunition for a long period of time, due to the extreme difficulty in resupplying ships in space. Some expendable weapons are fine, but to only produce expendable weapons systems is inherently more expensive than a partially reusable system.

Computers can handle targeting at such speeds, wouldn't be easy but it isn't unfathomable.

Okay, here's the breakdown:

1. Range is dependent on weapons technology. 1 light hour, which is 7.5 AUs, (7.5x the average distance between Earth and Sun) is the maximum radiation-kill range of a typical, theoretical x-ray laser.

We won't be killing a ship in orbit of Mercury with a laser near Pluto, sure. But in space, because there is no horizon, and it's also an extremely sensor-friendly environment, engagement ranges become really, really BIG.

2. In space, battleship analogues>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>carrier analogues. Why? Simple. A battleship analogue can carry far more weapons, armor, and ammunition for far more deadlier weapons than a carrier can, for equivalent mass and cost.

A space carrier with as much firepower as a space battleship will mass and cost much, much more than the battleship would. This gives the battleship one of two advantages:

i) The battleship has superior acceleration and maneuverability than a comparable-firepower carrier; OR
ii) The battleship has superior firepower and endurance than a comparable-tonnage carrier.

A space carrier must carry not only fuel, propellant, and supplies for itself, but also for it's auxiliary craft complement.

3. I'm not saying that these are expendable warships or that a warship would be armed solely with expendable weapons (note that a solely-missile-armed space warship isn't a bad idea*); rather, that for a total war, no-holds-barred conflict, a weapon system that not only carries weapons, but is cheap enough that you don't need to recover it, and is designed in such a way that the ship can act as a weapon system in and of itself, is a far superior weapon than a manned warship.

An unmanned warship will always outperform a manned warship, simply because a bunch of computer chips have much higher physical stress tolerances than a human. As an example, a computer is 99+% likely to be capable of withstanding accelerations on the order of 50 or more g's. Even in the most ideal posture/position for acceleration, which is pretty much "lying face-up on the floor", the human body begins to take structural (i.e., skeletal) damage at 40-50 g's of acceleration.

A ship that's cheap enough that it can operate as an weapon will be still better, because then the cost of losing it is more-or-less factored into operation; it's not a case of being dumb, so much as being frugal. You ideally want to recover your semi-expendable missile buses that can be reloaded, but you don't need to in order to figure a succesfull mission.

4. I'm not advocating the use of only expendable weapons. If you'd read my post more closely, you'd have noticed that for limited-warfare operations, like, say, pacifying that stubborn orbital habitat that's not been paying their taxes, a manned warship is of course superior. But that's because the purpose is to pacify and convey presence; an expendable weapon is designed to kill, and only to kill.

5. You again misread my post; I'm not advocating a totally expendable weapon system. I'm advocating something that is designed to be "semi-expendable", i.e. you can simply chuck it at the enemy and not give a crap whether or not you can recover, reload, and reuse them, but you can recover, reload, and reuse them.

6. You underestimate the rate of computer technology advancement. Every few years, computer data handling and processing capabilities are roughly doubling, or decreasing in physical size requirement. I doubt the average person notices, though, because there aren't a lot of commercially-available civil sector applications for such high-grade computing power.

Remember, a photon-based computer, unlike the electron-based "box" you're sitting in front of as you read this post, would be more compact, and lighter, and run cooler. Even if a photon-based computer isn't "more powerful", if it's smaller, then you can pack more processors into roughly the same space.

7. A blog I read fairly habitually, Rocketpunk Manifesto, describes kinetic-kill buses and "laserstars"; the latter is a laser-armed spaceship. Generally speaking, the article(s) that discusses said items describes the need and usages for both.

A lot of good points here from every party involved in this discussion.

1) While range of laser/plasma based weaponry may be limited by physics, technology, and power requirements an effective range of several AU's for an unmanned "missile"(or simply anything that has the desired mass) whether self-propelled or not is simply a matter of travel time (Granted could be unrealistic for the situation depending on tech available and propulsion or the lack of). The main barrier for such range in space combat would primarily be ballistics and the ease of evading such an attack by simple travel maneuvering so we will probably only be seeing self propelled and guided devices for this range or greater. By the time a self-guided and self-propelled missile reaches a target it would theoretically be unavoidable if the propulsion technology and computer guidance has reached sufficient levels.

2) I have to disagree with this point although such a circumstance "could" be plausible again at relative tech/resource levels. The main fallacy with stating that battleships are > than carriers in the space setting seem to rely in what the purpose of a carrier would be. A carrier is NOT and should not be designated as a direct weapons platform. Would a battleship have more/more powerful weapons systems than a carrier? Of course it should. Would a battleship have greater maneuvering/acceleration than a carrier? Fairly irrelevant in an optimal setting not to mention negligible assuming manned ships due to what you yourself have stated. Carriers are not direct combat vessels and ideally should never be used as such. Also as far as maneuvering/acceleration is concerned in space only acceleration (in all directions) matters. 

My idea of when I think of a space fairing carrier is a ship that stays on the outer edges of potential combat ranges, perhaps staying in a stable orbit on the far side of a planet/moon/orbital body where a direct firing line could not be made. Most carriers today have limited/no weapons themselves not counting their cargo. Similar to how carriers are used today they also would not be used alone and would have accompanying ships to deal with logistics and defense of the fleet. Much like carriers now have destroyers/cruisers to protect against enemy fighters/bombers/missiles so would carriers in the future. So now we have a carrier that sits outside of direct combat range of the enemy, is not in a direct line of sight for any attacks, and has supporting ships to deal with "ballistic" weapons or missiles before they reach the carrier. Carriers then may be used as mobile bases of operation and launching of strikes using drones or other such ideally unmanned fighters.

Of course battleships would perhaps still play a role in combat but realistically I believe they would be relegated more to the role of destroying stationary or low-mobility targets. The same reason that we do not use battleships today is that with a battleship that engages in direct combat with an enemy you are putting an extremely high cost production at risk. Just as FTL travel will not be possible, battleships are not going to have "shields" that make them invincible to mass drivers or explosive weaponry.

Instead of battleships I could see the argument that "missile"(or your preferable future weapon of choice) cruisers or destroyers would be more viable options. Sure a smaller framed ship would have less room for energy "batteries" or fusion or AM power production but again the power requirements may be sufficient depend on tech level all else equal.

3) You really lost me on this point after just stating that battleships were superior to carriers when you almost went as far as stating drone based weapon delivery systems(i.e. drone carriers) were as you said "Ideal". I understand when you say you would like to have a self contained ship that does not rely on others or requiring any logistical support but lets face it no competent navy commander would put a carrier protected by its contingent at risk of loss assuming equal tech on both sides of the conflict. I agree with this point.. I guess?

4) As far as unmanned vs manned a computerized system will always be "more" expendable than one that uses a life (okay not always considered true heh but lets say ideally with a high enough tech level as we are discussing). We also do not need a manned ship to convey presence as a drone or other unmanned vessel can do the same; Predator drones in Iraq could pacify the populace as their presence was observed sometimes. If you need a ground based presence robotics can fulfill that role as well. 

5) Carriers I agree completely with you!

6) These advancements will make great drones for carriers to load up on I agree/concur.

Not like any of this matters, war won't ever take place in space  

1. First off, plasma-based weapons which use a plasma to do damage, will not work at all. I hate it when people start talking about plasma weapons, because a real-life plasma weapon would be as effective as a gun that shot steam.

Secondly, that point was primarily noting that certain classifications of laser cannon have stupidly long range. If you had a better comprehension of the entirety of both that post and previous posts of mine, then you would realize that I have never suggested that a simple railgun would be the best space-borne weapon. It could be construed as rather the opposite, in fact.

2. In this place called reality, a space-fighter will have no appreciable advantage over a space-battleship, other than expendability. Furthermore, a space-battleship can pack on a lot more armor and weapons, and can also pack a much more powerful and longer-ranged weapon system than the space-fighter.

In general, if 1 space battleship=10 space-fighters for cost, then the battleship will swat down it's own cost in space-fighters with ridiculous ease. The only way you can rationalize space-fighters is by stupidly handwavey technological constraitns or advances, and by having weapons that are much more powerful than their size, allowing space-carriers to reign supreme over a space-battleship. A space-carrier also has a massive disadvantage in supply train requirements; a space-battleship only requires remass, fuel, and parts/ammunition for itself, and maybe any personal shuttles that are carried.

A space-carrier requires parts, munitions, and fuel&remass for itself, as well as every single fighter it carries. Not only that, but it cannot carry the larger and more powerful weapons that a space-battleship can, because it must have room for the space-fighters that comprise it's own main armament.

Furthermore, if a space-carrier cannot carry more fighters than can defeat a battleship at all (because there's no real way you'd have a space battleship defeated by an equal cost in space-fighters), then the space-carrier's squadrons all get massacred, shortly followed by the carrier itself.

Meanwhile the space-battleship is still standing, reigning supreme over the battlefield of the void.

Though, that doesn't mean a space-carrier would be useless and that noone would build them; they likely have a good role in keeping good sensor coverage of highly congested regions, such as orbital spaces of major worlds. This is mostly because the space-fighters would be very small and nimble, allowing them to "squeeze" into tight spaces.

Note, however, that a missile cruiser of equal tonnage to a carrier, equipped with missile buses that are equivalent to space-fighters, will be superior. This is because a space-fighter, by it's very nature, requires recovery.

That means it requires 3 to 4 times the propellant that a disposable missile bus requires.

Also, I have never once suggested that magitech shields will protect future spaceships. Don't put words in my mouth. As an aside, a ship is highly unlikely to use an antimatter power system, as fusion is a much better choice, and the expense of antimatter makes it a poor choice for a power generation source. Rather, antimatter propulsion systems would be seen.

3. You misunderstand the concept. It's not in the least a drone carrier. What it really is is the equivalent of a B-1B bomber, only comparatively cheap enough to allow the drone system to be completely expendable. You wouldn't carry these things aboard a separate ship; they've got enough engine power and remass tankage to do the same kinds of maneuvers a manned vessel would be required to do. The difference is that these drones are loaded with missiles, and the drone's hull can itself function as the equivalent of a giant bullet. Only guided.

4. Predator drones could pacify because people knew that those things could kill, and they'd probably seen Predator drones in action. There's also the slight problem that a drone warship can't investigate suspicious activity in a space context, by virtue of being incapable of boarding a manned vessel. Unless, of course, we decide to make the drone vessel fully reusable, non-expendable, and carry a complement of humanoid drones with laser rifles for boarding actions.

It's probably cheaper to just build a corvette with humans on it, because then you don't have to worry about losing this big expensive drone ship with boarding drones to a pirate action. There's also the slight problem of AI being unlikely for the next several centuries. No matter how much processing power you have, you still can't truely think if you don't actually have a consciousness-analogue.

5. You once again misunderstood my point. I'm not advocating any kind of space-fighter or space-carrier. It's an missile-armed drone, with the drone's hull and structure being capable of functioning as an impromptu kinetic-kill weapon. These drones would be launched from space stations, much like a manned vessel, only the drone is smaller. You'd likely build a handful of recovery vehicles that could tow one or more (probably two or more actually) of the drones back to base, for reloading, refueling, and any maintenance, but the basic design is predicated on the innate expendability of the drone.

6. As above, you don't understand that the drone design I advocate is either seeded into orbit and launched on command/as necessary, or carried in a space station that is immobile. These drones aren't space-fighters launched from a space-carrier.

Note that I don't think that fiction with space-fighters and space-carriers is inherently bad; space-fighters have a bit of maverick, hotshot flavor to them, and easily make for rollicking good space opera.

Hard science fiction could do without it though. Ironically the gothic space fantasy (not even the semi-scientific space opera) Warhammer 40,000 has an extremely interesting dynamic for space fighter-type craft; the only reason they can do damage to a capital ship is because they can bypass shields and do highly accurate attack runs against the hulls of capital-class warships. Of course, it also has boarding actions and ramming a viable (though in the case of the latter, a rare) tactic. A mixed bag more-or-less.

1) Sweeping statement saying plasma does no damage, as a short ranged weapon plasma would do far more than that of steam. Lasers capable of ionizing matter of say the hull of a ship would do more than nothing as you state. As for railguns, mass drivers, and other kinetic weaponry they are actually one of the most cost effective weapons in space as they only rely on mass and velocity to deal damage and build time/difficulty of such systems would be near trivial.

2) If you think a space equivalent of a battleship size ship would cost the same as 10 fighter drones or anywhere near that not to mention the time of construction and resources to do so of such a vessel I would say your idea of the future of civilization has massive financial difficulties and is maybe a production facility is on a union strike. You should "come back to reality" as space fighters won't be x-wings and tie-fighters using short range slow traveling lasers. As far as armor there is no amount of armor that would be able to withstand the forces of future weaponry at any true usefulness per cost of production and development unless your crazy idea of a battleship is a planet sized hunk of metal. Why would you engage a battleship when the point of conflict is not to destroy the others armed forces but to win the war? Even a battleship would not be able to maintain position to defend all axis in space around a target and that target would not need to be the battleship it would be a station/colony/planet. Surprisingly you do not even mention the main pro of a battleship would potentially have a higher acceleration due to more space for powering an engine system than that of a drone.

Going as far as saying it is magic to even consider armaments of a drone that would be able to damage a battleship is absolutely insane. The torpedo bomber equivalent drone loaded with the highest tech available of missile(swarm or cluster preferably) from extreme range in order to gain velocity would do more than scratch the surface of any object let alone a battleship equivalent. How do you plan on propelling the ship without putting the engine systems at risk of damage? Slapping mass via armor around it won't work to sufficiently defend it not to mention you need propulsion in all directions meaning multiple targets. How would you protect your humans inside your battleship from concentrated radiation from a weapon? Mass and armor does not solve all equations.

Saying that a guided missile cruiser is more effective than a carrier is a matter of operation. Unless you are launching 100's of missiles from that cruiser that will sit dormant in space capable of activation against a target then a carrier using drones would be more effective(Just arm a few bomb/missiles on the drone) if not less costly. Carrier battle-groups are useful for control and denial of area. War and combat does not occur as a single minded game in which either you or your opponent requires the single biggest piece in a single location to win. Still I like the idea of missile cruisers and they would be a key piece of the tactical carrier fleet and operations.

3) A drone fighter-bomber launched from a carrier could have the a similar function except with more operational range. Maneuvers in space are irrelevant except for long range evasion and drones would have less of it than your battleship unless it has poor design.

4) Space is a big place, sure you could send a corvette sized boat on a month/year however long tour you need to a colony or station but the fact remains that humans have needs and requirements even in space that our computer/robotic complements do not. Drones won't care to board a pirate ship when all their is mission is to destroy it. Why not just use the drones from your point 5 to deal with local incursions backed with human command? As far as AI advancement it would probably have a better likelihood of development than of your AM/M propelled missiles.

5) No I get that completely, I am just suggesting that fighter-bomber drones based on a carrier would have far better coverage and effectiveness due to the higher acceleration of the carriers systems than those based elsewhere. I am not suggesting that we should be building carriers filled with fighter-bombers that cost the future equivalent of millions/billions but cheap, inexpensive, reusable drones loaded with weaponry/missiles/bombs what your best tech allows that can also function as a mass projectile if at sufficient velocity to do effective damage to the enemy as calculated by the drone after time of deliverance of payload. Anything in space can but more mass = wasted resources all you need it the velocity to make up for the mass. Having it unmanned removes a significant number of variables and requirements than that of a manned space fighter would (Which I would say is not worth building except for patrolling local areas).

6) A stationed or orbited drone would never be able to achieve adequate coverage time for a local defensive action if it used as a kinetic weapon system in and of itself other than absorbing an impact. Unless you are going back into the fiction arena where ftl is possible and your drones are using a type of in system jump drive it would not be able to perform an intercepting role.

You keep mentioning "nimble" and "able to fly in tight spaces" in regard to drones when the fact is the fastest ships are the larger ones, the downside of such is that a single ship cannot use such speeds to maintain defense or tactical advantage over 100's to 1000's+ drones loaded with missiles spread across a vast area of space.

1. Once again, you misunderstand what I said. I said that a plasma weapon, i.e. a weapon that uses a directed plasma is equivalent to a gun shooting steam. Not a weapon who's effects produce plasma as a by-product. Furthermore, any laser powerful enough to turn armor into plasma is powerful enough to vaporize large depths of said armor. Moot point.

EDIT: the problem with pure plasma weapons, BTW, is keeping the plasma as a contained mass, instead of dispersing into a useless cloud of particles that are so far apart you'd be more likely to win the lottery than hit one (figuratively speaking, of course). A weapon which produces a plasma as a by-product of target impact is a different deal.

Secondly, the stupidly high velocities that railguns require are prohibitive. And I never said that kinetic-kill is useless; rather, that current and projected railgun-type weapons (unless it's a multi-stage launcher, wherein the railgun provides an additional boost to munition velocity) are ineffective in a space context.

2. Firstly, stop twisting my words, because I never said that a battleship would cost the same as 10 fighters. I also never said that the fighters were drone fighters, just space-borne fighter analogues. Secondly, the cost equivalence was to illustrate my point.

Furthermore, a battleship has better force projection. It has bigger guns, that can be fired at much longer ranges than anything the drone-fighter-whatever-fighter things can. Said guns will kill the fighters, and then the fighters will be SOL. Additionally, a battleship can mount an exponentially better sensors and fire control systems than fighters, allowing the battleship to kill the fighters before they can even acquire target locks.

3. You're still not understanding. Dropping a ship in deep interplanetary space, is stupid. Because then it's response time is huge. It will not be able to respond in anything passable as a timely fashion. You're also both correct and incorrect about a dronecraft having worse evasion capabilities than a battleship. You're right in that a drone will have a lot less delta-v to play with than the battleship.

But you're wrong because a drone will be able to maneuver a lot faster, by virture of having a higher acceleration curve. Speed is a meaningless term for space combat. Velocity isn't, but acceleration is where the real money is.

Additionally, these kinetic-kill weapons are intended to be launched as a primarily defensive weapon; hence why I denote that they are seeded in orbit or launched from specialized stations. These aren't intrinsically offensive systems. Of course, that big merchant ship at the next station over would make an excellent delivery platform.....

Which is, incidentally, another point about my drone design. It's intended to be something you can drop in orbit, or kick out the cargo bay doors, or launch from a specialized station. It requires no specialist launching equipment. It can use such devices, but it doesn't need them. Furthermore, while a recovery system would be intrinsically specialized, it also is a somewhat unnecessary piece of equipment.

4. These corvette-sized "boats" aren't intended for long-term or long-distance patrol. They're intended to investigate suspicious activity, like why Merchant Vessel 11-AAA isn't responding to a flight controller's hails. A lot like what customs and border patrol do, really.

What you also fail to realize, is that these corvettes aren't for circumstances in which it is known that pirates have taken over Merchant Vessel 11-AAA and slaughtered the crew; rather, they are intended for conditions in which it is suspected that such an event might have taken place, or other similarly unfortunate event. Like say, comm system failure. This, incidentally, brings up another useful facet of the "corvette" I described: you can use it for "rescue" operations.

5. As I described it, and for the role I envisioned, no, a space carrier would not perform that role better. This is due to the reasons I've described above.

Also note that a bigger ship can, as I said, carry bigger weapons, which allows it to carry more powerful weapons. This is particularly relevant for omni-directional nuclear weapons, due to the fact that nuclear weapon's destructiveness falls off with the square of the distance. It's called the inverse-square law, BTW.

Furthermore, the entire point of the drone system I described is to be a very-high-acceleration, high-delta-v platform, that can rapidly and reliably intercept a target, unleash multiple missiles of either kinetic kill or nuclear warhead variety, and then, if necessary, slam itself into the target. The idea is that instead of having a fighter-whatsit that flies by, launches warheads, and then flies back to the carrier (which will require 3-4x the amount of delta-v/remass that my expendable drone would require, thus making the drone that much cheaper), you have a drone that you just shoot off. If you've got the time and desire to go get it later, then whoopee, you can indeed reuse it.

But you definitely don't need to, because the thing is designed to be as inexpensive and deadly and expendable as is possible.

6. A lone stationed or orbiting drone might not, but a seeded swarm of several hundred thousand easily could. Remember, I can see you coming a long freaking time before you get there. If we're talking interplanetary warfare, then I've known you're coming for days, if not weeks.

Again, you miss the point of the device. It's intended to intercept and kill such things as enemy warships, whatever the type. It's not intended to intercept something like a big rock, though it would work just fine against an interplanetary nuclear weapon or a comparable/indentical device.

And I keep mentioning "nimble"/"able to fly in tight spaces", as a reference to a small ship being able to deftly maneuver through dense orbital traffic, such as would be present around worlds with the many hundreds or thousands of orbital stations that would be present in heavily space-present post-industrial civilizations.

The biggest thing you don't get about battleship vs carrier in space, is this:

1. For a given mass, the battleship will have greater endurance, protection, and firepower than a carrier.

2. Correlating to 1, is that a carrier with battleship-level firepower via fighter projection, will greatly outmass the battleship, but likely not have nearly as much protection or endurance.

3. Armor is not the only protection dimwit. There's this magic thing called point defence, and we do it now. See, it's when you shoot down missiles before they hit you. For a given tonnage and the requirements of both types, a battleship will likely be able to carry either numerically or qualitatively superior point defence systems. Or both.

4. A battleship is a weapon not only of destruction, but of coercion. You can feasibly use it to threaten ground targets with orbital bombardment. A carrier does (re: cannot) carry weapons powerful enough to do so, and it is effectively impossible to optimize a fighter for both space and aerial combat.

So you can forget sending your fighters on bombing runs (which will be cost-inefficient; a giant laser beam doing the work of a bomber squadron really drills home the point that battleship>carrier in space), unless you decide to pay the mass penalty of aerial bombers vs more ordnance or supplies.

5. There is no horizon in space. Generally, unless you hide behind a planet (unlikely, as at interplanetary distances planets are specks), everyone sees everyone else. So a battleship's superior weapons, which have longer range and higher destructiveness, will kill the carrier before the carrier can launch it's fighters to kill the battleship.

However, there is a horizon in orbital territory, which a battleship generally won't be in anyways, unless it's docking for whatever logistics-related reason. Rearm, repair, resupply, whatever. So a carrier would be more viable for orbital territory, but it would still be more expensive than simply basing the fighters off of already-there stations.

Note that my opinion is that a battleship, if it does engage in orbital combat, will mostly be sitting in high orbit doing a Death-From-Above shtick. This makes it very vulnerable to planetary batteries, but extremely lethal to said batteries at the same time...........the trick is to find the planet-bound silos and laser cannons.

A carrier is SOL trying to DFA something. Note that a battleship would be able to fire with relative impunity down on a target in a lower orbit, by virtue of being in a higher orbit; it takes more energy to throw a ball up into the air to any significant distance, than it does to drop it on someone two stories below you.

However, I concede that a carrier could be viable in some very specific environments, but not in a total-war open-space combat environment. The range is too great for fighters to close to effective weapons ranges, while a battleship will simply smite the carrier from afar.

I never stated that "plasma" weapons would be used by containing plasma as I said laser-plasma so we agree. The power requirements and resources required to create a pure plasma weapon would be on a scale that if achievable any space faring ship would have been LONG obsolete for use in conflict as such a weapon would just eliminate entire systems of being able to be habitable.

Battleships conveying overpowering force vs a carrier becomes obsolete once technology levels reaches a certain level just as they have in modern times.

You have serious flaws in your logic by thinking that a small sized drone would have higher acceleration or maneuvering than a much much larger ship. In space not near an orbital body more size for power systems or essentially stronger bigger power systems will create greater acceleration irregardless of the mass of a ship. Δv in situations such as these are calculated without mass factoring into the equation due to the fact that gravities or other external force is basically a non-factor except in very specific examples. A battleship sized vessel will have higher acceleration than a drone because it has more powerful propulsion systems.

As far as weapons range being better on a larger sized ship that is also incorrect except for using laser or energy based weapons due to the fact any shot fired will not stop unless it comes into contact with something. If you use ballistic weaponry then the range will not differ from that of varying platform size as only acceleration at launch or velocity of such systems self-propelling or non would increase not the range. Stating entirely that bigger systems will create greater range is simply not true.

You do not have fiction-like sensor detection to differentiate from space dust or natural particles and a properly built drone from the distances that would be their weapons range. 

Stating that you would need a small drone to navigate orbital traffic is laughable. Almost into drawing from the realm of fiction in which asteroid fields have to be navigated. Fighter-bombers would not need to gain close range on the target to have weapons range unless you are using laser weapons as their most effective armament type would be self-propelled and thus does not have a described finite range except for interception.

Point defense cannot stop laser based or radiation based weapon. Point defense at the ranges that will occur in space will not be as similarly easy as it is in an atmosphere (unless again you have fiction-like sensor detection unaffected by all external factors) as once again the duration and distance that a self propelled weapon has does not have a terminal velocity. What is there to stop a drone going to place a bomb/mine equivalent with some type of propulsion to stay at a relative point in space that will not be easily detectable as hostile until within arming range? I guess you could use lasers to blast every piece of space dust and rock within a certain range of a certain size but that would be quite impractical.

You never mentioned how a battleship would protect the crew from facing potential weaponry intended to just cause fatal radiation levels even through a super reinforced hull. All energy based weaponry does not have to be focused on destruction of the target as emp or radiation ect. can disable targets in their own ways. In almost all situations it is more favorable to disable a target or have it disengage than destroy it. I guess if you say your battleship has some type of organic "skin" that blocks all radiation I would say it was possible if not a little far fetched.

You do not need to have a large ship in uncontested orbit over the planet to "nuke" or control it via any missile or other weaponry. If you are able to sit freely uncontested over a place in a situation such as you described with a giant battleship then a single drone or even a satellite platform could do that.

For a given mass, the battleship will have greater endurance, protection, and firepower than a carrier.

Battleships in modern times have greater endurance(doesn't have to fuel planes and resupplying armaments), protection(thicker hull and reinforced systems intended for sustaining damage), and DIRECT firepower (massive gun batteries for bombardment) than carriers today. That still does not making them superior for operation.

Okay, Halador, I'm going to address this as simply as I can, point-by-point. Try to keep up.

1. Space warfare =! wet-navy warfare. In space, a battleship will outperform the carrier every time for cost. Remember, a battleship isn't necessarily the most expensive ship you can build; rather, it is the most well-armed, well-protected ship you can build. It just so happens that such things usually coincide.

2. Size matters, stupid. You want to know why the drone has better acceleration over short durations? Simple. The amount of stress it's structure must support is far less than the battleship. The amount of mass to be supported goes up with the cube of a structure, while area to support said mass goes up with the square. Obviously, then, a high-mass structure will not be able to sustain very-high-accelerations, simply because it is likely it would simply crumple like a tin can under it's own mass.

3. A bigger ship can carry bigger missiles, that have bigger engines and bigger remass tanks. Hurr Durr, it looks like my battleship still outperforms your carrier. Also remember that a weapon's range isn't limited by just it's physical constraints, but also by it's targeting systems. A railgun may be physically lethal at the same ranges as a laser, but it won't be effectively lethal, because the target is nowhere near your slug by the time the slug arrives.

4. "Fiction-like sensor detection to differentiate space dust or natural particles and a properly built drone from the distances that would be their weapons range". Hate to smash your little carrier-wanking fantasy, but yeah, I DO. Because no matter what you do, any functional space-borne weapon will still be hotter than anything around it. This might not hold perfectly true in some exceedingly rare situations, like close-orbit to the sun, but in such cases you instead look for occlusion of a light source instead of a big-honking heat signature.

Unfortunately for your drones, they are visible from obscene distances. Even if you slap a puny ion drive capable of only 0.001g of acceleration, then I can still spot it from 144 million kilometers away. Because there is no stealth in space.

5. I'm not saying a small drone is necessary to navigate orbital traffic, simply that a smaller ship will have an easier time of maneuvering in dense orbital traffic. Like, say, the kind that might arise around very large or popular stations. And yes, a fighter-bomber would need to close range, to ensure it actually hits the target. If you have railguns that can chuck slugs at 10 km/s, then you need to be no more than ten kilometers away from a target, to ensure minimal reaction time for the target.

And on their approach, the battleship will see them and snipe them out of the sky with it's big-honkin' laser cannon.

6. Durr, stating the obvious much. Of course a beam weapon such as a particle beam or laser cannon is unaffected by point defences. The point is, however, that a laser cannon would have to either be of a highly-difficult-to-construct variety, such as x-ray or gamma-ray wavelength, or of ludicrously high power.

A particle beam, however, will require only ludicrously high power and current. Which sadly means that if you shoot the beam cannon, it blows up spectacularly. Going back to my example with the x-ray laser, it only achieves radiation kill against non-hardened targets.

7. The problem with simply sitting in space at a "difficult-to-detect-range" is that such a range simply does not exist. Background temperature in space is borderline absolute-zero. There's no way you'd even get close to that, without some kind of magitech, thermodynamics-violating toy.

So your mines/drones get seen by the battleship anyways, and swatted before they can ever do their job. You've just wasted valuable time, money, and resources on a useless weapon, extolling it's virtues while ignoring it's failings.

8. EMP doesn't work on humans, and is very difficult to work with in space. A non-nuclear EMP, which would be the only way to work for deep-space combat, would have an effective range of 500 meters, or less. And that's kissing the enemy's eyes distance in space combat. And it's pretty simple to EMP-harden electronics; I mean, old-style vacuum tubes are highly resistant to EMP.

There's also the fact that a weapon capable of doing a radiation-kill against a hardened target would be more useful as a weapon used to actually do physical damage to the target. A side effect of radiation-kill capable lasers is that at the range at which they are unable to physically kill, and only radiation kill, are so stupidly long that it's useless against anything except for a stationary target.

A battleship won't simply sit pretty for you to shoot it in the face.

9. Well, maybe because any weapon capable inflicting fatal radiation levels will generally either be powerful enough to outright destroy the ship or be at such distance as to allow time for maneuver. There's also the fact that I never mentioned the battleships having a living crew.

10. Disabling a target that is going to keep trying to kill you no matter what (i.e. a dronecraft of any size) is an exercise in futility. The designers have surely been intelligent and competent enough to build it with a fair degree of redundancy. There's some things you simply can't "disable" or "force to disengage". You have to outright kill them.

In space warfare, most fleets will be entirely drone-operated, meeting in the void, and dueling. Whoever wins can then send their drone battleships to the enemy's planet, and then threaten a bombardment (this is all within the context of interplanetary warfare). The scariest part is that the winner can order the drones to bombard, and they will do it, because they have no moral scruples. It's a machine, and has no feelings, no morals, no ethics other than what it's creators build into it. Seeing as it's a warmachine, it's likely that such things will not be abhorrent to it's simplistic machine mind.

If it even understands what it is doing.

11. Except, of course, a drone or satellite will not have city-killing firepower, and hence the battleship is superior. It can destroy massive amounts of territory relative to a satellite or a drone. Would a network of drones or satellites providing orbital artillery (sometimes called "ortillery") tactical fire support be superior to a battleship in the same role? Probably, as the drones/satellites have much lower firepower, allowing them to be used in a highly surgical manner. The dispersed nature of a satellite bombardment network also plays to an advantage for tactical bombardment; there's lots of bombard-sats, so they can function effectively even with heavy damage to the network.

I'm not saying a battleship would be incapable of precision firepower, BTW. Just that precision tactical firepower isn't necessarily the battleships domain, and could possibly be performed better by a satellite network.

12. The reason that a modern wet-navy battleship loses to a wet-navy carrier is because the carrier is much more capable of projecting destructive firepower "over the horizon".

In space there is no horizon. Which is why battleship>carrier, in space warfare.

this got off topic.

Lazors in space have a small issue in that they spread out.  when we fire lasors at the reflectors we placed on the moon, we count individual protons on our detectors.  its not the atmosphere, its unavoidable physics.

That said, i think the ranges you are predicting for projectile weapons in space are patheticly short.  And targeting computers are going to be impossibley accurate. 

Also, if we assume no FTL travel, or inertial dampeners, interstellar ships will have almost no weight for any sort of armor.... most of which will be used in the front of the ship as ultra-thin sheets and/or an ionizer and a field generator and/or counter particles (point defence) for protecting against particles in the void between stars.  such ships will be most likely powered by antimatter-matter engines, in which the antimatter is synthizied from massive solar power plants... either space born, or moon based.  (I believe i did the math... and if our moon was ~50% covered with solar pannels, we could fuel a starship to alpha centauri every year or so assuming rather high efficiencies (~45% i wanna say, iirc))

such engines are going to be BITCHY as far as radiation... the solution is to place the engines far far ahead of the payload, and attached via a tether, with a radiation shadow shield to protect the crew/payload. so, a "capital ship" (battleship or carrier) is going to be multiple km long. 

The most effective weapon would most likely be little more than a matter-antimatter engine, its fuel tanks, and particle shielding (which would duel as a way to hide the engine from the target).  One, giant kinetic projectile. an astroid on steroids.  say, you have a target, 10 light years away, use 5 light years to get up to .95C or so, and just coast the next 5 light years.   Unless the target finds a way to change its orbit, its going to get smacked. hard.   Even if one found a way to detect and intercept the projectile, (and if you saw it when it was, say, 100 AU away, due to its speed, its really only 5 AU away, and you have ~45 min to respond...), the relativistic dust would rape the atmosphere.... then again... the projectile itself, when it would come into contact with said atmosphere... the projectile might not even have to hit the ground... idk.

i could go on and on.  but interstellar warfare is going to be hell untill we get all the cool fancy impossible plot devices that all our scifi shows have.

Except for one minor point.

Halador and I were not discussing interstellar warfare. We were discussing interplanetary warfare.

Now then, getting to the meat of your post.

1. The technical term is "diffraction"; if you have a short enough wavelength or a large enough mirror, then it becomes more-or-less a non-issue. You still dump enough energy into the target that you can still drill through armor and kill it.

2. The problem with projectile weapons is that they tend to have low velocities. At light-second ranges, which are not unreasonable for a laser weapon, then if your railgun can spit out a slug booking it at a whopping 10 km/s, then it will cover those 300,000 kilometers in 3,000 seconds, or around fifty minutes.

Plenty of time to move out of the way. As an aside, the more power you have available, and usable by a railgun to increase velocity to reduce time-on-target, the more power you alternately have for a laser cannon of greater range.

That said, a railgun is a far from useless weapon. If you use missile pods that fire relatively small diameter missiles, then why not sabot said missiles, and spit them out of a railgun to provide increased range.

3. Targeting is a far from simple science. You'll have target movement between when you detect the target, when you lock onto the target, and when you your fire weapon(s). Add into that thermal stress causing minute changes, and digital-to-analogue/analogue-to-digital conversion errors between the targeting computers and the servo motors of your weapons, and you are pretty much never guaranteed to hit the target unless you fire missiles.

In which case the missile might run out of propellant or get shot down.

4. IMO, we won't have interstellar craft that are dedicated to warfare. We might have interstellar ships that are large and powerful enough to allow dedicated warships to piggyback onto, but I doubt we'd have interstellar warships.

Unless, of course, we use a catalyzed Bussard Ramjet. In ulimate configuration. Which means that instead of reacting matter+antimatter, you simply use some big magnetic or electrostatic fields to draw in interstellar hydrogen, and inject a steady stream of antimatter through the intake/drive cylinder.

Reaction gives you great thrust, and quite possibly reduces antimatter consumption versus a pure matter/AM ship. Only in that case would I say "interstellar warships are possible".

5. And you sir, have just described why the "R-Bomb", or relativistic projectile weapon, is so deadly. It's never where you saw it, and you cannot stop it. Of course, the side effect is that any R-Bomb launch is painfully obvious to the neighbors, who might get really pissed that you just decided to attempt to wipe out a possible local competitor.

This is why my opinion is that we won't be R-bombing other civilizations. We will disperse, and "hide".

6. Oh yes, an antimatter production facility on the moon would be able to churn out quite a bit. But I think a facility based in open space, say at an Earth-Sun L4 or L5 point, would be a better option, because then you don't have enough energy to cause a catastrophic failure that affects not only the moon, but also Earth.

7. The two scientists who came up with the original antimatter rocket concept, the Valkyrie, described a liquid-droplet radiator that would be projected ahead of the ship. Not only would the droplets provide cooling, they doubled as a highly effective (better than solid) shield system against the interstellar debris.

Note that a Bussard ramjet-type interstellar spacecraft doesn't worry about interstellar particulates, as it's ramscoop fields direct said particulates into it's drives. An elegant idea, isn't, the Bussard ramjet?

8. Note that you don't have to put the crew habitat on the end of a tether behind the engine; you could also simply have all the payload, cargo space, and matter storage between the crew habitat at the "top" and the engine at the "bottom". This is a more likely configuration for a Bussard craft, as the radiation isn't as much of a problem.

9. Also, keep in mind that an R-bomb isn't particularly useful against a mobile target, like a starship. This is due primarily to the extreme energy requirements of an R-bomb, the mobility of a starship, and the acceleration region of most R-bomb concepts being inconveniently huge.

bussard ramjets dont work.  The drag that is created by the scooping action reduces the max speed to a point below the point where the ramjet effect kicks in iirc.

building a spacecraft in a conventional rocket type configuration significantly increases mass over a pull teather.

But yes, i am assuming that a valkyrie type starship would be the norm.

we also dont have to use the earth sun l4 l5... the conviniance of the moon is that there is alot of raw materials there... the jupiter-sun l4 l5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(astronomy) has significant quantities of potential construction material.  And then, there is that new fangled solar wind farm idea... which i cant link to cause all these dam hippy sites fill the results.

The Bussard Ramjet doesn't work. What I noted, and has been suggested by individuals far more qualified than myself, is what you could term a Bussard Scramjet.

Instead of taking in interstellar hydrogen, and turning it into both fusion fuel and propellant, you only use it as propellant. Essentially, you forsake the "infinite fuel/propellant" of a true Bussard ramjet, and instead take "infinite propellant". So propellant is infinite, but fuel is not.

The technical term is a "Catalyzed Ramjet". The variant I noted is considered the "ultimate" catalyzed ramjet, as it is injecting a steady-state stream of antimatter into the thrust stream. Which would work, as it's basically a Valkyrie, less matter remass.

Note that building in a conventional rocket-type configuration also provides a lot more structural integrity. Having your ship dangle on a tether really limits it's ability to, say, crashland on a planet or moon's surface, without disintegrating.

There's also the fact that a conventional rocket simply looks cooler.