Cliffski is currently working on a Sci-Fi Space Opera battle game and he recently asked about the economy and logic of epic space battles. He basically wanted to know what the logic is behind having small fighters and big capital ships because he tries to reproduce them in his game.
This is a dear topic for me. Some years ago, I was inspired by the Bad Astronomy website. It was a bit of a shock for me when I realized how pretty much every little detail about space Sci-Fi doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. I knew Sci-Fi was unrealistic but it was amazing how TERRIBLY AND UTTERLY unrealistic it is. So I sat down, ate some heavy books and now I believe I have a rudimentary understanding of Astronomy now. It has become of a hobby for me. That’s why I sometimes torment you with my space geek stuff. Like I will today. If you want to know about the science and logic of epic Sci-Fi space battles, please continue…
So back on track: people immediately responded to Cliffsky theorizing about mass, speed, armor, range or energy production of different sizes of theoretical space ships to rationalize and explain epic space battles. Basically, they tried to solve the problem with (dodgy) physics and engineering. It shows perfectly what I hinted at in my Solaris post: you won’t get far with just science, you need the humanities too!
Here is a different approach: Why did epic space battles appear in Sci-Fi in the first place? You see, Space Opera came about during the Second Word War. Many war veterans came back home and started writing novels about epic battles like they witnessed themselves but in a more idealistic, heroic future. The perfect example is Gene Rodenbery, who invented Star Trek. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941, aged 20, and flew many combat B-17 Flying Fortress missions in the Pacific Theatre.
So it is no wonder that epic space battles closely resemble naval battles from the Second World war – especially those from the pacific. That’s why you will often see combinations of small, fast fighter spacecraft and large, slow carrier-type spacecraft engaged in combat in close proximity to each other. Hence, if you want to replicate that epic space battle feeling, it makes sense to take a closer look at the technical specs and tactical logic of those battles, instead of trying to theorize about dilithium crystals and matter-anti-matter drives.
“Red five, coming in” – eerie, isn’t it?
Finally, you might want to realize that science is of no help if you want that kind of Sci-Fi as the likeliness of space battles happening in the future is pretty much ZERO. Not a chance in hell. Seriously. Get it out of your head! Here are some things you might consider:
- Space is vast. Spacecraft move very fast (more than 30 000 km/h even today already). The requirements for two spacecraft to meet each other so that the pilots can see each other with bare eyes are enormous and require careful navigation and cooperation on both sides. Dogfights won’t happen.
- There is no air in space so changing direction is very difficult. Even a simple dogfight maneuver like making a 90° turn requires you to decelerate to zero and accelerate to you preferred speed in the new direction – twice the energy required to get to full speed in the first place. Remember those huge tanks and external boosters on the Space Shuttle? Yeah, we are talking about twice this energy for one single 90° turn. Again, dogfights won’t happen.
- There is no air in space. There are almost no obstacles in space to hide behind. There is nothing that prevents you to shoot at enormous distances and hit your targets precisely. There is no such thing as “range”. There is no reason for spacecraft to get up close. You could probably shoot something on the other side of the solar system. They wouldn’t even know what hit them. It would take years to travel that distance with a ship using today’s technology. Why bother?
- This in turn, makes space battles stupid anyway as instead of fighting ships, you can even easier attack the cities and outpost on the planets themselves. You can probably even shoot from cannons installed directly on surfaces of you home planets, without the need of getting into space. Remind me please: what do you need weapons on space ships for again?
So there you have it. Space Battles? Just some silly stuff old war veterans came up with to cope with their posttraumatic stress disorder. Won’t happen.
Linked here off of Academy of Doctor X’s blog. Instantly consumed a number of posts because my best XBLive friends are always German, Italian, or Scandinavian.
Anyhow, since you’re the owner of a beautiful new 360, you should probably take a look at Project Slypheed at some point. You can probably get it for 10 Euro or less considering nobody likes it. Why?
Because they actually try to make realistic “space dogfighting” controls.
I’m not even good at the simplified classics like Star Wars: Tie Fighter. In this one, you have to manage all these weird thrusts and rotations so that you can basically fly alongside a larger ship, spin to face it, and then sustain a sideward thrust long enough to strafe alongside it and do enough damage before you end up in its firing solution and get toasted.
I’m sure I could play it on easy and just fly straight into things shooting missiles all over the place, but the “advanced control” setup and harder difficulties entice me to try to figure out the controls. I’ll probably need to wait for the semester to end before I’ll have time to dedicate time to it.
Anyhow, if you can get past the cut scenes and the Japanime style (it’s a Squeenix game), I think you’ll find something really worth digging.
Tell me if I’m totally wrong about this!
Was thinking some more about this; mostly in regards to your arguments from the standpoint of realism.
Okay, so because these are science fiction games that already take as given colonization and faster space travel, what are some reasons we might see ships attacking each other?
The answer to “why not just shoot from your planet to the planet you want to attack?” would be that the planet would be able to see exactly what was coming at them and throw up an obstruction (like a flak cannon that just spreads enough crap in the way of your firing to nullify the effects). Flying ships in close to bombard the planet from different angles would be more effective than this. Not to mention the fact that a straight shot from one planet to a target on another seems somewhat impossible (you’d have to calculate the exact location of each body in between as the shot passes, their gravitational pull, etc – you could use a piloted missile, but then that has the same problems that a ship has, namely that it could be easily intercepted).
There’s also the issue of transport. The taxi mission is such a cliche in these games, but it makes sense. Even assuming all the absurdities of sending ships to fighter each other in space, you still have the problem of keeping transports safe. You could shoot from a stationary position at a transport, but all it would have to do is navigate around the firing solution. Sending other ships to destroy it would make more sense. So you’d have to defend your transport with other ships, and you’d have to figure some way of engaging other ships.
So sure there are obvious realism problems, but there are certain situations that make more sense than others – those would be the ones you’d want to include in a “space opera” game, right?
Thanks for the great comments! I noticed Project Selpheed before, but haven’t tried it until you recommended it. I’ve downloaded the demo but couldn’t find the functions you were talking about. I haven’t heard about them in any review either. Are you sure they are there? Looks like pretty standard Airplane-based physics to me. Even what you described it doesn’t sound too realistic either: why would you need to “sustain a sideward thurst”? There is nothing in space that would slow you down if you cut the thrust – you will just continue flying.
More realistic space physics have been done before in space sims. I think the most famous example is Elite 2. I haven’t played it but it seems like many players disliked the “realistic” combat as it is very unintuitive and complex.
As for firing from one planet onto another:
- No, the victim wouldn’t be able to react if we are talking about lasers, other kind of radiation or near-lightspeed projectiles. The light (and essentially all information) of a cannon being fired would arrive at the same time (or nearly at the same time) as the shot itself.
- Shooting from one planet to another is not impossible. Calculating the physics is actually pretty straight forward as we have all the necessary data. In fact, it is being done all the time even with today’s technology. It is basically what spaceflight is about: you shoot projectiles from one planet to another. You want to be as precise as possible because you don’t want to accelerate fuel in order to make corrections later on. Out of necessity, we are already pretty good at it.
- As for keeping a transport safe: Well, shooting a spaceship at a distance is more difficult than a city. The biggest difficulty is to actually SPOT the spaceship because space is huge and the ship is tiny. There is no radar in space so you have to rely on optical observations. With today’s technology even the most powerful telescopes on earth aren’t powerful enough to see the stuff we left back on our very own moon – which is pretty nearby. And in this case we know exactly where we need to look. So spotting spaceships might be a problem but one that isn’t solved by having you own spaceships flying around in space searching for enemies. Space is just too big.
Once you know the location and trajectory of an incoming spaceship, the same applies as for planets. You can easily shoot it, they won’t see it coming. Having other spaceships as an escort won’t help them. The only remedy would be for the transport to erratically change the course over the entire span of the flight but that would be economically not feasible.
Good points! Oh well; I tried. So I looked at the Slypheed manual. The move I was referring to was the Power Cut: “reduce engine output to zero and fly on inertia alone. Your shields deplete during a Power Cut and you cannot change course, but you can change the direction your aircraft is facing.”
When I worded it I said thrust instead of inertia. Anyhow, yeah, looking at the book again there aren’t as many neat controls as I remember there being. I guess I sucked at it because I just suck at these space shooters.
Yeah I noticed that inertia comment and it confused me as well.
Actually, the reason why you might not be satisfied with your skills in the game might be simply the convoluted controls. They have been criticized in reviews of the game and I certainly see why. Having both, roll and yaw on the same stick depending on how far you move it is pretty silly, I can’t see getting used to that – it would interfere with my reflexes from other games. Also, what do I need 4 different weapons for? To add insult to injury, they even have a mode-based switch to map the many weapons onto buttons. And what exactly is the advantage of using guns if missiles have a longer range and are easier to use?
I was pretty happy with the recent Hawx demo. It features maneuvers comparable to what you’ve described (flying sideways etc…). You might want to check it out, the controls were quite alright.
Wordpress kept refusing to show my name despite numerous preference changes.
I need to finish Call of Duty: World at War and then kill off my rental subscription… then I’m playing the Hawx and Halo Wars demos, settling in for midterms, and then seeing where I’m at in three weeks. I definitely wasn’t going to try Hawx until I came here and read your post on it.
Finally, what all your debunking of the fantasy of space travel has implied to me is this: in the future our poor great*n grandchildren are going to frequently run into arms-fueled wars that not even mutually assured destruction can provide a solace from.
If you could fire from across a solar system (I guess you would just have to avoid points where two gravitational bodies had a numerically significant pull?) without detection – that sounds like the ultimate in first strike capability. Sounds like we need to make a bland geopolitical game where all one does is try to negotiate between space powers so that nobody ever develops one of these laser cannons.
Nice post, you’re totally right, it will never happen because it’s not cost-effective at all in standard reality. In games, though, mi best-in-all gripe was…the Inertia! For all the reasons you describe, those ships go about like they are planes!!! I didn’t really think about it until I played Independence War and Independence War 2 : Edge of Chaos, being the second the one which is actually playable (The history is very good too, I don’t know that many titles in which you can be a space pirate). Other (many) real-physics inconsistencies aside, this two titles implement inertia, so space battles are very different from your tipical X-Wing/Freespace title. You can even accelerate as much as you want, because no air=no traction. Besides, the (second) game includes a complete guide that explains much of the (imaginary but quite believable) scientific theories behind the ships and their systems. I found it quite refreshing in my day.
I have to congratulate you on your asessment of space battles. I’ve always known that Sci Fi battles couldn’t happen like a WW2 battle. I do have to take issue with you on your claim that space battles between ships won’t happen at all. First of all we can’t determine the effectiveness of battles using technology that doesn’t exist yet or the as yet uninvented defensive devices. As long as it remains in the realm of Science Fiction we can make it what we want it to be. Any theorizing to be credible must be based on current technology or technology that can be reasonably assumed to be achieved in the near future.
For example, attacking planets with planet based beam weapons. Currently a beam will slowly disburse over distance. We have no reason to believe this will be corrected in the near future even if we could make a beam strong enough to do significant damage on another planets surface. Even if it could, the techology to target something that far away will not concievably exist any time soon. Our accuracy at sending probes to other planets consists of getting into that planets orbit using some course corrections in route. This accuracy isn’t even close to whats needed for pinpoint lazer strikes from those distances. Any probe able to make the needed course corrections anyway has become a space ship. Close range target reconnaissance would be needed to locate targets as our best telescopes can’t get that kind of resolution of a planets surface from long ranges. Installations could be hidden underground or moved periodically like we currently do with some ICBMs. Incoming missiles could easily be spotted by radar far in advance.(Yes, radar in space already exists. Radar was even used on the “primitive” Apollo craft).
Yes ships will encounter each other in space. Every ship, especially merchant shipping, has a point of origin and a destination. These will usually be at fixed points such as planets or colonies or mining operations or research stations or supply bases. Military vessels will locate and interdict enemy shipping as they approach these sites but at a reasonable distance from the fixed sites defenses. Beam weapons won’t be effective against ships because at the distances in space, ships won’t be where they are supposed to be by the time light reaches them unless they don’t do evasive manouvering. Radical manouvering won’t be needed because in space very slight changes and fluctuations in acceleration or deceleration will use no extra fuel and very slight course corrections will make a huge difference in ship location quickly.
Ships will not be spotted and targeted all the way across the solar system with any technology we can reasonably be able to invision in the near future. The same problems with attacking planets would exist but be even worse against traveling ships at those distances. As weapons improve to overcome these problems we can only assume stealth and defense systems will keep pace with these changes also. As was pointed out, the distance in space is vast and a ship trying not to be seen when it’s already hard to find such things can best be seen and defended against at much closer ranges, in other words, from a space ship.
Hello Paul. Thank you for you comments. You raised some excellent points there. Let me answer some of them:
The reason for beam dispersion is mostly Eath’s atmosphere. Beam dispersion is a far less significant problem in space, where there is no air. Even with modest equipment we are able to shoot lasers at the moon, hit a small mirror installed there and receive the reflected beam. There was just no reason to try anything more ambitious yet. It is far less of a problem than propulsion.
This is true. I also assumed some kind of unmanned close range reconnaissance. On the other hand, keep in mind that the precision and resolution of our telescopes has increased at a dramatic rate during the last 50 years. Nowadays, we are able to spot planets orbiting other stars! Conversely our propulsion technology stagnated. If anything it deteriorated because it is simply too expensive.
This is true. However, the radar on Apollo was used to measure the altitude during the landing and the distance during docking. When it comes to doing a wide-area sweeps like on Earth, radar becomes ineffective in space. The distances are too great.
You didn’t really address any of my arguments there. For this singe maneuver, the military ship would need to use twice the energy the merchant ship used for the entire trip. The “merchant ship” could use that extra energy to simply get away. It quickly spirals away into a battle of fuel reserves rather than a battle of lasers like it does on the silver screen.
Not exactly true. Like I said, evasive maneuvers cost fuel. This is OK for a single course correction. For a flight that takes months or even years, it’s not something you can afford permanently. For a ship to do evasive maneuvering, it would need to KNOW it is being targeted. In case of a beam weapon, it would get hit before it realized it was being fired at. Even if it did evasive maneuvers, they are far less effective than you might think. Small course correction can have a great impact in space but only because the trips are so long. Short-term course corrections are actually far less dramatic than what aircraft do. Astronauts hardly even feel the acceleration of their ships once they are in space.
This assumes that the defending ship would be in the vicinity of the incoming ship. The chances for this to happen are extremely slim because space is so incredibly vast. The defending planet would need to have an enormous and quite expensive cloud of patrolling vessels. Again, a much more economic and reasonable approach is to use unmanned satellites and to shoot down incoming ships with space-based or ground-based energy weapons form afar.
Consider that even air battles don’t consist of dogfights anymore like they did in WWII. Most air battles today are about firing smart weapons at great distances. Or even simpler – using UAVs. This trend is even more likely to continue in space where there are much tighter constraints on fuel and weight.
But even this is a quite far-fetched scenario. That’s why I claim that of space battles won’t happen. It’s more likely for humanity to achieve eternal world-peace.
I thank you for your response and agree the preference will be to establishing world-peace. However this has always eluded humans in the past and I don’t expect this to change soon(Although I wish I was wrong on this). For the record, I had no difference of opinion with you from the beginning when it came to dog fighting. Certainly any space battle will be dramatically different then what we have envisioned on earth.
With due respect, I still see some critical weaknesses in the points expressed. Putting a large enough lazer above our atmosphere to get the needed accuracy will not be as easy as you think and fixed orbital installations are the easiest targets of all to destroy. As for the lazer to the moon, most of the energy from the lazer did not return showing major disbursal and even the closest planet to us comes no closer than 80 times more distant at it’s closest. The outer planets are many thousands of times farther than the moon. As far as telescopes are concerned, we can’t image planets out of our solar system. All we can do is detect a wobble in the host star showing that a planet is present. And this is with our latest and newest telescopes. Even stars themselves which are usually many thousands of times larger than the planets orbiting them can’t yet be resolved beyond a pinpoint of light. The radar used on Apollo was tiny because larger wasn’t needed. In space with no obstructions or atmosphere a large radar would have a vastly increased range. I do agree that this may not be enough to be useful because radar has to travel twice the distance of light from a passive optical detection like a telescope. And a telescope doesn’t reveal its location. A merchant ship can get away only if it knows where its attacker is and military ships invariably have better detection equipment. Also even if it can spot its attackers, running away would only work if its defenses could hold out long enough. And remember, fuel reserves only increase the top speed. NOT the initial acceleration so the attacker can keep up with it and close on it for a time. Small course corrections in space are affected just as much by speed as they are time. Even at our current speeds, a slight course correction can leave a ship kilometers from its expected position in a matter of seconds Making it extremely hard to find and hit at a distance if it knows that a war is going on. I do believe ships will be easy for other ships to find because we know where they are headed to and can intercept them just short of the destination. However I do believe that unmanned attackers and defenders may be the nature of the ships involved. Why risk human lives if it’s cheaper to use automation. After all, life support systems take up lots of space and expense. But even largely automated, they will still be armed vessels.
I’m sorry but this is getting really anal now. Also, you are making a lot of unfounded assumptions. I will need to cut some of these speculations off:
Sorry, but this is getting silly. We have crossed the line of scientific speculation and deep in territory where we draw our experience from Sunday morning cartoons.
Yes, it’s not a military laser. It’s a scientific one. The beam also passes the atmosphere twice. It’s doable with even modest equipment even today. I call this one closed.
No it does not. Radar beams lose strength dramatically with distance. That’s why radar has a limited range even on earth. A radar with a range usable for space operations is not feasible. Otherwise, doing things like detecting coming asteroids would be easy. For detection of such objects, infrared is the way to go.
Yes we can.
You are plain wrong in both cases. On chemical propulsion burns are short and acceleration time is negligible. As for course changes: you need to touch up you math. If you change your course by 1 meter per hour, after an hour you will end up 1 meter from where you would have been otherwise – no matter if you were standing still or going 30.000 km/h.
Think again. A flight path is not just straight in space. You are doing orbits. For every starting point and end point there is an infinite number of solutions. Take a look at this “simple” flight from earth to mercury.
I had no intention to make this discussion hostile and would like to say that despite our differences of opinion I have great respect for your obviously considerable knowledge. I don’t want to draw this out so I won’t respond to your latest rebuttal with a new one of my own. Allow me to clear up some simple misunderstandings though.
Even though I did say radar could be used in space I tried to concede that it was probably to limited to be practical. Also I did look up extrasolar planets and found my information was out of date on planets being imaged, although its been done in only a few rare cases now in the last 6 years, I stand corrected. In terms of acceleration I was thinking of electric drives which have already been used on unmanned probes and not chemical drives. In terms of math, you are correct about 1 meter per hour shift making no difference with speed but I was thinking in terms of geometry. A one degree change causes location change faster with more speed as the two tangents diverge from one another. I understand that flight paths are not straight. That is why I suggested that ships could only be found close to their destination or point of origin. I apologize for any misunderstandings and I hope this helps you to understand what I was really trying to say. I sincerely hope we do find peaceful ways to avoid future wars.
It’s me who has to apologize. You were perfectly polite. I lost my patience. I’m sorry.
You are right in this case. When talking about electrical drives, the acceleration is slower so the time becomes more important. But electrical drives haven’t been used in manned spacecraft yet. They are very weak and getting up to speed can take a lot of time. Their only advantage is that they are very energy- and mass-efficient. I guess it is conceivable to speculate about the technology becoming powerful enough to be used on manned spacecraft. However, the initial objection is valid for any kind of propulsion: intercepting an incoming spacecraft takes more energy than the intercepted spacecraft used for the entire flight.
If you are working with degrees, the change of the position depends on the speed of the spacecraft. But so does the amount of energy you need for the same course change. At 10 meters per second, a 1° change is 10 times more energy expensive than at 1 meter per second. The only exception is when leaving the orbit of small bodies (planets, moons, etc.). In this case, the timing of the same burn can change the course dramatically. But this isn’t something you can use for mid-flight evasive maneuvers. For long-duration flights they remain prohibitively energy-expensive.
Hi I’m very new to all this, I’ve only casually read some sites involving hard Sci-Fi like Atomic Rocket and others like it, so given my uncertainty I’m gonna tread lightly with what I say. But I read that space ships would use infrared sensors because ships would have to radiate massive heat and so would stick out like a saw thumb. Actually every website I’ve read on this so far, until I just found you’re site has said that because of this fact finding ships in space will be very easy, and it will be pretty much impossible to hide. This Is apparently one of the main reasons why stealth in space is impossible. This Is what I’ve read on this site http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php please let me know if I’ve misunderstood something here, as I said I have a very laymens understanding of this stuff, so it would not surprise me in the least If I completely don’t know what I’m talking about.
In the ’90’s, GDW released their new edition of their flagship space RPG, Traveller, and one of the books, Fire Fusion and Steel, provided a ton of details about how to design realistic spacecraft and perform realistic space combat.
One of the most surprising things I learned was that at space-combat distances, lasers are little better than high-powered flashlights. A realistic laser has to be very big (feet in diameter) and use a high-energy wavelength (UV, X-ray) to focus down to a spot which will cause damage to a target at even one light-second. It’s also got to put out a lot of power.
Another surprise that us regular folk don’t consider is engineering accuracy into the shot. You’ve got to compensate for the weapon’s varying heat as it discharges, the vibrations of your ship, the maneuvering of your ship, the maneuvers of the opposing ship, it’s position in 3 dimensional space, any intervening matter (dust, countermeasures, etc), and so on. The difference between a perfect hit and an imperfect hit can easily spell the difference between causing damage, just warming the hull a little, or missing altogether.
However, one thing sci-fi games rarely take into account is heat. From waste heat to insolation to incoming energies, it’s just not taken into account because it’s such a problem. It is considerably easier to use your laser as a heat ray instead of as a laser – many fewer of the above engineering challenges to worry about because we don’t have to focus on a tiny spot – and simply kill the life-system of a ship. You may not get an instant kill, but the crew will be dead within a week or so if they don’t get help.
Giant lasers are extremely expensive, even if you overcome the practicality issues, and we probably also want to kill the target right away, so lasers seem to be out. What about throwing bullets or missiles? Missiles are easy to shoot down because they’ve got that great big engine telling the whole star system where they are and they can’t spare the fuel to dodge that much. Plus they’re really expensive
Bullets are cheap, but they can’t move that fast and they can’t react to dodging targets or local gravity perturbations, so you’ve got to be REALLY close, or you’ve got to have a large, immobile target and a really big gun. In either case, you have to fire a LOT of bullets. Or there’s the option of dropping an asteroid on the enemy city.
The laser hitting the moon is no big deal. When it hits the moon, it’s a spot several feet in diameter. The reflection that comes back is scattered even more, but the detector is very sensitive. We’re not trying to blow up the moon.
When it comes to detection, active sensors (radar) have significantly less range than passive ones (IR). BUT, active systems require a LOT of power and passive systems require a lot of very expensive cooling and detector elements. Once again, engineering gets in the way.
Spotting planets is possible because of multiple years of intense observation of a very narrow segment of sky under near-ideal conditions, and with very specific detection parameters. We miss multi-mile asteroids all the time; many new ones have been discovered AFTER passing close to the Earth.
In some ways, spacecraft should be easier to spot, and in other ways they should be harder. Which wins? I don’t know enough to say; other than that engineering and circumstances will play a strong role.
So, due to the inaccuracies involved, it will be necessary to send warships to conduct precision bombing and invasions, and other spacecraft will be needed to fend off those craft. The difficulties to overcome are legion, but there will have to be a way for it to happen. Will it be like in games and movies? Probably not. But it WILL happen, you can be sure of that.
Thanks for you comment Jaycee. You have raised some good points.
Let me comment on some of them:
Claims are these are extremely speculative. At this point, pretty much everything you bring with you in space is prohibitively expensive. There has been no significant drop in the prices for bringing stuff into orbit. There aren’t any viable strategies to bring the prices down. It just takes a ton of energy, there is no way around it. Same goes for heat signatures. Yes, heat is a an issue with current spacecraft. The ISS has significant Radiators just to drop the heat it receives from the Sun alone.
http://spaceflightsystems.grc.nasa.gov/Constellation/T&V/images/P-1017-11%20ISS%20Radiator.jpg
The bottom line is that space is a remote and hostile environment. It’s difficult to keep humans alive there as it is. We may find better ways to deal with it. But bringing weapons up there is similarly silly and pointless as hauling a Howitzer up the Mount Everest.
True, but the advancements in our ability to spot objects from after are much more dramatic than the advancement in our ability to actually go there. It’s also cheaper and involves no risk at all.
I don’t feel like this is really the conclusion from your arguments. All you have proven is that warfare in space is really, really complicated. I claim that it is in fact so complicated that it will actually not happen at all. There will be technological breakthroughs in the meantime which will most likely change the whole idea of war. You can see the changes right now actually. I give you an example: The current generation of fighter Airplanes is the last one. There will be no manned air combat anymore. Drones are cheaper and more effective. Now take a look at an X-Wing. The idea of warfare this fictional vehicle is based on is becoming obsolete already. And of course, we don’t see the elephant in the room: the last war against two world powers was the cold war. A situation vastly different from previous engagements. Two opponents sitting on a stockpile of weapons capable of wiping the other guy out automatically and remotely.
Nuclear weapons were billed as being able to make war obsolete. So far, war is doing fine.
I may have gotten a little off track there, but the point to be made is that the long-distance war you propose can’t happen because it’s too inaccurate. So long as humans covet what other humans have, there will be a need for war. And where there is a need, someone will fill it. They can’t fill it with inaccurate planet vs planet superweapons, they have to do it with ships and guided bombs and such.
Just because it’s very hard to imagine doesn’t mean it won’t happen. I’m pretty sure the guy who invented the printing press had no idea how powerful and far-reaching his invention would be.
I also doubt that this is the last generation of manned combat aircraft. Maybe drones will become all the rage, but an enemy will simply have to find a different way to win. Shoot down or jam the GPS satellite systems and the radio waves, throw up enough smoke, etc, and the drone can’t get its orders or carry out its assignment. Humans are going to Mars for reasons other than the novelty, and humans will still be needed in the driver’s seat eventually.
Compared to the state of the world before World War 2, we are experiencing a period of relative peace.
I’m could answer with your own words: “Just because it’s very hard to imagine doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
But I won’t since both arguments are tenuous. The first one argues technical details in a yet not developed technology. The second one cuts both ways. There are plenty of examples of technology that seemed awesome but just didn’t work out. Flying cars anyone?
Considering the ongoing downfall of the print media, that’s an unfortunate
. I don’t really see how it applies to this discussion either.
analogy
It seems to me like you are grasping for straws. Under this circumstances, a human pilot wouldn’t be able to get anything done either. The air fleet will slowly but surely be replaced by UAVs. In fact, this has already happened for reconnaissance aircraft.
And yet the only explorers of Mars were robotic rovers and the only ongoing expeditions to Mars are robots too. I agree, humans will and should eventually get there but for any given task – warfare included – sending humans is hardly the first choice.