User:Izanami/Uchuu Senkan/Space Warfare

Space Warfare is combat in space, involving combat in planetary or lunar orbits, occasionally in interplanetary space, and rarely in interstellar space. Though it is one of the most hostile environments known to humanity, space has become crucial for transportation and communication as humanity has spread to form interplanetary and interstellar societies. Humanity has been travelling through space for over 650 years, and first fought battles in space 500 years ago. Since then, further refinement of space warfare and the development of new technologies has resulted in space warfare becoming increasingly complex and efficient.

The vast majority of space warfare occurs in orbit of planets, moons, or other satellites. A smaller proportion of historical engagements have occurred in interplanetary space, mainly due to the difficulty of detecting spacecraft in such vast areas. Engagements in interplanetary space are typically extensions of engagements that began in orbit of some body, such as when forces pursue craft attempting to flee the battlesphere, or attempts to interdict interplanetary resupply convoys.

Even rarer is space combat in interstellar space; with the development of the Ferran Process, human spacecraft rarely need to traverse interstellar space to reach other star systems, and it is near impossible to detect hostile spacecraft in these regions. Nonetheless, interstellar space is increasingly considered a new arena of space warfare strategy, as an unexpected vector through which infiltration of star systems can be carried out, and from which such attempts must be interdicted.

Sense and Strike
The central concept of space warfare is to detect and attack the enemy before the enemy can do the same. The vastness of space means that

Ferran Drive
FTL. Generally FTL is limited by the beacons; ships can choose where to emerge based on spatial coordinates in relation to the beacons, which are generally in orbit around everything of note. The computers on the beacons work with the ships' navigation computers to ensure they don't jump into other ships. Destroying civilian beacons is a war crime, but military beacons are fair game.

It takes time to prep for a jump so tactical FTL is out of the question. Ships must come to an almost full stop before jumping so that the computers can calculate a safe transition; otherwise they may emerge and immediately collide with something. Burning while jumping can also cause catastrophic vibrations that can destroy the ship upon transition.

Jumping into a system and then using thrusters to move around can take days to weeks, but allows forces to circumvent FTL beacons and be way more stealthy.

It is feasible to blockade the area around the system's primary beacon (the one that allows ships to jump there from another star system), which is why sieges favour the defenders initially. Some systems feature multiple primary beacons, and military forces may have their own private beacons and circuits.

It's also possible to set up new temporary beacons during attacks, or for specialised ships to act as beacons. Prior the Second Hyperpower War, the Union actually sent a drone beacon into Imperial Space at sublight speeds; it took 8 years to quietly enter the Ishigaki System from an adjacent uninhabited system (where it had been dropped by a spy vessel masquerading as a civilian cargo hauler) and laid dormant until it was activated when the war began. It is believed that all sides in the Southern Sphere have thoroughly infiltrated each other in such a manner since then.

FTL Travel Time

I'm just gonna arbitrarily say right now that jumping from one beacon to another takes roughly 5-15 minutes once the ship is at a full stop. During high traffic scenarios (like on the main circuits) the calculation of a safe drop point may take a while, increasing wait time.

The jump is instantaneous regardless of distance. Every 40-60 jumps they need to discharge the static electricity from the Ferran Drives; this is done at dedicated grounding stations along the way, which are kind of like filling stations and also sell provisions etc. This process can take between 30 minutes to an hour. The average distance between inhabitable star systems is like 2-3 days (~280 jumps); longer trips can take 15-30 days.

Thrust and Deceleration
Due to the microgravity and frictionless environment in space, spacecraft do not need to maintain constant thrust and will continue to move forward at a constant speed due to momentum. A spacecraft relying on momentum for forward velocity with its main thrusters shut off is referred to as "coasting". Following the development of artificial gravity through the use of Kaur Fields, human ships no longer need to maintain thrust throughout their journey to create linear artificial gravity (and are in fact discouraged from doing so as this would stress the Kaur Field Generators). However, in order to come to a stop or reduce speed, spacecraft have to fully rotate 180 degrees and fire their thrusters in the opposite direction. This manoeuvre is referred to as a deceleration burn, but is also known informally a "flip and burn" or "Kamal Manoeuvre".

In space warfare, decelerating ships are typically at a disadvantage as the use of the main thrusters would increasing the ships' thermal profile, allowing for easier detection or target acquisition by enemy forces. Convoys and combat formations thus typically carry out the deceleration burn in a staggered manner. When entering the battlespace, combat ships again rotate 180 degrees so that they can easily increase speed during the battle as needed; any increase in speed cannot easily be slowed during combat.

Three main tactics are observed by warships in space with regards to speed and momentum; these are coasting at a slow speed, adopting an extremely high speed, or remaining stationary. Large warships typically enter the battlesphere coasting at a low forward momentum in order to improve target acquisition and tracking, and to reduce their own thermal signatures, while relying on their armour and defence systems to fend off enemy attacks. Smaller warships like frigates and corvettes, as well as attack craft like fighters and bombers, often carry out high-speed and high-G manoeuvres to overwhelm enemy target tracking, evade enemy fire, and launch rapid attacks before exiting the battlesphere and decelerating; this is often informally referred to as "boom and zoom". Finally, some warships with inferior sensor systems or superior armour and defence capabilities simply adopt a quasi-stationary posture, typically adopting a geostationary orbit.

Travel Distances and Communications
I'm going to handwave a lot of things, but the general travel time I will use will be based on the following from :

If we want to be serious about things, spacecraft travelling at 1G would


 * The Moon / Luna:
 * Closest to Earth (Supermoon): 356,577 km
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 2h 22m 12s
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 3h 20m 24s


 * Mercury:
 * Closest to Earth: 77.3 million km
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 1d 10h 52m 48s
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 2d 1h 19m 12s


 * Venus:
 * Closest to Earth: 40 million km
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 1d 1h 5m 2s
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 1d 11h 28m 48s


 * Mars:
 * Closest to Earth: 65 million km
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 1d 7h 58m 5s
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 1d 21h 13m 1s


 * Jupiter:
 * Closest to Earth: 588 million km
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 4d 0h 11m 2s
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 5d 16h 2m 2s


 * Saturn:
 * Closest to Earth: 1.2 billion km
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 5d 17h 25m 1s
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 8d 2h 20m 24s


 * Uranus:
 * Closest to Earth: 2.57 billion km
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 8d 9h 6m 0s
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 11d 20h 24m 0s


 * Neptune:
 * Closest to Earth: 4.3 billion km
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 10d 20h 7m 48s
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 15d 7h 52m 48s


 * Pluto:
 * Closest to Earth: 4.28 billion km
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 10d 19h 31m 12s
 * Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 15d 7h 1m 12s

Some other shit

Earth’s nuclear missiles have delta-V of 15,000 km/sec. It also says that the missiles are almost all fuel, and such delta-V is not plausible for a ship carrying live passengers, or pretty much anything other than a very small warhead. This “almost all fuel” must mean about 20:1 mass ratio — Epstein Drive, plus fuel tanks, plus the warhead add up to 1/20th of the missile’s total mass.

Communications
Due to the vastness of space, there can be a significant time delay in communications between forward forces and command elements, which may not even be in the same system. For example, it may take around three hours for communication between an inner planet and forces in the vicinity of the outer planets even in a single system. Even with Han-Wavic Particle Narrow-Beams, communication between inhabitable star systems can take days to get through and may be intercepted. Naval forces thus mostly rely on courier ships to securely transmit orders, which also can take days to travel between inhabitable star systems.

Forward force commanders are thus typically given a wide margin to operate on their own prerogative, especially if they are operating in a foreign system. Alternatively, senior officers and tacticians may often accompany forces to the battlesphere to better command their forces from the front. This practice is more common in the Imperial Navy.

Communications

Handwaving aside, this is the rough scale I will use.


 * Mercury: 5.07 - 11.56 min
 * Venus: 2.33 - 14.30 min
 * Mars: 4.32 - 20.96 min
 * Jupiter: 34.93 - 51.56 min
 * Saturn: 71.02 - 87.66 min
 * Uranus: 151-53 - 168.16 min

Han-Wavic Narrow Beams are FTL-capable but need to bounce off beacons to get to where they need to go. Therefore it will take however many days are necessary to reach an adjacent star system. They can also be intercepted easily, so it is easier and safer to send courier ships between systems (with massive "backups" in uninhabitable systems)

Attack Craft
At one time considered implausible, fighter craft have since been developed for space combat and are deployed widely with all of the human powers. Some of the earliest examples of craft that could be considered space fighters were the armed spaceplanes used in the mid-21st century, which were modified or developed from the reusable spaceplanes developed by some countries on Old Ordis.

However, the concept of space fighters remained undeveloped until around 200 years ago, prior to the Second Extrasolar War. The high tensions between the Ordic Superpowers drove an arms race that saw the development of military technology as well as the need to maintain larger forces than their rivals. Increasing miniaturisation and artificial intelligence technology allowed increasingly small sizes of missile boats to be created. Smaller ships allowed for greater numbers to be produced at lower cost, as well as increased tactical flexibility with forces able to strike from multiple directions to overwhelm enemy defences. The small size of this new generation of combat spacecraft also reduced their detectability and improved their thrust and manoeuvrability, though at the cost of being able to carry lower munitions, life support systems, and inferior sensor packages.

The first generation of "miniature gunboats" are recognizable as analogous to modern space bombers, and were officially classified as Attack Craft, a term which has since expanded to refer to all space fighters and bombers. These attack craft proved their utility during the Second Extrasolar War, and quickly became adopted by the newly-independent Federation of Sovereign States as well. In response to the threat represented by the space bomber, during the war the belligerents began development of dedicated attack craft capable of intercepting these bombers and in turn escorting their own bombers, effectively leading to the creation of the dedicated space fighter during the Second Exrasolar War.

Since then, the continued arms race in the Human Sphere has led to ever increasing capabilities for Attack Craft. Many models are aerospacecraft designed to operate in both atmospheres and in space for maximum flexibility in aerospace defence and simplified procurement, while other models are designed to operate entirely in space, dispensing with unnecessary aerodynamic features to focus entirely on ship-to-ship combat.

Flight Characteristics
While combat drones are considered the most ideal for the high-G manoeuvres carried out by fighters, the danger of hacking and electronic warfare in the modern battlefield has resulted in drones being largely relegated to a support role on the battlefield. With the small size of attack craft enabling ultramanoeuvrability in microgravity, most fighters have numerous safeguards against Over-G to protect their pilots, typically through AI-assisted correction in the flight software. Such software in general automatically enforces flight characteristics somewhat similar to that of atmospheric craft, which also simplifies flight controls and allows faster training of combat pilots.

These software safeguards generally prevents pilots from fully exploiting the microgravity environment, and some skilled veteran pilots are known to disengage these safeguards at severe risk to themselves. In recent years, developers have been moving towards enabling ultramanoeuvrability while still safeguarding the pilots through other systems, such as the full-immersion inertia-dampening gel systems being trialled in the Federation.

Other common systems installed in fighters include artificial "combat ambience" systems, which use AI-assisted real-time analysis of camera footage to provide the pilot with easily-identifiable audio cues, generating sounds for explosions or incoming enemy fire which would not really generate sound due to the vacuum of space. The purpose of these systems is to improve situational awareness without using a myriad of distracting warning lights and alarms. Similar to the software safeguards, some veteran pilots also disable these systems as a distraction and "fly silent".

Stealth Ships
In recent decades, the Southern Sphere has seen an expansion in the development and use of stealth technology as part of the ongoing arms race between the sphere hyperpowers. Due to the vastness of space precluding visual detection by most conventional optical sensors, the majority of stealth vessels rely on foiling detection through the use of radar-absorbing hull plating and other signals scramblers and electronic warfare suites. As one of the easiest ways to detect a spacecraft is through its thermal signature, dedicated stealth vessels utilise various technologies to reduce this thermal signature as much as possible.

Modern stealth ships typically shut off their primary drives before entering their operations zone and rely on carefully-planned unpowered slingshot manoeuvres to move throughout star systems without being easily detected; this is informally known as "creeping". While creeping, stealth ships typically use active cooling technologies to reduce their temperature as much as possible in order to blend in with background radiation. Alternatively, stealth ships simply blend in with civilian traffic along high-traffic vectors.

Stealth vessels are mainly used for clandestine intelligence gathering, deploying special forces, and carrying out first-strike attacks. As stealth ships are immediately revealed the moment they fire their weapons or activate their main drives, these ships are typically used to ambush enemy formations or attack from unexpected directions as part of a larger attack, before immediately fleeing from the battlesphere. Another tactic used by stealth ships is to "drop launch" their missiles, releasing guided missiles into space and only firing the missiles' thrusters once the stealth vessel has left the vicinity to reduce the likelihood of detection.

The Interstellar Union currently boasts the most advanced stealth technology in the Southern Sphere, as well as the largest fleet of stealth vessels. In addition to the radar-absorbent hull plating, active cooling systems, and internal heat sinks, Interstellar Union stealth ships use hypercooled drives, that enable them to immediately "go cold" from full burn within less than fifteen minutes. The Corsario-class stealth frigate is the primary stealth ship in the Interstellar Union, along with the Murena-class stealth missile frigate, which acts as a stealth missile platform similar in concept to ballistic missile submarines from the Techsurge Era.

Developed to address the Interstellar Union's stealth technology, the Federation's Airaptor-class stealth frigates are equipped with internal lithium heat sinks as well as hull refrigeration, allowing the frigates to travel undetected for around six hours, or drift passively for days of covert observation. Though the Empire lags behind the Interstellar Union and the Federation in terms of stealth technology, they have also made some attempts at developing stealth vessels. The Kunai-class stealth frigate relies on internal heat sinks which are jettisoned prior to stealth operations.

Strategy
The primary aims of a space fleet during war is to keep the planets and exoplanetary holdings of its country free from attack, to secure the freedom of its trade, and to destroy the enemy's fleet or confine it to port. The first and second of these aims can be attained by the successful achievement of the third – the destruction or paralysis of the hostile fleet. A fleet that secures the freedom of its own communications from attack is said to have command of space.

Space warfare strategy is fundamentally different from terrestrial military strategy; besides the inherent danger and complex physics of space, there is also no territory to occupy in space. There are no economic assets that can be denied to the enemy and no resources that a fleet can exploit. While terrestrial forces can live off the land in many cases, a space fleet must rely on whatever supplies it carries with it or can be brought to it.

Ultra Long Range
ULR

Range is limited by detection capabilities. The sheer volume of space at such long ranges result in only missiles being somewhat effective at this range. Even detecting enemy ships at this range is difficult due to the volume of space and background interference.

Ultra Long-Range Missiles / Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles

20,000 km + - 10,000 km

Long Range
LRB

Anti-Ship Missiles

Range is limited by targeting capabilities and fuel on missiles. Some missiles are fusion powered so they can go basically forever; those are the ULR missiles. But they are huge (fighter sized) because fusion drives are big.

10,000 km - 1,000 km

Gun Range
Aka Medium Range.

Railguns, "Long-range Lasers"

Range is limited by targeting capabilities.

1,000 km - 100 km

Close-In Battle
CIB

Fighters, CIWS, light lasers, light missiles, etc

100 km - 0 km