Hi, I was trying to come up with more realistic idea of space craft in the far future. I thought all these ideas right now like in starwars, etc arn't that real. There would be the military flag/mother ships that would be more of a huge armored block that had immense power to move very fast to get around, and it would be a platform for launching small fighters and carrying lots of weapons. This ship wouldn't be able to land on planets due to its size and armor so no slimness needed. This ship would sorta be like a space station that moves :) Then there would be aero dynamic looking ships that are a style for alot of movies, these would be the more private enterprise ships and ofcourse there would be the planetary defense military ones. But mainly private owners. The fighters from the mother/flag ships would be aerodynamic for planetary assaults and be controlled by ai(and/or remote controlled). The mother/flag ships may also launcher other man controlled larger ships, eg retrieval, battle maybe etc This is what I am thinking for a game, but I want to know if my ideas are flawed and could be improved upon. Thanks

The further ahead in time you get, the harder it is to design 'realistic' spacecraft, because no-one has a clue where technology will be then. I would use your imagination, rather than trying to work out everything so that it fits together.

Also, bear in mind, that if you do go down the realism route, you're going to have to compromise at some point - huge great big motherships probably aren't realistic to begin with, regardless of their form or function.

"Realistic" space combat would probably be incredibly bland when you take one thing into account.
There is no significant drag in space, therefor projectiles have infinite range.

Combat would begin after you leave the port. Even if the enemy is also just leaving port on anothet planet. Why not launch your ordinance immedietely? The projectiles are obviously going to have a higher acceleration than the ship that launches them, and therefor they will arrive soonest if you shoot immedietely, instead of flying halfway there in your craft, then launching.

And so, combat would be a game of shooting various things and waiting 75 years for them to arrive and..miss, as technology has discovered some way to counter them as they were in-transit. Maybe you could arc your shot around the moon to sling-shot it and take a few years off.

If you were contesting a particular body, then there is no reason you couldnt do that from a few million miles out. No need to send fighters to physically bump into the enemy.

If you are going to solve the problem with laser weapons of some kind, then you have all sorts of other issues. If it's going to be realistic, then the laser is going to go on nearly forever. There is nearly no matter to diffuse the light in space. So, you are left with the same problem as above... just the projectile speed happens to be the speed of light.

What happens if you sign a cease fire after launching your weapons and they wont arrive for 50 years? Hope for another war to break out before they hit?

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Original post by Ajare huge great big motherships probably aren't realistic to begin with, regardless of their form or function.

How come?

I thought that because there would be enough resources to construct such a thing, it would be protected against alot of natural disasters and almost anything, it could generate huge amounts of power.

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Original post by CombatWombat The projectiles are obviously going to have a higher acceleration than the ship that launches them, and therefor they will arrive soonest if you shoot immedietely, instead of flying halfway there in your craft, then launching. If you are going to solve the problem with laser weapons of some kind, then you have all sorts of other issues. If it's going to be realistic, then the laser is going to go on nearly forever. There is nearly no matter to diffuse the light in space. So, you are left with the same problem as above... just the projectile speed happens to be the speed of light.

Well I thought if you could get ships closer to fire speed of light missiles they would be harder to shoot down,

i'm not sure about lasers as main weapons, i heard a discussion somewhere, all you have to do is mount lasers and your safe, or some kind of high heat resistant armor.


With these huge ship idea, I'd like to hear more any pro's or con's..

Aerodynamics only comes into play if you start battling in the atmosphere of some planets. Otherwise it had no effect. You could have multiple types. one that is aerodynamic which can enter/exit an atmosphere and then other fighters which have to stay in space.


If you want to know what a realistic space fighter would look like, take a look at the TV Series called Space: Above and Beyond. It's a very nice military sci-fi series. It's nothing like the series i have listed below.
There are many websites out there dedicated to it so you should get some info you might want.


Most other Sci-fi series have carriers because the small fighters lacked room / power for the long range engines. Well.....

Star Trek, shuttles didn't realy have much in the way of weapons, they only had limited armour and warp drive capability.
And the Defiant isn't all that small if people can walk around like they do in it.

Star Wars, It was the empire who didn't have fighters with hyperdrives. So they always needed a star destroyer around or a base.

Babylon 5, they needed cruisers to hold fighters for the same reason.


The medium sized ships had the ability to travel long distances while also being fast in normal space. They also had decent firepower as well.

Trying to bring real science into space games is always a bad idea...

I would suggest: make a list of the groups of people who will have spaceships, ie military, merchants, civilians, etc. Then, for each group, make a list of the ships that they would use, based on functionality - don't worry about their design yet.

Now, and I know this because I have tried myself, if you try to design the ships themselves from scientific principles, even taking into account their different purposes, you will find that they all look the same, and that any large ships will probably be, yes, large ugly cubes. Not much fun for a game, if you ask me.

Rather, I would work on simple principles - the more powerful the ship the larger it is, the faster the thinner it is, but stick to a basic spaceship-like look for all of them. You have to be aware of people's expectations - if you try to do something too different from what they know, it will confuse them.

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Original post by johnnyBravo Well I thought if you could get ships closer to fire speed of light missiles they would be harder to shoot down,

And how do you get such ships closer?

Answer) fly there. At significantly less than the speed of light. And therefor in the grand scheme of things, it takes longer for the projectiles to get there, which means more time for the enemy to counter the attack.

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Original post by CombatWombat There is no significant drag in space, therefor projectiles have infinite range.

That's not really accurate. A weapon's range is not determined simply by how far it can physically reach. The range of a weapon is the distance at which it can reliably hit a target, so factors like sensor range and resolution become more significant than the ballistic properties of the projectile, as does the ability to predict the movements of the enemy. You might very well fire off a projectile that will take years to arrive on target, but unless you know that the target will actually be there at that time, then what's the point? That's the advantage of closing the gap in ships first.

A missile can certainly go infinitely far, but unless it has fuel when it reaches the enemy, it is simply a sitting duck for his defenses to deal with. Not necessarily active defenses, either : The simple expedient of moving his ship in unpredictable ways will generate a miss. So unless your missiles have infinite fuel, they do not have an infinite range. I suggest David Weber's Honor Harrington universe as a look at this, particularly On Basilisk Station and Honour of the Queen. Of course, this doesn't apply if you are shooting at an immobile target, but then you're not talking about ships anymore.

About the Huge Mothership (tm), what happens if a nuclear missile hits it? I don't care how much armour you've got, a nuke is going to leave a fairly major hole. Even if you could build a ship capable of surviving a nuclear hit, why whould you? It would be far more cost-effective to build ten or twenty smaller ones with zero armour. So one gets hit, who cares? You've got nineteen to shoot back with. This was one of my major beefs with Master of Orion; you start out with nukes, and soon build ships that can take such hits easily. Yeah, right. There are defenses against nukes, such as pulling a mountain over your head, but they are not very practical for spaceships.

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Original post by Plasmadog That's not really accurate. A weapon's range is not determined simply by how far it can physically reach. The range of a weapon is the distance at which it can reliably hit a target, so factors like sensor range and resolution become more significant than the ballistic properties of the projectile, as does the ability to predict the movements of the enemy. You might very well fire off a projectile that will take years to arrive on target, but unless you know that the target will actually be there at that time, then what's the point? That's the advantage of closing the gap in ships first.

If you have the technology to be flying around in space, I make the assumption you can do simple things like look through a telescope. I would assume you would also be able to build a weapon with it's own sensor and terminal-phase manuevering systems, like an ammraam missile on a bigger scale it would guide to the general area via the launching vehicles direction, and then once close enough for its own sensor to work, guide itself.

The point I'm trying to make, is what is the difference of a projectile and a ship in space? The ship/projectile can sort of be looked at as a two-stage vehicle, where the first stage is nearly obsolete. Faster response times of having a launch vehicle in the area of conflict are nice, but how long does it take to actually get there? Probably hundreds up to millions of years. (Again, why a 'realistic space combat game' would be a terribly boring thing). Why not just shoot first and not get out of bed?
If the advantage of the ship is to "close the gap" as you put it, then you have the same problems with the enemy moving, etc. He probably wont even be there when you arrive, and the war will have been over for several generations. Using any sort of jump, wormhole, ftl type thing defies the "realistic" part, and even if it were possible, there would be no reason not to use said technology on the projectile directly instead of the vehicle. (shoot, bullet opens wormhole, exits 'subspace' ontop of the target instantly)