You have some good points, but there are some problems.

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I put armour on 4 times as thick, I've still roughly built 2 ships that can take a hell of a lot more of a beating than yours. 2 ships that don't need ANY support after being launched, you still have to build supply ships and bases.

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You are equating mass with volume. This is not correct. It is posible to make a ship that is a high volume, but low mass.

Armour has a lot of mass. So doubling your armour will increase the amount of mass you can set asside for missiles.

Armour is dense. So increasing the mass of armour would not increase the mass like increasing the missiles (or anything else) would.

A launch tube for instance is hollow and so would take up more volum for mass than armour would.

The factories work with mass, not volume. It is easier and takes less resources to create a cube 1m x 1m x 1m and have it hollow as compared to a 1m x 1m x 1m cube and have it solid.

Volume can not be equated as mass in these caclulations.

Increaseing your armour (high density) will reduce the volume of missiles (medium density) available to you by more than the extra volume of armour gained. You have not considdered this in your caclulations.

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250,000,000 for engines, fuel. 50,000,000 for a deployable refinery/factory system. 100,000,000 for pellets in my railguns. All guns firing, will take 3 hours. This gives me 1.0 × 10^14 pellets by the way. 100,000,000 for long range boosters that would have a number of Sabot attached to the front and fired at extreme range (Filling the role of your striker, in a rather small package, for cheap) gives me 500,000 long range boosters. They might not be fast, but they're hard to see and will pack a punch. 150,000,000 taking up space for structure. 50,000,000 for large warheads: The kind uses to blow holes in moons you're trying to set up a base on, packaged onto the same engine sabot with its own final stage booster. That gives me 1,250,000 of them, and I can get them all off in 4 seconds firing from all sides. These are more likely to be loaded on long range boosters however. 300,000,000 for smaller warheads packed in sabot, gives me 7,500,000 of them. In total I can unload them in 24 seconds.

You have neglected the volume of the weapons thenselves and the storage compartments and transport systems (to the fireing chamber) for them. You have given the ammo volume, but this is only part of the volume needed.

Another mistake is that I have a much higher surface area for weapons. So your rate of fire for missiles can be easily matched by my Drones. It won't matter how many missiles you have if I can have enough ammo (and point defence ammo is far smaller than missiles) and a high enough rate of fire to exceed your missile's rate of fire.

As I said a few posts ago. It is not how many warheads you have, but the ratio of the rate of fire for missiles and point defences.
if you can fire 10,000 point defense shells each second but I can fire 10,001 missiles each second, you will eventually be hit and destroyed.

If you waste all you point defence fire at my Drones, then you arn't fireing at the missiles that are aproaching your ship. You might destroy my point defence Drones, by that would have just allowed my missiles to get close enough to your ship.

Also their is the "Kill rate". You might be able to fire 102400 each side, but if you can only get 1 kill for every 1,000 pelets shot, then 103 missiles (in the same time period) will be able to breach your defenses regardless of how much ammo you have in reserve.

This is the critical number, not the volume or ammo reserves. Ammo reserves only come into play if the conflict is long lasting. Even then, a lot of the balance is detemined by the rate of fire.

If you have 10^14 pelets ammo reserve, and have a kill rate of 1:1,000 pelets, then 10^11 missiles will breach your defences regardless of the time taken to fire those missiles.

Kill rate to Rate of fire is important. You have not factored this into your calculatins.

I don't need to match your warhead storage capacity. All I need to do is exceed your ability to shoot them down.

Lets do this calculation:
If your Gunship is 1km each side that gives an area of 1,000,000m^2

If each Missile port takes up 2m^2 then you can have a maximum of 500,000 missile ports on a side.

But this leaves no room for point defence.

Lets add this in. Assuming that missiles and point defence takes up 3m^2 then we have 333,333 missile ports per side 166,666,000 point defense turrets.

PD turrets can only attack in the direction the attack is comming. So we only need to considder 1 side for PD. However misisles are guided and can change their vector so all sides can fire at a single target.

This gives 166,666,000 PD and 3,000,000 missile launchers for your GunShip.

Now for my Strikers and Point Defense Drones.
My Strikers are 1/16th the size of your GunShip and my PD Drones are 1/32nd the size (actually the sizes of them wwould be adjusted to give the best Rate of fire to storage capacity against your ship designs as that is what they are designed for so the 1/6th and 1/32nd ratios might be different if they would give a better rating against your ships).

At 1/16th the size my Strikers are 62.5m long each side giving an area of 3,906.25m^2.

This gives me 7,812 missile tubes each side and a total of 46,875 missile tubes total. Therefore I need 3,556 Strikers to overwhealm you PD. Volum to Volume I can produce 4096 Strikers to your 1 Ginship. So it is posible for me to overwhelam your PD and get hits on your ship.

But I haven't figgured in any PD for me yet.
At 1/32nd the size each PD Drone of mine will be 31.25m long on each side or 976.56m^2. Due to the smaller size, it becomes feasable for me to mount weapons on one side of this PD Drone and direct the muzzle as if it came for anotyher side. So to simplify, we can assume that I can get the equivalent of 3 sides pointing in 1 direction.

which give me an area of 2,929.68m^2 for mounting PD weapons. At 1cm each that givbe each PD Drone a capacity of 292,968 PD cannons each ship.

You can fire 3,000,000 missiles which means that 11 PD Drones can shoot down all your Missiles. Only 11! I can have a 100 or even a 1000 of these and still have enough to overwhealm your Gunships PD with Strikers. And this is equal volume.

For the volue of your GunShip I can produce 32,768 PD Drones. Even with 4,000 Strikers, I can have more than enough PD Drones to handle any missile strikes you send agains tme. I only need 11 to shoot down your missiles.

Sure you have more ammo in reserve, but I can destroy you before you can fire all your weapons.

For Missiles to be effective against a ship, the missile must be able to close the distance with the target in less time than it take the target to move out of the missile's manouvreing cone. A ship with more acceleration means this cone is smaller. For large ships (like your GunShip) this cone is huge. That measn that to engage my ships you have to be very close to them. For me to engage your ship, I can be further away. But we will be at a range much less than 1 light second.

If missiles taravel at 100km/s (max speed if all fue is burnt) and the engagement is at 1000km then one only need 10 seconds of fireing to reach the target. If you have 24 seconds of ammo, then 14 seconds are wasted. If it takes 3 hours, then there is a lot of waste (single engagement only).

This is why I said that your ships are designed for long term engagements, you have the advantage of endurance. But I have the advnatage of Rate of Fire.

The Motherships would exist in this situation just to provide my fleet with some endurance. If this is in the form of resupply or by auxillery ordinance, it doen't matter.

Rate of Fire will beat Endurance in a straight up fight any time.

If you are able to engage my ships over a much longer period of time, you will win. Over a short period of time, I win.

Also let us now factor in my Motherships.
Let us say that my Motherships are only 1/4 the size of your Gunships. That means that volume for volume I can have 64 Motherships.

Each mothership is indipendant with the same kinds of factory that you have in your GunShips. Also these Motherships don't need misisles so I can concentrate their weapons on point defence.

At 1/4 the length of your GunShip, this give me a length of 250m or 62,500m^2. At 1cm each PD turret, that give me a maximum of 6,250,000 turrets each side. But you can only fire a maximum of 3,000,000 from your entire ship. You can't touch my Mothership with any of your missiles. And I have lots of surface are to spare. And this is just 1 of them! I have 64 of them for every 1 of your Gunships.

With this kind of PD I might just send it in to combat with your GunShip along with my Strikers and PD Drones as a convenient Supply platform or if you attacked with a second flanking ship, I could just engage it and hold it off untill my Assult force has dealt with your other GunShip. Even if I loose one of my Motherships, I still have 63 more that can hold off your GunShip.

Who needs weighty armour when I can have this kind of PD protection? I just need to have enough armour to protect against micrometeors and shrapnel form the distant explosions.

I have chosen to ignore the amount of ammo available as PD ammo will always out number Missiles. It makes it next to usless to compare them. It is the rates of fire that is important for a single engagemnt.

So for each area that you can hold with your Gunships, I can hold off 64 of them. Each one of my Mother ships can be used to make the Strikers and PD Drones as these are much smaller than it. You have stated that You can make Missiles as large as my Strikers, so why can't I make an entire Striker and my PD Drones are smaller still so these too should be posible.

If we have the rule that we can't build a ship as big as the factory ship with the factory ship, then I can restock my fleet quite easily.

You are clearly missing things about the construction of ships:

The surface of the ship is made of plates. It doesn't matter how THICK these are, they are on the OUT SIDE of the ship. Adding thicker armour doesn't take away anything from the INSIDE of the ship. Draw a square on a piece of paper, now draw another square AROUND it. How much have you taken away from the inside of the ship? Nothing.

To make something that covers more costs more to make. However, something 1x1x1 has 1 volume for the cost of 6 surface area, just double that to 2x2x2 and you have EIGHT volume, and 24 surface. Using 1x1x1 ships to get 8 volume, you need to produce enough skin to cover 48 units of area.

Now then, back to my theory ship, I'm shooting 6,144,000 missiles a SECOND, that is 307,200 sabots carrying 20 missiles each, I have 7,500,000 sabot already loaded with missiles in storage, the ship is basically sets of tubes loaded with ammo, all basically ready to fire straight out the ship once the port covers are open.

Each side of the ship, which is basically 1000m by 1000m has a grid of 160x160 2m wide missile ports, each with an armoured cover that can quickly be opened and closed as needed. around each tube are 4 point defense railguns. Most of the gun extends into the ship, arranged to be part of the 'dead space' between the round parts of the missiles. Missiles are round, not square, so when I say they are 2m wide, I say that just for ease of the numbers, shave a few cm off that for the space needed for the minimal equipment to store them.

Now, for all the ammo my ship carries, it can launch it FAST. I'm talking each tube spitting out a new sabot loaded with 20 missiles every half second. If we are engaging at distances of 1LightSecond, that is 299,792,458m. At those distances, TIME to fire doesn't matter much, ALL my short ranged offensive payload can be unloaded in 24.5 seconds. Stealthy long range can be launched in less time than that. That you can get all your missiles off in half a second doesn't matter too much, the distance traveled by them in the 24 more seconds my ship takes to fire all of its payload isn't much, even if they were launched at speeds around 200km/s that is still nearly half an hour, less than a minute compared to half an hour isn't much.

I have 102,400 PDRGs per side of my ship. I point a corner of my cube at you, and I have 3 faces that can fire towards you, 307200 guns, each firing at metal storm (a tech that is around today, and actually less than it claims to fire a minute) speeds, of 15,000 pellets per second. Thats 4 608 000 000 per SECOND, and I have 3 HOURS of ammo, firing from SIX sides of my ship. How much is it going to cost you to produce enough of your strikers and missiles to take out ONE of my ships?

And for a given amount of production, I carry more weapons.


Now, this does raise a question of, how do I defeat your fleet of drones and strikers? Besides evading them and striking other targets? Luring your defense fleets a ways away from your factories with several ships in different areas, trying to get one in close enough to blast it away, then destroy your fuel stores, and all my ships sail away laughing.

Your strikers are meant to deal with very very lightly armoured missiles, you've said that is their job. They're there to shoot down missiles, not ships. They're going to scratch my paint job. How do I deal with them? I run them down. I see your ships coming at me, I gun my engines and fly into your fleet, PDRGs blazing away, the ammo is cheap and very easy to make, being refined pellets, powered by long lasting reactors as part of my engines.

So, you are flying at me, your ships carry limited fuel, according to you to make them as cost effective as my long range missiles they carry enough to reach the target, but not return. At the end of your missions you are going to rely on tankers to refuel you. (Of course, this logic is rather flawed, as you still have to burn the same fuel to MOVE the fuel in the tankers) You don't have the fuel to slow and make an extended run in the other direction. There is no air, so physics is totally against you unlike it would be on earth where you could use wings and the air to turn. In space if you want to turn around, you have to rotate your ship around to point in the other direction, apply the same force you did getting to your speed just to STOP, then that much more to get going in the other direction. Oddly enough, on the defensive, I have the advantage in maneuvering, as I have the fuel to actually DO it. You don't.

So, I've just blown through your protective screen of defense drones, maybe even blown up a fair number of them with the PDRGs. Now what? Your strikers don't have anti missile systems, and I'm shooting upwards of 6,144,000 missiles every second if I want/need to.

So, what do you do? You take those small PDRGs off your drones (scrap them altogether) and stick them on your strikers, now your strikers don't need to rely on other ships themselves, and I have a MUCH harder time shooting them down. Well, you just made your ships the same as mine, just a smaller scale. You now have gunship fleets, copies of the same ship that fill all roles. You've already dropped your scouts, and now I've just forced you to drop your drones, because if they're going to be right in the same general area as the strikers, why have those systems on another platform? Wouldn't it be cheaper to add a minor amount of hull to the striker to give it the little extra room for a bit more fuel and engine space, and the small storage needed for the limited ammo? After all, if you want the ammo in the same place, why build two frames to hold it, when you can build one that does the same for less materials?

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The surface of the ship is made of plates. It doesn't matter how THICK these are, they are on the OUT SIDE of the ship. Adding thicker armour doesn't take away anything from the INSIDE of the ship. Draw a square on a piece of paper, now draw another square AROUND it. How much have you taken away from the inside of the ship? Nothing.

Actually, I can make a ship that has 1/16th the mass of your ship, buit it could have 1000 times the volume. I just make it out of foil. It costs the same amount of resource as a ship 1/16th the size of yours.

Volume is not the metric by which we measure the production capacity.

I imagine the "factories" as some sort of nanofactory. We are actually making progress in this area with 3D printers and rapid prototyping technology. In fact the shuttler uses components that are made using this technology today.

Using such technology to build entire ships is really just an extention of todays use of it.

So, as you are processing a given volume of matterial, but this material has a specific density, what we are really after for the profduction rate metric is not volume, but mass.

So processing more matter means processing more mass.

Armour, being a high density means that for a given volume you need to process more mass. Therfore, if you add mass to your ship by adding armour, you either increase the total mass processed by your factories (which means that I can also increase the amount of mass) or you loose mass form else where to pay for that armour's mass.

Besides, sticking more armour on the outside would increase the size of your ships, which means that I too can increase the amount of volume I can use too.

Either way, I can keep up wioth you in either volume or mass produced and my rates of fire scale better to volume and mass than does yours.

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To make something that covers more costs more to make. However, something 1x1x1 has 1 volume for the cost of 6 surface area, just double that to 2x2x2 and you have EIGHT volume, and 24 surface. Using 1x1x1 ships to get 8 volume, you need to produce enough skin to cover 48 units of area.

See here you are arguing that you can increase volume, but I can only increase mass. You are using two completely different metrics. Volume to Volume or Mass to Mass, I exceed you in rate of fire. But Volume to Mass, well this is not really a comparison we can make if we don't have a constant density throughout the ship.

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Now then, back to my theory ship, I'm shooting 6,144,000 missiles a SECOND, that is 307,200 sabots carrying 20 missiles each, I have 7,500,000 sabot already loaded with missiles in storage, the ship is basically sets of tubes loaded with ammo, all basically ready to fire straight out the ship once the port covers are open.

And using the same technology I will, because I have far more missile tubes than you, out strip you in this department.

I was calculating the comparisons in the number of weapon ports.

If you are shooting 6,144,000 a second from your 3,000,000 ports, then, with my 46,875 missile tubes per sip and 4,096 Striker to your 1 GunShip gives me a total of 192,000,000 tubes fireing at 20 missiles each second gives a grand total of 3,840,000,000 each second!

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I have 102,400 PDRGs per side of my ship. I point a corner of my cube at you, and I have 3 faces that can fire towards you

This is the real reason for the multi-pronged attack. At least one of these fleets will be able to engage you on one side only negating this tactic. That is why I would use the multi-pronged attack. So I only need to exceed 1,536,000,000, not 4,608,000,000.

Now lets look to my fleet's defences against your missiles. I have 64 Motherships covered in your metal storm PD rail guns. Also they are full of ammo for it.

If I use the angled (3 facce) attitude that you use, then I can completely defend against any missiles you throw at my Motherships. Just 1 ove these Motherships would be able to protect my entire Striker force, leaveing the mass of 63 of them for Strikers and, if needed PD Drones (and the PD drones can resupply straight off the Mothership.

Lest say I use 4 Motherships (one for each assult vector) and and have the mass of 59 of them for Strikers and the mass of 1 of them for PD drones.

As your PD would not be able to pierce the Armour of my Motherships (in the same way that my PD drones can't penertrate the armour of your Gunships, or I would just load up everything into PD and hammer you). Just 1 of my motherships can completely protect my fleet from your missiles and I have a fleet of PD Drones to assist. My Strikers follow in, completely protected from your missiles. I can approach arbitarily close, I could even dock with your ship and still defend against all your missiles.

So I can determine the engagement distance. I can approach as close to your ship as I like and then launch my missiles from the cover of my Motherships. I can be touching you GunShip when I launch this attack.

I don't care if you see me or not as I can defend against anything you throw at me. My motherships (the Carriers) shield my ships against your PD turrets and can shoot down any misisles you launch. The engagement distance will not be 1 light second. It will be what ever I choose.

My ships all accelerate at a higher rate than you do, they can catch up to your ship, they can out manouvre it and they can defend against anything you can throw at it.

The absolute best you can achieve is a stalemate. Where neither of us has the firepower to penertrate the defences of the other.

In a stalemate situation I will have the advantage. I can change the composition of my fleet faster than you can. This means that I can respond to changing strategic situations faster than you, not only that, I can direct them as I can change them, then after you respond (commit to it) I can then just change it again.

In a stalemate situation, we will have skirmishes, in which your ships will be damaged and I will loose ships. However, a lucky blow where you loose a single ship will tip the scales in my favour and we no longer have a stalemate.

To penertrate my defences, you will need the firepower of more than 64 Gunships. which I can defend with just the mass of 1 of your gunships.

Thinka bout this. If I have the mass of 10 of your Gunships as Motherships (total of 640 motherships), I can have the mass of 34 of your Gunships in Assult ships.

My fleet is more manouverable, so I can cause your fleet to be pout out of position and then strike at vulnerable targets with a massive amount of firepower, overwhealm it before your main fleet can respond and then retreat to a safe location for rearming. My 640 Motherships can easily handle any assult you might might make.

I can decide where, when and how each battle takes place. I can cover more locations than you so I will have access to more resource and therefore can out produce you.

In a stalemate situation I have the advantage.

The only advantage that you have over my fleet is in an extended confrontation where my fleet is attacking your fleet for a long period of time without the chance to retreat for resupply. Unfortunately for you, I can dictate when and where I retreat and can cover it with my Motherships.

I can rotate my Motherships for resupply and can even use them to resupply my assut fleets.

They are just as capable as your Gunships, but they don't have to carry the bulky misisles and are more manouverable (acceleration).

Yes. Against any fleet of mine that is made up only 1 type of ship. Your general purpose ships can defeat me. But the whole point of my fleet design is that you never just engage a fleet of mine made up of just 1 design.

Regardless of the actual weapon port design, my fleet will be able to have more of them than you can. Only by specifically choosing the weapon designs can you hope to reach a stalemate, outside these limited weapon designs, I can defeat you.

Remember, as I can have more weapon ports, and we have equivalent weapon tech and capabilities, the specific weapon design does not make too much difference and can not give you an advantage.

Your ships can launch it fast, but mine can launch it faster. You can not have more missiles than I can have PD ammo.

The best you can how for is a stalemate. But a stalemate allows me to claim more locations for resupply and building ships which eventually give me more production capacity than you.

For each location you can defend for a factory, I can defend 64. I can place a Mothership in orbit (geostationary) above a factory and start pumping out ships and ammo. Mean while you can only do this for 1 location. If we have planet side factories, then the size of the ships do not factor into the production capacities.

Also I can defend these locations at the same time as I am supplying my assult fleets. And, I can move my assult fleets if I think you are close to locating it, and still retain my production capacity. You can do neither of these things.

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Luring your defense fleets a ways away from your factories with several ships in different areas, trying to get one in close enough to blast it away, then destroy your fuel stores, and all my ships sail away laughing.

No. A mothership stays in orbit and can defend against you attack. I can survive this type of assult.

Remember 1 of my motherships is full of PD ammo and has has enough PD ports on each side to hold off an entire GunShip by its self. And I can have 64 of these babies for each Gunship you make. I don't need to abandon my defenses at all.

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Your strikers are meant to deal with very very lightly armoured missiles, you've said that is their job

No, my PD Drones are ment for that. Actually that is a secondary role for them. Thier main role is the destruction of Strikers or missiels around that size.

The PD Drones are not designed to tackle (by themselves) a ship with PD capability.

The Strikers are ment to tackle the Ships armed with PD.

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How do I deal with them? I run them down. I see your ships coming at me, I gun my engines and fly into your fleet, PDRGs blazing away, the ammo is cheap and very easy to make, being refined pellets, powered by long lasting reactors as part of my engines.

That is better for me as it give you less time to defend against any incoming missiles that I fire. I cna easily just veer off aftre this and you will be running straight into my missile assult, and as I have veered off long before your PD assult gets any where near me, that was a watse of ammo on your part. Your missiles will also have a harder time tracking my ships than my missiles will of homing in on your ship. More of my missiles will hit and there will be more of them in a given period of time. You have just aided me.

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So, you are flying at me, your ships carry limited fuel, according to you to make them as cost effective as my long range missiles they carry enough to reach the target, but not return. At the end of your missions you are going to rely on tankers to refuel you. (Of course, this logic is rather flawed, as you still have to burn the same fuel to MOVE the fuel in the tankers) You don't have the fuel to slow and make an extended run in the other direction. There is no air, so physics is totally against you unlike it would be on earth where you could use wings and the air to turn. In space if you want to turn around, you have to rotate your ship around to point in the other direction, apply the same force you did getting to your speed just to STOP, then that much more to get going in the other direction. Oddly enough, on the defensive, I have the advantage in maneuvering, as I have the fuel to actually DO it. You don't.

In free space this would be true. But I can use gravity to sling shot my ships around and rendesvous with the tanker, essentially getting a free return trip.

If we are just using volume as you seem to want to do, then I have the advantage as you would have much more mass than me compared to the engine size. Sure you could ahve an equal ratio engine as me, but then you would not have any room for ammo. And besides an engine's power scales with its area, not volume. Area goes up by 4 for a doubleing of size wher are volume (and mass would be similar) goes up by 8.

No, you don't have the advantage of manouvreing at all.

When I make an attack, I don't need to carry the entire mass of my fleet. If my resupply is diametrically oposite from my starting position, then I don't need the fuel to return, just to slow down (but then the supply fleet can also accelerate too to match velocity - these calculations are too compex for here, but they can be done).

I can also place fule stores (defended by Motherships) at the assult staring positions. This means that I can get away with less fuel in my Assult fleet ships as I can refuel at arbitary points in space. You have to return to a reasource point (which are covered by my sensor drones) to refuel.

I can even afford to send out a mothership to locations that you might choose as a refueling point. Even if you don't go there. I have just secured a refueling point for my self. Doing this would take one of your Gunships out of the fight, which lessens the firepower you can bring to bare on me.

Because you have everything on 1 ship. If you assign a role for that ship (guarding, assult, resupply, colonising/factory) then it removes it from another role that it can perform. I do not have this disadvantage.

So to sum up:

My fleet is strategically more flexable than yours. I can rapidly change the composition of my fleet to adapt or direct the stratigical situation.

I can hold more locations for a given mass than you can and thus parlay that into increased production capacity.

Tactically, my fleet out performs your in rate of fire (and thus defence too), but it falls short for protracted tactical engagements in an assult role. In a defence role, I can have far more defensive endurance that you can have offensive endurance. So you would not be able to launch an assult on me.

My ships are more manouvreable and I can refule at arbitary points, giving me greater flexability in my deployment.

I can decide where, when and how each battle takes place. I can retrete from an engagemnt without fear of you out running me, I can out run you if you attempt to retreat. I can attack along multiple vectors if that will give me the advantage.

As your only advantage over my fleet is endurance in a single battle, but this is negated by my ability to retrete and rearm at will without interfearance from you, then what do you really have that can defeat me?

If you attack me with the mass of multiple ships to my one, then you might have a chance (athough it would take much more than this - around 64 to 1 if we use the numbers you proposed for the weapons). But then this would also require you to out manouvre all the ships that the mass of your other ships have. Not an easy task when you look at the numbers.

Even with equal chances of an assult getting past the PD of a fleet/gunship, if 1 ot two missiles get through and hit my ships, then I have lost 1 or two ships out of thousnads. If the same number get past your PD you have lost your entire gunship. Looking at the loss of firepower that results from this 1 or 2 hits, then you can see your fleet design is at a major disadvantage here too.

Darn peeps,

I have been thinking of a project in the same paths on my own as well. Oh well great minds think alike.

Browsing through this thread I noticed the discussing revolving a lot around the proper tactical implementation of small (fighter/bomber) sized units.
Here is my take on the whole matter.

As a commander, would you send 100 ppl out to take out a 100000 person manned capital ship on a fairly certain suicide mission? With the option of using drones, missiles and other 'smart' ranged weaponry? It's a war situ, are you willing to kill of a 100 men and women for that single goal? Are you ready to take that crew morality hit? What if they fail and still die?

Despite Hollywood's badguy characters; I highly doubt any decent armed force accepts that kinda reckless command staff on any recurring basis.

In RL drones are still pretty much in their 'teens' as a military asset. As we are talking about a space fairing society, it's fairly obvious that automation, AI and drones developed leaps n' bounds.

However! I think the mainstay of cons' against unmanned vs. piloted units is the inherent lack of a human brain to creatively analyze developing situational awareness.

So, let me get this straight, you are going to ignore my numbers totally, claim you get more ships of the same size as my gunship for the same cost as one,...


Ok, a 1m by 1m plate, 1cm thick. Takes a set MASS to produce. Using these plates, made out of something that is 1gram per cm^3, a cube made of them will have a mass of 60kg, and a volume of 1m^3.

A cube, made of the same plates, but 2m tall, will take 24 of these plates, take a mass of 240kg, 4 times the mass of the 1m^3, but has a volume of 8m^3.

Using the small cubes you need 480kg of material just for the outside.

For 480kg of material I've now made 8m^3 of ship.

Scale up to 16x16, using the same material, the outside of the ship takes a massive 15360kg to make, but gives 4096m^3.

But to carry the same space with 1m^3 cubes, you need 245760kg.

For that, I can produce 16 ships giving me 65536m^3.

The same space would then take 3932160kg, for which I've produced 256 ships and have 1048576m^3

For you to field that much space and ammo you need 62914560kg and I've made 4096 ships,...



As for maneuvering: Your gas tanks are running low by the time your fleet gets to me, they top up after the battle. So, if you plan to use slingshotting, that means your ships have to travel on a set path, or have the fuel to get back on that set path. This is weight you have to carry and can't burn, or, you lose a fleet and have to expend a fair bit of fuel tracking them down and topping them off. That is assuming I don't stick around, and run your drone's tanks dry and then blow them up with rail guns after they become drifting objects that are easy to hit.

Engine power relates to area how? Care to explain that one?
If our ordnance has the same mass per volume, and we each split our ships, half fuel/engines, half ordnance, our power to cargo can be simplified to 1:1.

But my fuel to surface mass (assuming our armour is the same thickness) I get 83.3 fuel/surface, and you get 5.20832.

My ship gets to be faster as I can apply more thrust. Inertia works the same way for both of us remember. If your fleet carries the same amount of weapons as me, you still have to move the same amount of mass, plus all the extra hull to hold it compared to mine. a 1 tonne ship with 1 tonne of thrust moves the same as a 1000 tonne ship with 1000 tonne of thrust. Inertia drags you around the same as me.

Even with my armour's mass being 4 times, the fuel to surface mass is still 20 to your 5.

When considering a plates, if you set their depth to 1, you can then ignore depth, and take the length and width as your main numbers, and you can then scale that 'invisible' 1 for added thickness.

As for getting your strikers closer to my gunships, this isn't an advantage. You aren't getting close enough to dock, remember, my gunships have BOTH offensive weapons and defensive weapons. As you get closer and keep launching missiles at me your missiles get easier to shoot down. Remember, my ships have thicker armour and strength of armour doesn't scale linearly. a 2 inch steel plate takes roughly 4 times the force to punch through.

If I put my gunship between your drones (sorry for putting the wrong names in places a few times in my last post, I'm sure you understood what I meant) or mothership and your strikers, Your strikers are dead. If you put your ships between two of mine, well, they just have less space to run.

So, we are in a deadlock, but I can still kill your offensive force if I can bully my way between your ships. How to fix this? Replace some of my weapons with new ones. New style missiles that can guide themselves into your drones, but are hard for your drones to shoot down. No, this isn't 'giving into' your style, this has been how my ships worked from the start. And guess what. My gunships can refit themselves with new weapons/ammo on their own. Your fleet can't. I've deployed a way for my ships to take out your fleet. Your mothership doesn't seem to carry offensive weapons, so I take out your drones with my new anti drone missile, and put my gunship between your mothership and your strikers, the back side of my gunship shoots down any offensive weapons your mothership can launch, and goes on to launch a deadly blow at your now undefended strikers.

Now, what sort of things can I do to my ship design that your ships can't really benefit from? For one, if we have warheads that are designed to not cause a secondary explosion when hit, and can produce missile fuels that won't explode either, then ammo can become armour. This means you HAVE to blow the snot out of my ship, AND make sure you take out that deployable factory system, or my ship is back in action given a bit of time, re refining itself to repair engines, hull, and weapon systems, then head off to the nearest asteroid to replenish its weapons store. Point defense guns would be designed to keep firing even with one side of the ship destroyed. Sure, once you start putting holes in my ship it becomes easier to destroy, but once I start shooting down your ships they become easier to shoot down as a whole.

Now, assuming production of weapons is equal cost for both of us, the advantage then goes to the person that can build things to carry more of those weapons. I've already proven that for your cost of building a fleet that carries as much as one of my ships, I've built two heavy armoured ships, or what was it? 13 lightly armoured ships.

Battles will take hours, we can each empty our ships of ammo in seconds. That you can do it in 1/24th of the time it takes me isn't an advantage when you consider I take 0.002% of the battle time, you take 0.0001% Big deal. You rely on resupply ships with more ammo. If you have built a stockpile of resupply ammo, I'm going to have resources to build the same amount of spare ammo. Here is the real kicker. For the cost of your ships that launch all that ammo, I've built a SECOND heavily armed and armoured ship. So, now you aren't facing ONE gunship, you are facing TWO.

Throw in the cost of building your resupply fleet, how much material did it take you to build that fleet? How much of a THIRD heavily armoured ship do I have finished and then waiting for ammo do I have built?


Splitting your weapon systems into different parts and spreading them around isn't an advantage. It is like building tanks. I'll build tanks that are armed with a machine gun along side the main gun, another in the hull by the diver shooting forward, 1 in the back of the turret to cover behind the tank, and another for the tank commander. You produce two lines of tanks, one with a main gun, another with just machine guns. We'll assume all 3 tanks are made with the same armour. Who do you think will win? My tank doesn't rely on something else for basic machine gun support, it has it itself. I build two tanks, and while I can't carry nearly as much ammo as you can in a single tank, (your machinegun tank would need to carry lots of spare machine guns for the ammo it could carry, you would melt the barrels before running out likely :P) if I spot your cannon tank and take it out, your machine gun tank is now worthless against my two tanks. If your cannon tank takes out one of mine, it still has a second to deal with.

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Ok, a 1m by 1m plate, 1cm thick. Takes a set MASS to produce. Using these plates, made out of something that is 1gram per cm^3, a cube made of them will have a mass of 60kg, and a volume of 1m^3. A cube, made of the same plates, but 2m tall, will take 24 of these plates, take a mass of 240kg, 4 times the mass of the 1m^3, but has a volume of 8m^3. Using the small cubes you need 480kg of material just for the outside. For 480kg of material I've now made 8m^3 of ship. Scale up to 16x16, using the same material, the outside of the ship takes a massive 15360kg to make, but gives 4096m^3. But to carry the same space with 1m^3 cubes, you need 245760kg. For that, I can produce 16 ships giving me 65536m^3. The same space would then take 3932160kg, for which I've produced 256 ships and have 1048576m^3 For you to field that much space and ammo you need 62914560kg and I've made 4096 ships,...

This is wrong yet again. Equal mass remember. Not Calculate the mass of your ship then compare it to the volume of mine. Volume is arbitary. Mass isn't

Mass to mass.

If you have 1,000,000kg of ship, then I have 1,000,000kg of ships. You don't out produce me.

I have agreed that you have, Mass for Mass a larger volume. I have never denied that. I am just saying it is not as big of an advantage as you think.

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As for maneuvering: Your gas tanks are running low by the time your fleet gets to me, they top up after the battle. So, if you plan to use slingshotting, that means your ships have to travel on a set path, or have the fuel to get back on that set path. This is weight you have to carry and can't burn, or, you lose a fleet and have to expend a fair bit of fuel tracking them down and topping them off. That is assuming I don't stick around, and run your drone's tanks dry and then blow them up with rail guns after they become drifting objects that are easy to hit.

I can have supply ships (The Motherships/Carriers) refuel my Shipd before the battle. My ships will have full fuel tanks at the start of the battle and this gives me more fuel for manouvreing. Also, I don't need to carry all the fuel needed to relocate my fleet during an assult. You do. You can't expend all youe stored fuel in a battle because if you did, you could never get your ship to a point to refuel.

I can, as I can save a small amount of fuel for after the battel to rendesvous with a supply tanker. So during the battle I will have a better use of the fuel mass than you. I can wait untill you will need to refuel before attacking and thus even further limit your ability to counter manouvre.

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Engine power relates to area how? Care to explain that one?

Simple. The engine power, assuming we can accelerate the fuel to a the same speeds, is emitted at a constant rate. The more area you have, the more fuel (and therfore more thrust) you can generate. So the power of an engie is related to the area of the engine.

In a rocket, you can either increase the speed at which you burn fuel (which then has problems as the pressure build up) or you can increase the number of engines (increase the enginge area). This is why the initial stages of a rocket has multiple engines, it means they don't have to increase the pressures in the engine to get the greater acceleration.

Because my ships are more manouvreable than yours and I can used other ships to cover diferent vectores, I don't need to have armour on all sides of my ships. I can leave 3 sides unarmoured reducing my armour costs by 1/2 and still get the same amount of cover (in fact more as I can manouvre ships to provide more cover in a particualr direction - even destroying ships does not reduce the armour cover I can apply, it would reduce the area I can cover, but not reduce the amount of cover the armour provieds).

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If our ordnance has the same mass per volume, and we each split our ships, half fuel/engines, half ordnance, our power to cargo can be simplified to 1:1.

No, As I explained above. Ammo is mass (or at a constant mass as ammo would be volume) engine power is area. Mass increases by 8 times for a doubleing of length, area increases by 4 times.

This means your ship, for the same ratio of engine size will have a far lower acceleration than mine.

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My ship gets to be faster as I can apply more thrust. Inertia works the same way for both of us remember.

In space, manouvreability is based on acceleration, not maximum velocity. If we are talking longer periods of time, then, yes. You can be the faster ship. But over the time my ships can expend their fuel, mine are the faster ships.

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If your fleet carries the same amount of weapons as me, you still have to move the same amount of mass, plus all the extra hull to hold it compared to mine. a 1 tonne ship with 1 tonne of thrust moves the same as a 1000 tonne ship with 1000 tonne of thrust. Inertia drags you around the same as me.

Yes, but I can devote more surface area to engines than you, thus my fleet can deliver more thrust than you. In a single engagment, I can be faster and more manouvreable.

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As for getting your strikers closer to my gunships, this isn't an advantage. You aren't getting close enough to dock, remember, my gunships have BOTH offensive weapons and defensive weapons. As you get closer and keep launching missiles at me your missiles get easier to shoot down. Remember, my ships have thicker armour and strength of armour doesn't scale linearly. a 2 inch steel plate takes roughly 4 times the force to punch through.

Remember I can fire more missiles each second than you can fire PD guns. So, if my missiles are 1 second's flight (not 1 light second) away form your ship, then you cann not launch enough PD ordinance to stop my missiles, they will hit. Even if every single one of your PD shot destroys one of my missiles, I still hit, simply because you can't fire enough ammo to hit every one of my missiles.

You were using the fact that you have a larger total ammo and that being 1ls away you could fire all you ammo and shoot down my missiles. But as I know that and I have a higher rate of fire than you, I just bring them in close enough that I can use my higher rate of fire than you.

Your Gunships can never have the assult capacity of my Strikers, and they can never have the PD capacity of my PD Drones or Motherships, because you have both on the one ship.

As for armour strength, it is Warhead yield, not number of missiles that is the comparison. And since yeild is volume of explosive, and Armour scales as the crossectional area (the deapth of the plates), warhead yield will eventually increase beyond your armour for much less mass.

Having massivly think armour is not the way to prevent my attacks. Sure, it will reduce the damage a bit, but I can jsut use bigger warheads to blast through your armour with less cost of mass.

Also, seing as I exceed you by thousands in Missiles launched to you PD launched, I can ablate away your armour no problems.

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If I put my gunship between your drones (sorry for putting the wrong names in places a few times in my last post, I'm sure you understood what I meant) or mothership and your strikers, Your strikers are dead. If you put your ships between two of mine, well, they just have less space to run

That is a big "if". I have a higher acceleration than you do, so that if you attempt this manouvre, I can out accelerate you and plug this gap (or move my fleet) faster than you can exploit it. I would have to be blind and a hopeless commander to fall for this manouvre.

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So, we are in a deadlock, but I can still kill your offensive force if I can bully my way between your ships.

As i said, not likely. If you only chance of defeating me is for me to make obious tactical errors, you strategy is not looking good. If you can see them to exploit them, I can see them and plug them. I can plug the gaps faster than you can exploit them. This won't work. Also the sheer numbers of ships I have and the PD ability of them means that this would be very hard to do in the first place.

If you attempted this I would just bring in more support (in the form of PD Drones and Motherships) to defend my Strikers, and then pull in more Strikers to blow you out of the sky.

Even wothout any strikers, my Motherships can completly defend against your Gunship. They can protect my factories as I make more ships. But to do this, you have to give up your defence of your own factories. I can then launch an assult against them. You loose production capacity and I loose a few rel[laceable ships. I now have the strategic advantage but lost the tactical advantage and lost a few assult ships. My defences are sill in place.

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Replace some of my weapons with new ones. New style missiles that can guide themselves into your drones, but are hard for your drones to shoot down.

And I can replace my missiles with missiles that are hard for your PD to shoot down. Equal tech remember. Also you forget my Motherships. The PD capability of any 1 of these is close to the PD capability of my PD Drones (for the same mass) and far exceeds your Missile capcity of your Gunships, and I can have 64 of them for every 1 of your Gunships.

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My gunships can refit themselves with new weapons/ammo on their own. Your fleet can't.

But my Motherships can too. My motherships are carriers/factories, they can process raw material into weapons and ships. I can recycle old ships into new ships without having to stop off at a resource point. I can design my smaller ships to be modular and swap out old weapons to install new weapons (or even new equipment entirely). Even if a Mothership/Ginship can process the mass of one of my Strikers, I have 32 (if half my fleet's mass is in Motherships) of these Motherships for each 1 of your ships, so I can process more mass than you..

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I've deployed a way for my ships to take out your fleet.

And also developed a way for me to destroy your Gunships quicker. So you still loose.

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so I take out your drones with my new anti drone missile, and put my gunship between your mothership and your strikers, the back side of my gunship shoots down any offensive weapons your mothership can launch, and goes on to launch a deadly blow at your now undefended strikers.

As I said, my greater acceleration means I can then reposition my Strikers behind my Motherships before you can exploit this properly. While you are taking out my Drones, my Strikers are getting in behind my Motherships, which are then approaching your Gunships along with my protected Strikers. I'm now in position to strike. My PD drones would have been manouvreing to split up your fleet to allow me yo isolate any Gunships for a direct strike.

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Now, what sort of things can I do to my ship design that your ships can't really benefit from? For one, if we have warheads that are designed to not cause a secondary explosion when hit, and can produce missile fuels that won't explode either, then ammo can become armour.

And I can do the same. I'll just redirect my attacks to your bridge or your engines/life support/computer core or other vital system.

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This means you HAVE to blow the snot out of my ship, AND make sure you take out that deployable factory system, or my ship is back in action given a bit of time, re refining itself to repair engines, hull, and weapon systems, then head off to the nearest asteroid to replenish its weapons store.

Not without engines, the factory or lifesuppot you can't. If you have non volitile system, I can just disable your ship and then let your crew die in the vacuume of space (and then I can board it/tow it and process it into more ships).

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Point defense guns would be designed to keep firing even with one side of the ship destroyed. Sure, once you start putting holes in my ship it becomes easier to destroy, but once I start shooting down your ships they become easier to shoot down as a whole.

But shooting down my ships is hard. Much harder than it is for me to shoot down your ship.

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Now, assuming production of weapons is equal cost for both of us, the advantage then goes to the person that can build things to carry more of those weapons. I've already proven that for your cost of building a fleet that carries as much as one of my ships, I've built two heavy armoured ships, or what was it? 13 lightly armoured ships.

Not really, If I can have a constant supply run, I can have the advantage as I can keep supplying my ships while they are engaged, you have to break off your attack to resupply, I don't. If weapon resupply equals or exceeds the rate of expendature, then it doesn't matter what storage capacity you have.

Think about modern production methods. We once relied on warehouses to store masses of production, but now we are moving towards "Just in Time" production, Storage is expensive. Also, having production in storage is wasted production as it is not being used.

The supply line with minimal storage is much more efficient, and that is the model I am using.

I don't need to carry as much as your ships, I don't want to carry as much as your ships. That reduced soreage mass that you are using I am turning into functional mass.

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Battles will take hours, we can each empty our ships of ammo in seconds.

No theresults of a battle will take hours, the battles will be over in seconds if we have no more ammo to fire at each other.

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If you have built a stockpile of resupply ammo, I'm going to have resources to build the same amount of spare ammo.

Yes, but then all that ammo is sitting in storeage and not being used. I would rather use ammo than let it sit on a shelf somewhere.

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Here is the real kicker. For the cost of your ships that launch all that ammo, I've built a SECOND heavily armed and armoured ship. So, now you aren't facing ONE gunship, you are facing TWO.

No. Equal mass. If you can build 1 ship, I can build an equal mass. If I have spent resources on ammo, then so will you. IF you have enough resource to build 2 ships and supply them with ammo, then I can have built the same mass and supplied them with amm. Same Mass.

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Splitting your weapon systems into different parts and spreading them around isn't an advantage. It is like building tanks.

And yet they stillbuild tanks like this? I wonder why? Is it because it does give an advantage?

Actually, Tanks in isolation is not what the battlefiled is about. Tanks have a specific role to play on the battlefield. Nomatter what the armament of the tanks, there is always situations wher they are not useful. This is the reason they have infantry. You would think that the fact that infantry can't shoot buletts into a tank to destruy it would mean that infantry are useless. Why then do they even train infanty?

See, you Gunships are like the Tanks. They have a role to play, but they are limited. They will never be the best in all situations. They might be excelent in certain situations, but a good general on the otherside would not put themselves into those situations. They would in fact look to put you in situations where your tanks are a disadvantage.

As my fleet is able to better exploit changing tactical situations and can also be more strategically flexable, I can more easily put your fleet into situations where yours are disadvantaged and mine have the advantage, much more easily than you can do this to mine.

Yes. You can destroy my fleet in certain situations (splitting it up), but I can avoid those situations so you can't use them to destroy me.

I have never denied that your fleet has some uses (I even have stated some my self), but a fleet that soley relies on your composition has many weaknesses than I can exploit.

Know your enemies strengths and weaknesses and know your onw strengths and weaknesses. Out manouvre your enemy so that they can't exploit your weaknesses and you can exploit theirs and victory will be yours.

I know your strengths and weaknesses and I know mine. I can out manouvre you. You can't out manouvre me. I can exploit your weaknesses, you can't exploit mine. Victory will be mine.

What is inside my ship? (I'm trying to remember why I'm giving 15% of my volume to structure when I don't need it) Inside my ship are fuel tanks, engines, and a massive amount of stackable ammo, the same as what is in your ships. You build 1000 ships with 1m^3 compartments, or I build 1000 of the same compartments and stick them all in my ships. Main support for the ammo comes from the sabot themselves. (The real ship wouldn't be cubes, the sides would be curved a bit, with small ultra thin, ultra light ribbing for extra strength. The insides don't need support to keep it up, it is designed to stand up on its own. It might have to deploy the refinery farther away from itself than I would want if it took too much hull damage, but thats a risk I take. Cubes are only shown here because I don't want to do the math for finding those curved parts and ribs)

Another advantage the self supporting hull structure gives us is flex value in the armour itself, you aren't breaking through a rigid thing, you have to move it, flex the whole structure, and basically the whole force of an impact is transfered to a huge part of the ship. Lets think about this (which I should have remembered to post before) my hull has a mass of (We'll using a density between Iridium and Tungsten, nice round 20tonne/m^3)
My ship, with FOUR times as thick of armour, part of which is then used to hold itself up, so it acts like 3 times as thick, we'll be nice and say armour only increases by the square so 9 times the base armour factor of yours.
My ship has 48,000,000 tonne, and we'll say 40% of my ship being ammo, to 50% of yours, you still need 3277 ships. Each of your ships needs 46875 tonne. That gives us 153,609,375 tonne.

I have 3.2 ship hulls, which is 90+% of the ship structure.

As for acceleration: We'll say ammo has a constant of 10 tonne per m^3, we each carry 4,000,000,000 tonne of ammo. But my ship is 40% ammo to your 50%. Your fleet carries 400,023,390 m^3 of fuel (rounded your ships up to nearest whole) but my ship carries 500,000,000 fuel.

(Giving that 10% volume of my ship a mass of,... 1tonne a m^3, I'm thinking 10% is actually kind of high for a deployable factory and stuff, even just the space, without deploying anything, something that size could refine and build another ship in a matter of weeks, let alone processing enough to rearm the ship. but I'll leave it for now)

My fleet has a mass of 4,148,000,000 tonnes without fuel.
your fleet has around 4,153,843,275 tonnes without fuel.

My fleet is still only 99.859% the tonnage of yours, minus fuel, and I have more of it.

I have 1.2054 tonnes of fuel on board per tonne of ship and arms.
Your fleet has 0.9630 tonnes of fuel on board per tonne of ship and arms.
My ships have the space for higher pressure engines, your 'advantage' in engine space is void.


My fleet could refuel itself on the way. Burning a large amount of fuel, then drifting. Doesn't really matter what way you do it, it still costs fuel to move fuel. If I use long range missiles for an attack, I have to spend fuel to move the warheads to you (And their base, but I'm dropping unneeded parts off as I go, you keep yours whole). You have to spend fuel moving the warheads there, fuel moving the whole ship there. Fuel moving refill fuel, moving the ships CARRYING the fuel. And don't forget, unless you are planning to leave that refill ship there, you'll have to spend fuel taking it back with you.

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Remember I can fire more missiles each second than you can fire PD guns. So, if my missiles are 1 second's flight (not 1 light second) away form your ship, then you cann not launch enough PD ordinance to stop my missiles, they will hit. Even if every single one of your PD shot destroys one of my missiles, I still hit, simply because you can't fire enough ammo to hit every one of my missiles.

So, my short range missiles are 2m^3 I think it was. I can fire 1,536,000,000 pellets PER SECOND. If they all hit their target, that means you need 25165 ships, assuming you take just 1 second to unload the full payload. Even if 1 in 50 pellets take out a missile, you still need to get 503 of your ships inside of 1 second missile flight time. I can fire 1,024,000 offensive missiles at those ships in the same time. This is assuming we use the same warheads. Yours have to have about 9 times the power of mine to punch a hole in my armour, and even then you're doing damage, your ship is basically gone from one of my smaller ones.

How are you getting inside of 1 second flight time with out me blasting your fleet to scrap? Putting up your defense drones between me and those ships. However, as you are trying to close, I'll start shooting the snot out of your defense drones with railguns, the closer they get, the more I can shoot per second. If I make a hole in them, I can start shooting up your attacking strikers. If I rotate my ship and give you 3 faces to deal with (humm, I need to think about the 'real' shape of my ship, forgot to account for the real ones having curved sides, which would cut off some of the rail guns line of fire if pointing a corner at you, but would let me go head on, and fire nearly half of the ships weapons at you,... oh well, we'll roll with it) then you need to deal with triple the point defense and missiles. (actually missiles I can fire from all sides of the ship)

If at around 1 second missile flight time distance, my PDRGs are 1/10 effective, you need 2516.5 ships, for the hulls of your strikers alone, I've built the ship you are attacking, a second one to help defend it, and a third nearly half way done. This doesn't include the cost of your drones to keep your strikers from becoming scrap for my refinery before closing.

Also, how do you plan to attack my ship from different vectors? If you have 4 groups attacking my ship, I already said, I turn and fight them one at a time. 1/4 of your attacking fleet is then facing me, with their back up hours away. I could then even make a move on your resupply.

Your fleet has holes in it. What happens if I manage to strike your resupply ships? I don't rely on resupply ships (I can still use them, but they're not needed, yours are).

Your ships weapons can't be made any more modular than the weapons on mine, if you can pull stuff and swap them out, I can pull stuff off my ships too.

You haven't proved your ships have greater acceleration than mine. Provide numbers here please. "Rockets are area" doesn't really work. I have more fuel that I can burn. You can keep trying to up the power of your engines, but for the same range, I can up my engines to go faster.

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Quote: Now, what sort of things can I do to my ship design that your ships can't really benefit from? For one, if we have warheads that are designed to not cause a secondary explosion when hit, and can produce missile fuels that won't explode either, then ammo can become armour. And I can do the same. I'll just redirect my attacks to your bridge or your engines/life support/computer core or other vital system.

So you are going to blast through to the core of my ship, through 500m of dense material to get one command and control center, one engine? I have at least 8 main engine sets (each corner of the ship basically) and can have smaller engines besides those. This is any easier than me using smaller warheads to blow up your smaller ships?

How is it any harder to shoot down your ships? How do you get past my defenses so easily? How are they any easier to take out than your mother ships and supply ships?


As for your production style, if you build what you need to use, as you need it, without any stockpiles, sounds like a good way to come up short in a shooting war. If you have a gun, you don't want to be ordering a new bullet each time you fire, you want a box of it there with you. More of my ammo is ready to be fired.

I can still USE supply ships, the point of my fleet is I don't NEED them.
Like it or not, you still have to carry your ammo around. Which do you think costs less? Shipping things one at a time with trucks, or shipping things on a rail or ship where you can ship hundreds at a time. And guess what, doesn't matter what you do, you still have to SHIP it.

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I don't need to carry as much as your ships, I don't want to carry as much as your ships. That reduced storage mass that you are using I am turning into functional mass.

I don't get your point. We each have X tonnes of ammo to fire off, I keep a larger portion of it loaded and ready to fire. Like it or not, you still have to carry it eventually.

So, all the time in perwar build up, you don't want to have made any extra ammo? Don't you think that might be a good idea? Most of my stockpiles would likely be stored in orbits, guarded, and setup to be fired easily if attacked. My ships can swing by and pick them up if they're close enough, or make new stuff.


And you do know that main battle tanks usually have at least 2 machine guns, M1A2 has 3 machine guns. Why? Because that tank is going to face infantry at some point. Is it perfect in all situations? Well, space doesn't have forests, or cities that ships would move through. And things that would be useful in city combat isn't likely to do squat in deep space combat. I've focused on deepspace combat, and guess what, your little ships aren't likely to be of use in cities either.

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I know your strengths and weaknesses and I know mine. I can out manouvre you. You can't out manouvre me. I can exploit your weaknesses, you can't exploit mine. Victory will be mine.

And I don't know your weaknesses? How about starving you of fuel? Attacking your supply lines in force, pressing your factories and that? How about that weakness? My fleet with its main core of gunships can always be backed up with new developments as needed. If you build a stealth missile that I can't shoot down, what stops me from building my own and shooting the snot out of your mother ships and factories?



I haven't had this much fun on gamedev in a longtime. Refining this idea down is going to be of great help with a project I've been working on.

I spend way too much time thinking of problems related to space combat now. Chocolate covered coffee beans as a favourite snack means you have lots of time late at night to think of random things,...

2 key advantages large mass ships give over smaller ships:

1. More effective point defense. I'm defending a single point, trying to shoot down what is being fired AT me, which nearly boils down to (on the short range at least) finding an incoming warhead, and shooting at it. Missiles can only make so many movements and still be heading for a target. I have a smaller area to defend, all around my ship, at 100km, without even aiming, my point defense can cover the surface area of a 201m cube with a pellet for every m^2, every 26 seconds. And things just get denser the closer you get in. Come into just 25km from my ship, and every other second, a pellet passes through that plane.

Shooting at something head on, you can basically shoot at a flat plane, or nearly flat, provided you have a high enough rate of fire to make the time and space between the shots as small as possible. With a missile of known specs, you can figure out how far it can deviate and still hit you. From there you can do the boring math, figure out the point it will be if traveling a straight line by the time your bullet hits it, from there work back and start making circles to correct for if it had changed course, (actually I guess you could simplify it, and calculate just the circle that would be made if it preformed maximum turn rate in the time it would take your shots to reach it. Have your high speed guns fire as much as possible at that area in as close to a single instantaneous burst as possible, and it dies. As opposed to shooting from the side, where the volume of the area it could travel matters a little more, you then get a strange shape, sort of a triangle with a semi circle on the end, or nearly a triangle shape (but curved sides) if you are firing from nearly a perfect right angle. Eyeballing line distance because it is nearly 2:30 in the morning, and calculus class was over a year ago, firing from head on may take as low as 75% the shots as opposed to side on. Your point defense is spread all over, with huge distances to travel. lowering its effectiveness.


2. I'm harder to confirm as a target on long range sensors. A large single object traveling on a given vector in space is fairly common, there are thousands of known objects larger than 1000m across, and new ones coming into the system aren't uncommon either. One hulking rock flying round isn't going to raise an eyebrow. Now, what IS odd, are thousands of small objects to all have the same vector. And when they do, they're fairly stable and have been there for a good part of the solar system's life. Your fleets moving around are going to attract a lot of attention, it might be hard to see for sure, and look like sensor ghosts, but persistent ones staying together are going to warrant checking out closer. Splitting your fleet up into chunks that make it hard to detect like that means increasing your attack times, your small fleet portions wouldn't be effective till the rest joined it. And if you station them close enough to attack me that I wouldn't have time to call in reinforcements or setup counter attacks (something close enough to be just a week or two travel) and I happen to find your fleet massing there and only half done, bye bye much of your fleet, for very limited risk to me.


There is something else about regenerative armour I thought about last night as I was falling asleep, something to do with a larger ship being harder to ablade its armour, the larger ship, being larger, means you have to hit the armour hard enough to send the material out of the range of any field setup to pull it back to the surface, or enough that collection fields will cause the armour to sort of orbit, forcing the ship to either abandon the armour matter totally, or change its heading/speed to collect it. Small ship would require making the matter travel at far lower velocities to avoid the ship getting more. With an armour that can flow smartly, but still be strong armour when hit, punching a hole in it can be a waste if you don't follow it up with another in a matter of seconds. I get to use smaller warheads and less of them to put critical holes in any of your ships, but finding these numbers is more than I care to do tonight.


Anyone else have comments on this issue? we should recruit new people to give their ideas on how this works and punch more holes in both sides.

I original starships concept made starships be about couple of light years in size and made of pure energy. It would be a fairly loose structure that would allow planets or even stars pass through it. So essentially a cloud of electromagnetic micro components on a galactic scale. That would create new ships by splitting. But I guess this will not play in the same ball park as your ideas starship systems because of the technology involved in building my ships. And this type of ship is so much hurder to visualize for us now.

What do you think will be the most fun starships system to play? Take all the realism aside.
Would you go for rock paper succor effect? As fighter> bomber >carrier>fighter with some verity thrown in. Where class will define how well it performs.
Or would you go for a short range / long range, slow / fast type deal? Where their immediate ability would define their effectiveness rather class.
Or would you go for some thing strange like attack ship – energy ship – shield ship – radar ship – deflector ship – command ship ? Where the ships have to work as a “well maintained system” in order to win.
Or would you just try to pump out as much ship and have it be a battle of attrition?

Fast action based games will want a cycle style with offshoots. Like Eve-online, a single player that somehow gets his hands on the largest ship (A Titan) which costs billions (actually I think it might be trillions) can easily loose to a small group of people with fleets of ships that costs just several millions.

If you are looking for a naming scheme, use naval ship terms, starting with a corvette or frigate as one of the smallest classes.

Make small ships fast and hard to hit with larger more damaging weapons, while smaller weapons are more likely to hit a target of any size, they lack the damage to be of good use.

A setup that works like:

Equal tier ships will be on equal footing, in one on one battles, the outcome is hard to decide.

A ship that is just one 'level' below still stands a chance of winning, but would take heavy damage and is more likely to lose anyway.

a level 1 or 2 against a level 4 ship will most likely lose, but balance the weapons of level 5 to be unlikely to make a solid hit, so several small ships could take it on and be a fair fight.

Include 'special' ships that aren't as effective against their own level, but highly effective against multiple smaller ships.


For a slower paced game, large battleship vs battleship battles are likely your best bet. Slow moving, slow firing ships. Staying quiet and only opening fire when you have a clear shot. Smaller ships could be faster but weaker, but fairly minimal differences, minor trade offs in firepower to be able to sneak around easier, but a head to head battle is likely to end badly for the one that trades firepower or armour for speed or stealth, but giving up almost all speed means you get out flanked. Trading stealth for speed would also be dangerous for you, but potentially rewarding as you move in to exploit weaknesses, but your every move is likely watched.


(interesting thing about my huge cubes, is they can refit themselves to fill a needed role in this style of combat. Need speed? Reprocess ammo into fuel for longer burns. Changes would be fairly small, but does offer the option of flexibility from a single ship other than rather inflexible single role ships)