Most likely they left when Yu Jing ships were forced to withdraw due to not being able to return fire.
What you're talking about is dispersion. An unfocussed source of radiations and projectiles (read: an explosion) will disperse. The same energy will be dispersed into a huge volume (radius cubed), so the farther you are, the less energy you'll take. BUT, a single projectile (ie: a shrapnel) will keep it's power, meaning that while you're unlikely to be hit, if you ever are hit, you'll take the same damages whatever the distance you are. The projectile will not slow down or lose energy by friction, contrary to what would happen on Earth. So if you use weapons recklessly in space, you will sooner or later do some collateral damages. This is what i mean by saying there is no safe distance. And if you use some focussed beam, because it is probably the only good ranged weapon in space with missiles (because it is faster than any projectile you could have), your beam will not really lose it's power at all (it may, because it is not perfectly focussed, because space is not totally empty ...) Meaning if you shoot at something and miss, you may have shot something else.
Except that black holes do emit radiation. Hawking radiation. It's more quantuum freaking weirdness. Possibly. It's noted that something like 50% of all the ships the EI sends to Paradiso don't make it. Not sure whether that's being told through EI or Human observers. I'm assuming that if it's a human observation, we see the spray of particles that the ship became leave the wormhole mouth. Most of the fearsome effect of a nuke that we are familiar with is actually caused by the atmosphere. There's no blast wave in space. There's not even much of a thermal pulse, because the thermal pulse is caused by the atmosphere absorbing xrays and converting that energy to heat. This heat is what makes the blast wave. There's no shrapnel larger than single atoms, either. Atomic Rocket's section on nukes in space. In fact, a nuke going off is going to look like a flashbulb, no lingering light or whatever. Even megaton-range weapons have a surprisingly small blast radius due to all of this. Damage falls off as an inverse-square function, so being 2x the distance away does 1/4 the damage. You're not getting any impulsive shock damage unless your 1megaton nuke detonates within a kilometer or two. Ewww. Nukes in deep space do damage by hitting you with xrays and some gamma rays (80% yield in xrays, 10% yield in gamma, 10% yield in neutrons). There's also neutrons and whatever fission fragments are left over, but those are much slower. And every ship, military or civilian, needs serious radiation shielding on general principles. You do not want to be outside the radiation shielding during a solar storm. Water makes a good, if heavy (1tonne/m^3), neutron shield. Hydrocarbons (plastics, diesel fuel, etc) make much better radiation shields due to higher attenuation (think absorption) per thickness, but you need lots of water on a spaceship anyway, 20-50liters per person, not counting water used for equipment cooling or other purposes. If you've seen Starship Operators, one of their sensors is a giant neutrino detector that requires ultrapure water in mass quantities. Judging by apparent scale, something on the order of 10,000 tonnes of water in that neutrino detector (which detects you by your fusion reactor). Neutron bombs? Oh, yeah. Guess you could use those. ~80% yield in neutrons, 20% in xrays. A 1 megaton neutron bomb warhead will produce fatal radiation doses on unshielded humans at 300km. But that's got to get past some serious radiation shielding on a ship. For better stand-off ranges, you're talking about either a Casaba Howitzer nuclear lance, a nuclear shaped charge or a bomb-pumped x-ray laser. The nuclear lance concentrates about 85% of the yield into a narrow direction. At 'worst' that's a 22.5deg cone (which is pretty good for pushing rocks around), at best it's a 5.7deg (0.1radian) cone. 0.1 radian means that 85% of your nuclear blast's energy is concentrated into a circle 100m in diameter at 1km, a circle 1km in diameter at 10km. (note that the energy % may be highly optimistic, but the cones have been experimentally proven to be orders of magnitudes smaller at 5-10% total energy) Now we're getting some stand-off distance. If you accept a wider cone, you can sweep a lot of incoming junk out of the sky. Nuclear shaped charges are easily throwing tungsten penetrators at 6-9km/s, and much faster if you're willing to accept breaking the tungsten penetrator into smaller pieces. Breaking the penetrator is not necessarily desirable, due to potential collateral damage. But who cares about maximizing speed when you can use a 1-kiloton blast to launch nearly 22 tons of tungsten at 9km/s? That's enough KE to knock a 10,000ton ship back at 19+m/s, which will probably just break that ship in half. That boulder is also so massive that a wide-angle nuclear lance isn't going to stop it. The collateral damage from using one of those will be hideous, though. Not from the nuclear shaped charge, though. From the pieces of what's left of whatever you just killed. The bomb-pumped x-ray laser is nasty. Much longer standoff range than even nuclear lances or shaped charges. We did several nuclear explosions in space. The surprise was Starfish Prime, a ~400km altitude 1.4-megaton blast that caused auroras and blackouts in Hawaii, plus damage to satellites. The last satellite obviously damaged by Starfish Prime completely failed about 6 months later. So there is probably some part of the Concilium Conventions that says "Thou shalt not use nukes in space combat within 10,000km of a planet." Though there is also the possibility of having built/rebuilt the electrical grid and electronics to handle things like the Carrington Event, where a solar Coronal Mass Ejection directly hit Earth. EMP effects were so high that telegraph wires were arcing and setting the telegraph poles on fire, telegraph operators were getting shocked by their sets (hey, it happened in 1859, not like there were many other electrical wires around). Honestly, I'd hope that we do get around to re-designing the power grid and electronics to be able to handle such events. They might not happen often (so far, maybe 3 in the last thousand years), but the effects of a CME hitting Earth today would be terrifying. You really need to read through the Atomic Rockets pages on space warfare. You'd be amazed at the distances lasers become ineffective. Even a 200nanometer wavelength UV-C laser has a damage distance of about 2000km through a 1m targeting mirror. IR lasers have a damage distance of about 300km with the same mirror. Double the size of the mirror, double the range. Hubble's mirror is 2.4m in diameter.
As i said before, you are very well informed and it's interresting to read you, BUT you can't just compare what we have now and what can be done in the future. Nowadays we cannot do laser coherent enough to keep it's power after a few thousand kilometers. But in theory a laser should be able to keep it's power in vacuum. The fact that at the present time it cannot do is just due to the fact that we are unable to build them. But in a world where humanity has conquered planets far outside our own solar system ... you can't just say that the limits we are now will still exists. Note that i differenciate theoretical limits and practical limits. The practical limits may be lifted, the theoretical ones may not (depending if we are talking about hard SF or not). I would agree for example that a FTL projectile could be unlikely. As for collateral damages, i was mostly thinking about how a small particle with a high speed has a high energy, and that energy can be enough to do big damages on a civilian vessel, even if it has some sort of armor. It is very unlikely to be hit by a stray projectile in space, due to the sheer size of space. It is even more unlikely to be hit in a vital place. But it can happen. And everything short of a laser of some sort will create such projectiles. Your nuke has a solid shell, an ignition device or several (for ex. present H-bombs use an A-bomb as an ignition device, said A-bomb having it's own ignition device. Will the technology improves enough to garanty that such collaterals are unlikely ? Maybe. I think that there should be rules like "you can use xx weapon only if you meet these criteria:", and those criteria would aim at decreasing the collateral risk to a negligible chance. And if that ever happens ... we'll be sorry - if we ever learn of it. As for weapons, i think the nuclear lance you're talking about is really interresting, because it has both power (as you said it's more than probable that nothing can withstand it) and precision (cone shaped - with future technology the cone may be even tighter). The problem would rather be: will it be able to fire at it's target ? It should have a short range and the initial missile (you probably don't want to create the nuke too close to your ship) may be destroyed before it can fire it's nuclear propelled shell. Maybe we can imagine that ships would use their energy weapons (lasers ...) to damage point defense (since they may have not the power to destroy the target itself), then use their big weapon to do hull damage. The main problem i see is distance: you'll have to be close enough if you want to have some precision. I mean, you shoud be easily able to detect the target from very far, like the other side of the stellar system you are in (even farther, that's not a problem), but what you have is the state of your target seconds, minutes ... ago. Unless the target has a perfectly predictible trajectory, you won't just hit it easily if you're farther than several seconds of lightspeed (that would depend on the target's acceleration capability).
Even so, they had to stay using the space stations as hostages for months (possibly six!), I see 2 options there: the JSA threatening to blow up their hostages if anything goes close, in which case THEY are portrayed as villains murdering civilians, or YJ sending boarding parties hidden by the station's shadow/long range hits (since the JSA ships should not have enough reaction mass to maneuver constantly for six months, note that is not the same as going in a straight line from one position to another). But yeah, it is the only way to retreat without being blown to pieces. No, I was talking Distance. You are, however, talking about a missile that uses a nuke to disperse flak, and then go to energy weapons, when it's been mentioned that the spinal weapons and cannons on the Human Sphere ships don't fire energy beams, but slugs (like in Mass Effect's ships). The real combo of energy + nukes is to do as it's been described in the Honorverse: the missile launchs some sort of focuser making a vector between the missile and the target, and then makes a directed detonation that looks to project as much lethal, intense radiation in that direction, so the target will get a really huge energy "beam" at close range. EDIT: Section9 got it more detailed. Infinity does not seem to have lasers. But be my guest, it's not as if the countermeasure for a laser is hard to implement, or that it is an effective weapon (because, yeah, light won't diffuse much in space, and it travels quite fast... but you don't want to "paint" a target, but burn it). I mean, we already talked about armor-water-armor for the ships ^^ Yeah, but unless that radiation is 90-99% of what the hole "eats", law of conservation means most of that has to go somewhere (which can also be the black hole growing). Mind you, there is an old "black hole energy generation" in Sci-Fi that uses that method (drop matter in a black hole, get radiation, turn into electricity). Well, unless you are talking about the Russian Solution (BIGGER!!! MUCH BIGGER!!!!) there is little that can be done in that camp when it comes to physics. Nukes in space are not the most efficient way to deal damage to enemy ships, and while it is possible to increase the damage they do in the future... logic implies that other means will also improve, leaving the relative position between those systems more or less the same. Simply put, stars are nukes always on, always emitting. So you need shielding against that anyway. No, Vacuum disperses heat (VERY badly, but it does so, or it would be impossible to use thermal sensors to "see" stuff). So yeah, you can light up a part of an enemy ship, but the longer the distance the laser has to travel, the less damage it will do. However, as I mentioned before, Infinity does not have energy weapons like lasers. In the past, armies fought in neutral ground. It was not a good idea to turn the farming fields into blood-soaked, bugs-filled useless ground... The same principle can be applied in space combat: thou shalt not polute the shipping lanes... Anyway, remember that something exploding goes away, so it's not like it would be a threat forever. And that nukes tend to turn into atoms whatever is containing the explosion, so... No flak. The Honor Harrington series has those detailed in the honorverse wiki (search the laser warhead entry in that page), they would stagger all kind of missiles (decoys, nukes, ECM, ECCM, laser heads...) and saturate the enemy's point defence.
This reminds me of an old Sci-Fi novel I read like 15 years ago... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall [spoilers incoming] To fight the aliens, the humans build a large nuclear_bomb_propelled spaceship that also uses nuclear bombs as weapons, directing the radiation against the enemy ships to just kill the crew and damage the systems.
They based that on an ACTUAL plan for getting stuff into space. Project: ORION. Nuke under an upturned bowl will move a surprising amount of mass.
The limit on lasers is the diffraction limit. That's a theoretical limit, because lasers are nowhere near being limited by diffraction! Most lasers are only as good as 1/25th the diffraction-limited range, and others are literally millions of times worse (it's an inverse-square function, beam quality M=5 means that your beam is only 25x worse than diffraction limits). Worse, beam quality goes down linearly as beam power goes up. 10x the beam power, 10x the beam quality. You cannot get long-range optics better than the diffraction limit. At least not for telescopes (and a laser cannon is functionally a telescope operating in reverse). There are some really damn cool tricks for microscopes, but those either: 1) involve first painting the target with a fluorescent dye (or sticking fluorescent atoms into a chemical structure you want pictures of!) and then causing, then suppressing, the fluorescence with lasers to take a picture through the microscope; or 2) involve being within 1 wavelength of the sample being imaged; neither of which work for telescopes. The only things remaining from a nuclear weapon after it goes boom are literally individual atoms. It's how, even after an underground nuclear test, we can tell what kind of weapon went off, or if someone was just trying to screw with us by setting off a couple thousand tons of fertilizer. If you detect fission products, there was an atomic bomb. If there are specific fusion products, well, someone set off an H-bomb. And all spacecraft need to be shielded against individual atoms at speeds not measured in significant fractions of cee. Because that's what the solar wind and cosmic rays are, atoms at speeds usually under 14% of lightspeed (ie, under 42,000kps). OK, sure, you get some pretty crazy shit, too, like individual atoms packing as much energy as a 100kph baseball (translation: screaming along at 0.999 999 999 999 999 999 999 9951 cee!), but they call that the Oh-my-god particle because nobody expected something carrying that much speed/energy to exist. Plus, we've only detected 16 of them since 1991, so we can safely rule out those as being a realistic threat to shield against. One particle is a non-threat. But you do need to shield against solar storms. I hate to shift units of measure in a debate, but almost all the radiation shielding data is in terms of electron-volts. The OMG particle packed an insane 3x10^20 eV, but you really only need to shield to 10^10 eV (10GeV) for most solar storms. I can't find particle energy estimates for monsters like the Solar Storm of 2012 or the Carrington Event of 1859, so those would be 'dive for the storm cellar' issues. Because of how radiation shielding works, I'd make the storm cellar have twice the shielding of the entire ship/station to keep idjits happy, but honestly you could just make it equal to the hull. If your hull is armored to 10 attenuation-lengths (which is the kind of primary shielding you're talking about for a running nuclear reactor), you're looking at ~1% the radiation inside as out (if I've done my math right, it's an exponential function not linear). The storm cellar would be behind more than 30 attenuation lengths, so less than 0.0000955% the intensity as outside the hull (technical term at that point is 'negligible'). Yeah, it goes into Hawking Radiation (which isn't thermal, exactly. More fucking quantum weirdness). It's just that Hawking radiation is almost always a lower temperature than cosmic background, so it's nearly impossible to detect. You don't get radiation above the ~3Kelvin cosmic background until the black holes mass is down to that of the Moon(!), so most black holes radiate below microwaves, and the big ones radiate down in the extremely-low-frequency radio range. You should get a big splash of gamma rays when a black hole does finally evaporate, though, as the 'temperature' of a black hole is inversely proportional to the mass. The smaller the mass the higher the temperature. Yup. The USAF made a design for a 4000 ton spacegoing battleship (no, I did not mis-type, I do mean 8 million pounds of spacecraft!), armed with something like 3 naval 5" guns, five hundred 20megaton hydrogen bombs, 6 hypersonic reentry boats, a couple hundred Casaba Howitzer nuclear lances in six launchers and six 20mm Phalanx CIWS guns. Plus 1500 or so propulsion charges, at 1kiloton each. Scared the everliving shit out of Kennedy, sadly, so badly that he canceled the entire project. Best-estimate as to what that bad boy looked like: The ship in Footfall is named the Michael. As in, the Archangel of War. And when you use a 1kt nuke detonating 52m (again, I did not stutter, I mean ~120 feet!) from your pusher plate, well, you can quite frankly laugh at damn near anything the enemy wants to throw at you!
Hi, late to the game here I know. This is a cool thread so I was just reading for fun. But then I had a thought. Real space combat is deadly enough that whoever wins the first pass is probably the winner. But if, in the Infinity universe the ships are able to survive multiple hits, wouldn't that bring in the need to maneuver? Imagine 2 ships approach each other, they come at high speed for their first pass, throw a bunch of stuff at each other and survive or miss. As they pass each other they can spin on an axis to keep firing (I'm assuming that main weapons are things like coil guns that run the length of the ship and require it to point its nose at what it wants to fire at, as mentioned somewhere earlier in this thread). But if you just spin your ship without changing the direction your trajectory would be easy to calculate, plus, if you didn't get shot down like a chump you would just float away. So, you start maneuvering which slows you down, this also happens to aeroplanes when they dogfight as they try to turn inside each other they get lower and slower, I read somewhere that BF109's had automatic slats which would extend at low speeds to increase lift. This meant that low-speed performance for fighter planes was just as important as high-speed performance. (Yep, I know that spaceships don't work like planes, but accelerating in a new direction is going to sacrifice some velocity in your previous direction) Somewhere in here, I have a point. Yes, maneuvering slows you down, so suddenly the ability to accelerate and change direction quickly becomes important. I'm imagining here the smaller PanO ships with smaller mass and lower inertia being optimised for a close in "turning" fight, versus the larger Yu Jing ships wanting to maintain distance and speed, maybe more of the "turn and burn" style.
Yes, but most of the maneuvering is really in the approach phase to the battle, not the furball of a dogfight in air. No, accelerating in a new direction IN SPACE does not sacrifice any velocity in the previous direction. It works that way in an atmosphere because you're dumping energy into the air to turn faster than your engine can pull. After all, most airplanes cannot stand on their tail and accelerate at all under engine power, and yet they can turn at several gees. In space, the only way you change direction is by having an engine push you. If you are zooming along at 10kps in direction X, burning to get 10kps in direction Y does not remove any of your 10kps in direction X. Your resulting course (vector, technically) is X:10kps, Y:10kps, and so you're only at a 45deg angle to your original course. No matter how much you burn in direction Y, you will maintain that 10kps in direction X until you hit something, or if you start burning in -X.
True, i guess in my head i was imagining burning at -X as you endeavour to stay in the combat zone. Surely there would be some frantic maneuvering to align the main weapon for that second shot, especially if we are talking about a gun that is fixed in the direction the nose is pointing.
And most ships in Infinity over the size of a Frigate do have a large primary rail gun running the length of the hull and pointing forward.
Aligning a fixed gun isn't much of a problem in zero-g, that's just some manoeuvre thrusters to flip the ship around which should be trivial at the tech point we're talking about. The problem is moving about enough that enemy shots don't hit once they have a lock on you, 'cause targeting computers involved will trivially be able to calculate your possible positions based on trajectory and engine performance.
Yes, we all already at the point where the meatbags are the limiting factor of what the tech is allowed to do. I imagine cutting edge space combat and physics will just exasperate that problem. Which is why your entire meat crew needs to be replaced with high-g capable Lhost bodies! Or better yet, just get rid of the meatbags entirely. That is why Aleph posthumans are AVA 1. They are in high demand as starship captains!
The more I read and think about this topic, the more I think the most devastating weapon in space combat is Math. That side with the better math has won before the battle has ever begun.
Thanks to neo-materials the Warships fighting in Infinity space combat are actually damn tough. So much so that only the primary weapon of most ships will actually damage ships of the same class, secondary weapons are only for "punching down" and will do little to nothing to a ship in the same weight class. In fact, between the improved armour of Warships, Teseum plating (as opposed to standard armour, which incorporates Teseum), the use of Magnetic Deflectors actively as a defensive countermeasure and the "Brace for Impact" action, it's actually quite difficult for ships of the same class to damage one another if they are built for tanking. Two standard Human Sphere Cruisers facing off against one another, with reasonable gunners (not PC skill but trained NPCs) will do little to no damage with even their Primary Weapon, likely taking upwards of 12 combat rounds to cause serious damage (but quickly finishing off the damaged target in only 2-3 rounds after that). However, fighting down with a Crusiser against a Frigate or Destroyer (one class down, but still a Warship) or a Freighter (same class but not a Warship) and between primary, secondary, missiles and even potentially some damage from point defense guns, likely means one-round-kills are possible with focused fire and a little luck (or good gunners). This, and other considerations (use of intensive systems, pushing the engines, evasive maneuvers etc.) are all tracked in the game with "endurance" which restricts how far you can push your ship (and crew).
If you are playing the RPG, you seriously need to introduce a homebrew rule, that a sufficiently fanatical organization can gain a slight edge in "endurance" if the entire crew has their bodies replaced with high-g designed Lhost bodies. That would be awesome, and crazy. And if I was a player character, I would totally try to convince the rest of the group to do so, so we could be the most hardcore space pirates in the human sphere!
There are rules for modifying the Endurance of ships, and this is one of the things which would certainly change it!
For an example of this, see "the expanse" S01E01 at 28:39 into the episode. "Hi-G "flip & Burn". They use "the juice" (pumped into your system to enhance your G-tolerances - but sustained 15G will still cause you to stroke out). They also have g-couches that orient you to the direction of thrust, though.
