Actually, a pocket battleship* is a poor man's battleship. A battlecruiser is basically a lighter-armored and faster battleship. In space, you might get a better acceleration curve, but o/a, a battleship>battlecruiser.

*A pocket battleship was more-or-less a slang term for the German Deutschland-class cruisers. The class was heavily armored and armed enough to defeat (almost) any enemy that could catch it, and fast enough to outrun (most) enemies that could outgun it.

In a space-context, a pocket battleship basically manages to cram a couple battleship-sized weapons onto a much smaller hull. A pocket battleship would be what you'd build in order to have more ships in more places, but have said ships be more powerful than a frigate or cruiser.

There isn't much of a way to make a distinction between a battlecruiser and a pocket battleship, because pocket battleships can be classified as battlecruisers. I am well aware of the Deutchland-class pocket battleship, which can't even be compared to a battleship, and is like the HMS Hood being called a battleship by the British.

we are off topic again....

I thought Starbases were 

Where were you when I was debating this in a World War I forum?

off-topic but as we are not going to get data from IC on titans soon...

Well, IRL, the size and armor would not matter at as it doesn't exist any armor that would protect against a direct hit (or even a proximity explosion) from a thermonuclear missile. Far more efficient than any laser, mass driver, phaser, whatever other weapon exist in Sci-fi. I, mean, the plasma wave will slice your battleship in two.

In space, the only thing that matter is the acceleration (to outrun or catch an enemy ship) and detection devices (if you spot your enemy without him detecting you, you can shoot your missiles without any exposure to retribution).

By the way, you are lucky if you have a radar that can detect anything beyond 100 000 km (and i am being very very optimistic here) and considering the size of the solar system, two enemy ships will have trouble to find each other.

If you want to have an idea of how space combat looks like, think today submarine battle, the kind of everything or nothing bloody brawl.

Depends on where said WWI forum is and at what time you were debating it.

And much more knowledgeable people than both me and you put together disagree with your naive approach. We aren't going to rely on RADAR for detection.

We're going to use telescopes and thermographic imaging. Drives are going to be bright. The current NASA Space Shuttle's main engines can be seen from the asteroid belt, IIRC. So it's not going to be a case of "where's the enemy".

Further, a nuclear weapon is expensive, and, more importantly, very heavy. Spaceships are one of those things that simply cannot afford extra or useless mass, otherwise it impedes performance. A laser would be much better. Not only is the laser a better generalist weapon, it can be used as a PD weapon system to zap incoming missiles.

And for a nuke, it doesn't take much to make it not-dangerous.

Also, "plasma wave"? What are you talking about here? There isn't any "plasma wave" from a nuclear detonation in space. A nuke going off in vacuum is like a flash-bulb; a very, very, intensely bright flash, that lasts less time than it takes for your brain to tell your eyelid-muscles to blink. That's not to say a nuclear weapon wouldn't be dangerous, though. Any nuclear weapon that detonates within 500 meters of your ship is very probably going to slag your ship, and you.

But that's the problem, see. It has to get there to begin with. If it can't, then it's a waste of money. And if I just zapped your missile with my laser, and I can keep on doing so until you run out of missiles, then once you do run out of missiles, I can then zap you.

So really, generally-speaking, everyone sees everyone, and lasers are more likely to dominate than missiles.

That's not to say missiles are useless, per se, just that you need a lot of them, preferably very inexpensive, to overwhelm a laser-based PD system. At which point the lasership is pretty much SOL. But you have to overwhelm the laser, and that can take a lot of cheap missiles, or a few very expensive missiles.

That's one of the reasons why, IMO, nuclear weapons aren't likely to have particularly widespread usage in space warfare. They're expensive, and they're easy to neutralize.

EDIT: thought I should also address this:

Well, in a wet navy context yeah, a pocket battleship and a battlecruiser are pretty much the same thing.

But in a space context they're very different. A pocket battleship is simply a smaller and cheaper battleship, but still a battleship. It'd be something a nation-state would build if either they needed to police a lot more territory than they could afford battleships, or if they can't afford battleships in the first place. A full battleship would likely be able to defeat a pocket battleship, but then again, a pocket battleship is simply a smaller and cheaper battleship, so it's presumably armed with weapons of the same firepower that the battleship carries. Likely, it simply carries fewer battleship-sized weapons.

A battlecruiser in a space context is fairly nonsensical. It's supposed to be faster, and less-armored, but of the same armament as a battleship. "Speed" isn't a focus in space combat. So that's strike one. If it has less armor, it's not as tough. Ergo, it's a lot more likely to get blown up. Strike two. It packs the same (likely expensive) armament as a battleship, but can't take the punishment a battleship could. Strike three.

A battlecruiser is likely to be too expensive and fragile for it to see any kind of service in a military setting.

Of course, that's if you use the fairly traditional definition of a "battlecruiser". If you instead define it as a fast, better-armed and armored cruiser, then you have something more useful. If you instead say, "A battlecruiser is a cruiser with battleship-ranged weaponry", then it could work. The former would likely find usage in, say, a merchant navy. The latter, well, I'm not really sure what use would be found for something of that type.

Well, as an engineer, i also know quite a bit in physics (and you will agree that, for now at least, it is not groundbeaking physics).

So, let us see :

-Yes, you can use telescope and thermographic imaging... if you know where to look for. We know how to find comets because these things get bright once they get closer to the sun (by the way, an astrophysicist told me that if a comet that we had not discovered before (meaning we don't know its trajectory) is on a collision course with Earth, we would discover it with telescopes only one month before the collision. Contrary to comets we already know, whose trajectory are predictable).

So, if a could have a telescope the scale of those we have on earth on a spaceship, why not. Not very efficient but better than nothing.

For thermographic imaging, i would like to know where you read the stuff about the space shuttle engine. Considering the space shuttle is traveling very close to Earth, i am surprised that the Infrared emissions of Earth don't hide those much weaker (even if more intense) of the space shuttle.
But, even considering you are right about the space shuttle, it is a completely different matter to detect an object knowing where to look and searching through the whole volume (like, when you look for something, you start by using your eyes and only once you have narrowed the whole investigation space to a smaller area, you use you binoculars and, eventually, a telescope. You don't start to search using your telescopes because the area you get though it is too tiny. but if what you are looking for is too tiny to be seen even with the binouclars, you have no other choice than using your telescopes from the beginning, and that takes a lot lot more time).

About nukes, now. You are right by saying "A nuke going off in vacuum is like a flash-bulb" but the energy of the nuke is spreading through electromagnetic waves (the flash as you say) but also by transferring its energy to the material of the missile itself. So much energy that electrons are ripped off the atoms, making plasma. Then, the plasma particles are ejected at very high speed making the plasma wave. As the plasma wave go in every direction, the effect wears off quite fast but it you have a spaceship in the area, it may seriously damage or destroy it (if you are lucky to enough to not being already burnt to dust by the Gamma ray flash).

You are right to say that a laser may destroy the nuke, unless you use a saturation strike. But it supposes you can detect the missile in time. The missile will come at you fast, and your laser will have to power up to shoot the incoming bugger. If the missile is shot on a ballistic course to intercept your ship and only turn on its engine for the final approach, you may even not detect it at all. And that's only one of many tactical possibility (blind spots, laser on the missile to blind your PD defense, etc...)

I am not saying your analysis is bad. I am just saying that you assume that your ship's detection capacity is flawless and i disagree on that.

And for nukes being expensive. Americans and russians built ten of thousands of nukes during the cold war with a technology level far inferior to the one needed to make a functional space warship. So I am not too concerned about the ability of making low cost nukes from a civilization able to make space warships.

Another advantage of a missile over laser. They are long range, allowing you to outrange you enemy. If you get to close combat, you are unlikely to not undertake damages. In today's world, missile is supreme because not only they are powerful but you will never suffer from a counter attack if the enemy doesn't have missile itself, no matter how powerful he is with his artillery.


Finally, do you have read David Weber Honorverse books ? If you are interested in all that stuff, i am pretty sure you will love them.

With all due respect,

I get all my information from here. The guys it references really know there stuff.

But the problem is sensors tech is that in space, it's dark. Which means that your high-temperature reactor shows up really well. The thing you haven't factored, is that with current or near-current, off-the-shelf hardware, a full sky-search looking for a spacecraft will take time in the hours region. And that time will only get shorter as scanning and computer technology gets better. Also keep in mind that the chokepoint is data processing, not actually looking around.

The limitation, of course, is that the basic sky-search outlined above only gives you some very basic information. Namely, "there's something there, it's about as hot as a spacecraft, and it's moving". So it won't get you a target lock or a target ID, but it'll definitely tell you "something's there".

Further, missiles are great weapons. I like them, and in space combat, you really don't even need a nuclear warhead. Just strap a chemfuel booster to a rod of metal, and bam. Instant kinetic-kill missile. It's dumbfire, but the thing that makes such a weapon dangerous is just how cheap and easy it is to field. A ship could quite plausibly carry hundreds, or perhaps thousands of chemfuel booster missiles. All for much less than a nuclear-warhead equipped guided missile.

Of course, said chemfuel missiles won't have nearly the range or accuracy that the nuclear missile will. But that's a perfectly acceptable tradeoff, considering just how cheap the weapon (chemfuel missile) is.

Also note that there's a point where upgrading your missiles to beat laser PD becomes too expensive. I'd say that said point is probably before putting a laser on the missile to "blind" a PD system (though I confess that that sounds a bit absurd to me*). Lasers are good weapons, because they don't run out of ammo, and they don't need to reload. One of the other things is that laser optics are usually fairly rugged.

That also tends to mean that a duel between to laserships will resemble a mutual eyeball-frying contest.

*It sounds absurd because of the fact that it would take a fairly high-powered laser, and there's the issue of the laser's power source almost 99% certain to be hot enough to be the equivalent of a big "I'M RIGHT HERE!" sign.

Also, the idea there's one, really big problem with ballistic-course missile launches. What if the target moves? In a ship-to-ship duel, a ballistic-course launch is pretty much a useless tactic. It's not going to work against a target that maneuvers. Keeping that in mind, even if you did try it, you still have to consider that the missile will have to start it's drive unit to close with the target, and will be visible.

Also keep in mind that unless the time it takes to close with the target is measured in 0.x seconds, it's unlikely to hit. As that's a fairly reasonable reaction time for a laser-based PD. After all, it's not like a person is going to be aiming&firing the PD gun. Then again, that applies to pretty much all weapons. Aiming will invariably be done by computer.

There's also the slight issue that laser-PD can use trigonometry tricks to "lock up" a missile. After all, said missile can't laterally juke without missing. Note that this is in the "home stretch", that distance that the missile must cover in the range of the target ship's laser-PD.

Where be this WWI forum, I have never got to debate that kind of stuff before?

@Whisky and RS-fx

I myself have not invested much time in in really trying to figure out what space combat would look like, but I would think it should be very little like what we might expect.  As far as nukes go, I think Whisky does have a point with his laser point defense system.  I saw somewhere a while back that the US military is either nearing the completion of developing a large aircraft fitted with a laser, or that it is actually in service, I do not know.  But the technology exists not just to use lasers to redirect missiles, but burn a hole through the warhead effectively disarming it.  And, as for detection.  Missiles are not sniper bullets going through space... well, okay, unguided would be.  But I would assume if you launched a nuclear warhead you would want to make it a guided one.  In space that is no easy task.  I would assume you would have to sacrifice some speed for accuracy in that case.

Another plus for lasers, I think, is being able to harness massive amounts of solar energy. 

Anyway, just some thoughts.  I too am an engineer, so I love to contemplate the physics of it.  This thread was my entertainment during lunch today, hehe.

Lasers only dominate in battle if energy is NOT a problem. Lasers are pure energy, and that must be generated somehow. If you are on a realistic space battle, lasers have a huge energy cost to be fired, but missiles already have their energy pre-packed in a self-contained chemical storage, to they cost very little to fire. 

It boils down to resource management. If A can fire enough point defense lasers, and manage the waste energy, which is probably generated in the form of heat, you will probably be able to counteract B's missile wave.

But then B starts adding decoys to its attack waves, to confuse the enemy and try to overwhelm the point defense system with a thicker, longer lasting barrage, and launching more barrages.

If B has enough missiles, it will overheat A's cooling systems or surpass A's energy generation (firing) ability, and the PDS will not fully block B's attack. Otherwise, B's missile waves will do nary a scratch.

You can also reduce the laser's effectiveness or block it altogether by basically throwing any kind of particles on its path. Small, shiny, highly reflective metallic shards would be able to absorb some of the laser's energy and 'de-coherentize' it. 

I can think of other interesting hybrid weapons for my own universe-dominating ambitions (cue cackling laughter).

A solid-state laser, for instance. A very specially crafted mixture is prepared, in a way that once a reaction is kickstarted, lots of energy is created in a coherent beam. The laser energy is chemically stored, or 'frozen', able to be sent as a payload in a missile.

Only that, instead of shooting a high-energy missile, I can throw it with a magnetic catapult (a gauss gun), so its engines will be off until it is really close. Once it reaches a short enough distance, it will only adjust the way it is pointing to, to target the enemy, and fire its payload (de-solidify the laser).

This has the advantage of making possible to throw my payload in the enemy's general direction and do a last-second turn, where it is very easy to target the enemy, instead of firing lasers from far, far away. I can also pre-pack the laser energy on a planet, where resources are more abundant, instead of taxing the ship's generators.

Don't know if it would be particularly effective, but it would be huge fun.

Here is how I would "love up" the advent. 

response on Previous posts:

With all the antifighter/bomber capability being added to the game, and with the addition of corvettes to mix up the strike craft, advent's "airforce superiority" in the early game is being challenged.  Vasari in the late game have the best airforce, so in all reality they should be considered the "strongest" in fighters.  It is the advent halcyon carrier's defensive antifighter ability that makes the advent good against other racial airforces, NOT the fighters themselves. 

Commence the Advent lovin:

The advent titan should do one thing well.  Provide actual fleet support.  Advent usually can only field one effective fleet, and even a fully protected advent starbase will fall by the time reinforcements arrive.  And these reinforcements will usually be without one key ingredient,  Antimatter.  An advent fleet without antimatter is a dead advent fleet. 

The advent Titan should be able to replenish antimatter fleet wide to make advent assaults and defense more effective.

Also, having a "wormhole generator" for a one time 60+ second jump capability from one gravity well to another for the entire fleet would be a great way to reduce this critical weakness and allow the advent to defend and attack effectively.  For attack you would have to get a ship into enemy territory and maintain sight for X amount of time.  This would give advent a reason to upgrade their scouts abilities for the persistent sight allowed by them when they are destroyed.

Also, an on use "fleet shield" ability that would increase advent shield mitigation to 100%, and a 0% phase missile penetration for a few seconds of duration in a wide AoE, to avoid any of the nasty vasari super weapons and concentrated kanrak fire for the weaker HP advent ships. This would shield ships and structures temporarily from a superweapon strike, So defending with an advent Titan will force an enemy to get down and dirty for a toe to toe fight.  Currently the vasari are up to this sort of fight against the advent, but the TEC are not. 
After the 100% mitigation fades, the entire fleets shields remain at +10% mitigation higher(or remain the same in case the fleet is already at maximum normal mitigation) for the purpose of absorbing incoming attacks. 

If titans get a superweapons of their own, having a charge up on the super weapons so that damage is applied only upon impact so that the quick player can successfully defend their fleet with the 100% shield mitigation ability.

The advent titan would serve more as a super tank/fleet support unit, and the advent would be balanced in that they would still have to build their expensive ships. 

Also I'm all for a reduction in the cost and supply requirements of advent capital ships, as they need secondary capital ships to cover for their weaker overall capital ship lineup.  Since it seems that capital ships are being reworked, perhaps advent can get a fleet advantage in being able to field more capital ships than any other race.  Would be interesting

Sareth, if you want the ability to go from grav well to grav well without using normal phase lanes - play the Vasari. That's one of their primary advantages/distinctions. Also... 100% mitigation is basically invulnerability, think about it. Also, super weapons don't affect fleets (other than mitigation bonus granted by Advent cannon). A "Super Tank Fleet" is not balanced. Also, cost balances little once you have a decent infrastructure.

Really, your entire post is simultaneously hating on Vasari and then demanding their advantages in addition to some extras that no one has. Again, if you want the Vasari's race-specific-advantages, PLAY THEM.

How 'bout next time you just ask IC to give you a cookie and an I Win button?

-Itharus

Whats you talking about? Advent capital ships pwn. They have some of the best abilities in the game. Their pretty fine the way they are. And a price reduction and extra fleet capacity for capital ships would give them way too much of advantage in the game. I do agree that the phase missiles should have means of being blocked by the shields.

And yeah if the had a 100 shield mitigation, little to no damage will be dealt to those ships.

Oh, wow. I didn't think this thread was ever going to get back on-topic after Star Wars came in.