- Space battles are ubiquitous in science fiction. Usually it seems to look a lot like some variation on WWII sea battles: fighters whizz around and engage in space dogfights as the great battleships pound each other with death rays. But in fact this is probably a very unrealistic depiction of what a space battle would look like. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s wondered “so what would a space battle really look like?” In this essay I will attempt to answer that question as best I can. For those who are interested, somebody else has already tackled the question on Strange Horizons, but I believe that essay is flawed in several ways, most notably the conclusion that stealth will be important in space warfare. First, let us take a look at the environment of space and see what considerations it imposes on any attempts to make war in it.
It's a layman's take. That part where he says "guns are useless" is kind of telling; the only weapons employed in space so far have been 23mm cannon. I did the math once, either here or on Reddit, to demonstrate that hitting an object from one orbit to another with a kinetic energy weapon of any kind is really really tricky. Thing of it is, though, once you've expelled that little nugget'o'death out there into orbit, they never go away. So yeah - you're 20,000km away and I fire a shotgun at you. You've got time to move. But those shotgun pellets are now an intimate part of the solar system, and they're going to whizz about until they hit something. Any sort of orbital combat is rapidly going to become an exercise in area denial: one busted-ass Chinese satellite and you've got a perpetual cloud of kinetic death consisting of more than 2300 objects bigger than golf balls. Missile? Shit, son, I don't even have to get close. I just need to put up a cloud of shit between you and me and your freedom of movement becomes distinctly curtailed. "Fighting" becomes a near impossibility; "fucking shit up to the point where nobody can fight" is the easiest thing in the world. Harry Harrison argued in the Stainless Steel Rat series that interstellar warfare was simply impossible because of the logistics. "Realistic space combat" probably happens at the UN because it's not " fought between sports cars painted with phosphorescent paint, with machine guns mounted on their hoods" it's Asteroids where the bullets never go away and the rocks never get small enough to ignore.
Now that you mention it... We may first infer intelligent extra-terrestrial life exists from imprints left on planetary/stellar motion. We could theoretically find an entire star system in total disarray for millions of years after a galactic-scale genocide. Haha, imagine seeing an accretion disk, or newly congealed planets, around a 4 billion year old star. The most realistic space combat (I'd certainly like to think) is none at all. Morals and ethics seem to evolve with technology, and once a civilization reaches the threshold of interstellar capabilities, they should be pretty Zen by then. But maybe that's just the closet optimist in me speaking. P.S. Never give AGI your actual personal information, they have an aggressive sales department.
Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle starts with a prologue at JPL, where scientists are observing a "braided" ring around Saturn that is later revealed to be caused by the ion drive of the Fifthp mothership as it emerges from its hiding place. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land mentions the Martians' destruction of the "fifth planet" because of the disharmonious nature of its inhabitants, leading to what we know as the asteroid belt.
