How to Survive a Space Battle (Shields, Armor, Point Defence)
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2023
- Spacedock delves into the various means of surviving a space battle in this week's thought piece.
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Hey Spacedock. Are you going to make a video about a ship or ships in Nebulous Fleet Command?
Great video, but you left out another potential method to avoid or reduce some damage: the barbecue roll.
If you're going to take a hit from something approaching in a continuous fashion (a string of multiple projectiles, a lengthy beam from a weapon, etc.), if you execute a barbecue roll, you may be able to distribute the damage across the shields or armor and hopefully protect key systems. The barbecue roll can also be used to obscure parts of the ship to prevent a target lock.
* O N Y O N *
One thing not mentioned but very important to space combat. Pumping the air out of outer layers of the ship most likely to take damage.
Do you think the deployable armor from Voyager could be altered to be man portable? Sort of like pseudo power armor.
Unironically the Survivability Onion is one of my favorite infographics
All hail the Survivability Onion.
at least that onion doesn't induce tears.....
why ya crying Jack?
I'm not crying, you're crying!
head chef: it's the onions dipshit, leave Jack alone and let him cry in peace
wom wom wom wom lolz
oh and there's no crying in sci-fi!
It must be unironical since onions don't have much iron in them, around .2 of a microgram per 100g...
Didn't you mean the survivability ohnyon?
@@LarixusSnydes A SCIENCE dad joke?! You win!
I've always found it far easier to explain from the POV of the hypothetical enemy.
- There's nothing there.
- It blends into the background.
- We know something's there but can't tell what it is.
- We can falsely identify what it is.
- We can positively identify it but can't target it.
- We can target it but can't hit it.
- Our shots are doing no damage.
- Our shots are doing manageable damage.
- We have scored a mission kill.
- The target has been removed
Honestly to this day Galactica's holy wall of flack is still my favorite defence system from a pure aesthetic and in universe perspective.
"holy wall of flak" has somebody been watching Science Insanity?
@@VallornDeathblade What can I say It was one of his best lines.
While it is visually spectacular, whenever I see it all I can think is Kessler Syndrome...
Especially a tight enough FLAK Cloud works against EVERY kind of weapon. Projectiles hit the srapnells. Missels have to get punch through it without getting destroyed by them. Lasers might melt particles but that takes energy off it even if it is just a few seconds till it "melted through" the cloud till new shrapnell block it. Plasma-Balls or such lose energy working through the cloud.
And last, flying through a cloud with your ship first might cause damage to your own ship.
Not seen Galactica at all but that what happened in "Enders Game" in the final battle kinda works exactly like my idea: You can't hit the big gun if your weapons can't even melt the Cloud of drones around it.
@@Scoutter love the Ender's Game reference
You actually got a lot of the ideas that I use in my own stories. Surviving in space depends on several things:
- Space is absolutely huge. You usually have plenty of room to decide if you're going to charge into battle or run away.
- Space is so huge that it's difficult to find places to hide.
- Intelligence. Having recon and information makes a drastic difference in avoiding battles or preparing for a battle that you know you can win.
- Technology is your friend. Resources are your partner.
- Plot armor is only so good in small doses. Find ways to utilize engineering design and defenses to show why your ship can survive. A little bit of luck is ok.
I would add to your last point, tactics. Head on charges are just gonna end up in a slug fest, out manoeuvring your opponent to get the maximum amount of firepower on a section of fleet whilst minimising incoming fire is the way to win these engagements.
While the TV version obviously had to compress for broadcast ( no one wants to watch a week of a ship "in transit", THE EXPANSE did a pretty decent job of trying to make the size of just the Sol system alone clear. Add in the size of the RIng Space, and then transiting from Ring to the Ilus planet, and it really starts to add up.
The point about space being huge doesn't make sense.
@@shrayesraman5192 It means you can see farther than you can touch. Sure, you could lob a projectile at a station to hit a month from now, but it will likely be seen and intercepted long before it gets close. Same with moving a fleet, its not like hopping from port to port, you need to transit. So in the time your reinforcement fleet jumps from your military port to when you arrive the entire war might have been brought to peace.
@@shrayesraman5192lready been replied to by someone but essentially your sensors will reach further than your ability to act upon. There is also infinite ways to approach and create problems in an infinite void, you have to make your points of interest line up logically and scientifically unless your universe has warping everywhere or something
The purpose of "Don't be there" is that proper scouting and route recon planning can easly mask your units' movements from direct contact until you are ready to imitate said contact.
Also implies picking one's battles, and avoiding unnecessary military action.
@@SamnissArandeen well said.
I read the don't be "there" part as not being detected. Camouflage theory/ force protection runs like this: 1. Avoid detection as a location of interest. Once the observer deems the location to be of interest, then it becomes a target area. "Captain, there's possibly something on that vector." "Focus Lidar and let's have a better view, I don't want us shooting at shadows and scanner noise". 2. Avoid identification as a valid target object in the area. "There's a solid object on this vector." 3. Avoid identification as a specific type of object. "It's a ship." 4. Avoid identification as a class of Friend/Foe. "Enemy, Light Cruiser confirmed." 5. Avoid an accurate firing solution. "It's jittering in heading." "It's gonna be tough to hit it at this range" "Fire a spread." 7. Avoid being hit. "They've deployed counter measures and pulled a double bluff, acting like a decoy for the decoys, 6 missiles took the bait and detonated prematurely or off target." "One dumb one got through." "Lucky 7." 8. Avoid damage. "Ablative armour absorbed most of the missile's pulse drilling/boring laser. The missile detonated against the hull" 9. Avoid the damage affecting operability. On the Terran ship; "So we lost the mess hall, the only ship facility the designers didn't think to double up on, I guess it's MRE's for the next week boys." "Weapons Officer, how did that frigate fair after our missiles hit it?" "They never even saw our stealth missiles inbound, I bet they were celebrating their hit when their ship went bye-bye."
@@rrossouw100 imo "don't be there" refers to you not physically be there, not being undetected. It's don't be somewhere where you can be at risk. For instance, don't drive into a mine field or into an openfield where the adversary can see you.
@@delfinenteddyson9865 Your interpretation of "Don't be there" does not make sense on the onion graph, as you have to be there to do the job - someone has to go into the lions maw to pull its teeth. If the teeth don't get pulled because everyones avoiding contact, then the war continues...not useful.
In camouflage design, we attempt to make our guys "not appear to be there", while they are very definetely there to do the enemy in before they even knows the fight is on. My favourite saying is - if you find yourself in a fair fight, then your tactics suck. If the fight is fair or you're overmatched, then withdraw and try again - you have try until you can have a succesful engagement.
It's a pity that we don't see engineeringand damage control teams in sci-fi more often. Imagine plots that can be made with teams racing to lost ship to save the crew while another ship tries to use the hulk as a way to conceal itself thus putting the people in danger or boarding partially destroyed combat vessel to bring its weapons back online to even the odds all the while battle is raging around? Nope, can't have it😅
Nebulous: Fleet Command and Battlefleet Gothic Armada II may be worth checking out at least. Nebulous has an extensive damage control system alongside ECW and complex missile mechanics. Battlefleet is set in the Warhammer 40k Universe so its a little goofy, but a key part of ship management is their overall health, modules, and crew. As the crew is killed by fire, boarding actions, and attrition, the ship's capabilities decrease, and if the crew is wiped out, the ship becomes a Space Hulk (in game term for a Derelict.) which can be boarded and brought online again. These hulks also can be used as cover, concealment, or nuclear-yield traps if you time it right.
as a former US NAvy man it does drive me bonkers that no one seems to even TRY to realistically address that even in space you cant just magically force field off everything. Star Trek Generations at least showed Kirk trying to do something, but such cases are far far too rare
absolutely this, in a much older video this channel said that shields are a bit of a cop-out because "people shouting percentages isn't exhilarating", i think the same applies to reactor core explosions. sci-fi seems to show damadge control just as "the reactor/engines/weapons/life support is offline" or "someone is welding in the background".
There's a movie i highly recommend you watch if you have the time, Das Boot (1982) yes it is about a submarine but it would make a brilliant template for a sci fi one about an experimental stealth ship or something.
That movie convinced me damadge control teams need more screentime and damadge needs more depth. at one point an electrical panel catches fire in the background, in any sci fi movie they would've mostly just ignored it, in this movie people get behind things to shield them from the heat, someone shouts to switch to the auxiliary panel and another rushes to grab a fire extinguisher. once the fire is out everyone around is left coughing for several seconds because *the room is still filled with smoke*, the panel is visibly charred for the rest of the movie.
people are repairing the ship for quite a long time after a confrontation, people get violently thrown and sustain injuries when an explosion rocks the boat or the pressure launches bolts across the cabin, said casualties are treated and evacuated in the background as the crews solve simple and *understandable* issues, not "the core shielding has low integrity" but, quote: "we have wonderful torpedoes on this boat, worth 25 thousand marks apiece, and we can't find a piece of goddamn wire?".
TLDR: watch Das Boot 1982, it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being in a small metal tube surrounded by death, that's also being actively hit with explosions, and also has to be your house for the forseeable future.
It's rare to have them even mentioned let alone seen. The Expanse probably showcases it best. There's a scene where they cover up and seal a hole made by a railgun round, and another where they have to weigh the risk of doing high-g evasive maneuvers while the person making repairs isn't strapped in.
Star Wars has astromechs fiddling around with repairs during battle a couple times, though there's not a whole lot that can be done when fixed in place in an X-wing. Star Trek has a fair amount of people fiddling around reconfiguring hardware during battle but not a lot of fixing stuff. In the battle where Odyssey was lost there was a mention of damage control teams. It's also the only ship to raise shields immediately when encountering potential hostiles instead of waiting until they knew the potential hostiles were actual hostiles or until they got kicked in the ass. Apparently even after Kirk nearly lost a ship by ignoring that regulation, most captains still don't follow it.
Battlestar Galactica's Damage Control (DC) teams are awesome for this. You see how insane the job is in the miniseries and they're mentioned in multiple episodes.
FTL taught me these ideas through this. If my shields/defense drones can take more than your offense can make, you are no threat to me. Though I am reminded from FTL that my ability to counter my target offensively still has a role in its defense. If my ship is completely vulnerable, but can hit at twice the range of any target against it, or can disable an opponents attack prior, that is a defense all its own.
Being twice the range of your opponent is technically the first layer on the onion "Don't be there"
Think this is known as the glass cannon. Super effective offense, little no defense. Ideally screened by other ship types/specialties in a fleet battle
Nebulous is a wonderfully brutal and visceral game and should be exposed to a wider audience. Though not hardcore in its realism (I mean, engagements are within a few kilometers of combatants because anything further out would be boring and involve lots of equally-boring sand canister throwing), it _does_ do quite well with the basic principles of the value of electronic warfare and the importance of damage control. Next major update will even let players do entire system-wide, long-term campaigns where logistics is just as important.
It's a great naval-combat-in-space game
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
A pity that there isn't an option to see several light seconds distance battles. Yes, it'll take missiles and shells several minutes or even hours to arrive. But there's that chess game of trying to predict the movement of a ship in regards to combat with weapon that can't be detected before you're hit ie laser.
It'll also highlight the weird duality of missiles in space combat as they're both the shortest(due to speed) and longest(due to ability to correct course) ranged weapons... unless you can somehow make hybrid shells for lasers that will use your beam as propulsion, but are equipped with mirrors to later on redirect the beam when they're closer to the target. But missiles are still superior in long term if said long term implies that it can track targets for years😅
Missiles and time multiplication would work. Sub sims do this just fine, and while a mark 48 isn’t a nuclear rocket, it works out similarly.
@@HuxleysShaggyDog hmm, haven't thought about it that way, but good point.
It is a fun game, I just need to scrape off the rust whenever I put it down since it is rather technical to play properly
special mention for the USS Defiant for having shields and ablative armour
A thing that I think can be added, is that sensors and detection systems actually play a massive part in protecting your ship. If you can detect your enemy before they can detect you, it will not only give you an incredible advantage in aggressive actions, but also defensive actions. This does not just count onboard sensors, but also scout craft or drones and their range and effectiveness in relaying their information.
All the point defense in the world won't help you if you can't detect incoming missiles. All the shielding and armor won't save you if your enemy ambushes you. Only plot armor or sensors that avoid such encounter will. And as such, I argue that sensors are just as important as systems that make you undetectable.
This should be a sub-item of the first layer: not being there. You can only avoid the enemy if you know where it is and where it will be. That can be done a number of different ways, sensor arrays being one of them.
Except stealth is EXTREMELY difficult in space. A James Webb Space Telescope resolution sensor vs a simple infrared sensor won't differ too much in useful info.
Scout ships will be even less necessary since hiding is so difficult.
You'd be able to see ships an entire solar system away with just a simple IR sensor.
As for missiles the same applies. Missiles want to accelerate as fast as possible to the target ship.
This produces large amounts of waste heat they cannot hide
Considering the distances of space combat, it will take missiles minutes to potentially hours to impact. And you'll be able to see them as soon as they exit the enemy ship since infrared (IR) travels at Lightspeed.
The only way sensors can be important is for minesweeeping, since stationary mines can be kept cold in space. In this case radar might help
There can also be stealth missiles that are launched from the enemy ship or use cold gas propulsion until they get close enough and then turn on their boosters. But 1. Unless you're using springs, any form of launch will produce detectable heat (and springs will not produce enough of a launch) and 2. Cold gas propulsion is extremely inefficient so although your missile won't be detectable for a while, the enemy ship will have accelerated too far away for it to do anything even if they turn on boost phase.
Stealth and detection in space does not need to be speced into too hard unless you're building a ship for a specific task (stealth ship a la helium steamer or stealth ship detector)
@@hoominbeeing While I have to agree, Id still like to point out that, yes in hard sci fi visual range is like it should be, but in softer sci fi such as star trek or star wars visual range seems to be severely limited.
And even if that is the case, it is one thing to see a ship or missile from long range, it is an entirely different thing to identify it. Sure you could with ai be able to indentify a certain heat signature as a starship, but there might be a risk that that starship is either a sun, a planet, a friendly ship, a freighter, another natural phenomenon or anything else producing a heat signature. What many seem to forget ist that sensors aren't magic know-it-alls, especially on long ranges such as in Space. Its often very hard to calculate distance.
But in any case, you are absolutely correct.
One thing I find fun to consider, is that light doesn't travel instantaneously, so if you spot a vessel far away, it might not actually be there. It may have been there eight minutes ago, but not any more. (In the case of sun-to earth, I think its eight minutes)
And as for stealth missiles, if you ship has tractor beams or artificial gravity it can just simply push the missile out slowly. A missile needn't be launched rapidly, just launch it, wait until it is a safe distance away from your ship, and it can start it's cold-propellant burn.
@@moteroargentino7944 I agree
@@hoominbeeing, if I'm trying to scape another ship and accelerating away from it while it goes towards me, I can release turned of missiles together with flares and things like that, if the opponent do not identify them, I can activate right when they are passing by the missiles.
Goddamn man, so many fantastic references in the clips of this episode. Knights of Cydonia, Stargate, Starsector and so many more. The crew of the Spacedock are clearly people of quality and culture.
I was reading a battle report from a game of Star Fleet battles told in character. The Federation ship took a single point of damage on the Hull, destroying one Hull box. The Captain asked if the damage was serious. The Engineer replied that the bowling tournament would have to wait until repairs were made. Everyone chuckled. In WWII several classes of bombers were armored in the vital areas only...the bomb bays, crew areas, and fuel tanks. The other spots were all aluminum skin which allowed many shots to simply pass through and waste their energy. I can see a starship being built with all of the non-essential areas just inside the armor as a dead space to absorb some of the damage.
Basically the all or nothing armour scheme of British and American WW2 combat ships
Many aircraft are built with the idea of the most/best armor protecting the crew and that's about it. The A10 comes to mind with its "titanium bathtub" and I'm fairly certain there are Russian planes and helicopters with similar features.
@@Brigand231 The Fairey Swordfish planes that torpedoed the Bismark into a mobility kill weren't "completely missed" by the Bismark's anti-aircraft gunnery.
Instead, the rounds just passed through the fabric of the wings and fuselage, not encountering enough resistance to set off the explosive rounds (for those rounds which were explosive) as well as the gunners having trouble depressing some guns low enough, and fire direction not properly accounting for the slow laden speed of the Swordfish planes.
Indeed, that's what "torpedo blisters" (aka anti-torpedo bulges) are on a lot of bigger ships.
This happens in FTL. I'm always glad when an enemy missile hits an empty room because nothing gets damaged.
I would love a video on ECM. Not just active usage like jamming, but passive use that ships just, have on. It is actually one of the most believable reasons space combat is always shown in visual range, ( other than because it looks cool) is because the enemy ships can't achieve a hard lock until they close in to visual distances due to countermeasures preventing it.
I liked that in Battlestar Galactica the raptors had ECM officers. It was a nice touch, and in the opening miniseries we saw Boomer and Helo sifting through sensor ghosts before finding out how many raiders were coming after them. Also, the playing dead and letting their ship drift to Caprica was a great level of detail. Playing possum by shutting everything down seems like a great way of building tension if the show calls for waiting for an adversary to approach while the heroes’ ship is in a temporarily vulnerable state.
This is something Gundam does a lot. Most of the settings in that series has some kind of equivilent to justify why most combat takes place on such close ranges.
Stowing atmosphere when rigging for combat makes sense as it deals with most fires and reduces penetration impact.
It also creates more problems.
The requirement for crew to operate in vac suits leads to all kinds of problems when the time the crew is required to remain at action sations exeeds a few hours.
Bodily waste comes to mind, And while it will be primarily a comfort and morale issue for the first couple of hours, it will become more serious.
While things like air, power and coolant can be replenished, just keeping a crewman supplies with fluids and nutrients can be more challenging.
Then there's isues like filters clogging up and visibility slowly being degraded by the visor getting dirty from both sides.
Plus, a crew wearing vac suits will simply not be able to reach the same peak performance as one opperating in a shirt sleeve environment.
@@Bird_Dog00 Combat depress makes sense when in active combat/excepting it quite soon not during whole high alert.
During combat you want everyone in vac suits in case of unplanned decompression.
Except accidents visors would take quite a while to get dirty.
Body waste can be solved with diapers or integrated waste removal if you want to go the hi-tech or kinky route.
Drinking ports are mandatory equipment for modern military gas masks so no issue there.
Combat vac suits must provide significantly higher mobility than currently developed space suits anyways.
@@tymoteuszkazubski2755
While I supose many problems can be solved - I'd stay away from any more "complex" waste disposal setup though as hundreds of spacers hurriedly self-cathing with the CQ allarm blearing in their ears will only lead to trouble - I still don't think you'd put your entire crew in vac suits basically for the same reason modern day silors don't wear scube gar when taking their submarine into battle.
Unless you handwave the whole issue about decompression sickness away, a vac-suit will not preserve your crew's combat effectivenes in the event of explosive decompression. The bends is a quite debilitating condistion...
Plus, in most situations it wouldn't save you anyway. If your compartment gets breached by anything nasty enough to get through your ships armour in the first place, chances are, said nasty thing's behind armour effects will kill you long before decompression get's a go.
And if you by a miracle survive unharmed and with your suit intact, chances are you now find yourself trapped in a trashed compartment unable to do much of use to your ship.
@@Bird_Dog00 to be honest ai would expect battle ready ship to be running partial pressure unless pressure suits can sustain combat operations at full pressure. Another reason to stow atmosphere is to make it possible to move between sections of the ship. Imagine a damage control party that needs to get to the reactor room but accessways were punctured. Lack of atmosphere makes it significantly easier to traverse damaged sections of the ship.
@@Bird_Dog00 I mean, the expanse made a pretty good case for vac suits, since there you could be hit by PDC's and shrapnel that go through your ship without destroying vital components or necessarily hitting you. VAC suits in this scenario are kind've like bomber crewmen with flak jackets, not likely to protect from direct rounds and more cumbersome to wear, but necessary protection from explosions and grazing rounds. (Except in this context it'll protect you from the vehicle taking damage, and means you'll loose less/no air in combat).
The "Don't be there" is more specific to SURVIVE, not specifically to win a combat or encounter, even if that means escaping or retreating.
But can also count as outranging your opponent, can't be hit if you're out of range.
Curious about what you mean by out range? Cause I believe that some weapons can out range ones ability to acquire a target.
In a setting like that, scout ships might be needed to mark opposing ships, and radio their cordonates to the main battle ship.
@@erikschaal4124 What I think he means is having the stand-off advantage of being outside of enemy detection range whilst still being able to identify, target, and hit yourself. "Range" in this case refers to both the ability to see and the ability to shoot
I was thinking more of remote control or autonomous weapons, like drones. Why send a ship that is crewed when a swarm of drones, with or without a central control ship, can be sent instead? Or if you don't trust the drones to act on their own entirely, then substitute as much of the forward fleet with drones as practical. An half-measure of "Don't be there" would be to run ships on a high degree of automation so as little crew as possible per ship has to be risked.
Something that I would like to add is that it's also a good idea to think about this from the other perspective too: how do you penetrate an opponent's defensive onion?
Barring some fresh development in defensive technology (and technology doesn't stay fresh for long in the context of competing military forces) antagonists in a conflict will have a good general idea of how they expect their opposition to try and resist their attacks and so they will calibrate their offenses appropriately. Getting through the onion is also why it's a generally good idea to have a mix of weaponry in a given force, be that different weapons on the same ship or fleets with ships specialized for different combat roles. Since there are so many layers, with each layer having it's own resistances to overcome, using different combinations of weapons increases the likelihood any one of those can make it through.
Do they have electronic counter-measures or decoys to avoid target locks? Then you need combinations of different sensors that could composite their inputs to avoid any one of them getting too disrupted. Do they have counter-missiles and kinetic or energy point defenses? Then you need to overwhelm them with large salvos or have decoy missiles of your own to draw the defenses' fire away from your actual offensive missiles. Do they have energy shields? Then you need some setting-specific weaponry that's good at stripping, overloading, or penetrating that (a nuke for an EMP blast is probably a good bet.) Do they have armor? Then you need something that'll get through the armor or won't be mitigated by it (something that sticks to the armor and administers a huge electric shock or has a shaped-charge that drives a penetrator on impact.)
Things like that.
My favorite defensive systems that show up in science fiction book; In Her Name: First Contact are the antipersonnel mortars that the UTN Navy bolted onto the outside of their ships to prevent boarding actions by enemy paratroopers. The tactic was so effective that that the enemy commander gave a fleet wide order not to attempt boarding to avoid taking any more casualties. They also never attempted boarding actions ever again because of that battle. The UTN Navy when into that fight expecting them to try that tactic and as an extra layer if they got through the mortars some how the ships had marines on board.
As an annex to armor, sometimes having more armor will actually make the effect of weapons worse. For example, a kinetic penetrator hitting barely any armor has a real chance of going straight through, overpenetrating and delivering almost none of its energy to the target. Similarly but in reverse, if a particle beam weapon hits heavy armor it will not go through, but it will instead produce braking-radiation, which are gamma rays that are shot out in all directions as the particles are stopped, which will promptly give the crew inside the armor acute radiation poisoning while frying all the electronics.
So with the extreme energies involved in space combat, you need to have really good armor on the places where you think you'll get hit, and none at all in all the other places. This also reduces the mass penalty somewhat. If your ships are relativistic, you'll probably need at least a front-facing strike plate anyways because specks of dust hitting your craft at 0.4 c will have the energy of a small cannon round.
It's rare but it does happen. I can't remember which battle it was, but during the war in the Pacific, lightly armoured American escort carriers survived multiple hits from Japanese 14" shells because they punched right through them and out again without exploding
You're likely to see spaceships be more akin to a demented fusion of submarines and surface vessels. In addition, you can make lightweight materials with great radiation defense properties thanks to metal foams (a recent article had someone literally just put tungsten spheres in the bubbles of a steel foam block, and it enhanced its neutron-protection capabilities tremendously).
@@TheTrueAdept yeah, foam or jelly armour looks to be the current best bet for space armour. Gives you volume of defence without mass, jellies can shape to fill holes meaning micro impact abrasion wear is essentially eliminated, can mitigate radiation leakage through cycling the jelly around, great at absorbing kinetic energy, fantastic insulators allowing you to separate crew from equipment without having huge expanses between sections, and very cheap compared to other options such as heavy plating and vacuum spaced armour systems.
Regarding particle beams, thin armor will not help.
The enemy ship can tell if the particles are going through your ship by measuring it. Then they can adjust the beam accordingly so that the Bragg peak (where braking radiation is maximized) will be back inside the ship
Thick ship armor won't do much, it's **layers** that will help the most
You'd want to look into Whipple shielding. NASA uses it and they're just thin spaced sheets of metal
The reason why this helps is because most projectiles are traveling at hypervelocity in space combat (3 km/s or more) and at those speeds the impact will just ionize both projectile and armor into plasma.
Whipple shields simply let that happen and then let the plasma expand and cool in between the spaces harmlessly
So in reality, combat space ships will likely have extremely thick armor, but not in the way you typically think; there'll be massive spaces between many thin sheets of armor
That being said explosive reactive Whipple shielding might also be possible, where a few meters before the projectile hits, a panel of metal is ejected from the ship explosively to act as Whipple shielding.
If you're curious where I learned all this check out ToughSF in their space war series and Atomic Rockets (both are websites, not channels btw)
@@thegreatchimpWell they still disabled boilers and I think that was against destroyers not CV
I like shields. We may or may not ever invent such a thing for spaceships, but if we do, that's what I'd want.
I'd rather invent "stormtrooper aim" and gift it to my enemies. That's the best protection I can imagine.
Pretty sure we have prototypes for magnetic fields to protect from charged radiation and the theory behind plasma screens would have them absorb whatever optical radiation band you want. Don't think possible future shields will stop a kinetic projectile, at least not without a pretty crazy amount of energy behind it, but I haven't really looked into that.
@@jasony8480 Yeah, those are easy. Even Earth has a shield from charged radiation, but I want kinetic shields. I know they're possible, but whether humans can figure it out remains to be seen.
That JAM when talking about jamming was a touch of genius! 😂
You can thanks Spaceballs for that
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Ive read a whole bunch of Sci Fi Series lately, that have done space combat really really well in my opinion.
The first one is "Lost Fleet"
Then there is "Terran privateer"
"Starship Mage"
"Castle Federation/Space Carrier Avalon"
They all have different Tech levels or premises, but they do space combat really really well within their own reality. Good fun.
This will be extremely useful for my Sci Fi project. Thank you Spacedock, for being the most useful source of easily digestible information
Digestible like onion.
Try Atomic Rockets and Orion's Arm too
Something I would like to add is that this onion is a great way to do passive worldbuilding.
Ship design follows a culture and you can use aspects of the cultures you're talking about to reflect on how their ships are designed and what they prioritize.
For example, an equivalent of the semiconductor shortage could make shields very expensive, leading a nation to rely more on armor, for which abundant material can be found in asteroids. Even after the shortage ends, you're very good at designing and producing armor and coping with the increased mass, plus you have asteroid mining companies looking for a candidate to support in the next election.
The goose shape of Klingon ships, from the D-7 to _Negh’var,_ comes to mind for this. Horribly obvious weak point, but _only from the sides._ So Klingon crews are incentivized to attack head on when in open battle and not hunting under a cloak.
I love the very hands-on demonstration of the Survivability Oignon in the end. It all makes sense now.
Maybe its just coincidence, but the mentioning of millitary power points and showing that particular one a gew seconds in makes me think someone on the spacedock team might be either a Hell of a Way To Die fan or a Well Theres Your Problem fan and either one warms my heart
I just remembered the design of the Mothership in the RTS game Homeworld, where its outer layers where all just unpressured storage of high density materials. They do it by the magic of atomic disassembly of resources, that are then used to 3d print anything needed.
Another good design example was in a novel I can't remember well, but there was a huge missile cruiser with 4 small crews, each in a separate habitable area. Each of these areas where just beds, bathroom, dining/hangout/gym area and small work room. The work room doubled as a escape pod, and was basically a bunch of chairs and Virtual Reality headsets. Entire ship could be controlled by any of the crews, and all hardware maintenance was done by robots. For some time I wanted to write a story with this kind of ship but I don't really have the skills for it so feel free to take as is: Story would follow one of the crew members, they would be one of the first human ships to interact with aliens (there should had been some reports and sighting of alien ships before, but always one of the ships would quickly flee from the region). The crew would go into the work area, try to start communicating, but the situation escalates quickly and after they start battling, MC's pod lose connection to the rest of the ship. Some minutes later they would hear their main engines failing, and some time after they would stop hearing sounds of shooting their missiles or of being hit. They would take some days to reestablish connection to the ship, first they find that the other pods where ejected and that most of the systems are damaged. Some weeks later they get "radar" working and that there are some alien ships around but they don't seem to acknowledge they are still there. It would end with them being saved some months later by a human ship. They would eventually find out that what they assumed was the aliens shooting weapons was a misunderstanding, maybe some really powerful laser used for long range communication. I also wanted to end with MC confiding to a grandchildren that she was in "that infamous mission" where they started a war by killing the "peace envoys" from the aliens.
Sounds interesting.
I think the absolute worst way to go in a space battle is rapid decompression as you get 'sucked' out the hole in your ship.
This happens to a minor character in the book Hyperion (1989) by Dan Simmons and, well, let's just say it's not pretty what happens.
One of the earlier Expanse shows deals with this. The popular conception of decompression is much, much more violent than what would likely happen even with what we'd think is a pretty big hole. In the episode, the crew have a decent amount of time to deal with a fist-sized hole in what's actually a fairly small compartment.
@JBBell I'm not talking about the cliche head-exploding stuff. I mean, having an extreme case of the bends that may be lethal even if you are rescued from vacuum.
(Oh, I see, you're talking about the meat grinder scene)
@@JBBellmech won't survive such losing limb
He looks fairly dramatic when you see it in the movies and stuff but I don’t think it’s actually that big of an issue. I mean first of all everyone running around inside a ship in combat probably should have a space suit on for exactly that reason. And secondly, we are used to the concept of a massive torrent of air pouring out endlessly like we see in movies but it’s just not gonna move all that fast. Imagine 100 gallon barrel full of water with a 1/32 of an inch hole in the bucket. Yes, the bucket will drain, but it’s gonna take a very long time to do so potentially days.
My favorite starship is undoubtedly the Omega class from Babylon 5. Although, I don’t believe they ever mention it on screen, the Omega‘s and earth force in general have a hell of a lot of armor. And Omega is about a mile long and the carousel section has armor about 60 feet thick. Hence, it can take a pretty massive hit and end up with only a 10 or 15 foot hole in the hull. And hence the Agamemnon can get the absolute living hell beat out of it and go through an exploding weapons platform at point Blank Range, and come out the other side, massively damaged, but still apparently reasonably secure. Or another omega takes away*crashing into the hanger bay in the front and apparently survives minus the hanger bay.After the ISA is formed, presumably, a lot of ships got dispersal ship, plating, which doesn’t stop incoming energy, you, but distributed over a much larger area, so that it has less effect. I am sure other franchises have use something like that, but I’ve only ever really seen it explicitly used in Babylon 5.
I am quite fond of the shield barrier from the original Macross, which absorbs energy, and then releases it disastrously in all directions once it hits a certain level of saturation. So the shield is also potentially a weapon, which I love. I and while it is pretty much just a generic spaceship shield in the 2014 space battleship Yamato, I do like that. They can only run it for 10 minutes at a time, which is an interesting wrinkle that I have not seen used anywhere else.
Speaking of the Yamato, while it is slightly off-topic, I do like that in the 2014 show, they establish that Reagan’s cannot be fired and hyper space because they just don’t work, and then the Yamato manages to win a battle by firing physical shells at Deslock’s ship
Plot armour is the best defence
Bruh
xD
It only applies indirectly, but "not being there" is a totally valid tactic and usually achieved by information warfare, ie making the enemy believe you are somewhere else. Then you end up being where you want but the enemy isn't so you are not where they would have liked to battle you.
You’ve got my vote for an ECM video.
Note: There’s some great stuff pertaining to that in the BSG miniseries, and probably the whole series.
BSG miniseries and Picard season 3. I mean has nobody at starfleet command watched the miniseries??
That clip of the chef working with the onion brings me a lot of joy.
I'd definitely be interested in more videos like this. They're so helpful. The one on stealth/low observability ships particularly catches my eye.
Think this is the soonest I have watched a video after its released.
Thumbs up for showing the only proper example of radar jamming!
A video on ECM itself would be fascinating, in my opinion
Make the whole series!
Glad to see footage from Knights of Sidonia! For a mecha anime it has a great deal of realistic(ish) aspects of space flight.
Another aspect of the final layer is repair/recovery. The various Enterprises show how valuable having an extremely competent repair crew is and having systems be tolerant to patch jobs.
The dont be hit bit
Is the technical term in the military for a single word.
DODGE.
Or Evasion.
The Onion is a nice short hand for getting the idea across to a layman.
The full deal is a flow chart deql that constantly jumping around different layers, with multiple ones be used at any single time. All working together as a team.
The most important not mention is be able to take the hit.
Which comes from good hull design with multiple compartments, like seen in BSG and Expanse.
Cause after all.
No matter how good the Armor.
Something will find its way in.
Chef Jean-Pierre nice. Great episode, and yes please to vids expanding on the various subjects mentioned (particularly damage control/mitigation). I'd love to see stuff about related subsystems as well, ecm/eccm, sensors, various types of comm and C3 systems. You cover stuff like this really well so I hope you'll consider it.
The ending bit was glorious
Talking how much armor is needed depends on what it's being hit with just reminds me of early encounters between the UNSC and the Covenant. UNSC ships had a full meter or two of Titanium-A armor that was adequate against their own weapons as they only fought other humans before, but the Covenant's plasma weapons melted straight through it like a hot knife through butter.
There was one battle where a single UNSC destroyer (the class with the most armor and a second MAC gun) took out a Covenant light destroyer and two frigates while a Covenant carrier largely stayed out of the fight. During the battle, the UNSC ship just barely grazed it's counterparts' shields which resulted in the human ship shearing through 2 full meters of armor and breaches on every lower deck. The Covenant ship, meanwhile had it's shields overloaded and unable to stop previously fired plasma rounds from gutting it.
The TFS Ingenuity Series by Tori L Harris introduced something i had never seen which was gravitic shielding. The humans in the series never figured out traditional shields but use targeted gravity spots using the ships FTL drive to deflect small caliber rounds or energy weapons. Its a neat idea. Could do a video about stuff like that.
It's also present in Star Carrier book series.
A video on ELINT/EWAR and sensors would definitely be interesting to hear about.
Also, nebulous mentioned, nice.
I liked andromedas approach to defense. Combat Drones that could be several light seconds ahead of the ship, missiles and attack drones, and then point defense turrets. The ship was covered with a frame that could spread armor designed to intentionally be hit far away from the main body of the ship so any explosions wouldnt damage anything important.
1:11 I'm interested!
Thx for the video!
The onion effects all types of combat, and is a good examole of how to explain these concepts.
Thank you for including the 'On-Yoon' man at the end. I watched him when I was younger. Cooking 💗
It's interesting looking at how the survivability onion fits well into space combat in sci-fi. Every ship is different, even in its own franchise. For example, starfighters like the X-Wing can avoid being hit using its speed and evasion though at the cost of not having much avoidance for penetration, but something bigger like the Millennium Falcon rely on shields to avoid penetration to prevent a direct hit even though they don't have the same sort of speed.
I imagine strike craft could be the topic of its own video, but speed can be a matter of both offense and defense.
The X-wing is a well rounded fighter but the tie fighter must be faster. Otherwise the X-wing could simply out run its opponent.
Obviously the Tie will loose out on its armaments and armor for that speed. But ultimately it makes the better space superiority fighter.
The segment at the end was just pure goldnion.
Chef Jean-Pierre and Spacedock - a combo I had not expected.
Another Knights of Sidonia shot. Still waiting for the video on Sidonia itself. I have hope...
Yes these are points taught in RL war fighting. Also "The Lost Fleet" and "Ex Force' books do a great job covering all
of these issues.
Space battles are like fighting in the ocean.. yet somehow more dangerous
I was wondering if use of polished armor, or mirrors makes sense in sci-fi, i.e. in defense agaisnt lasers or as stealth thingie ?
ASide form that, I realy would love any material about Nebulus Fleet Command :)
So many visual references in this video... I love it!
funnily enough some of the most armored ships in the settings mentioned are the few actual warships in Star Trek: their shields still transfer and disperse energy and they use their hulls as a large part of how that interaction is managed, essentially the majority of the mass and power systems of the ship are all integrally linked to the shield projection with the shields in turn being interwoven to the point of being functionally part of the materials.
spacemagic mumbo jumbo aside what this amounts to is making an impact take place over the entire depth of the region around the ship and disperse across most of the ship instead of happening all at once over the penetration depth and all focused on one point. the "spacemagic mumbo jumbo" seems to mostly amount to everyone's weapons and shielding getting to be VASTLY more or less effective depending on how well tuned it is to counteract the other side of the interaction. that mechanic is why two crews in nearly identical ships can produce such glaringly different results in the same situation in that setting, the skill of the crew at obtaining and processing that information results in a direct multiplier on the efficacy and survivability of the ship _and_ feeds into dues-ex-machina BS at the same time.
Using the Jam (raspberry!) just switched you channel from really good to Unbelievably Freaking Awesome! 😂 Best thing I've seen on CZcams in years.
I think the survivability onion is a mental tool to help standard people understand military design and the reasons for the design.
i didn't realize i needed a "l'oignan" supercut, but it turns out i did, thank you again, Spacedock
I loved the Spaceballs reference, with the " sensor jamming" I laughed out loud when I saw it. Then started quoting that seen in my head, " Rasberry jam, I only know one man who uses this, LONESTAR!!" I am paraphrasing, but you get the hint. Thanks for sharing, always love the videos. 🖖🤓👽😊
In a sci-fi setting I'm working on with my brother, shields have an interesting failure mode. If they have enough power and cooling, and no emergency shut-off (or if the shut-off does not trigger), a sufficiently strong hit can knock the shield generator off of its mount, or even through the ship. This is because momentum is conserved.
Fleets are also usually surrounded by nuclear minefields, which are used as anti missile weapons. Once a missile gets through that, if it's late in the timeline, it has to contend with gravity lances. These are gravity generators adapted to have a very narrow, long, and powerful area of effect, in order to counter antimatter weapons and ramming attempts. After that is point defense railguns and lasers. Then shields, which usually have to either be overloaded using brute force, or locally pierced using special ammunition. Next up, on some ships, are point-defense plasma lances. Basically the overloaded projectors from Lensmen, set up as shotguns. After that is surface shields. They are stronger than normal shields, but can transfer kinetic energy into the second to last defensive system, the armor. Later in the timeline, fighter armor is usually over a foot thick. And capital ships have well over 10 meters of armor. Finally, if a hit gets through, there are redundant systems and partitions, and essential systems have extra armor and their own shields inside of larger capital ships.
These defenses mean that fighters are extremely oversized in comparison to real life, usually being larger than most houses, and far heavier. Being able to take a nuclear blast vaguely nearby is essential.
YES PLEASE, I love Nebulous fleet command so much, and would be delighted to see your takes on it
Always love survivability onion topics - though most sci-fi severely simplifies it.
7:45 - When the 500m 250mtn MCRN Donnager was at battle stations only the citadel retained its atmosphere. This was to prevent massive venting of atmospheric gas during battle damage, causing a loss of manoeuvring ability at a critical moment. This is a clear weakness of mega-ships in Sci-Fi, which I think assume each bit of damage is randomly distributed and individually small, but coordinated attacks will often hit the same part of a Mega-ship giving it a “vent-list”.
YES PLEASE. I love Nebulous fleet command and Im love to see your talk about it.
“Don’t be there” is ironically very applicable to space battles! Because of the light speed limit, any long-range battle with ships more than a few light-seconds apart will have to be fought with stale data and guesswork. A ship that is say, 10 light-seconds away, will always have 10 free seconds to attack and move that you will literally never see until those 10 seconds have passed. This will allow ships to say, launch a flurry of missiles and warp away before the enemy even knows what’s going on. Ships can even dodge relativistic weapons if the firing ship guesses wrong as to where a target will be located based on the telemetry they had from 10 seconds ago and the additional 10+ seconds it will take for a near-light-speed weapon to travel to its predicted target location.
So, unless ships close distances quickly (without being noticed or fired upon), the “don’t be there” defense is quite viable.
Pretty sure "Don't be there" involves fighting using remote controlled (drone etc) or autonomous (mines etc) means. If you can sink the enemy without putting yourself in danger at all, that's for the best.
The survival onion is about, well, survival. Not winning a battle/destroying your enemy.
And obviously the easiest way to survive a battle is to not be in the battle in the first place.
War is not just killing your enemy. There are other missions that don't require you to do any physical damage to the enemy, and it is best if you can achieve them without the enemy ever being aware of your presence at all.
@gokbay3057 While I understand where you're coming from, the survivability onion is intrinsically tied to combat. We're not exactly talking about cruise ships here. If you can do your job on the battlefield while not even being on the battlefield, your mission was an unqualified success.
Also stand-off weapons
@@gokbay3057it’s about combat so naturally the use of stand-off weapons and or fire and forget weapons directly plays into that for instance a fox 1 type missile vs a fox 3 type. Fox 1’s have much worse survival rates for the firing aircraft cause you can’t not be there you need to guide in the missile all the way whereas with a fox 3 you can turn away and the seeker on the missile does it’s own thing. Thus keeping you alive and much safer
I remember the Traveller Roleplaying game had a defensive system called Sand which would deploy a cloud of granular crystals whose purpose was to attenuate laser and particle beam weapons.
Sand casters were for shredding incoming missiles, Glitter casters were for diffusing lasers
I died at the edit of Daniel Jackson looking through the Ancient's database and its all DoD PowerPoints. Brilliant
On the Long Rod Penetrators - I think it was Chieftan that covered that. Spaced armor works well on it.. IF the gap is larger than the projectile is long. Because then it destabilizes the round and turns it from a small area hitting the second armor plate to a very large area as the round tumbles.
From memory, the Leopard 2 turret uses this protection.
When I got down to brass-tacks on designing my space opera universe, I started to figure out what the defensive options were, and they went as follows-
Stealth (you can't hit what you can't find, which is good on the strategic/operational level and "okay" at the tactical level. There's no "submarines" or "cloaking devices," just difficulty in detection.)
ECM (makes you harder to hit, with a number of jammer types.)
Long-range point defense (counter-missiles to take out torpedoes and missiles.)
Close-in point defense (x-ray laser cannons in the 60mm, 40mm, and 20mm beam impact point sizes.)
Decoys (make the torpedoes and missiles hit something else.)
Shields (think "regenerative armor" against most attacks.)
Armor
Hull design/bulkhead.
1:56 I love how the Normandy and the Normandy are the only instances (mainstream) Sci-Fi got the idea of stealth right 😂
Loved this, but that editing at the end was a nice treat. Thanks
This video nearly brought me to tears…
I like the touch with the onion, very humerous.
One advantage of very large ships is the square-cubed law. Armor is more efficient per mass on a larger ship.
Yes. Nebulous video. Please. Please. Yes.
great video. hilarious ending
Useful video! It perfectly encapsulated and elaborated on the very ideas I had been mulling over in my mind about the significance of redundancy in spaceship design for a 3D construction game I'm designing
BAHAHAHAHA, I love the touch of Chef Jean Pierre at the end! Two awesome channels in one video!
I've seen that onion used for naval ships because they're basically the only thing that we have that can employ all the layers, nothing else can really do evasion, stealth, EW, CWIS, armor AND redundancy
Maybe next in the series would be talking about sensors in space, with adjacent topics like ECM, and how in some universes this also ties in with the propulsion tech (Star trek's warp engines and subspace sensors, Honorverse's gravitic wedge propulsion and how that influenced weapon design, favoring pod-noughts, and how most sensors are based on gravitics).
More Spacedock analysis vids are always good. Bring on the Fleet Command video!
Great discussion
I think a video about escape pods could be cool. I once deep dived into the requirements for a space escape pod, and had to realise that those are a new level of Complicated.
From where to put them, making sure they have enough room to how to Keep the inhabitants alive and for how long.
There are multiple strategies out there on takeling these problems.
(Sometimes there are even specific search and rescue ships introduced)
I'd love to see the electronic warfare in space vid! Great job man, love the content and ideas.
Step 1: Read on modern EW used in the Navy.
Step 2: Extrapolate it to greater distances.
Profit.
Great video!
I am extatic about any video you could make.
I just realized, in Star Trek, between their transporters and replicators, they should be able to create ships capable of replicating large scale armor plates in real time, and transporting them to a position where it would do the most good. There would be some lag to it, so it couldn't just intercept high speed projectiles or energy weapons, but you could replaced damaged sections within seconds, or start chunking extra plating onto an area facing the enemy.
At long enough range, when it comes to dodging shots, it's not just the travel time of the attack, but also the light speed delay from you to the person shooting at you to see you. Star Trek mentions this in one episode, where they meet some civilization that doesn't have sensors that work faster than light, like every other advanced civilization in the setting has. If you're far enough away, and have enough acceleration, you can dodge lasers, although it would take improvements in lasers to even maintain a tight beam over that distance, instead of spreading out wider than a ship.
Dodging shots is one place where fighters and bombers make the most sense in space. You need to move by your size in whatever time it takes an enemy to see you and the attack to reach you. A smaller craft has less distance to move, so it can get closer and still be able to dodge. And if you can't manipulate gravity, any manned craft can only accelerate at speeds the pilot can handle. One advantage of unmanned drones and missiles is they can accelerate harder without killing the crew with g forces.
The ship-to-ship combat in Charles Stross’ _Singularity Sky_ is absolutely *incredible.* Stross does this interesting thing where ships have FTL drives but are otherwise pretty hard sci-fi, and the implications of that are really well thought-out. The result is a space battle that’s more like submarine combat at relativistic speeds and *enormous* distances, almost entirely a game of cat & mouse to detect an enemy vessel with LiDAR while simultaneously trying to avoid detection, until you have an opening to just… nuke each other. Space feels infinitely vast and empty and blind, even the speed of light feels crude and limiting, and massive warships are fantastically fragile. Much of the “combat” is just patiently trying to discover whether there even _is_ another ship, almost like how astronomers might comb the sky for a rogue asteroid, followed by terror when you find one. It’s probably pretty close to what space combat would actually be like, and it’s absolutely _nothing_ like how it’s depicted on screen. Just really really interesting.
(It’s been years since I read it, so apologies if I got anything horribly wrong. Although, this is making me want to find my copy….)
I feel like 'Don't be There' isn't talked about enough. Even the example showed of having to be there, D-Day 1944, is a good example. No one can deny it was a bloody affair, but the landings were a much more survivable fight for the Allies since the 'there' the Germans expected was elsewhere along the coast.
'Don't be there' is more a stragice level idea. Maybe we need a series on the strategies of space warfare now that we've had a fairly comprehensive set on the tactical level?
Keep up the good work!
6:44 Long rod penetrator was my nickname in college LOL
I like how the focus on different layers of the onion gives different factions across sci-fi different identities. In Sins of a Solar Empire, for example, the human TEC faction focuses on heavy armour and sturdy hulls. Their shields are more often than not rudimentary and just a first layer of defense, not the last. Their rival, the Advent, vengeful psionic humans, focus much more heavily on shields. It's harder to break through them, but once they're lost, their ships are much weaker and more fragile. The Vasari, the alien faction in the game, exists in more of a middle state between the two, they have decent hull and shield, but aren't super focused on either.
Something similar is seen in Halo, where the Covenant rely more on shielding, while the UNSC go for more armour.
There's also various types of active armor ranging from explosive reactive armor and electric armor that dynamically counters against certain penetrators like HEAT or rods (to an extent).
Don't forget about soft-kill or hardkill methods (you touched upon this some) for an incoming projectile (namely missiles). Soft kill could be something like electronic jamming or confusing a missiles sensors such that it doesn't land.
Hard kill methods include something like the real world Arena, Drozd or Iron Curtain that actively fire protectiles back at a incoming missiles to destroy it before it does serious damage (or atleast lessen the blow to shields and underlying hull armor). PDCs in The Expanse (and IRL on naval ships!) are great examples of this.
“If you get hit and it affects you don’t die”. The last but ever so important layer