Five Space Warfare Tactics That Make No Sense
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- čas přidán 27. 05. 2024
- Space battles seem to work quite a bit differently depending on the alternate reality in which you find yourself. That said, I do think there are some tactics though, that should generally be avoided.
0:00 | Introduction
1:06 | #1
2:52 | #2
3:43 | #3
4:45 | #4
6:22 | #5
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Before I see "The Templin Institute hates X and says it will NEVER WORK", let me remind everyone that we're speaking in generalities here. There are always exceptions to every rule.
Please try strawmanning your critics less. It does not show integrity. For what it is worth, i think this video has some good advice. Some advice I can give you is to include the exceptions to your rule in the video, maybe?
does it count as strawmanning when I use a direct quote from a Discord user?
Will you do a video on space battle tactics that are effective?
@@jakespacepiratee3740 Seems like you're the one doing the straw manning.
He never said not to point out exceptions to the rule just not to use them as proof that the rule is wrong.
Well you forgot one crucial flaw of the whole super tractor beam array on the Starhawk...
What's to stop the ship they've hooked onto with it from dumping mines, missiles, or just tons of cargo/trash right into that beam that'll yank it right into the ship?
I'll then procede to make a gimmick weapon that spins other ships around after ramming them in unstable nebulas
Where you then proceed to board them.
@@rainick AFFIX BAYONETS
@@gilbertosantos2806 And when you get even too closer for Bayonets, utilize alien kung fu!
@@justicetaylor3050
The Vulcan neck-pinch or Jedi swordsmanship?
Have me a good laugh. Thank you
The first law of space combat is get close enough to your opponent so both of you can fit on the television screen. And when turning, always remember to bank like a Cessna, so the audience will know you are turning.
Quoted verbatim from the Star Fleet training manual.
Although B5 did adhere to the first one, it does beg to differ on the second one (especially the Starfuries which are seen to basically flip 180 and shoot a pursuer in the face before flipping again and continue as before)
@@srenkoch6127 Rotation around your own cg without altering trajectory is actually a very realistic maneuver for a space fighter. B5 is the only show that ever got that right.
@@utoob7361
CG? What's that?
You mean just turning on your axis, no banking around like they're using a rudder in space?
@@thalmoragent9344 I think they mean cg = center of gravity
Ramming may seem silly, but the UNSC Infinity exiting slip space to ram a covenant ship - literally cutting it in half - is the coolest clip in Halo.
Many cool things are often quite silly
@@amiablereaper Hence space operas and many scifis run on Rule Of Cool
@@Alpostpone I mean that Silliness and Coolness go hand in hand, so you shouldn't be afraid to be silly in the pursuit of being cool
We see it done in Star Wars on a few different occasions, at least one of those being canon. The Hammerheads, or whatever they're called, are designed to do it.
We also see the Reapers use it quite effectively in Mass Effect, that's reliant on a significant tech advantage though.
And how is this preferable to dropping out of slipspace 1000 km away and shooting it in the face with a MAC? That maneuver could have gone horribly wrong in any number of ways. Most importantly, the infinity just blindly jumped into the middle of a fleet without and prior knowledge of how many ships there were or what kind of defenses they had. As Infinite has proven, the Infinity was tough, but not invincible.
This reminds me of how the Tau from Warhammer 40k had so many illusions about how interstellar warfare should work, that were absolutely shattered by encountering the lower-tech and more coldly pragmatic Imperium of Man. One of the first ever naval engagements between the two saw a lone Imperial heavy cruiser successfully defeat seven comparable Tau vessels, simply because the range-loving blueberries didn't expect the human ship to barrel straight towards them at full speed, ram their flagship, and unleash point-blank broadsides into their flanks. Because of course, no sane stellar navy would ever resort to such madness, but that over-the-top insanity is exactly why I love Warhammer so much!
Didn’t that space marine chapter also teleport Terminators into the T’au ships?
Warhammer 40K: Where insanity is the primary tactic of most armies.
@@fan9775 That's pretty standard for Space Marines. Teleport in Termies and launch boarding ram ships full of tac squads to kill everything they can.
My favorite stories of the Tau are how they arrogantly consider their tech to be superior, but realize too late that it is *their* tech that is inferior and they end up losing.
That doesn't sound pragmatic, that sounds like something that had the writers been realistic would have cost the imperium a ship and maybe the Tau 1 ship
I love the fact that 40k has boarding actions! That doesn't mean they make a ton of sense, but it's fuckin' metal, so I'm good with it.
Plus ramming.
When you have giant super soldiers you might as well use them in space too
Ramming will never not be badass.
There bow is literally a ram
40k is just a mess, that's why we love it. If the Orks believe ramming works, you better zoggin believe it will work
Ironically Space Engineers has given me an appreciation of the spinning thing.
My salvage ship was a chonky industrial beast with only a single small turret for discouraging drones. Was cleaning up a huge asteroid station just outside the gravity well of a planet. Ran into a big gunboat. I ran. Couldn't outrun it and it was messing up my main thrust (not to mention the mess when my cargo hold popped), so I span around, harpooned it (the harpoon was mostly for catching bits of debris and bringing them into range of the grinder arms) and tried to haul the thing into grinding range. Unfortunately the guns and collision disabled most of my grinders. But I was left in a situation I could bash the enemy onto an asteroid till their main hydrogen engine failed, then spin them and release so they were tumbling into a gravity well without enough thrust to escape.
I collected up what debris I could, repaired one grind arm and a couple of thrusters, and went down to pick over the wreck.
Battlefield tactic? Dreadful.
Improvised bit of desperation with a non combat vessel? Possibly the only option.
DAYUM
Brilliant
Honestly, people REALLY underestimate how effective spinning is in the right circumstances. Space Engineers is a great example because spinning lets you spread out damage throughout your hull rather than allowing the enemy to take advantage of armor deformation and punch through to anything vital. Against the kind of high rate of fire, low penetration weaponry that's typically favored in SE when players don't just run artillery cannon alpha boats, spinning IS a good trick. And it's also a good way of messing up an enemy's controls if you can somehow manage to either overcome the enemy's gyros or take over a few and set them on override. And they can't really fix it without outside help either since getting out of a seat while your ship is spinning out of control is one of the many ways to die in Space Engineers.
SE is also an environment where ramming is viable. In fact, I competed in the Starcore Potato Bowl, flying a Tau Emissary Class named the T'au Par'ty B'oat, and did the most of my damage by ramming. Starcore uses the Defense Shields mod which changes things up a bit, but that actually just makes ramming stronger.
@@VestedUTuberdifferent kind of spinning, but yes, spinning your ship in SE is really good
The 'Spinning' Tactic in 'Serenity' was accidental. The Reavers harpooned a ship heading in the opposite direction, and they wound up locked in a death spiral.
Yes, it was a result of physics not an actual tactic.
Physics? You mean a cable with infinite tensile strength?
I always figured it was on purpose, but it just made zero sense because of the absolute insanity of the reavers.
@@kazedcat I dunno, space cables or something.
@@kazedcat If it doesn't have to do with interpersonal conversations, then Joss will liberally sprinkle the Rule of Cool around, usually to marvelous effect.
In Coles defense, the Sangheili ship masters were super prideful. There was a good chance they'd have chased him into a gas giant.
More specifically Cole made a point to goad then into fighting him in the more traditional manner by mocking and insulting them in a way that world force them to fight him. Could this have still backfired? Well yeah, he could have pissed them off enough that they just ignited the gas giant from a safer distance instead and just blow up this annoying human. He also didn't really have any options, and was just dead in a fight so took the only out he saw.
"Sheer fucking hubris."
To be fair to the Reavers, I always took what the Institute describes as "spinning the enemy" to be a side-effect, rather than an end in itself. They have harpooned the Alliance ship, probably with the intent of boarding it. The Alliance ship attempts to escape the grapple with a burst of acceleration. This doesn't work, and the interaction of objects travelling at high velocity cause spinning to happen.
yeah, that's what I thought too when i saw it - was an accident not an intention
absolutely agree, surprised I had to go this far down in the comments to see this
Exactly. The Reavers were not masters of tactics, they were Raiders at best. They expected fleeing civilians, not a warfleet. The Alliance was expecting a single ship, not insane space zombies. Both sides were caught off guard, and the mess that ensued was Glorious.
@@ArnezBonsol It's almost like someone was... misbehaving...
@@mystrtwenty that was the aim
Regarding Cole’s tactic in particular: He used the Covenant’s high regard for “honorable combat” against them the same way Admiral Whitecomb did in Operation First Strike. He dared the Fleetmaster and his lackeys to get close, essentially questioning their ability as warriors. To me, that’s the primary reason as to why his gamble was successful.
That is precisely the reason why it is very important to understand the enemy's mindset. It might be quite a gamble, but Cole knew that his decision was based on a relatively concrete knowledge about the enemy and wasn't just a shot in the dark.
plus, the Covenant underutilized the uses of their technology. Covenant ship do have the capability to perform slipspace jump into and out of a planets atmosphere. And their weapon can charge and fire much faster then they used it. Book Halo First Strike touch on this point when Cortana took over a Covenant Flagship.
Covenant didn't make their technology or reverse engineer, but copy it without completely understanding how it work. Sort of how driver can drive a car but lack knowledge to make their own car from scratch.
He also figured that they were going to lose in direct combat, so his hail mary move was pretty much his only option to _maybe_ get out alive.
There's IRL examples too. Hannibal Barca pulled off his victory at Lake Trasimene because the Romans didn't scouted enough. He pulled off an even more insane victory at the Battle of Cannae because he knew the Roman would just use their superior numbers to attempt to just break the center into collapse rather than something as simple as a wider army that would lead to an envelopment of his army.
Just those two examples alone are arguably "tactics that relies on your enemy being complete ignorant of basic military practices". It's called knowing your enemy and sometimes it does translate into conditions that hindsight would call out as "unrealistic". In the case of #4, there's been many echos where armies place themselves into situations that would sounds unrealistic in fiction. Which is also make such stories like Admiral Cole's trap actually does makes sense.
@@RhoninFire A more recent example will be Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia have the capabilities to basically annihilate Ukrainian military on day one, but they for some reasons didn't do that. Heck, Russian air force didn't even try to establish air dominace on the first day, which they can if they want to and committed. Right now, one of the biggest military powers in the world is in salvage mode to save its face for a failded invasion of a neighbouring country
Ramming is a very viable tactic when you’re dealing with inexpensive drones, or significantly stronger material sciences, like the droplets in The Dark Forest novel. At orbital velocities, even a small mass has tremendous amounts of kinetic energy.
When drones are in play, is it really ramming or is it simply using it as a kinetic munition
Yeah, anything a ramming vessel could do, a guided missile can do better. A drone or autopiloted ship is kinda in between.
That just sounds like using a gimmick munition that costs way more and has the chance of being shot out of the sky before reaching its target, there’s a reason why Kamikaze’s were used later on in ww2 before the U.S caught on and adapted to the tactics.
@@teambellavsteamalice I think the line between a suicide drone with missiles and a torpedo with indepently targeting sub-munitions is really a matter of perspective
Or in the frontlines series where they fill a tug full of water and ram it into a Lankie ship at a high velocity.
The Honor Harrington series handles "New Experimental Weapons and Tactics" really well. The situation at the beginning is basically a full on stalemate. Ships at huge distances are functionally invulnerable because of shields, and so those are the distance they deploy. So nothing happens until one side makes a move, and then the outcome was extremely uncertain. This prompted all sides in the stalemate to start working on new stuff.
The new stuff was all expansions on existing equipment, tactics and doctrine. But some of it was revolutionary. Mount a tractor beam behind you and "tow" a trailer full of disposable missile pods with some passive Electronic Warfare packages in your shadow. Enemy gets a feel for your tonnage, knows how many missiles you can fire in each salvo and then ... surprise. That first salvo is actually 10 times as big and overwhelms your defenses. Etc.
As the series progresses the capital ships that used to be big ol' gun boats turned into big empty trailers carrying sensor suites, light attack cruisers, missile pods and a big-ass laser. With all the sides' various development all slowly converging on that design philosophy.
There are also plenty of mis-steps. Usually ambitious engineers forcing weird unworkable crap onto the space navy to earn their stripes of whatever.
You know ... how things like this actually happen.
yeah, fucking loved that evolution of warfare in the books... Considering that series spans about 20 years or so, its also quite realistic in timeframes.
And wiping enormous fleet of Sol navy which wasnt paying attention and was years behind in technology development was really fun :D
The entire premise of the first book is about Honor being affected on a ship that just got fitted with a "New Experimental Weapon" and how bad it turned out.
but people who read honor harrington series have to agree it's not so much the tech but the people behind it that wins battles and weapons helped but were just there to add action.
@@tonynelligan1930 well yeah, of course it's about people when Honor is probably THE definition of perfect Mary Sue... 😂 Still love it though 😊
@@tartiflette6428 ...and she made work even though it was terrible as a main weapon.
I think boarding actions can actually work against civilian ships.
Kinda how in the real world pirates can easily take over big freighters with only a small crew and a fast boat.
Like imagine hiring privateers to board and take over your enemies freighters to cut off their supply lines.
I don’t think they argued against boarding actions working in such a situation
Hence convoy tactics to protect supply lines and thus rendering these tactics useless since while you're boarding, the enemy patrol craft are slagging your ship. That said, this is assuming a wartime scenario where nations would invest in such protection. Ultimately, it's better to ambush them with mines of some kind (say, mines that launch a missile at the target when it gets within a few tens of thousands of kilometres?) or hit and run if your aim is to destroy rather than loot.
Even civilian ships are going to have pretty powerful shields or point defense systems to protect against impacts. If you’re traveling at even just 10% of C, even dust becomes a kinetic weapon.
Warfare, this kinda excludes civilian vessels, but yeah, boarding civilians makes sense, because you know, they dont fight back as hard as military vessels
A space ship must have sealing doors and pressurized atmosphere. You can't climb onto it like a super tanker, and grab or intimidate some crew. Even if you get in, you have to make it through every bulkhead, and make sure they don't depressurize the room you are in.
Even Civilian ships will have protection against the debris and asteroids in space, whether that include point defense, shields, armor, or more. The thrusters on a civilian space ship would be more powerful than most military lasers, and turning them towards your enemy deals damage to them and helps you escape.
Boarding may be attempted, but it is still a stupid, desperate tactic. It's success rate in fiction is completely out of proportion. The best way to board a ship is to get them to surrender, and you do that with conventional weapons.
#2: The last time I remember a warship trying an intentional ram was an epic failure. They sank from the collusion and the ship they rammed wasn't damaged.
#4: I remember in Wrath of Khan this was used, but it was justified that Kirk knew Khan completely unfamiliar with space warfare.
Well old trek was pretty decent with battle tactics anyway. Because the way all ships were designed as well most "standstill" fights were also lancing matches
What are missiles if not small automated (hopefully) ramming ships with explosive payloads?
in Star Trek Discovery S1, the battle of the twin stars IIRC, a Klingon Ship used its wedge shaped, probably reinforced, front hull in combination with its cloaking device as a ramming weapon to destroy a federation ship.
@@WindTempest UNMANNED ramming ships, that are EXPECTED to be destroyed by the maneuver, hopefully taking the enemy with them.
@@zeux5583 reread what i said OLD trek as in the stuff before disco along with the most recent trio of movies and in another conversation i mentioned the worse of the ramming issue started in the more recent decades...DSC included...
In defense of 40k, it’s important to remember that the ships are often measured in kilometers and have often been known to have regions of the ship that are completely abandoned. So it’s less that they’re swinging on via a space rope, and more that they’re getting dropped into a bombed out city.
WH40K is such a bizarre setting, that it's hard to map it closely to anything in real world history.
Spinning would work, if enough orks believed, strongly enough, that it worked, right?
@@rileymclaughlin4831 Yellow 'unz spin 'arder!
Kind of surprised you didn't mention the "fight on the same horizontal plane" so many space fleet battles seem to embrace. It's slowly fading away, but I still see it occasionally. It always baffled me why you won't use vertical as well as horizontal "stacking".
Another is having a bridge sticking up above the outer hull as if that would help them see anything further away. It just makes for a really big and obvious target.
To be fair, it's a reasonable assumption that most, if not all, spacefaring races will be terrestrial in origin (as launching to orbit from underneath an ocean is much, much more difficult than doing so from land), and are thus likely going to have evolved brains that think best in two dimensions.
In other words, the reason that the fleets would be fighting primarily along a single horizontal plane would be simply because everyone involved finds it easier to keep track of everything going on.
@@coryzilligen790 But it's stupid and limits the firing arcs of all but the very front line ships.
1. Body blocking
2. Indirect fire
3. Cohesion of forces
Also, for the bridges, what are you gonna do when your cameras are shot? Or your sensors? Gonna go for a space walk?
@@Airsickword Do you realize how big space is? Ship-to-ship combat with guided weapons would be measured in thousands of kilometers, if not tens of thousands. You ain't seeing shit at those ranges.
But thanks for demonstrating how some people can't imagine space combat as anything more than sea combat in space.
As for blocking shots... you do realize there is no up or down in space, yes? That you can roll or angle a ship without affecting it at all except to open more firing arcs?
@@Uldihaa Technically speaking, vertically stacked rows can still be "on the same horizontal plane" but wouldn't block firing lines ("arcs"? In _space?_ Are they fighting deep within a gravity well or something?).
That's kind of the problem with space -- it's so different from our terrestrial origins that we often don't have good vocabulary to even _describe_ the things going on clearly and concisely, let alone to keep mental track of numerous ships moving in different angles and orientations across a complex battlefield.
Edit: To clarify, if they have a bunch of ships coming in behind each other for no good tactical reason, then yes, that's dumb, but the simple matter of orientating themselves to a common plane is not.
in defense of astartes:
that wasn't as much a war, as it was special ops.
they needed to get in there, and neutralize a certain thing with special equipment, destroying the ship with regular ordinance wouldn't have done it.
only reason I mention it is that you showed that segment on screen.
To be fair, boarding in 40k is a big thing. As is ramming. However, 40k is awesome, no matter how illogical it is
@@XraynPR It’s awesome BECAUSE it’s insane, and so are the inhabitants.
imperial ships tend to be so well built that the machanicus can just go collect the wreckage and weld it all back together. boarding and blowing up all the ships systems then waiting for space to do the rest is a good option especially when you can teleport super humans in power armor in and out.
Just my opinion.
The Starhawk's weapon would have been better if it was a 'sheer force' weapon. 3 pulling and 3 pushing to literally rip apart ships since, as far as I know, shields do not block tractor beams.
The problem there becomes if you can surround an opponent with 6 ships with turbo lasers. Do you need tractor beams to rip it apart or can you just cut it to ribbons with lasers
Like Halo's torsion drivers on Forerunner vessels? I mean that did almost happen in that clip, you can see plates and shit flying off the ISD.
@@exilestudios9546 idk I don’t really see how the star hawk really improves the capabilities of fighters and support ships. In open space, say in orbit of a planet, how would repositioning an ISD make it any easier to take down than just shooting at it with more cannons? I don’t think tractor beams disable weapons so it can still fire back. And from all star wars media we’ve seen starfighters are capable of taking on an ISD without a star hawk.
@@exilestudios9546 you know what also holds them in place? 20 more turbolasers blasting them to pieces.
@@exilestudios9546 there are better effects for that. they should go dig up the tech behind the interdiction cruisers.
My head canon of the spinning thing was that the reaver ship was just trying to grapple onto the alliance ship for boarding, but they didn't anticipate how much thrust the alliance ship had, as they'd probably really only targeted civilian vessels up to that point, and the alliance pilot just gunned his engines when he was grappled.
In which case, that scene demonstrates one of the failure cases of boarding actions, and Templin's point remains valid.
@@rileymclaughlin4831 yeah but Templin's point was that "spinning is dumb" I'm saying "spinning wasn't the point". I didn't say boarding wasn't dumb.
One aspect of ramming is that if the ship still gets destroyed, the debris still has inertia and will travel whatever way the ship was going and the debris field hitting another ship do a lot of damage
The demise of BS-62 Pegasus shows this.
Of course, the damage that debris will do is somewhat dependent on the ships it hits having significantly different inertia than the one that broke into the debris. That said, it may be a viable strategy, if you find yourself as a single ship facing a large fleet, to put yourself on a collision course and then scuttle your own ship to create a debris field before they even have a chance to evade your ramming maneuver.
The point of the Starhawk was to be used as part of a large fleet, dragging enemy ships out of formation and immobilizing them so your own side could pick them apart one by one. In a one-on-one engagement...yeah, it's a pretty bad weapon, but it's what they had in that engagement and they found a way to make it work (within the rules of the setting).
the Starhawk strikes me as basically a support vessel; not just for disrupting enemy formations, but also for retrieving (and possibly towing) allied vessels that have been disabled (A vital tactic when your enemy employs slave and prison labor, and cares nothing for conventions of civilized warfare). They could have done the same with a few dozen up-powered space tow-ships with turbolasers bolted on though
I can see.that. it just that Star wars( from.what i fleet to foeet battles.)
@@Edge-wx7hv Not to mention the later, peace-time possibilites of massive field clean up, asteroid diversion, colony construction, etc.
The New Republic wanted to end the war and return to a peace so it makes sense to have a multi-useful ship.
I mean it was handily starting to disable the ship. it's a massive tractor beam, it was already starting to pull pieces of the ship apart from another, that's why it was dangerous
@@exilestudios9546 Kind of like the Titans from Titanfall, from what I've gathered.
(6:35) I don't think the "spinning" in this instance was intentional. Reavers are definitely enemies who love capturing and boarding enemy ships, and in Firefly, it's a relatively viable tactic because of technological limitations. In this particular scene, the Reaver ship has some kind of grapping weapon it uses to latch onto enemy ships and reel them in for boarding. It's probably meant primarily for use against unarmed civilian ships. In this instance, they hit a military ship that kept using full acceleration, which resulted in the "spinning".
Gotta assume that after that spin-a-roonie the reavers boarded with buckets to scrape some alliance soup off the walls. Lol
@@Zahgurym Reavers are human, mad humans but still humans. If the Alliance crew was soup so were the Reaver Crew.....
makes me think about the outlaw star grappling ships
I think the best argument against boarding action comes from The Expanse.
They really drive home how unreliable it is, and a few ships were actually scuttled to prevent it from falling into the bad guys hands. This resulted in the loss of life on all sides (and thankfully in one case did not include the Tachi).
The Expance , doesn't have MAGIC gravity plating - all other sci-fi does
I was always bothered by the opening battle in Revenge of the Sith. Turbolasers can fire very long ranges. There's no reason for Age of Sail-style close-in broadside engagements. At least in Return of the Jedi there was a valid reason established for it: avoiding the Death Star's gun.
Same in Revenge. The CIS fleet was blockaded in forcing everyone together, so much so that two ships ended up broadsiding each other.
Turbolasers lose their energy the further they travel in star wars. Significant enough losses that going right up close to each other is the preferred tactic. We see this across all forms of star wars media
Engaging your enemy IE a flagship at point blank does ensure accuracy, It maybe extremely risky when it’s all said and done but sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty to ensure a kill, In the case of the Guarlara, (due to a lacklustre of intel that the chancellor was still aboard) The Guarlara’s captain chose to engage the invisible hand at point blank to ensure accurate hits and potentially a kill, Whilst angling his topsides to starboard to protect the more vulnerable parts of his cruiser
It was more explicitly justified in the old canon where in order to prevent the CIS fleet from escaping, Coruscant’s planetary shield was raised over them, trapping them close in with the Republic fleet.
So I'm gonna pick the two that everyone is probably picking apart: ramming and boarding. Ramming isn't a great strategy, as you point out it's most likely to take out both parties if done successfully. That however does not make it nonsensical. As a last ditch desperation play, it can be very effective. Early uses of the kamikaze were fairly effective in WW2. When it went from desperation to standard tactic, it's effectiveness went down because it lost its surprise. Similarly, fire ships in the age of sail were very effective in specific circumstances, especially against the Spanish Armada and the Battle of Cherborg. Even in WW2, the British rammed a destroyer into a Franch drydock to prevent it from being used as a base for the Tripitz and Italy used MTM (essentially suicide speedboats) to limited success including the destruction of the HMS York. Even the USS Cole was was taken out of action by a explosive ramming in 2000. In SciFi, ramming because much more effective when you deal with unrealistic acceleration factors. The Holdo maneuver basically breaks every weapon in Star Wars by making the ultimate weapon a cargo hauler with a FTL system. If F=(0.5*m*v^2)/d with F=Force, m=mass, v=velocity and d= duration of collision then the near infinite value of Faster than Light for velocity is the ultimate expression of death by math. In fact, factor in AI and droids, and there effectively exists little difference between ramming and missiles.
Boarding is kind of the opposite. Historically, all tactics is based on the balance between offensive and defensive. For the past several hundred years that balance has been swinging more and more towards the offensive. That is to say, the ability to inflict damage has been superior to the ability to negate/absorb damage. But nothing says that has to remain the case. If your dealing with the super tech of shields and regenerating armor, a small marine detachment that can get around those defenses can do tremendous damage. The example shown in the video from Astartes demonstrates the advantage of a boarding party if the "marines" deployed have a nearly insurmountable advantage. The Space Marines deployed were at a huge disadvantage while in flight, but once onboard where effectively unstoppable, with the added benefit that they were to secure or recover a targeted artifact inside the ship. Add in transporters and it gets pretty bonkers. The boarding party was a primary tactic of the Borg in Star Trek, and even used as a counter tactic in the Star Trek novels against the Borg during the Borg Invasion (Star Trek Destiny: Lost Souls). In Stargate, as soon as Humans gained even a basic transport technology they were using head hunter teams to neutralize command elements on the ships of the Goa'uld and the Wraiths. Hell the first offensive use of Asgardian beaming technology the SGC was to "beam" WMD's directly into enemy ships.
The holdo manuver is actually easy to counter for larger militaries, you just start using interdictors as a defence system, although that actually begs the question of does its gravity field block FTL or merely trigger a built in failsafe that aborts it, if its the later, then your back to square 1. Star wars FTL is so inconsistent its a bit of a joke, it needs lanes, then they invent hyperspace skimming which seems to be near instananious, make up your mind.
As for boarding, its viable when your boarding force is willing to die/are acceptable casulties and have the firepower advantage. As for star trek and SG1 however I have an arguement against it. Transporters have a smarter tactical use, why send in troops when you can send in munitions, or beam out the enemy crew (into space) or vital parts of their ship itself. SG1 actually messed up when the wraith developped jamming tech, at that point go "ok, lets be mean", fire a nuclear missile away from the enemy ship, let it get nice and fast, then beam it directly next to the ships open hangar bay. Their point defence has much less time to intercept it, its already going fast, and the bay is a big open target. That said they could also have just reverse engineered the cloaking tech everyone seems to have, and stuck a small version of it on their missiles too.
@@cgi2002 Star Wars DID have a more or less consistent explanation of Hyperspace travel but Disney retconned the whole franchise. Basically jumping into a 5th dimension where distance was wonky but gravity still carried over, so 'mass shadows' existed of things like planets and stars. Hyperspace lanes were where there was a usable tunnel of very little such shadows and was stable for long periods of time, no asteroids drifting into the lane and it was generally safe. Ships would be automatically forced out of hyperspace if some unexpected mass was found. Pirates would abuse this and tow rocks into high traffic lanes and then ambush ships that were forced out and not prepared. Hyperspace travel could theoretically be done in straight lines, problem was the computer would have to stop more frequently and recalculate. So hyper lanes that were known, and known to be stable, were very valuable as they were the fastest. Collisions weren't really possible since your computers forced you out to prevent collisions, which I image would be you blowing up in hyperspace, not realspace so there wouldn't be debris. The communication network the Old Republic built made use of the fact that hyper space was a whole sperate dimension, they basically tossed buoys out of a ship while it was in hyperspace and the com buoys were stuck there, communicating but inside of hyperspace. So stuff like shooting a dude out in an escape pod while in hyperspace was condemning them to an eternal coffin. Hyperspace drives weren't really moving the ship just slipping it back and forth between dimensions and required a complex computer. Not having one or both of those, a shuttle or escape pod would be screwed.
Disney... they just don't understand anything about Star Wars to begin with so of course they botched the physics. That was the same movie that they shat all over Luke Skywalker with, can't expect much.
They also fucked up the Time travel rationale in End Game, mixed both the parallel timeline theory and the Time travel creates paradoxes assumption. If they snatched the stone from the past and created a branch in the timeline, how the hell was Rogers around at the end? Time travel either occurs in a closed loop or it creates branching points when it occurs, not both. Totally botched the sci-fi logic.
In real physics, yeah F=(0.5*m*v^2)/d, death by math is the big winner. You crank a bullet up to a tenth of light speed, you get what's called a Relativistic Kill Missile and you can blow up entire planets. Not terribly hard for some K1 civilization to lob trillions of RKMs out around the galaxy and shred any planet in the habitable range of every star in their own galaxy, so really makes you think why our own galaxy wasn't already cleaned out like this, implies we're the first ones on the scene. If intelligent life was common, all it would have taken was one civilization to do this and no one else would be around. A K2 civilization could do this to *other* galaxies and it'd barely make a dent in their energy budgets. The horrifying ease some slightly older civilization could have cleaned out all other competitors (and the fact humans would probably do, so why wouldn't some slightly more aggressive species?) just adds to the Fermi Paradox. Perhaps young civilizations try this, but some billion year old civ gets offended by it and blasts them apart when they try to do it. Altho that begs the question of how come there isn't some billion year old civ doing this themselves? The rock that killed the dinosaurs or the bigger one that made the Moon after it collided with proto-earth, those were just unguided, dumb rocks. The shit you can do if you *intend* it to happen, it's just absurdly more destructive.
@@Lusa_Iceheart who is to say someone hasn't done this and the shots just haven't arrived yet. Throwing a load of rounds out at even 50% the speed of light would still mean they'd need a hundred of thousand of years to circle our galaxy assuming they fired from the edge, 50000 from the centre outwards. It also assumes they got the math right and accounted for everything, its easy to ignore for example the gravity effects other galaxies have on ours, and on a flight measured in thousands of years, a fraction of a % of a degree means your now missing by distances that are simply put, insane. Enough math lets you hit anything, provided you get the math right, larger distances and times mean more variables need to be considered as their effects become noticable. Also consider some variables need you to build exact models of everything occuring now and what it will do later on, these models can't take into account the activities of sentients. Consider it's possible for even a low teir species to mess up your math by for example mining their gas giants, thus altering their gravity effects which affects every solar system for many lightyears, even if its a millionth of a % difference in gravity. Or god forbid they start experimenting with gravity itself, you now have unpredictable variables.
@@cgi2002 Yup, it's very true it'd take a hundred thousand years to hit all your targets, and you'd probably fire a bunch per planet to account for any error margin in your modeling. A K2 could literally have their planet killing weapons firing off constantly and it'd be something as routine as military recruits practicing at the range. It's mind boggling just how powerful such a civ is to us. Now, 100k years seems like a long time, but this is a civ that could have achieved space flight 10 million years ago and probably has stuff like life extension so they have members living that whole time. That's why I brought up the fact some billion year old civ would be in a position to smash any 10 million year old civ link ants. It only takes on civ like that in a mega-cluster of galaxies to purge everything in that area. The calculations have been done and humanity could colonize the entire milky way galaxy in the next million years just organically (and without FTL of any sort). Just normal population growth and crawling thro space on generation ships or some sort of 'cryo' system. Odds are cryo would be a lot more like reanimating the dead than unfreezing you, you sick trillions of nanites into your corpsicle and they rebuild your cells internally. Not like waking up from a deep sleep but being rebuilt as it were. Anyhow, some tech like that is shockingly close to us now, maybe 100 years off if medical research into nanites keeps going with the interest it has. So it's a fair assumption that some 10 million year old civ has similar levels of advanced tech and then even crazier god-like magic tech. The whole ancient mythology of Apollo pulling the sun across the sky in a chariot is something that can be done, it's called a Shakodov thruster. Some K3 or higher civ could rearrange every star in the galaxy to paint some piece of art work if they wanted to. Keep in mind, K1 is all the power of a planet, K2 is all the power of a single star and K3 is all the power of a galaxy, then hypothetical K4 is a super cluster of galaxies. Humans just need a little over a million years to get to K3. Why are there no K4s making artwork out of galaxies for shit and giggles? We carve faces into mountains, they could carve faces into galaxies. That's the sort of power differential we're expecting (and expect to get to ourselves on day). "Where are they?" is the big question.
I feel like you've touched on some interesting points, but left out the most common "bad tactic" which you see everywhere. Engagement within visual range. Naval vessels right now, in the ocean, don't have to engage within visual range. Our weapons are already so absurdly long ranged that there's just no point in getting that close to one another. In a sci-fi future with advanced torpedoes, missiles, and functional laser weaponry there's no way. Space is obscenely big, there is plenty of room to maneuver. There's no reason for everyone to be so close together other than cinematography. The closer you position your ships the more danger you're putting them in. I know there are a rare few settings that have an "out" for this, but usually they don't. Ships are just engaging close so they can both be in the same shot.
Runner up is always engaging on the same horizontal plane. If you have the luxury of a 1-on-1 fight why would you continue to engage your opponent evenly? Go underneath their firing angle, try to maneuver out of their hotzone. The immediate example that jumps out is Star Wars where most of the armaments on a Star Destroyer are on the top.
Star Wars battles are also weirdly linear. There is no up or down in space, how are all these ships on the same level? That would be so chaotic.
One explanation is maximum weapons range vs effective weapons range. Long range torpedo/missile barrage is almost pointless if the setting has good point defense. The farther away an explosive projectile, the more time the target has to either calculate where to shoot it down or to just move out of the way. If the incoming shots can't be shot down at all like mass driver slugs and energy beams/bolts, they'll still miss if the target is fast and maneuverable enough to evade it depending on how far away the enemy was. The Expanse did a pretty good job of pointing out the varying levels of usefulness between bullets, railguns, and missiles. New BSG showed how ineffective the Cylon Basestars' missiles barrages were against the Galactica's point defense and fighter screen. And then there are settings where seemingly most weapons can only function at close range or they fizzle out. That last one is Star Wars but only if you regard the EU retcons of "lasers" actually being made of plasma as canon. But on screen there is never a stated explanation for why their pewpews can't shoot slow af capital ships from much farther away.
Visual range in space is a bit of a misnomer, as well, unless your behind something, everything is technically in visable range, in a realistic universe there is no such thing as stealth, there is a practical "maximum" detection range your enemy has depending on their sensor tech's ability to pick up your emissions. Long range weaponry has 2 drawbacks that unless you have specific technology render it mostly usless except against stationary objects or ones on predictable courses. First if your at say 10 light seconds away, your enemy isn't were you see them, they are 10 seconds ahead of there, if they are manuvering that means they could be considering the speeds involved, be in a potentially massive area, so now you need either smart self guided weapons, FTL sensors or ideally a combination of the 2, or even better, FTL weapons. Self guided munitions are the easiest option, but they then become increasingly expensive, and you end up in a battle of ECM vs counter ECM, and point defence.
For first strike/siege weapons however, they are ideal, you can fire off litterally thousands of railgun darts from anywere in a solar system and hit anywere else with enough math & time. Same applies to planetary bombardment, you don't need to get close to a planet to hit it, you can sit on the other side of the sun from it and just throw kinetic projectiles at it without risking your ships. Sure a planetary sheild could stop the weapons been effective, but if they can stop you at that range, getting closer isn't going to help.
Oh and a word on sensors and FTL if no FLT sensors exist, you can play this mean. You can jump into a system say 10 light minutes out, fire your weapons for 9mins and then jump out, by the time the enemy knows they are under attack, you've already left and they don't get to return fire. You can expand this into actual full on battle tactics, constantly using your FTL to move around the system leaving your enemy firing at ghosts, admittedly they can do the same to you. Hence why you end up closing the range, since no one can shoot anyone if no one actually knows were anyone is at any given time.
@@Samm815 [Long Post Alert, I didn't mean to ramble this far:] As far as I know, Star Wars does play on this theme a lot, even having something like luminiferous aether that control fields can interact with like a ruder. This is how the fighters moving like atmospheric craft in atmosphere has been explained. It is also possible that the Star Wars galaxy does have an up or down, or localised up and down based on local gravity wells, because of how this effect is distributed. This could potentially make ships that use inertial dampeners and other common field emitters essentially "buoyant" in space.
Other than that, trying to extrapolate to more grounded sci-fi, it could be convention that the gravity well that effects you most at that point in space is universally considered "down" and ships out of courtesy, some practicality we are unaware of, or simply habit, are oriented accordingly. Though this does not explain why combat ships have large blind spots facing "down" and don't orient themselves for maximum effect of their armour and weapons. Even if there is a conventional "down" toward the most relevant gravity well as a reference point, one usually doesn't have to functionally adhere to that in space.
The only exception I can think of is if the setting uses repulsor type technology that is directionally mounted on the hull. Or if the underside of artificial gravity causes a similar effect when interacting with natural gravity. In that case, the interaction of these generated fields with local gravity will determine the most efficient orientation and all ships using a similar system would also automatically orient to a similar attitude. More energy would have to be spent to tilt the ship into a different orientation, and possibly a lot more for it to be suspended "upside down" against gravity and how it's "anti-gravity" profile match up. There could even be a most efficient altitude for a given ship's mass and power output. This is the only reason I can think of for ships to be so overwhelmingly consistent in their orientation across factions and production lines, and only because such gravity manipulation devices are ubiquitous.
Come to think of it, when a sci-fi ship looses power, it is often starts to list and loose altitude, falling toward the most relevant local gravity well. Perhaps it does all come down to the integral and often essential gravity manipulation devices, and without them standard Newtonian physics apply and space becomes functionally directionless.
@@darwinxavier3516 My personal favorite universe that has a reason for close engagements is Legend of the Galactic Heroes. They detail that they've developed such pervasive and potent ECM and ECCM that you can only really locate enemies visually.
Haha so I saw some EVE online footage, and I have to say, there are definitely some gimmicks that work there. There's a tactic called the "Pipebomb" where an unsuspecting fleet is caught off guard with a drag bubble and a bunch of smartbombing battleships. The battleships can quickly kill well above what they normally could in such a situation. There are dozens of other gimmicks which have limited use, but can seriously swing the tides; only a few stealth bombers with focused void bombs, can kill a ratting dreadnaught worth 20x what their ships are.
If properly used, gimmicks can be very effective. At least in video games. IRL, space battles are super boring and generally will go from nothing, to over, almost instantaneously. Acceleration and range are the two biggest constraints, though intel makes a huge impact. The ships that accelerate faster win any engagement which isn't over in the first moments, which is to say that they can achieve their objectives before the other party does. If they want to run, they can. If they want to come in closer, they can. Acceleration is king. The thing is that acceleration isn't a static bonus, if you accelerate faster, that makes your velocity that much faster, so acceleration gets a squared bonus.
Range can be used to counter acceleration, but only with good enough tracking. If Acceleration is too high then evasive maneuvers can close a range advantage, starting farther away gets the higher acceleration ship more of a speed bonus, and so they can still close in on the slower ship *while slowing down and evading*.
So basically, somebody gets in range of the other, one side blows up, the end. A small technological advantage is basically GGs. Come in at relativistic speeds firing kinetic weapons and a 1kg slug is basically a nuke. Nothing, nothing, nothing, KABOOM.
pipebombing was gimmicky but similar to something like a roadside bomb or unexpected mine field. Although ramming in eve was a valid tactic since you ruin an enemies speed tanking which is handy for people shooting it.
The whole thing of the spinning ship in Firefly, since it was only ever the one time that it happened, I always took it as a freak occurance where the Reavers tried to catch the ship, but the victim's momentum and g-forces ended up pulling both ships into a random spin once the catch was made...
I feel like 1-4 could be labelled “Imperium of Man void combat doctrine”
Which is why 40k void combat is hecking awesome.
My ships are cathedrals in spehss, your argument is invalid
Is it any better or worse than in Warhammer Total War, where enemy ships at sea land on nearby islands to fight land battles instead of naval battles? :D
Of course, but Templine would never display or bring attention to the fact that lots of the things they Criticize happens in 40K very often.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 Except for, you know, multiple videos that do exactly that, including this one.
Boarding action might make sense if your boarder are autonomous machines to reduce risk of lost of manpower in transit. However, there's no guarantee how well the boarded will stand up to the boarder. Boarding only make sense out side of battle using small stealth insertion tactic when the enemy isn't on high alert.
Or if you posses super-heavy infantry that drastically outclasses the enemy.
Unmaned boarding action are a good way to disrupt an ennemy capital ship if you can get your machines onboard. Making these capital ship easier target.
You would need very specific setups for a situation like that to work properly.
Space is unbelievable vast and distances between crafts are likely the same, why even risk a critical hit from a close distance if you can torpedo your enemy from a distance and reduce the chance of boarding to near zero…?
@@2x477 It depend, but captured ship are always better than destroyed one. You can easily gather intel, capture eventual innovations, etc.
And I think that, if you have a very advance technology, you could just fire some boarding machine designed to be fired by a gun to board, with advanced algorithm capable of calculating a trajectory for a good "landing" on the ennemy vessel.
Of course the technology required would be insane since you can't just land by smashing into the ennemy ship without risking of destroying the boarding crew (the speed of the projectile having the boarding partie inside would be crazy). Advanced algorithm to calculate a trajectory necessary to make a "soft landing" would be vital.
And since the ennemy can have anti-missile defense, he will have means to destroy your boarding partie even before it can reach him (so you'll have to neutralize the defenses system or just use en masse the system I described)
Of course that's just an idea, which could only exist in a setting with a crazy technology.
i would argue to the compleat contrary.
boarding during calm moments means your boarding ship has to compeat with the sensor watch with nothing to do, the landing/entry action is more likely to be noticed and you will have to deal with the entire crew once it has been noticed.
compare that to a mid battle boarding.
your boarding vehicle will be a blip on a swamped screen, possibly coming from the "wrong" direction (if you flank your boardings)
a relatively weak/low damage impact (the bording pod hitting/gaining entry) will be noticed but likely to be dismissed due to the minor damage done.
and if the entire crew is on battlestations they are not out in the halls fighting your boarders.
lastly even partially succesfull boardings ("only" destroying some hardware or temporarily draw attention/manpower from other areas) is MUCH more impactfull mid combat that it is outside of combat.
Boarding parties is a viable strategy especially if you can just "transport" them the star trek way
Also, it is needed when you rescue a hostage /POW/ capture key enemy personnel/ rescue allies
The ability to teleport things into enemy hulls star trek style would change space combat in quite a few ways (teleport a nuke into an enemy ship for an instant win).
As for rescuing personnel, usually you can only safely board a target once you have already disabled the target's weapons and propulsion systems, which basically requires you to already win a fight against the ship before sending your troops in, rather than using the boarding to win the fight.
But in Star Trek the Transporters can’t beam when a ship has its shields up. So you have to completely disable your opponent to drop yours and then hope that they don’t get off a lucky final shot… 🙂
The Expanse books explain why even in those cases it's not. Boarding action is a race to secure the bridge, CIC, and engineering at the same time. If one of those isn't secured by the boarders, the defending personnel in it can disable the magnetic containment around the reactor and reduce both the boarding party and the ship they wanted to secure into their component atoms. Unless you're teleporting your Marines into all three of these compartments simultaneously and all three of them are able to secure the rooms instantly, boarding action will fail 99 out of 100 times.
Out of curiosity, sir, have you ever read "The Chronicles of the Lensmen"? It is one of the progenitors of the space opera genre, and it fully explains situations for both boarding actions (and in the vast distances of space) and gimmick weapons.
First off, boarding actions: Primarily used where ship combat is too destructive. Early on, purely acts of piracy/slavers. Ship combat would usually cause the entire crew to be destroyed, and do substantial damage to cargo. Depending on what they faced some pirates would just beam out the living quarters to secure cargo, but what if you want to secure prisoners, or don't want to risk damaging precious cargo, especially biological? There were also specialty missions involved for capturing particularly important pieces of equipment or other information. The manner in which they made these actions viable in the vastness of space is deeply tied to the particular sciences of the series, but I can explain in more detail if you'd like.
Secondly, gimmick weapons. Incredibly useful if primary weapons fail. This happened several times over the course of the series. Probably the first was when the Galactic Patrol was in danger of being obliterated. Enemy ships deployed shields and weapons superior to anything that the Patrol could mount. Something needed to be done, and the result was a specialty weapon with a ship built entirely around it. Almost all conventional offensive power had to be discarded to support it, and it was essentially a massive gamble. This also coincided with a boarding mission where not only did the weapon need to eliminate one of the vastly superior enemy ships, but a boarding party then had to secure whatever the source of its overwhelming power was (it turned out to be efficient reception and conversion of stellar energy from distant stars, essentially granting near limitless power, until knowledge of how it worked allowed a scrambler to be built that blocked it).
Re boarding in Lensman: I think the ultimate gimmick weapon, and the one I still love (and adapted to a WH40k game), is the Space Axe.
@@CyberiusT The Space Axe is amazing. And I love how it helps make melee viable in a space setting. “Shields can stop energy weapons, so just get a huge weapon”.
And by the end of the series they're firing planets made of antimatter through hyperspace at each other. Bergenholm is clearly the baddest sonofabitch in space in that universe.
@@TigerofRobare Yes, Warhammer 40K is one of the few settings that beats Lensman in terms of Weapon's of Planetary Destruction.
"You have a Death Star? How cute. We bundle the energy output of a sun into one beam, just come a little closer. Not coming closer? Should we throw one or several planets at their moon-sized planet destroyer or just use a Negasphere? Of course we could humble them and take their toy apart with a fleet of battleships and their Primary Beams."
I personally find that boarding could work, if you can ensure that
1. You have a reliable way to almost if not immediately close the gap between you and your target, preferrably undetected and
2. You have a reliable way to get in because normally you can't just use any ordinary airlock to get inside, yet at the same time you better not damage the craft itself, causing a leak or potentially worse
3. you must be capable of getting enough people of sufficient quality to do the boarding itself because the crew of the ship got both the home turf and the numbers advantage, while the boarders only got surprise on their side, and even that might not always be the case.
In conclusion, boarding can work, but there are too many individual factors that make it a rather situational tactic.
interesting line of thought, how about these observations:
1. Then why not close the gap with some sort of bomb or other weapon.
2. then disable the ship through other means, and for god's sake run scans or basic observations on the enemy vessel.
3. what is to stop them from scuttling that section and blasting you to space? you can just shoot or bomb them if you can get people to their vessel.
in short, while there are going to be exceptions, none of these points really make an excuse for boarding actions to be doctrine, at best they can be a maneuver based on very special opportunity.
Yeah, that's why I would rather spend my time and energy building up a military advantage.
I think boarding can work in two cases;
1: the enemy dont know they are in a battle yet, so most of his defences are down and un prep.
2: the faction doing the boarding is a "swarm" faction that can sacrifice men,bugs,drones etc like nothing.
Also boarding always goin to open a second "front" for the defenders, so i can see it being use as a regular doctrine for a faction.
Any properly prepared boarding party would not have any issue with atmo loss.
1 If you can close the gap, a bomb or EMP seems more reliable then a strike team.
2 If you have a way to board withoit damaging the ship, a spy drone or some sort of malware would be much more effective then space pirates.
3 a faction capable of providing such an elite training would probably be capable of training an infiltration team, which is more versatile and dangerous.
I'm surprised that - excluding maneuvers like the Marg Sabl - ships always maintain a unified 'up' in multiple franchises.
Also it would be interesting if a designer in the Star Wars universe tried to capitalize on flaws of ships like Star Destroyers by maintaining the massive oversized bridge structure but have the command section buried deeper into the ship, thus getting rid of a major weakness while leaving opponents unaware.
I have a feeling that would be a command and control issue. it's a lot easier to orient from a single point of origin like the flagship than from a local planet or star. modern air forces due something similar in order to make commands easier
That would be op,and I've been thinking about that too
The bridge part is more about ship architecture than tactics
in Star Wars Squadrons, you can actually evade enemy anti-fighter weapons by going underneath the target ship
If you’re at the point where you’re critiquing Star Wars, then you’ve outgrown it
In the Starhawks case, three of them used their tractor beams to drag the Super Star Destroyer/Star Dreadnought Ravager, an Executor Class, out of jakkus orbit and slammed it into the planet after its escorts were destroyed. I imagine that was the reason for the tractor beams.
I feel like boarding actions would be a neccesary part of policing space by established powers so they can maintain security. Would it happen in a space battle? Nah, probably not.
Imagine even trying to get into docking position to even board your enemy. With current technology it takes an entire day to dock a spacecraft onto the ISS without getting shot at. Now you have to do that while getting shot at.
@@robbieaulia6462 he is talking about boarding ships like merchant systems, which is needed
More likely, you just track any 'pirates' down to wherever their eventually destination is since you could easily track them from anywhere in a solar system.
Hiding a spacecraft anywhere in the solar system would be pretty much impossible.
I feel like boarding actions would mostly end up as an after-combat action. If any of the enemy ships were disabled but still reasonably intact (say you knocked out their reactor, or something like that) then you'd send in a boarding party after to try to secure prisoners/intel. Actually taking the ship would be a best case pipe dream, since it'd probably be safer to just build a new ship from scratch than try to repair a ship that you just battered into scrap metal and then stick your own crew on it, unless the enemy had surrendered and powered down the ship before you board them.
@@robbieaulia6462 Docking is complex because you need to undock without causing too much damage to either ship. That's not as much of a concern when the boarding ship is just a breaching pod that barely deserves the name "ship" and the boarded ship belongs to the enemy.
You left out my favorite: The same-plane, nose-to-nose, old-fashioned slugfest we often saw in the older Star Trek battles. Space is a three-dimensional playing field, but somehow -- and the larger the fleets, to more likely this was to be onscreen -- the ships would all line up opposite each other and begin shooting. That didn't work so well in the 1700s for foot soldiers, I don't see how it could be an excellent way to even begin combat in space with advanced starships.
Uh no it worked pretty well in the 1700s to the early 1800s.
Britain literally built the largest empire know to man with those tactics, so I'd say for the time, it worked pretty well.
I was expecting this. Most writers & directors seem to not get their heads wrapped around the idea that space is three-, well really four, -dimensional. Even if you meet on the same plane why would you be oriented the same way?
Maybe the only time I read this being directly addressed is in Ender's Game.
"The Enemy's gate is Down."
The thumbnail for this video promises it, but it does not deliver. Lame.
A couple thoughts:
1) Would scuttling your ship actually be standard procedure against boarding though? Historically, when boarding was common, sinking your own ship in response wasn't the usual response. So if the distance problem can be solved then I could see boarding making a return.
4) Usually when someone is blowing up a star or something to destroy a fleet it's a tactic of desperation anyway. I've never come across such a thing being used as the standard go-to tactic when there's a reasonable chance of winning in a more conventional manner. So in a desperate situation surely the small probability of success is better than a (nearer to) certainty of defeat?
In 1879 a Peruvian ironclad was shot up by a Chilean one, at one point their flag came down... so the Chileans stopped shooting... but since they didnt stop the ship, the Chileans kept shooting until they stopped, two boats with marines were then sent over and they took the ironclad without a shot being fired, back then ships still had a marine garrison, but they didnt defend the boarding and their officers threw their swords and revolvers over the side... they then yelled "Peru doesnt surrender!!!"
...just as they meekly surrendered their warship.
They had opened the sea cocks... but just enough to ensure the Chileans would make it in time, people back then didnt know how to swim so they tried not to overdue the "scuttling".
If they wanted to avoid the ship being captured, they had a classic powder room, just make a fuse or use a revolver... done.
...if surviving is secondary of course, but if it is not, half-opening the sea-cocks so you can get captured is a better plan!
The "Huascar" is still in Chile and is one of the oldest warships afloat, as a museum.
Unless the crew held some bushido esk code of honor, they would allow themselves to be captured.
Scuttling a ship that has been evacuated is one thing. Scuttling a ship with your men still on board is probably a war crime. (So would scuttling a ship under the pretence of surrender.)
In my own setting, even pirates will promise the safe passage of they're victims. (As long as they cooperate.)
I can see scuttling being an option. Recall the ST:TOS episode where Kirk was going to self-destruct the Enterprise to prevent Bele (the "black & white" man) from taking control of it.
If I'm a private freighter captain with all my assets tied up in my ship, or if the enemy is believed to go all "Reaver" on captives -- I'll be sitting there with a deadman switch wired to the warp-core and a plasma-thrower in each hand!
"Nemo me impune lacessit, bastiches!" 😡
@@stevenscott2136 Sure... but if the ships isnt yours and you expect the enemy to just put you in a prisoner camp and feed you... how many are going to blew up the ship with all its crew?
@@stevenscott2136 I'm not saying that scuttling wouldn't be an option ever, just that historically it wasn't really done in response to boarding. Now, if you're fighting an enemy that is guaranteed to subject you to some "fate worse than death" things then sure, blowing up your own ship may be an option.
But in any case where there's a reasonable chance of being taken prisoner (and taking prisoners can be useful for a bunch of reasons so I would suspect most enemies would) then I think surrendering would be preferable to blowing oneself up or being stranded in deep space (abandoning ship in the comparatively small oceans on Earth is already not an appealing prospect, doing so in space seems like it'd be just as bad if not worse) in whatever lifeboat-type craft the ship may have.
In the defense of the starhawk, it ripped a star destroyer in half at one point, and the ships was also meant to help with reconstruction after the war.
“The chance of capturing another ship is relatively low”
Unless the people capturing it are genetically modified super humans with rocket launchers and chainsaws as their basic kit, covered in armor that basically makes them a walking tank, who can move, think, react, and kill faster than any human ever could.
Yeah... no. I love 40k but it is dumb.
And we're always assuming that the space ships which they are trying to capture have the interiors designed specifically to fit bulky walking tanks.
There is something so comical of the ship spinning the enemy
Yeah the Reaver ships used a lot of absurd tactics during that scene, like attaching literal blades to their ships. But they are a faction of insane people who like to fly their ships around without radiation protection so... Yeah if anyone is going to be using grappling hooks to yeet the enemy around and other ridiculous stuff just for the hell of it, it's them
Or if you like to grapple with ships you are likely to get it wrong and end up with this situation.
Something to note: every weapon is situational. weapons system are dependent on the sensor system that allows it to target enemies, sensors due to their nature are usually exposed much more than other equipment. As such sensors are naturally vulnerable and high priority targets. They do not have to be destroyed with ship to ship combat either, if you have advanced AI, and your enemy doesn't, then you can hack the ship and disable or even destroy it (why the UNSC didn't do this more is beyond me (ik smart AI were not common place, but they were still present in some battles), especially because we see how effective it is the one and only time Cortana does it) Due to this Boarding and ramming could be considered viable.
Which as flipside to this video "highly effective tactics we never see"
1. Electronic and digital warfare
2. Sabotage and espionage
Rarely are space weapons that precise or systems so clustered like in Star Trek where you can target the 'weapons grid' or 'sensor grid'
Hacking an enemy sensor only works if your enemy has an active comm signal open, and the sensor system is networked with the communications system. ?If either the comm system is turned off, or the sensors are operating only on their own internal network, then hacking wont work at all, no matter how advanced your AI is.
I feel like we’re never going to know what makes space combat the most or least effective, until we do it for real.
And it might change over the centuries with technological develpoment as warfare on earth changed over the centuries as well.
Regarding the time Carter blew up a star, it’s worth remembering that the Tau’ri were only able to develop that tactic due to a freak accident where they gated to a planet near a black hole. So yes, a lot of unlikely things had to happen, but the most unlikely parts happened years before
Yeah. Kind of funny how they eventually used that black hole gate as a garbage disposal. Imagine you are a poor doomed SG-team and when you give up all hope of returning the gate opens twice in quick succession, spewing out some colonialists who got trolled and billions of tons of stellar mass.
I like how in space, something with infinite dimensions, two sides always line up *right* level.
That’s because for the most part, the bodies of a solar system will be on a plane. Obviously people don’t have to fight aligned with this plane, but it helps with fleet coordination.
Yeah I think the third dimension represents a lot of untapped potential for a ton of scifi. Even in a planar solar system, being able to flank above and below your opponent is just as important as maneuvering in any other direction and could result in interesting tactics.
I have other problems with how the scale of space is routinely mutilated on screen, but that's a different discussion.
not really a problem especially with large ships who will manover in intercept Position aka the two dimensional plain . smaller ships can exploit it against slower ships
Yeah, a star or pyramid shaped formation would be much better
That's because the two biggest sci-fi series Star Wars and Star Trek, have space battles that have largely been inspired by world war 2.
I feel like boarding is a very situational and setting dependent. One of the reasons no really mentioned is that boarding in the age of sail was a standard tactic because, ships are valuable and can be easily pressed into service and captured and that in the Age of Sail actually sinking a ship is actually a very difficult prospect.
In the 40k setting, there is inconstancy within writing of course, naval battles where one side doesn't hold a massive advance over the other generally occur over a period of days. The ships in this universe are generally capable of taking enormous amount of damage and generally require being blasted into oblivion to actually destroy them. In this situation boarding does make sense as with some luck you might be able to cripple or hamper a ship from the inside enough to hamper its effectiveness. This applies especially when side are capable of fielding superhuman warrior's who potentially to do damage in a boarding action is far distortional to their threat in the void.
The Halo universe also presents a interesting setting where it is useful given the resilience and lethality of Covenant ships when compared with Human one/s mean that a boarding party, especially where Spartans are involved, have a slightly better chance of destroying the ship in such an action then the actual navy would.
Plus melee is genrally more effective for some races and enemies. becuase grimdark.
Distance is also a problem though. Astarties are valuable and if the pod misses there goes all that gene seed.
@@jarlupathingy7260 Boarding torpedoes seldom miss, as they are self-guided, but they can be shot down, so yes it is a massive risk to yeet a strike force of invaluable supersoldiers as projectiles... takes a special kind of "not giving a f***" to pull it off successfully lol
The war hammer logic was really absurd to me. The atom bombs from world war 2 were almost powerful enough to destroy the average 40k ship. Using an atom bomb on a ship is ridiculous for sea vessels, but in 40k it would be substandard loadout. They would use better tech than we currently have. The tsar bomb is a 60year old weapon with blast radius of 160km and would destroy the biggest 40k vessel with one shot. Stick one on each missile in combat(not even overkill for 40k) and space ships drop like flies….
Basically, you just laid out a logic pattern where all scenarios lead to a preference to boarding. Are your ships durable? use boarding tactics. Are your ships fragile? Use boarding tactics.
What you are forgetting is the need to travel several hundred thousand kilometers against a moving target, under fire. You almost need a deus ex machina excuse just to consider such things.
To your point. Yes, if you somehow achieved spacefaring technology while only knowing how to use matchlock pistols and cannons as your main armament, you would likely find boarding more feasible then fireing from the engagement range.
The whole gimmick weapon issue plays a large part in the first Honor Harrington book as well. Outlines exactly the problem with gimmicky weapons 🙂
Darn it you stole my example of how it can be done well
All of these are valid points, except for boarding, only in specific cases. Like you said, boarding is an archaic tactic that was effective pre-WWII. But there space environments out there that fit this criteria, namely treasure planet. For alternate universes similar to treasure planet, where the space environment mimics that of a pre-WWII, steampunk/late colonization period era, boarding is actually a valid method of victory because of the close proximity of space battles. However, I can’t think of many other space environments much like treasure planet’s. Most alternate universes are a bit more realistic, with no air or gravity or radiation shielding in space, most of which treasure planet ignores for theatrical sake.
Most realistic space boarding action is to capture spacestation
Other viable 'boarding action' examples:
1: Star Wars: A New Hope opening sequence, essentially following the advice of the video by 'docking' the Senate ship inside one of their massive warships, then running in a boarding party. Any time you have one ship capable of swallowing another whole, you have an option for
2: In settings like Star Trek, where short-range teleportation is viable, boarding actions become considerably more likely to return to common use. Trek, of course, requires shields to be down before transporters can be used, making it a tactical viability.
3: In some settings, it's possible to disable a ship's engines without destroying it. (In others, destroying the engine pretty much guarantees a big boom.) If you're lucky enough to be a space pirate in one of these, boarding parties, while risky, may be worth the dangers. Disable the enemy's engines and weapons with precision fire, then board the drifting hulk. At this point, it's no more difficult than landing on a hostile-infested asteroid.
The spinning thing got some use in Gundam: IBO, where it worked because ships are coated in near-impenetrable nanolaminate armor (which will almost always resist the first impact and can only be broken by successive hits to a compromised plate) so combat happens at knife-fight ranges (sometimes literally) with a lot of ramming and use of grappling hooks to slam things into other things and do slingshot maneuvers.
What about the classic star trek strategy of firing at the enemy only once or twice then sitting there scanning for weaknesses while they beat down your shields a few % at a time with continuous fire.
I don't think Star Trek ever even tried to make any sense whatsoever...
@@Samm815 I don't fallow.
What do you mean by that?
Only the best from Starfleet Academy!
"Sir we fired one shot at the enemy. Their Shields are still up."
"Well, scan for weaknesses."
"Better hurry, Worf, they are hammering us badly. Shields at 65%."
"After intense scrutiny sir, it seems their shields are vulnerable to multiple attacks. We should have been firing this entire time. We do have like thirty different phaser banks and torpedo launchers."
"Hrm. Well analyzed. However we stood here for ten minutes and now our shields are down, weapons inoperative, and they are boarding. Options?"
"Well, we could flood the ship with Trilithium-baride, that would kill all of them, but it would also kill all seventeen surviors sir."
"We could blow up the ship."
"We could beam over to their ship and use it to blow up ours?"
"Or you morons could just surrender, we're already on the bridge and armed with disruptors."
"Oh, shit."
A thing to mention, in halo lore, Covenant, specifically the Sanghelli have high amount of honor, so when facing other sangheli or other races excluding humans they will choose to board an enemy ship instead of just destroying it, even more honorably is boarding it with only energy swords.
5:10 I have kind of objection here toward example on screen.I mean Stargate one. You kinda suggest that Apophis fleet just arrived let itself destroyed by happening supernova, and his enemies were relying on it. But If I remember correctly they actually caused that star(which were not even unstable) to explode, after luring that fleet there, which arrived without worry since nothing of sorts supposed to happen in first place. Which makes it rather something like Red Cliff scenario.
See, I always thought that engagement ranges would DECREASE, not increase, if you're going FTL in interstellar war. Because if your ammo is NOT FTL, you want to jump in before they can get their FTL travel ability up again.
Depends on the setting but if you have the tech to go ftl you can make weapons go just as fast imo
IMO if you want space battles that make any sense whatsoever in your setting, you need to put some rather hard limitations on the FTL system.
How do you even fight a war if the enemy can at any time just jump into low orbit around your homeworld and drop a few dozen nukes onto your industrial centers with no warning? No defense can stay at full allert forever.
Best case scenario, you end up with some sort of cold war, mutually assured destruction IN SPAAAACE! situation.
You need some limits like the hyperlimit in the Honor Harrington novels, or the jump points in the Starfire Universe.
There was this novel setting in some obscure manga I saw once, where the FTL tech basically formed a large "bubble" of warped space around a ship during travel. Ships in FTL were obvious to detect, and could also be intercepted by others. If two ships in FTL met their "bubbles" would merge and they'd now effectively be sharing a pocket of space able to fly about it like normal. This meant that pretty much all interstellar combat occurred at near point blank range. It was all brutal salvos of weapons fire in a chaotic debris filled mosh pit as more ships joined the bubble.
The other very unique quirk of this FTL style in the setting, was that the space in the "bubble" was perfectly insulated. Meaning that no light, heat or other radiations could escape it. Every bit of engine thrust, every weapons firing, every ship reactor going critical, all added to the background heat/radiation of the space, and all the ships involved were trapped in it until every ship present disabled their FTL drive. So the ships in this setting were built extremely hardened, but otherwise had to endure being gradually cooked the longer the battle went on. In fierce battles the FTL pocket space would turn from black to blinding white, as the ambient heat and radiation became like gradually diving into a star, and the debris from destroyed ships melt down into floating streams of molten metal.
I can't remember the name of the manga and have never seen it since, but I just loved this aspect of the setting specifically. Was honestly pretty hardcore, and super unique.
@@esotericegoism7536 As you say, it depends on the setting, but if you require large engines to produce your FTL effect (which does seem to be a common condition of most sci-fi) then you wouldn't be able to make any reasonable FTL weapon. Lasers, by definition, are not FTL, and if a missile has to be even 1/10th the size of the ship carrying it then it's not exactly practical.
But then in reality, almost everything on the list is situational. A writer needs to set up their own rules and, most importantly, understand and abide by them. Case in point, the Silverhawks cartoon had decided that the reason why all of these aliens didn't have to wear helmets in space was because that section of space was oxygenated. Did it make sense? No. But those were the rules you had to accept if you were playing in that universe. Much like the Force in Star Wars. You don't need to explain it. You just accept it and move on.
If you're capable of accelerating a ship to FTL, you're capable of accelerating ammo to it as well.
At that point, "ramming" isn't such a bad tactic after all, just remove the crew and point it at the nearest enemy planet or star.
The thing I love about #4 is the whole "let's use weapon X on the star to make it explode" ... "Captain do you have any idea how much energy is involved in making a G class star explode? Why don't we just point that energy at the enemy fleet and use 1% of its power to flash vaporise them (and the planet behind them)."
A boarding action might work if you disable the attacking ship’s power supply even temporarily before boarding. That would effectively knock out the ship’s defenses and might prevent them from scuttling the ship before you get there. The only other way I can see it working is if you somehow distract the defensive guns so a boarding group could sneak aboard and disable the self destruct and/or power before the enemy is aware of what’s going on.
I mean, sure, but boarding is only really effective if you've basically already won the fight or have an overwhelming advantage (knocking out enemy power and if you successfully distract the enemy defences and somehow get the boarders inside, you could just as easily have destroyed the target with missiles that stayed hidden).
That seems to be the cost of taking enemy ships intact.
@@collectiusindefinitus6935 I imagine the true goal of a boarding action is less about taking the ship intact (you don't want to trust a ship you just shot up with your own crew on it, for instance), and more about securing intel from the enemy ship/prisoners. If you can board a disabled ship and get to their computers before they realize what's going on and have a chance to destroy them, you could get intel on other enemy fleets movements, where their supply lines are, etc.
"The enemy would scuttle try to scuttle their own ship.." This is still an acceptable outcome.
Also imagine 2 ships of exactly equal offense and defense. A hit and run boarding action takes out a targeting system or power relay or kills a maintenance team. This now becomes an advantage for the other ship. At worst it's a distraction during an emergency.
Also disabling then boarding is a sound tactic if you have the time.
I thought around the potential to force the enemy to lose assets. A boarding party that can force the enemy to scuttle the ship might not be fun for the guys boarding, but, still results in a win for the team that is still alive. Many ships may also be carrying things to important to scuttle on a whim as well. A powerful AI, primary command and communications facilities, remote logistics support, or VIPs. All those reasons may delay the destruction for an extended time or even stop it entirely depending on the VIP. Intelligence discovers enemy emperor is making an unscheduled visit to a world where your forces have a way to ambush them(sensor blind spot, collaborators, etc). If forcing capitulation or cessation of hostilities is the goal having the emperors life in your hands is a hell of a bargaining chip, the enemy would be unwilling to scuttle his vessel in most circumstances.
For number 3, the Gravestone from SWTOR, it had what can be described as a ramped up sith lightning attack that could travel between enemies, it was extremely useful against the Eternal Empire's fleet because it was literally built to defeat that fleet, and is not very useful against other types of fleets
"It seems insane."
I like the idea of leaning into the absurdity of cutting your way into a space-faring ship w/ a crew of insane ODST-like characters.
1. Boarding actions would probably not be the primary weapon in any fight, but they could be one tool in a toolbox. They would likely rely on a carrier launching boarding craft rather than direct ship-to-ship boarding, so that would handle the distance issue. The boarding actions may not immediately involve capturing the whole ship, but perhaps just disrupting operations or sabotaging key systems. As ships get larger, this becomes more reasonable, becoming more akin to dropping paratroopers behind enemy lines.
2. Ramming certainly could work as a last-ditch effort. At large ranges, perhaps not, but if you are in a closer-range situation, you may be able to fly to the enemy ship before it destroys you. Also, the relative maneuverability is important. If the ramming ship can maneuver really well, it should be able to hit the other ship. As a ship design, this does make less sense, but in certain situations it may be effective, perhaps working together with boarding. But ramming is, ultimately, very situation-dependent in its effectiveness.
3. Any new weapon may be a gimmick weapon. You only know that it is a gimmick by field testing its effectiveness. In real life, planes, tanks, rockets...pretty much anything might be viewed as a gimmick before it is used. The tractor beam example might be more useful than you think. Even if there are no asteroids, you may be able to make ships crash into each other, similar to as was done in Rogue One except this would be easier. Taking out two capital ships like that seems far more effective than 20 turbolasers, assuming those are even equivalent in requirements.
4. Environment is always important. True, in space, much of the environment will be empty, but not always. When the opportunity arises, any good strategist should utilize the environment. If a group, say, is recharging near a star, then you can use the star. If you are facing an enemy with inferior engine power, try skimming the edge of a black hole to escape. Maybe the enemy has a thin hull but thick shields; try fighting in a magnetic environment that would largely negate shields. If nothing else, use something like a nebula to disrupt communications. Perhaps this would be more of a defensive strategy than an offensive one, but it is still something to use.
5. Yeah...spinning is weird. Maybe if you can spin enemies into one another? Probably easier to just shoot them though.
There was at least one episode of Battlestar Galactica (the new one ), where a Cylon strike force boarded the Galactica and raised all kinds of hell on board. They did this by basically crash landing in the unused launch bay. It had been set up as a museum, and hadn't yet been returned to service.
If you can easily gain access to a pressurised interior of an enemy vessel, you're probably better off throwing a nuke in there then forgetting about it than sending out a few soldiers which are prone to getting killed.
Shoutout to The Lost Fleet for avoiding all of these. It’s got some of the most enjoyable space battle scenarios I’ve read in a while.
I have complaints about the writing of the series but I will say TLF got the space combat absolutely spot on. I've encountered very few other stories (only The Expanse, really) that use the third dimension, the scale of space, and the relative speeds involved to create a genuinely interesting and unique combat environment.
TLF has some issues with calling out random degrees and directions and expecting readers to enjoy decoding that. And yeah, the writing outside of combat unfortunately gets repetitive
@@lordofthepies, apparently the author's test audience asked for those instead of the more traditional vague relative terminology
I like how in the Starhawk discussion the video shows the Starhawk's tractor beam literally ripping armor plating off the ISD and creating this electrical surge effect, but you class it as a gimmick weapon. There are a million different things I think would be classed better, like interstellar space harpoons, or ship-sized shotguns, or something or other.
I don't know the name for the series of books, but in one of David Weber's stories (there are four books in the setting) they developed a "Primary Beam" that was basically a tractor beam set to rapidly (microseconds) switch back and forth between presser and tractor settings. It literally tears a hole through whatever it shoots at and can't be resisted by shields.
@@katherinestives940
Star fire series. More than 4 books. But it got silly after the bug war, a prequel to Insurrection.
The force beam punched the target. Primaries passed through anything. But an individual shot did relatively little damage most of the time, unless it passed through something critical. Like the antimatter warhead storage. 😬
I fail to see how that still isn't a gimmick. Maybe I've fallen behind on my Star Wars lore, but don't turbolasers outrange tractor beams? Not to mention they could've used conventional weapons to just punch through the armor. And finally a tractor beam is basically just an energy harpoon when used offensively.
@@ChakatBlackstar for most tractor beams you’d be absolutely right. For the Starhawk’s absolutely colossal tractor beam array, you’d be wrong. It can rip small ships apart just with the attractive force, peel the hull plating off a star destroyer while ignoring its shields entirely, and can yank around an executor class super star destroyer with the assistance of a planet’s gravity. And the mayhem it wrecked upon the Imperial Star Destroyer in the video was just from the prototype, imagine what a full production run grade tractor beam could do.
@@ItsJustVirgil Maybe not in massive battles but if its a battle with 1 or 2 star destroyers and the star hawk has an escort then it could be deadly
I have a subjection ,boarding to capture a ship might not be the best idea, but boarding a ship to detonate a nuke onboard the ship is a good one (maybe because it is your only may to bypass their most efficient defenses).
So, i would not say boarding is bad, but rather the goal of the boarding might be good or terrible depending on the objective you seek.
For me the most egregious mistake in lots of TV/film space battles is the lack of appreciation of fighting on a full 3D plane. Some get it much better than others but the amount of time producers/directors equate space battles with sea battles and both ships approach each other on the same plane and at the same angle...
I think Boarding Actions would primarily happen after a battle on disabled ships. Defenders might not be able to scuttle it without killing themselves.
There is also the issue of pirates who would be more interested in capturing/looting a ship rather than just destroying it.
@@spectre111
Even as a military action, capturing ships allows them to be examined for intelligence.
Or as atack on target solo ship
The Tractor Beam is the most neglected weapon in space combat.
I know, right?
Enemy ship moving rapidly in one direction, lock onto something big with the tractor beam and drag it in the opposite direction.
Rip it right off the hull.
The Borgs use it to great efficiency
@@arafat88ryu The Defiant used it as a weapons fire scattering field against a Vorcha.
If nothing else, it can be used to prevent or minimize a ship's maneuverability, making it an easy target.
Good list! I think the best tactics must include what we know today such as being the first to detect and maneuver on the enemy and weapons with longer ranges having the advantage. Others are stealth and thermal camouflage.
Ramming tactics are usually acts of desperation in most sci-fi settings, and the rammer isn’t expected to survive.
Like the sacrifice of the EAS Victory in Babylon 5: A Call to Arms. After the Excalibur’s main gun misses the intended target, only minutes are left before Earth is rendered uninhabitable by the Shadow death cloud. So the captain of the Victory opts to ram his ship into the command center instead of trying to shoot at it (since firing the main gun renders the ship powerless for up to a minute)
Or Agamemnon last charge, even they were rescued
This is why in my sci-fi trunk novel, one of the few bits of tech that gets lingered on is kinetic shield plating. That, combined with electrolytic chaff for sensor blinding, keeps tactics like boarding relevant. More importantly, it keeps the tactics of space warfare recognizable to the readers (and comprehensible to the author).
A bit of a tangent, but IMO sci-fi stuff really, really overestimates future sensor capabilities in space. I'd love for a future rant video to focus on that. From a physics perspective, you HAVE to either catch a bounce, or you can have a receiving sensor behind your target and pass through.
Radiation shielding, needed for space travel, IS SENSOR SHEILDING. This also indirectly further incentivizes boarding actions, as a sensor physically attached to the ship is huge edge.
Radiation ?
Thermal signature is limitable but within limits. A [thermally] shielded ship is a crisping ship.
EM signature can be worked on, yet at the end a [EM] shielded ship is a blind ship. I arbitrary put most hopes on this one.
Nuclear particules ? Non nuclear ship should already emit quasi zero [alpha, neutron] particles. So unless the sci fi setup involves dominance of nuclear powered ships, there is no need to shield against sensors ( protecting the electronics and, if crewed, the crew, still is relevant )
I greatly encourage you for your novel, sci fi is so great !
Take a look at the "projectrho" dot com website ( section "atomic rockets" on the landing page ) for more in depth considerations about space battles and tactics.
Sensor wise, there is a "spacewardetect" page dedicated to the question.
( Yeah ugly website design, but the content is great.)
This really comes down to propulsion. Even if you have radiation shielding to protect the crew, that radiation shielding would be designed to keep random radiation out of the ship, not in. If your propulsion comes from more "traditional" methods using thrust, whatever your engine's exhaust is producing is going to be detectable from pretty long range, and it would require insane levels of energy to prevent your ship from sending that exhaust out into space. And even if you have some sort of other propulsion method, all known energy systems create heat, and spacecraft would need to eject that heat into space or they'd cook the crew.
In other words, you don't need to catch some sort of radar bounce, you just have to be looking for heat, and spacecraft would need to be radiating the heat to prevent their ship from melting. You'd have to propose some sort of Star Trek level tech that ignores basic physics to avoid this, such as something that moves through gravity manipulation or warping space, but there's no reason why future tech wouldn't be able to detect these forces as well (we have the ability to detect things like gravity waves and heat in space with current technology). Not to mention detecting things with mass, which is also theoretically possible, by identifying areas with distorted space. As a final note, unless ships have some method to make them invisible, they could still be identified with ship-based telescopes, and the star field is dense enough that an AI visual system could likely be developed to continually look for ships at fairly high ranges, especially if it is giving off any sort of light spectrum radiation.
The real issue is finding something that is drifting or in low power, so a giant fleet that is just coasting would probably be very difficult to find with passive sensors. Also, nearly all known sensor-like systems are limited by distance, as any sort of radiation emission a ship gives off is going to be dispersed as you get farther out. But I don't think it's *that* hard.
@@hunteriv4869
I did a pretty poor job with my original comment.
I should have specified that I was talking about the pop-scifi sensors that can do stuff like "three life signs detected." Or the notion of scanning a ship from a distance. I take issue with the level of detail that the average fiction ship sensor can gather.
IMO, there's very little way to see into a ship at a distance. Anything that you would want to be protected from radiation/micro meteoroids would be behind something that would block or at least obscure its contents. So exterior engines, sensor towers, maybe an exterior-mounted weapon -- that kind of stuff could be seen/scanned. Everything else would be a black box.
You are completely correct about ships being visible, and even when attempting silent running, would emit some heat. Not only that, but open space is quite bright, and any ship would be visible by the notion of blocking light from the stars behind it.
@@haydenhuffines8648 Ah, that makes sense. I agree with everything you just wrote, lol.
@@haydenhuffines8648 I misunderstood your initial comment, and apologize for being off topic.
I've played some games that do boarding pretty well. Sure, you capture the ship, but it only gets you some extra resources. Sword of the Stars' Zuul do this pretty well, as they consume absolutely everything, hollowing out planets to a fraction of their mass through deadly slave labour and shredding enemy battleships in mobile shredders.
Tractor beams as part of a fleet is incredibly valuable. The ability to deny an enemy ship of its mobility alone is unbelievably useful
@@nuclearsimian3281 acting reasonably, that would require a significant technological edge or size difference between the ships in question. If you're putting enough force on an enemy ship to tear it apart with a tractor beam, you have to have a tractor beam emitter strong enough to be able to withstand outputting that sheer amount of force. If there's similar technology levels, which is more likely to break first: an armoured warship or a highly complex, high energy piece of machinery?
I could see ramming attacks being a thing, if ship's armor development was outpacing weapon development. For an example, look at the ironclad era, all the way up to the pre-dreadnaught era of ship development. Recent developments in metallurgy had created much, much stronger armor, and weapons technology hadn't developed an effective counter yet. So, some of the faster ships in fleets, such as the Royal Navy, were outfitted with ram bows, pretty much to directly counter ironclads. The thinking went that no armor could withstand the force of a massive ship, moving at full speed, impacting the armor. For a sci-fi explanation, you could have a similar situation, but maybe it's a newly discovered material, or new shield technology. An effective counter to this new type of armor hadn't been developed yet, and the technology was expensive/rare, so ships were outfitted with rams, and instructed to try and ram such ships until something better was found.
One thing not to forget with Ramming though, is that the distances involved in space combat are likely to be huuuuuge. A lot of our senses from those things come from our abilities on earth. The range at which the ships are likely to encounter each other are likely to make ramming impossible, simply because of the reaction time. Don't forget that you now have 3D space, not a 2D plane in which to manoeuvre, acceleration, not speed, is what matters... a small vector changes can make it immensely unlikely that the two vectors will cross when intended, while the other guys are free to keep shooting at you the whole time. Again, this need to be emphasized, engagement distances will be huuuuuuuuuuuge. This is why I find the expanse reliance on railguns such a weakness in a mostly realistic show. (let's not talk about the mirrors falling "down" on Ganymede), a constant speed ballistic projectile would be insanely easy to dodge at engagement distances that would be encountered in space combat as soon as the elecromagnetic signal of a railgun launch was detected (as they usually do in the Expanse).
The same is true for ramming. I can only work at very short distances. Damaged ships would likely be boarded by smallcraft without ever putting your capital ships within ramming distance. The scenarios where ramming became possible would be so specific at to become a "gimmicky" weapon. You could not count on ramming and wouldn't build it into ship design, the mass needed for an effective ram would probably be better employed in other weapons, or improving the acceleration curves of your ship instead.
That being said, one thing that I disagree with the video is the reference to "high speeds" in space. One thing to keep in mind is that speed is extremely relative. Our perception of "high speed" in space is based on our recent experiences with orbital flights and space debris. To stay in orbit, stations and satellites (and debris) need very high velocities with respect to the earth, and if they are not in the same orbit, when they meet the resulting relative velocity will indeed be colossal. This does not need to be the case in a space battle. In a scenario of a fleet pursuing another, velocities may not be that different as one catches up to the other and tries to match velocity to increase engagement time. Even in a convergent scenario, the force that wants to keep the engagement open is likely to decelerate to increase the engagement window whatever the initial velocity differential might have been. The relative velocity may therefore not be extremely large automatically just because it is in space.
@@theguyfromsaturn I think the realism of railguns is just directly proportional to your ability to intercept missiles. If we discard lasers and plasma as unrealistic, then it's basically railguns or missiles, and if your railguns can shoot down enemy missiles reliably (there's the rub) due to good targeting and high speeds, then railguns dominate (ECM also factors in here) . If they can't (probably due to quantity and or fancy maneuvers of missiles, and Expanse missiles are pretty good dancers I believe)) then missiles dominate. Might also be about how much fuel the missile can carry for those tricky maneuvers.
@@RorikH For the expanse universe, I don't think fuel for the missiles is an issue... just consider that ships can sustain 1g accelerations for long periods of time and they have very tiny fuel supplies judging by the size of the ships that we have seen. So assume for the Expanse universe missiles have infinite fuel. Further assume that they can attains several gs acceleration since even the ships can routinely do this. Railguns won't be able to beat the delta-V that such a missile can generate at long-range engagements (and lets face it, if you have the engines of the Expanse then long range missile engagement is where it's at). Further, missiles have the ability to be able to maneuvre at the end of their run. With properly designed salvos including missiles with ECM of their own to defeat point defense, they are much more likely to strike a hit at very large range than the railgun projectile which will not have attained the same speed (that long range of continuous acceleration will really be in favour of the missile) and will be locked on its course, making it a much easier target to intercept or avoid than the missiles.
In short, because of the Epstein drive that makes all their ships so small and powerful, the Expanse has essentially made the railgun irrelevant in-universe. I just find it immersion-breaking that they keep wanting to portray it as this superweapon that it couldn't be given their drive tech.
@@theguyfromsaturn the thing with the expanse is, those missiles can still be shot down by PDCs. This has a lot of potential of turning most battles into a war of attrition.
But those railguns function as a trump card. Especially since those missiles have a minimum effective range of 1000 km. Which kinda implies that those missiles rely on a kinetic kill, and need time to accelerate.
Ramming can also be refered to as manned kinetic kill missiles. Which can be quite cost effective.
OBVIOUSLY before you board you'll cripple the ship, and most fictional crews aren't that keen on scuttling their own vessel rather than surrendering and living to fight another day. You underestimate the mighty boarding action :D
That still circumstantial. In some universes part of crippling a ship is to sent a group of specialist to blow up it sheld generators or engines.
As for.scuttling tue ship, that can.depend on wheither it military or civilian, ecape or recuse, the treatment if the crew, etc.
@@woaddragon sure but the point the video is making is "these tactics are generally extremely bad outside of rare exceptions", and I'm saying "actually boarding makes sense in many universes, provided it's written sensibly" :)
In the Expanse, they talk about how you generally don't want to board another ship, because EVEN IF your ship can take the barrage, its STILL a heck of a lot of damage that you take on that you are going to have to pay to repair. In most cases, the only reason to do it is to get right to engineering and to the bridge to cripple the ship if you intend to claim it. But it only really works in an overkill situation where you have a HUGE naval vessel against something much smaller that isn't armed well enough to pierce your ships armor. They also do a lot of explaining that while space is huge and everything is far away and hard to hit (especially when its firing and moving at the same time), most torpedos are designed to be really fast, and really good at locking onto you and not letting you get away. If you are really into space military tactics, read the Expanse story..its really great and showing you how horrible it is to fight battles in space.
Harley Quinn: Why don't you just shoot him?
Joker: Just SHOOT him?
On the topic of boarding actions, I was going to mention a plethora of small-boat and helo-borne maritime interdictions, but the overriding majority of modern examples are either piracy, anti-piracy, or similar law enforcement seizures. I would say there is still a modern (and likely futuristic) doctrine of using divers (eva marines) to conduct ship-born exfil, infil, and in-port sabotage, but those are indeed different from interdictions and boarding operations.
*You spin me right round baby right round like a record player right round baby!*
I had a ship called the Aegean Blade Ship designed for ramming based on these justifications:
- The ships were originally built by the very traditionalist Aegean, who usually fought melee battles. As such, many of their ships were designed with similar melee capabilities
- There are very few blade ships left, because most were destroyed by superior ranged vessels. This is because the power needed to run shields powerful enough to facilitate the use of ramming also meant they couldn't have any ranged weapons.
- The modern Blade Ships have been heavily modified with modern technology. Most notably, due to the invention of the Link Ship (a ship that can open temporary rift lanes), they don't have to engage enemy ships from a long distance. As such, most fleets that utilize them only jump them into the system once their other ships have closed enough distance. Even then, they're still used in only the most incredibly niche circumstances.
- The design of the ship is very thin, meaning it's 1) Harder to hit, and 2) Easier to effectively cloak, making it harder to hit. Issue with cloaking is that they have to divert power from the shields, meaning the ship always has to de-cloak before ramming.
- Why bother when you can just use ranged weapons? Shields. Too powerful. In this world, defense won the arms race, making ranged fighting so much harder. Because the blade ship lacks ranged weaponry, it can divert extra power into its own shields, easily overpowering enemy defenses.
- Also, it's just a really well-designed ship in general. Very hardy, and is one of the only capital ships capable of sublight acceleration. The Aegean could've accomplished so much more if they didn't insist on making 90% of their ships rely on ramming maneuvers.
I think boarding actions would be common place for "small scale scifi" where humanity only has a solar system or two
Because the resource cost of a space ship would be gigantic
Also depends on the development of said systems. Sure a species may have only a handful of systems but their population might be far higher than most sci-fi have in their whole galaxy.
@@mill2712 yeah fair point
There is a reason that a boarding torpedo if space marines is arguably more dangerous than a normal torpedo. Whenever you have a really powerful unit like elite shock troops, super soldiers, birder bots, or gene-engendered berserker beasts, it can force the crew of the enemy ship to either hope to overcome them in combat or damage their own ship to try and cauterize the infection. And that’s assuming sabotage isn’t the goal.
Bonus point if the boarding party is expendable or can simply jump out into the void and be picked up later.
Also, remember that if surrender is an option, then many will be unwilling to simply blow up the ship. Maybe just render it combat ineffective before capture/surrender.
Ramming, it depends on engagement ranges, though if nothing else then crippled ships are always an easy target. The distance issue can be solved with the speed of the ships, and battle damage can decrease their ability to maneuver out of the way, as well as lessen structural integrity or bring down shields.
For gimmicks weapons, depends how many eggs you put into that basket. As long as you are at least decent without it I don’t think it is inherently bad.
For instance, the Star Hawk can take a disabled enemy ship, use it as a human shield, and hit the enemy with it as a sort of kamikaze attack.
Those last two I totally agree with though. Using the environment is risky, and probably an act of desperation or relies on massive intelligence superiority, and the reavers are insane (though amusing).
The thing about space marine boarding torpedos is that the cost of failure is so high. If it’s shot down by one of the many flak batteries on the enemy ship before it makes contact that’s so many space marines dead and they’re so difficult to replace.
Teleporting terminators makes a bit more sense because they arrive directly into the heart of the ship without the risk of getting shot down. Although they now have to worry about getting teleported into the floor or walls of the ship.
@@captainsalty8898 true, but marines are easier to replace than a warship, so sometimes it’s worth the risk.
Boarding actions are often the objective, and not the means to some other end. "I want your stuff" is honestly the most common reason to have a war in the first place. And USA is famous for our "dont touch my boats" motivation
With a couple of (mostly move-based) exceptions, cloaking devices in Star Trek prevent shields and weapons from being used while cloaked.
With that in mind, ramming could be a VERY potent tactic if you make a ship whose main purpose was to do this. Emphasize armor rather than shields, stay cloaked, and just fly right through your target.
As an alternative, since the Romulans like their bird motifs, make a ship that has dedicated "talons" on the bottom of the ship made of the strongest and densest material you can find or make. Just fly past an enemy while cloaked, and let the talons tear through their hull (or rip off their warp nacelles, or rip through the "neck of a Starfleet ship so the saucer is forcibly separated from the rest of it, etc).
I feel like "the enemy will just scuttle the ship as soon as you board" could be used to your advantage. If you have the technology to close the distance quickly enough without getting absolutely destroyed by their weapons, but you don't have weapons that can harm them - either because they're better equipped, or yours are offline - you either end up with a free, functional ship, or you end up forcing your enemy to abandon ship and self-destruct the threat.
But that is a huge bunch of very specific situations all aligning to make it viable, just like how it wasn't standard practice by WWII but in super rare situations some grunts would get in a dingy. I totally agree with your list, just throwing out niche ideas.
That's kind of like how in contemporary warfare, armies will often scuttle advanced tanks that are merely immobilized, to ensure that the enemy doesn't capture them.
@@MrFelblood Also why, if I recall, advanced planes are intentionally designed to be as unsalvageable as possible after a crash. At least one long-distance almost-perpetual-flight spy plane was meant to be that for sure.
The only time I can see using 'spinning' a ship is if one side of your ship's weapons or anti-fighter/ anti-missile defence turrets are destroyed or off-line and you gotta turn 180 degree to maintain combat effectiveness.
This is explicitly the case in the Honor Harrington series. And The Course of Empire.
There's another use for it that pops up in the Honor Harrington books: increasing rate of fire. Spinning to fire the port weapons while the starboard ones are reloading and vice versa.
Another use depending on your setting is if ships have regenerating energy shields and different regions of shielding are created by independent generators instead of a single generator covering the whole ship. Then spinning would spread incoming hits across different generators' areas of coverage and make it take longer to punch through your shields than if everything is hammering into one generator's area.
ramming makes sense if all your weapons have been destroyed or something and you're going to die anyway. at the speeds involved in more realistic space combat you may have a chance to destroy both ships before the enemy's ship has a chance to react.
I can't remember where I heard it but the best example of what space combat at long range might be like went something like "you need to aim where your target is going to be in half an hour, based on where it was half an hour ago"
I think boarding actions are a useful tool for asymmetric warfare.
All it takes are a few drop-pod style ships to quickly get a bunch of ballsy and well trained soldiers into a critical area of the ship and take control long enough for more help to arrive.
The aim should never be full control, but diverting enemy resources away from the battlefield
Boarding actions make complete sense. You are just pondering battle scenarios where the objective is defeating or destroying an enemy fleet, and not the ones where the objective is capturing specific information or a person of interest inside a ship. 2 main examples:
1) The raid of the Imperial Stormtroopers of the Devastator inside the Tantive IV to recover the schematics of the Death Star.
2) The raid of commander Radec inside the New Sun to steal the codes of the nuclear weapons the Helghast Empire had captured during the invasion of Vekta.
He did mention that it would make sense concerning capturing intelligence. But other franchises like 40k feature boarding almost like entire factions primary means of fleet warfare. E.g. Space Marine and Necron teleportariums, Tyranid boarding craft.
I think the gold standard of boarding tactics is the Long Night of Solace from Halo Reach. The plan is pretty simple, get some fighters, attack a small warship, cut its comms and engines, take it over, put a bomb on it, blow up the big ship. The use of long-range self-sufficient fighters is a key aspect that caused the plan to really work out, since their maneuverability allowed them to get in close and then deposit their crews on the ship directly, something I'd imagine would be a major factor in space engagements. Targeting a corvette made the most sense as well, since it was small enough to deal with both the hangar and bridges crews quickly but still large enough to get access to the supercarrier directly. I think this sort of approach makes the tactic much more viable.
Also of note, even with modern ships, scuttling can take hours sometimes, and I doubt the advanced warships of the future will have a "reactor explodes" button or anything like that, so I don't think scuttling is the biggest concern so long as you're swift enough
I also love in many sci-fi settings, the order for evasive manoeuvres. But of course, the next shot is of the ship, flying in a straight line
I think the expanse saga depiction of space combat is probably one of the best, given the ranges and the general lack of cover space combat would probably be more like a fast paced version of submarine combat at extreme ranges
true, but then I pose this. in the expanse humanity is only gust stepping out and so are bound by limitations of the time. but its like compering sea warfare in 480 bc to ww2 navel war fair there not comparable technology changes as to tactics. when people talk about space combat in the expanse, some speak as if space warfare will always be like this.
much like what early man may have though when he used to club in battle, he may have though it would always be so, till some one invented the bow. so to it will be in space, who know maybe star wars space battles, would be the end or just a phase in the evolution of war in space.
Boarding actions as a real strategy is probably dumb, but I did love doing it as my entire war effort in Star Trek Dominion Wars. Would pile up extra crew instead of ships and end missions late in the game with 3-4 times as many ships as I started. I just imagine how that would have played out in debriefings with heavy Starfleet personnel losses but enough battlefield captures of Dominion/Cardassian/Breen ships to make a fleet.
Too much manpower, not enough metal. Solution, take their metal.
Regarding Gimmick weapons. My favorite in Sword of the Stars was the Pulsed Graviton Beam, when I lucked out and got it.
Large standard turret, beam weapon with decent range, and less damage than it's predecessors. BUT it imparted momentum on the target. Halting them, swinging them into the planet, and best of all, THE VIBRATIONS WOULD RIPP OFF THEIR TURRETS!
That's a nice fleet you got there, be a shame if I ripped their weapons out...
I feel like all of these boil down to "if it's good enough to work consistently, everyone will be using it shortly. There's no magic bullet, just effective tactics, competent training, and the willingness to use every asset you can."
You make good points. However, I want you to consider these points from the Star Wars galaxy. Military grade ships were equipped with two weapons systems designed to entrap enemy ships. Ion cannons and tractor beams. They were used to entrap pirate and rebel ships for boarding actions. This tactic was used by the Star Destroyer Devastator to capture the Tantive four.
Like, within the rules of their universe, the NullSec corporations of EVE Online have nearly perfected space tactics.
I plan on making my own space tactics game, and I hope I can provide a challenge!
sounds intresting..we will watch your career with great intrest!
would be nice if the Institute would cover the recent big war in Null. Beyond the really big super capital fights (esp. in M2-XFE), there were a good number of interesting engagements in and beyond Delve (e.g., fleets of kikimoras and stealth bombers taking down Rorquals; the successful bombing runs against clustered enemies; the so many sub-capital fights, some of which escalated to involve caps and even super caps). That and the whole history of the war, covered by a 3rd party, would be cool.
@@GottHammer I don't think they cover player made things tho, their main focus is worldbuilding in fiction
"Orbit anchor @ 5km, lock primary, press F1, broadcast for reps if you get locked" that's fleet combat as an individual pilot in EVE in a nutshell haha. Actual tactics are mostly relegated to small scale frigate combat. Big fleet fights mostly come down to numbers and who has the most effective fleet doctrine and uses that doctrine correctly.
@@mrvwbug4423 It is still very complicated for the people spending weeks theory crafting and then scrapping all their work and just using Muninns again. I just enjoyed the social aspects, it's a day out in space with the bois going to blap some Fat Bees or Pandas and trash talk in local.
I like how Legend of the Galactic Heroes pulled off the 'environmental factors' of this. Two examples spring to mind
1: an Imperial force pulls into the atmosphere of a gas giant and the Federation fleet follows them to maintain their advantage. During the battle, weapons fire heats up the atmosphere and causes huge gusts of wind. The Imperial commander gets the idea to fire a strategic-level thermonuclear warhead into the compressed hydrogen layer of the gas giant's atmosphere right below the enemy fleet, triggering a minor runaway nuclear chain reaction and scattering/destroying the enemy fleet.
2: A Federation admiral positions his remaining fleets around an unstable star with frequent solar flares and an asteroid thicket, which forces his Imperial foes to focus their much larger fleet into natural killzones with predictable (to the Feddies) solar flares cropping up to do additional damage.
Both use the environment and the enemy's own initiative/goals against the enemy
A lot of tactics indeed depend very heavily on the setting. Particularly engagement ranges, how the ftl works etc. Whether FTL detection exists or not etc.
Hard disagree on the Starhawk
The Tractor beam was designed to expose Star Destroyer since the ship was designed to break through Remnants blockades
The plan was to use the Tractor Beam to expose or incapacitate a Star Destroyer, while the Starhawk can inflict heavy damage on the ship since the NR (except for Mon Cala Ships) doesn't have a lot of well shielded/armored cruisers to take down a Star Destroyer
Star Destroyers are a mile long, how much more exposed does the Republic need them to be?
It's probably the ONE Capital ship in that franchise designed to basically be a Nightmare for those sorta ships
@@TemplinInstitute enough to not being a threat
Just by not having all their weapons being able to be brought to bear makes the ship way less threatening that it is, while its suffering damage from opposing the beam itself
@@TemplinInstitute I mean, lets be fair. The Rebels/New Republic failed repeatedly at capturing a intact and operational ISD-1 or ISD-2.....yet they SOMEHOW managed to get an Executor Super Star Destroyer in Legends. I think that StarHawk was made due to how annoying ISDs became to the Republic show this thing was made out of SPITE.
@@deloreanrc New Republic got the Lusankya because it was surrendered during the battle for Thyferra at the end of the Bacta War.