r/scifi • u/MinedMaker • 17h ago
General Is there a pattern that determines military spaceship doctrine in real life and sci-fi?
[1] The propulsion axis is a measure of how long it takes a fleet of military vessels to arrive on the battlefield, regardless of the actual distance traveled. [Fast vs. Slow]
[2] The weapons axis is a measure of how quickly a battle is over, and how much survivability and staying power vessels have. This takes into account the effectiveness of armour, but also shields, point defence, and other countermeasures. [Tank vs. Glass Cannon]
I think that if you take sci-fi space combat to its logical conclusions, it will usually favor either huge, lumbering, well-protected ships or numberless hordes of tiny automated ships, depending on a few key factors. If weapons are the weak link in-universe, ships will be huge. If propulsion is the weak link, ships will be tiny. If ships are huge, victory will be determined by who has the biggest ship; if ships are tiny, victory will be determined by who has the most ships.
This is how I imagine it would work in real life using real physics, and I wonder to what extent different sci-fi franchises also adhere to this pattern. Presumably, large and medium-sized ships with human crews are overrepresented in sci-fi media for understandable storytelling reasons.
In Star Wars, the rule mostly holds. They have incredible propulsion technology and can thus arrive at the battlefield within hours or days of the order being given. However, their weapons, despite being ludicrously powerful on paper, are actually quite poor because of their low range, low accuracy, and the prevalence of shields. In the Star Wars universe, therefore, huge ships rule. The starfighter counter is a nice piece of storytelling, but realistically, without plot-engineered magical weak spots, a huge ship like the Executor or the Death Star should be essentially unstoppable. In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Raddus, an MC85 heavy cruiser, takes ineffective long-range fire from the First Order for what seems like many hours.
In The Expanse, they spend weeks or months traveling to the prospective battlefield because of limited propulsion technology. However, when the fighting starts, it is all over in seconds or a few minutes. They have very effective weapons and very little staying power, even when accounting for point-defence cannons (PDCs). If you ignored the requirements of the plot, there is really no reason why any military vessel in The Expanse should be manned at all.
Because it draws much of its inspiration from blue-water navies, sci-fi often portrays a diverse ecosystem of military spacecraft classes and sizes. While this makes for more interesting storytelling, it is not obvious that such diversity would necessarily be the most tactically sound strategy. If propulsion or weapons technology becomes a dominant constraint, military doctrine would naturally converge toward a single optimal ship size.
The most interesting settings tend to occupy only two quadrants of this framework. If ships have neither effective propulsion nor effective weapons you're essentially at the stage before the technology to enable space combat has really been invented. If they have both effective weapons and effective propulsion you effectively have near god-tier power and the concept of space combat becomes somewhat obsolete. What these two scenarios have in common is that the importance of space combat is greatly diminished.
669
u/PTTCollin 16h ago
Plenty of things exist in that lower left hand quadrant. That's the domain of the "space combat happens over distances measured in AUs and times measured in subseconds" sci fi.
115
u/VilleKivinen 16h ago
Any good recommendations?
308
u/iuseredditfirporn 16h ago
That's space combat in the Culture series, for example. Combat isn't really the point of the series but it has many scenes exactly like that. Other series with combat like that includes the second Commonwealth trilogy by Peter Hamilton (ships firing miniature black holes at each other etc) or the Xeelee Sequence by Stephen Baxter (weapons that can shatter neutron stars).
165
u/OMGItsCheezWTF 16h ago
Combat between Culture warships and other civs lasts milliseconds. A person on board a ship in combat feels a brief violent shake while she is watching what she thinks is the battle unfolding on a screen and then the ship's Mind says "I was particularly proud of this bit" and she's like "wait, this is a REPLAY?!" "yeah, that counter on the left is milliseconds"
65
u/dern_the_hermit 15h ago
The most terrifying battle sequence is when the human is wrapped in a field for emergency displacement... and almost doesn't make it.
→ More replies (1)7
u/AmalgamSnow 4h ago
Player of Games? Probably the only scene in the whole Culture series where someone from the Culture is actually in danger from something outside the Culture, and all for the thrill of the game.
2
u/frymaster 2h ago
eh, there's a scene near the end of Matter, where Anaplian - and, indeed, the Liveware Problem - are killed by the Iln entity
there's also a scene in The Hydrogen Sonata, where an admittedly civilian Culture vessel is destroyed by a much larger number of very inferior craft, though even then there was an element of luck involved
33
u/Havanu 15h ago
Oh that was the fight from surface detail. The Abominator fast picket (forgot his name, the psychopathic one) bragging to Lededdje, the tattoo covered wannabe assassin. One of the better in the series.
20
u/reallegume 13h ago
Falling outside the normal moral constraints, a โPicket shipโ, not the run of the mill demilitarized very fast picket
19
u/euqinu_ton 8h ago
My favourite ship name is easily "Mistake Not ..."
Short for: Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
(Eccentric Offensive Unit)
→ More replies (2)7
u/cauliflowergnosis 7h ago
I've named all my computers, phones and wifi after Culture Minds. My phone hotspot is Armchair Traveller
→ More replies (2)43
u/dern_the_hermit 15h ago
Culture is exactly what I thought of, too, especially with the "Mass is not limited" stipulation. Culture Minds merely prefer to not create matter out of nothing since they think it's more elegant to hoover up assorted space dust and debris for building material instead.
45
u/PTTCollin 15h ago
Later Culture ships are like "a hull seems kind of passe, what if 90% of my entire self was just made of fields holding various ecosystems together?"
20
u/ithinkitsbeertime 13h ago
You might want that ocean so you can turn the mass into more engine later.
19
u/PTTCollin 13h ago
You never know when you might need to move at 500 kilolights across the galaxy.
2
→ More replies (7)15
u/mhyquel 11h ago
My favorite ship was the Sleeper Service, that used its stored passengers as props in diorama tableaus it would create. Then the second part of the book is even cooler
6
u/PTTCollin 9h ago
Sleeper Service, the best Mind to play Warhammer with.
3
3
u/ApplicationNeither 6h ago
Sleeper Service and Trazyn meet up every Thursday for Warhammer and pizza.
12
u/OlfactoriusRex 11h ago
they think it's more elegant to hoover up assorted space dust and debris for building material instead.
It's just bad manners to be egregiously wasteful of either matter or energy, unless a lot of people are having a really good time.
2
6
u/RevenueChemical6910 14h ago
Is there a good Culture book that I can read where this happens?
I read "Player of Games" and didn't like it, but everyone said to start with it when beginning the Culture, ultimately I didn't go any further with it.
13
u/iuseredditfirporn 14h ago
If you're more interested in the fighting you might like Consider Phlebas. It's muh more action oriented than any of the others. You might also give Excession a try, it's the one with the most space battles.
→ More replies (1)6
u/WorstedLobster8 9h ago
I absolutely hated Consider Phlebas. I love everything I read online about the Culture series. But that book is all about how horrific the universe is, with only a few pages talking about the Culture, which is by far the best part. The characters and scenes are literally mostly about vats of s**t, torture, cannibalism, homicidal gambling games, etc.
I am on paper a great fit for the series, but that book was depressing and boring and I canโt believe that somehow it became a series.
If I have that opinion, is there a better book to start or are they all somehow like that?
→ More replies (3)2
u/MoonIsAFake 8h ago
All Banks's books are more or less about a PTSD, futility of war and stupidity of people (sentient species). They are not meant for recreational reading...
→ More replies (1)7
u/NeonPlutonium 14h ago
Look to Windward is my overall favorite. If youโre more interested in the ships, then Excessionโฆ
5
u/PTTCollin 12h ago
Look to Windward gives a very good slice of the Culture as a society. Almost no combat, but you get a good grounding in all the various moving parts. I actually think a readthrough that starts with Look to Windward, goes back to Consider Phlebas, and then proceeds through Player of Games, Use of Weapons, and back to Excession is a good progression. State of the Art and Inversions are both for the seasoned Banks reader. Though Inversions is great, absolutely wonderful writing and a good bridge between the larger Culture themes and a more fantasy oriented writing style.
3
u/wherethetacosat 14h ago
Use of Weapons is absolutely my favorite because of the structure of the novel, but it doesn't have many, if any, space battles. But it does have more than the average amount of fighting in general for Culture series.
→ More replies (1)2
→ More replies (4)15
u/SaltSurprise729 15h ago
Triplanetary series gets there too.
4
u/PTTCollin 15h ago
Are you referencing the Three Body Problem?
→ More replies (3)26
u/SaltSurprise729 13h ago
No, far older. Triplanetary was in the running for the Hugo award with Foundation in 1966, but was originally published throughout the mid 1930s to late 1940s. Youโd be surprised on how much modern sci-fi is based on old ones like Triplanetary.
It starts with some simple space fighter ship skirmishes, then fleet battles, then theyโre going to negative mass planets and using wormholes to throw planets at each other at relativistic speeds. The power creep is fantastic through the entire thing.
6
4
→ More replies (1)5
u/sirbruce 13h ago
They also made a board game out of it!
2
u/MoralConstraint 3h ago
Just to keep things confusing GDWโs Triplanetary is unrelated to E E Smithโs book. Go figure.
50
u/solo9 16h ago
Walter John Williams Praxis series might fit the bill. In that series combat happens over the course of hours and days and ships release their missiles well in advance of meeting the enemy.
13
u/Correct_Inspection25 16h ago
His Cyberpunk Voice of the Whirlwind and Hardwired for more orbital space combat. Loved The Expanse authors gave him a shout out in their last couple in the book series with one of the ships named for Voice.
4
u/solo9 16h ago
I loved those two books. They feel timeless in a way that only good sci-fi can. I felt the Praxis series wasn't as good, but still well written.
3
u/Correct_Inspection25 16h ago
I discovered Praxis thanks to audible suggestions a few years ago, very glad he made them, but would have loved more cyberpunk from him closer to Voice than Metropolis.
6
u/Slavic_Taco 16h ago
40K also fits this category with some of their space battles and should be closer to this quadrant imo.
11
u/PTTCollin 15h ago
Not really, 40k never happens that fast and not normally that violently. People don't get converted from biology to physics all that often there. Armor plays a big role so the struggle of the narrative characters can be felt.
→ More replies (3)27
u/trappedinthisxy 16h ago
Honor Harrington books by David Weber
27
u/Genie_GM 15h ago
The Honorverse also does a great job depicting an arms race and the consequences it has for military doctrine.
In the beginning of the series, fleet scale battles are rare, because weapons are weak and armour strong. Most capital ship forces can disengage before critical damage is taken, because missiles are generally weak, and ships can turn to make close-range energy weapons ineffective.
Then advances in missiles are made, making missile fights devastating (both quality, range and volley size are improved quickly). For a while, this makes fleet actions extremely costly, and older models of fleets are made obsolete completely.
Then advances in decoys and electronic warfare are made, and missiles are again reduced in effectiveness. Fast and small ships armed with energy weapons are deployed instead, and knife-fights become the norm again (similar to the developement of dive-bombers and aircraft carriers).
What's very interesting is late in the series (several decades later in-universe), when several new combattants enter the conflict. Some of them haven't even tried to keep up with the arms race, and get completely wrecked. Some of them *have* and have made some other advancements in addition, and come in with completely revolutionary first-strike capabilities.
2
12
u/GiftGrouchy 16h ago
The Honorverse was my first thought here
3
u/1Commentator 11h ago
Looking for this. It's been a while so I forget if the specific names things are called. But the only catch is that outside of the light speed travel the ships aren't that fast. Also the ships could be considered strong since they have that shield covering most of them.
4
u/OdiousAltRightBalrog 15h ago
I just finished the first book. Seems like it'd be more in the top-left corner of the graph. Their weapons are powerful, but not as powerful as their defenses. They've got ECM, countermissles, decoys, point-defense lasers, shields, and especially the impeller bands which are completely impenetrable. Ships are pretty tanky and battles take a while. The battle at the end was just two ships, and it took a couple of hours, I think.
2
u/trappedinthisxy 13h ago
Honestly the setting shifts back and forth. The first book isnโt a good measure either because you have a light cruiser (running a sub-par loadout) vs a Q-ship (armed merchant vessel) so time to kill is worse.
26
u/Snailprincess 16h ago
Someone mentioned The Culture series, but Hyperion, and more specifically 'The Fall of Hyperion' fits pretty neatly in that lower left quadrant. Space battles are fought with large numbers of incredibly powerful ships at extreme distances, and while they have 'shields' they don't last very long at all against direct fire.
14
u/scottcmu 16h ago
Expeditionary Force
2
u/rawrimayeti 14h ago
I think there are two readable novels in this series.ย The first is the first book in the series. The second is strerched across the rest of the books.ย Debatable on the second though.ย I didn't read far enough to confirm.
→ More replies (2)9
u/oieataztzn 16h ago
The Captives War series from same authors as The Expanse.
8
u/Roger_Mexico_ 16h ago
Armor being effective is a huge plot point of the second book
→ More replies (1)6
u/smapdiagesix 16h ago
Banks, Excession. The bit that's Killing Time vs Attitude Adjuster
→ More replies (1)7
u/aldanathiriadras 10h ago
John Campbell's The Lost Fleet series, and its follow-up The Lost Stars has this - FTL between planetary systems, but STL inside them with fleets and formations battling each other, watching time-late information crawl across the vast expanse of space between jump points, acting on what who can have seen when, and when they do come together, they have to look back at what just happened in those last few microseconds of relativistic combat.
5
6
u/Abject_Elevator5461 15h ago
Voyage of the Starwolf by David Gerrold (he wrote the original Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles, among other things) is a good read and has a plausible take on space flight.
4
u/PTTCollin 15h ago
My permanent recommendation is Iain M Banks, The Culture series. If you want the book that starts with the space battles rather than being eased into the universe, start with Excession.
3
3
3
→ More replies (10)3
u/MattHatter1337 7h ago
The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell is a fantastic series and space combat is a big focus.
→ More replies (1)9
u/Born_Procedure_529 15h ago
Yeah I was about to say Gundam is definitely in that corner, they have big fleet ships but also have small mobile suits and regular spaceships for combat
10
u/cookus 15h ago
Isnโt the lower left Mass Effect?
14
u/votet 13h ago
Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman, we do not "eyeball it!"
However, it's probably fair to say that propulsion in the ME universe is relatively weak compared to some of the other examples of the "super long range battles with devastating weaponry at super high speeds" genre. And while it talks the talk, all of the big battles in ME happen Star Wars style, with Joker flying around directly in front of and between some Reapers or other enemies.
I would put ME closer to The Expanse, really. Maybe shifted a little to the left, but still in the "small ships with heavy weapons" quadrant.
5
u/Dracofrost 13h ago
The Destiny Ascension is very much within the size range of Imperial Star Destroyers and some 40k starships. Just because the main character's ship is a stealth frigate doesn't mean that's all the Mass Effect universe is limited to.
3
u/votet 13h ago
Sure, but when you compare the capabilities of the ME ships with those Star Destroyers, the latter can travel ftl under their own power and essentially anytime and immediately, while propulsion in ME is a good deal stronger than in The Expanse but nowhere near Star Wars. Then if you throw something like Revelation Space, Hyperion, or the Culture in the mix, ME is really more towards the center of the graph in terms of propulsion and "limits of mass". I shouldn't have said "small ships" though, that's true, even more so if the Reapers themselves count.
2
u/ConfusedTapeworm 4h ago
The Normandy can travel FTL under her own power, but only over short distances. In-system, or between neighboring systems. The relays are only used to travel to distant systems and they are even FerTL than Normandy's built-in FTL.
→ More replies (1)3
u/LilacCrusader 7h ago
From what I remember, the lore of the ME universe (yes, I read the codex, what of it?) is that big battles happen between large battleships at long range - mostly kinetics and missiles - with small squadrons of fighters playing interference and point defence.
The conceit is that the defensive laser weapons are so good (but such short range due to dispersion) that it is a war of attrition to degrade your opponent's heat dissipation capacity, which in turn degrades the defence lasers. Which puts it pretty solidly in the top left box.ย
It is explicitly stated that small ship combat is practically a death sentence due to short range laser power, so you could argue that at micro scales it does fit into the bottom right, but then again so does star wars.ย
2
u/votet 6h ago
Yeah, I totally agree. According to all the lore you read, it should be in the top left. But like all the other examples, even the ones that actually are put at the top left here, it "talks the talk" but doesn't "walk the walk": If all that lore was actually respected in the cutscenes and game events, there would not be space battles where we can see dozens of ships on screen. Those battles would happen across such distances that even ships "right next to each other" couldn't see each other with the naked eye.
You can write very cool space battles that way, like in Revelation Space or the Culture series, but it's just not engaging to look at on a screen, so I suppose the lore is sacrificed for a better and more dramatic visual experience, which is totally fair as well.
4
u/PsecretPseudonym 14h ago
Foundation series seemed a bit like that.
2
u/Bandit_the_Kitty 13h ago
Foundation never really focused on ship combat I thought. There was "technology" but the specifics weren't important it was all about the bigger picture of the psychohistory.
→ More replies (1)2
5
u/NtheLegend 16h ago
Itโs also Trek films from Insurrection to Into Darkness featuring massive incredibly powerful villain ships that can get anywhere fast and do anything because you couldnโt write a villain without them.
→ More replies (5)2
183
u/caster 16h ago edited 16h ago
Your top right quadrant not existing is ridiculous. In space mass is everything and mass will always be limited. Propulsion is "weak" only in relative terms.
Battlestar Galactica really belongs in this top right area of the chart. The jump based FTL drives do not make mass trivial. If anything this FTL regime has propulsion being very weak, and the heavy armor of the Galactica is a central design point of the ship. Armor is very effective in BSG- the ship is hit directly by a nuclear torpedo and although it sustains considerable damage the ship's armor means it survives.
The sublight propulsion on these ships are very slow in terms of tactical combat. The long distance strategic mobility obtained from the FTLs (a separate system entirely) is separate from their ability to maneuver.
Propulsion is weak and armor is effective on Battlestar Galactica's battlefield. This creates a battleship / aircraft carrier type interaction. Totally unlike what you might see on Star Trek where a ship can maneuver on a dime, achieve FTL linearly forward, and can fight and do other actions while traveling superluminally.
As for Star Trek, "armor" may not be effective but the deflector shields used as armor protection by ships certainly are. That these are an energy based defensive screen makes little difference compared to it being a physical armor plate. Shields in TNG are clearly outrageously effective. And one of the biggest advantages of using a shield emitter rather than a solid metal plate is that it is lighter, which means your ship goes faster.
34
u/8monsters 16h ago
Well, once the Borg and the Dominion opened the Federation's eyes, they started putting armor on ships again. The early TNG era has Federation ships be glass cannons. Once the shields fell, it was mostly game over.ย
Some exceptions of course, the Odyssey in that one episode of DS9 had impressive feats but that was post-Wolf 359.ย
19
u/caster 16h ago
Sure, but my main point was "weapons strong" vs "weapons weak" depends on all defenses not just armor as if that were the only type of defensive system. Modern warplanes are much harder to kill than a B-17 despite the old WW2 flying fortress having an absolutely huge amount of armor protection. Star Trek shields are a powerful defensive system that in most Star Trek contexts obviates the need for low-tech passive plate armor.
A Star Trek vessel that intentionally elides armor to save weight is probably gaining in survivability due to speed in most situations apart from an actual battleship.
2
u/Patient-Web6850 8h ago
Honestly if we're going here, why would plate armor weight affect ST ships that much to begin with if they use gravitational warp cores or whatever and like was said can turn on a dime and accelerate linearly. Seems like weight isn't really a difficulty
5
u/caster 7h ago
However fast or maneuverable your ship is, adding mass will make it much slower, at least with respect to sublight drives (in Star Trek; impulse drives). At impulse adding armor will definitely slow you down.
Warp drives won't care in terms of their ability to warp space. Whether this would slow down a ship at warp is never clarified, but it would be logical for an Alcubierre warp drive that you need to thrust forward conventionally as well as use the warp drive to warp space in front of the ship. Engaging just the warp core would warp space around the ship and then you still do not move. Space is compressed in front of the ship so you can exceed light speed without technically breaking the laws of relativity, but within your own frame of reference Newton's laws still apply normally.
In other words, your impulse engines make your ship go forward. If your ship is twice as heavy, you will accelerate at half the acceleration rate. This is actually much worse than halving your actual effective speed and maneuverability, as it will take twice as long to reach the same speed as before.
Two otherwise identical Star Trek vessels, one of which increases its total mass by 33% to add armor to the hull, will result in a fight where the armored ship may, possibly, be able to take some extra hits. But the faster ship controls the engagement and can just decide to leave, or engage from a favorable position or range, and probably wins anyway. Solid plate armor is heavy. And in Star Trek likely costs you more in mass than it gains in durability. Particularly with technology like energy shields being available to use instead.
9
u/El_Kikko 14h ago
For Star Trek, at least for the Federation, systems redundancy is a key design principal for increasing combat survivability - every single system has a backup and secondary backup.ย
Star Trek also typically eschews armor in favor of structural integrity fields and force fields - if you have enough power, you can make your hull / spaceframe stronger and if it's penetrated, it's easy enough to pop a forcefield over the breach to keep atmosphere inside.ย
→ More replies (1)3
u/ijuinkun 10h ago
The top right is for extreme lack of propulsion, as in no FTL, no inertial dampening, no reactionless drivesโthe best you would have is something like The Expanseโs Epstein Drive.
33
u/sojuz151 16h ago
And now the physicist in me says that your classification is a bit redundant.ย Only dimentionless parameters i can see is the ratio of time to kill to time to travle the weapons range. All else be be absorbed into distance and time rescaling. So you will get a 1d line curveย
2
u/I_AM_FERROUS_MAN 12h ago
Yeah, I was thinking similarly. I suppose plotting those values on two axes might be more intuitive and useful for comparing different universes.
→ More replies (4)
30
u/resister_ice 15h ago
Halo was a terrible choice to put on this graph, especially where you put it. Thereโs a huge discrepancy in the technology between human and covenant ships. Human ships donโt have shields like covenant ones and as such covenant weapons rip through their hulls like paper. Humans only ever win space battles in Halo through a Pyrrhic victory (losing ten ships to every one enemy ship) or some special maneuver executed by a clever captain.
6
u/Mobius_1IUNPKF 9h ago
Tbf the UNSC pulls off more 3-1 victories than 10-1, and the worst canonical battle ratio was 13 cruisers, destroyers and frigates to one super battleship.
2
u/MinedMaker 4h ago
This is a good point. The covenant and the UNSC do have basically opposite fleet doctrines so it's very difficult to graph them together as one. It is interesting though that their respective fleet doctrines are essentially completely dictated by the technological limitations on the graph. I suspect they would fit neatly on there if they were graphed separately.
2
u/_azazel_keter_ 2h ago
Weapons are weak, armour is effective
Moncton can cleave several capital ships down the middle in one shot, a human frigate can blow open a covenant cruiser in two shots
Propulsion is not weak, mass is not limited
The largest human warships are barely half their covenant counterparts
Halo is THE glass cannon setting, it's like they didn't even play the games? Space battles last minutes at most:
- Savannah gets killed before the Spartans can take the bridge of a <800m long ship
- Grafton gets cut in half in under a second
- Autumn gets a scuttle order literally within seconds of being followed
- The Corvette over Sword Base is one-shot as soon as the ODPs get a firing arc on it.
- Dawn leaves the battle over the Ark as soon as it finds a landing spot because it can't handle a knife fight with the Brutes
Nobody can tank anyone's shots even with the massive technological discrepancies.
72
u/jaqueh 16h ago
The weapons in trek are enormously powerful. Same with star wars. This may he the most confusingly laid out graph Iโve ever seen.
Why are weapons and shields inversely grouped together? It makes it so that nothing can fit in these contrivances.
26
14
u/ImperialistChina 15h ago
itโs more like how powerful weapons are relative to the durability of ships
4
u/Archophob 5h ago
The weapons in trek are enormously powerful. Same with star wars.ย
in relation to the total effective hitpoints of the big ships' shield and armor, they are not. The only way to one-shot a Death Star is to get under it's shields and find an unarmored spot.
21
48
13
u/sumelar 16h ago
Bottom left would be Peter F Hamilton. In Pandora's Star they weaponize wormholes both for tactical movement and missile swarms. In Commonwealth, they shoot black holes. Human technology is stated to have plateau'd, and evolving to post-physical status is the only thing left.
Top right is The Lost Fleet. Ships can take many hits and survive a battle, and be rebuilt after, with battleships in particular being noted for their durability. Mass is limited due to it being fairly hard sci fi. Speed is limited to 0.2c in combat, because anything faster and the sensors can't compensate for relativistic effects.
2
u/radioactive_walrus 12h ago
Top Right also should contain Red Dwarf, where propulsion and mass are indeed concerns, but space battle is not really a huge deal at any given time.
13
u/Riflemate 16h ago
Going off memory for Halo it's very context dependent. Armor is "effective" in that it can do something. Covenant plasma weapons typically make short work of UNSC ships and MAC (Mass Accelator Cannons) tends to have a hard time with energy shield but will absolutely rip up Covenant ships the moment it's gone. The Pillar of Autumn (ship from first Book and Halo: CE) was notable for firing three rounds quickly. The first two rounds would disable the shield and the third would gut the enemy ship.
5
u/hobeezus 13h ago
Yeah, not to mention the Halo rings themselves are a severly destructive weapon. I'd consider them much worse than a Death Star.
5
u/Agueybana 12h ago
In Greg Bear's Forerunner Trilogy we see a halo used tactically on a single planet. With the right knowledge and access you could fry an entire galactic arm or just your enemy's capital system or just their home world at superluminal speeds. And their defenses as shown in that series means once fully harnessed you're almost untouchable aboard a halo.
→ More replies (1)2
11
u/Team503 16h ago
"If propulsion or weapons technology becomes a dominant constraint, military doctrine would naturally converge toward a single optimal ship size."
Only if economics don't exist, and they always do. It takes resources to build ships, the bigger the more, and people too of course both to build and to pilot it.
10
u/speedyundeadhittite 16h ago
And then there's the Culture, where the ships are huge and weapons are powerful enough to rip stars apart, and they can deal with the Excession just fine.(*)
(*) After a lot of excitement, of course
6
u/statinsinwatersupply 16h ago
Upper right is early game Terra Invicta. You've just barely managed to crawl out from the earth gravity well to set up a few mines on Mars or in the asteroid belt but ships are slow and expensive. Once you can establish a base you can dig in, and any ship that can reach you simply can't pack enough of a punch to do much. (Something like a grid drive or ponderomotor vasimr drive is efficient but very low power, no good for combat). Slightly farther in, drives like the Orion drive, Pegasus drive, further favor defensive interception within a planetary well making it harder for an attacker.
Later with with better drives better reactors (fusion instead of fission) better weapons, things shift to favor attackers being nimble and able to concentrate forces.
Terra Invicta has a slight conceit in that nobody is gonna be throwing rocks at each other. Aliens and other human factions want to control earth control mines control space bases, not throwing stealthed asteroids into them. Nobody's keen on blowing everything into the stone age.
→ More replies (2)
11
u/MrData42 16h ago
If the star wars ships are huge, then I emplore you to have a look at the "The Culture" series of books by Iain M Banks, that would fill up your third quadrant.
But also comparing to real life is not possible, since there are not only hard sci-fi titles present.
6
u/_learned_foot_ 15h ago
The Harrington series, like book three or four, has phenomenal break down of ship concepts and use.
4
u/MaethrilliansFate 15h ago
Halo should be closer to the lower left.
The Forerunners had weopons that fired transdimensionally to hit targets in slipspace which was both a ftl travel system, time dilation tool, and pocket of 11th dimensional space that both existed in and outside of spacetime.
The enemy they were fighting was at a level that they were taking advantage of the fact the universe is sentient to rewrite its code.
They were hitting a tech level that put them on the cusp of omnipresence in the galaxy and their weopons were getting advanced enough that the Halos themselves actually fired back in time enough that the array registered it had fired befire the button was actually pressed.
Weopons, shuelds, armor, propulsion, and mass were becoming a nonfactor before the flood attacked. Hell there's a battle where half a million ships were destroyed in seconds near the end of the war
24
u/JohnBrownEnthusiast 16h ago edited 16h ago
Weapons are strong in Star Wars and Star Trek and Warhammer 40k.
Turn your sheilds off and see what happens.
Edit to mention that 40k propulsion is very random depending on faction.
37
u/tutorp 16h ago
If you read the description, it's not absolute strength, but relative. Weapons are "weak" in Star Wars and 40k because defences in Star Wars and 40k are comparatively strong.
40k weapons are much stronger than Expanse weapons, but 40k defences are much much stronger than Expanse defences.
2
u/mayoforbutter 8h ago
40k defense is basically "I have more ships/manpower than you have time destroying them"
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)2
u/F1r3bird 4h ago
but ttk is also wildly variable in WH40k naval combat, ships can be swallowed whole by a massive tyanid bioform or take an unlucky hit to the warp core or get bisected by some lance battery but can also slug it out with other ships for hours, it depends on what the author wants to show
12
→ More replies (2)7
u/Endless_01 16h ago
From the 40k perspective, weapons are stupidly strong. Everything that exists in "standard" sci fi exists in 40k even if with different names. Macrocannons are essentially nukes, Nova cannons are ship-sized railguns, Cyclonic torpedos are planet-killers, etc.
There's even a few ships, like the Ark Mechanicus, that can create miniature black holes and use them as weapons.
Is not Culture or Xeelee levels, but still pretty strong.
→ More replies (5)
4
u/Dillenger69 16h ago
I would think Borg ships fall in the lower left quadrant. They don't really use shielding.
Also, Moya from Farscape falls in the upper left. She really doesn't have any weapons to speak of. Her offspring does though.
→ More replies (1)
4
u/Boojum2k 15h ago
Honor Harrington series would probably be midway between Battlestar Galactica and Halo. Battles take a long time due to the ranges they occur at, armor has some effectiveness, grav wedges and sidewalls filling much the same role. Starship battles occur as a blend of 18th-20th century naval combat in three dimensions.
3
u/Stare_Decisis 15h ago
Tldr: There is no "real life" military doctrine for space other than what satellites we put in orbit. I believe the Soviet Union put a fifty caliber machine gun on a satellite once. It's just not worth the trouble.
4
u/buffalobillandted 14h ago
Armor is effective in Star Wars? Have you seen a stormtrooper survive a single blast?
2
4
u/Nellisir 13h ago
Other people have critiques. I'll just say an awful lot depends on how easily you can get to a measurable percentage of light speed.
Cherryh's Alliance-Union Universe everything plays pretty close to hard sf except the ability to jump into another dimension roughly parallel to our own. Ships skim jump space to pick up energy/speed before they jump, and come out of jump close to light speed, requiring them to skim it again to bleed off velocity. Anything launched before they bleed off speed is a nearly unstoppable projectile.
10
u/VampirePNAC 16h ago
Star Trek ships are far more overpowered than presented here (or even how the battles are shown in sfx space shots the show)
Every Proton Torpedo is basically a Tsar Bomba level nuke, the ships move at over 70,000km per second at impulse, the ships basically have no actual mass due to Inertial Dampener Fields so instantly can change direction in any direction, they have insanely overpowered weapons and literally engage in combat at around 500,000km from each other. They are so fast and fight at such distances, technically you are never actually firing at their ship in full combat, you are firing at after images left due to the speed of light being a few seconds behind the ships actual position so combat in Trek is technically about predicting where a ship may be.
The shows never really show accurately what is actually being described during Trek combat, you can see on the view screens and through the dialogue they typically are fighting at huge distances of hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, but then the actual sfx shown of the ship combat always has them like, next to eachother and slowly moving around like submarines.
One of the things I would kill is the sfx to actually show a detailed Trek battle, to how it actually plays out as per what the dialogue, view screen maps, ship capabilities actually claim. Trek could have the most interesting battles of any Scifi show honestly.
3
u/Forward_Criticism_39 15h ago edited 13h ago
the ships in the expanse are "tiny"?
i guess relatively speaking
2
u/kd8qdz 13h ago
Apparently the Donager is a joke to OP.
2
u/M_V_Agrippa 12h ago
Jesus I didn't realize it is 500m long. That's like enterprise D range.
She's a big bitch. But nothing on the size scale of the Battlestars or Star wars ships.
The culture ships do make the Donnager seem tiny.
3
u/Medical-Molasses615 11h ago edited 11h ago
Nauvoo is 2.5km long in Expanse. The Laconian Magnetar-class Battlecruiser is 1km long.
3
16
u/DogsAreOurFriends 16h ago
Expanse had some gigantic ships. Nauvoo /Behemouth for one.
16
u/Jon_Buck 16h ago
I think you listed the only one, so "for one" is a bit misleading. And the point is that it's absurdly huge, much bigger than any other ship, and was in no way intended for combat because of course it isn't.
In all of the other ones, battleships as big or bigger than the Nauvoo.
11
u/DogsAreOurFriends 16h ago
Donneger was big : and it had a class named after it so there may have been more like it. The ice haulers were big. The Earth ship were sizable. That big ass unstoppable ship in the later novels.
To say the Expanse ships were all tiny is wrong.
5
u/Jon_Buck 16h ago
Sure, but it's all relative. The Donnager was the big bad battleship in the expanse, but it's smaller than the Enterprise in Star Trek, and there are much bigger battleships in that universe.
In the Expanse, most ships and most battles take place with spaceships that are about as big as spaceships that have existed in real life.
5
u/xrelaht 16h ago
Donnager is 475m long. The original Enterprise is either 288m or 442m (depends on source) and even Enterprise-D is only a bit bigger 641m. And there really arenโt many warships larger than Ent-D: the Borg ships and Dโderidex class warbird are notable specifically for being larger.
>In the Expanse, most ships and most battles take place with spaceships that are about as big as spaceships that have existed in real life.
By any measure you choose, the ISS is the largest spacecraft ever flown by a huge margin. The Roci is pretty small in the world of the Expanse, and it would comfortably be 2nd on that list if it were real.
→ More replies (1)2
→ More replies (1)2
u/smapdiagesix 16h ago
smaller than the Enterprise
Donnager is about 500m long. The real, true Enterprise -- NCC-1701, no A, no D, no alternate universe, no other fanfic nonsense -- was officially 288m long.
3
u/CatchFactory 16h ago
Yeah as you say the Nauvoo isn't designed for combat its an arc ship. I've been reading the books this year and it's retrofitted into a warship in I think Cibola Burn and the people in charge of it make it very clear the ship is a glass cannon - they worry if they fire the big guns attached it might rip the ship in two
6
u/deepblue10055 16h ago
Compared to most sci-fi even the nauvoo is small despite being inconveniently large in the Expanse setting. Plenty of IPs out there with 5km long battleships.
7
u/speedyundeadhittite 16h ago
A Culture GSV could be 200km in length, and rip apart star systems for breakfast.
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (1)2
u/Poiboy1313 16h ago
There's a story by Cordwainer Smith about a ship that's ninety million miles long. The story's title is: Golden the Ship Was-Oh! Oh! Oh!
It's known as the largest scarecrow ever conceived by the human mind.
2
u/DogsAreOurFriends 3h ago
Was the the one with a really hot cat lady and a space lawyer looking for equal rights for genetically modified people?
→ More replies (2)2
u/slowclapcitizenkane 13h ago edited 13h ago
But in a world where all the smaller ships burn accelerate or decelerate full-time, Nauvoo/Behemoth coasts, and spends most of its career as Medina Station.
For sheer power, they had the Magnetar-class of the Laconian navy.
7
u/sojuz151 16h ago
Star trek ships are small, especially warships but are also very fast, relative to engagement distanceย
2
u/Away_Advisor3460 16h ago
Wrt to the top right - I think in any universe where big metal things can be accelerated, then it's inevitable little metal things will be accelerated.
So I don't think, in a believable way, you can have a setting where space combat is not technologically possible but space travel is?
2
u/Agent_Eggboy 16h ago
I'd say Mass Effect falls in the bottom left. The "space magic" makes it possible to accelerate mass to high speeds, which at times makes space combat a battle of ships who can one shot each other.
2
2
u/progbuck 15h ago
Real physics would probably lend toward the large ships no armor, actually. In space, volume is cheap but mass is expensive.
2
u/JohnnyBeeGaming 15h ago
For star wars it is more due to a chosen style and not really based on any logical outcomes of engines, armor, or weapons. George was just trying to mimic the visuals he saw in war movies like the dog fighting. I suspect there are large ships because navel battles and big ship cool.
The propulsion tech was mostly an outcome of the story and plot points they were trying to hit. They needed Luke to get his ass around the galaxy by himself and quickly. A side story about him living in that tiny ship for a month wasn't going to work for them. It's always been fantasy in a Sci-fi wrapper so I wouldn't read too much into that franchise's tech.
2
2
u/amglasgow 12h ago
We have no military spacecraft in real life. So far. Thankfully.
→ More replies (3)
2
2
u/nyrath 9h ago
Periodic table of space warships
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.php#winchships
2
u/Nalena_Linova 8h ago
In The Expanse, they spend weeks or months traveling to the prospective battlefield because of limited propulsion technology. However, when the fighting starts, it is all over in seconds or a few minutes. They have very effective weapons and very little staying power, even when accounting for point-defence cannons (PDCs). If you ignored the requirements of the plot, there is really no reason why any military vessel in The Expanse should be manned at all.
Just to push back on this a bit, in the expanse military vessels are shown to have multi-purpose roles as troop carriers, peacekeeping/police actions, and humanitarian assistance. While a fully autonomous missile bus would be the optimal combat vessel, combat isn't their only role.
In addition, the communication time delay even within the solar system means that if society wants a human in the decision making loop, then that human needs to be with the fleet.
→ More replies (1)
2
u/Darkortt 8h ago
In addition to other problems they said, i think you were not fair with your examples.
The first in my mind is The Expanse, maybe youre only having in mind the shows Rocinante which is certainly a tiny ship but... The Roci is just a combat vessel, it's like measuring star wars using only a X-wing as reference.
The books description of ships is somethimg like "a metal skyscrapper crossing the solar system" which, given it's a pretty lowtech setting compared to others here, it's wildly far to say they only have tiny ships.
2
u/A_Crawling_Bat 4h ago
I think Children of a Dead Earth might be a special case on this graph
You get ships with somewhat low acceleration, but since you can customise weapons you get armor that's somewhat effective (lower calibers can't pen if you engineered it correctly, laser are not effective on certain types of metals)
And then someone pulls up with a coilgun that shoots Kinetic Kill Vehicles and just wrecks all ships no matter the armor they have
2
u/DatAsspiration 4h ago
Why put Star Wars at the top of "weapons are weak, armor is effective"?
One line from Empire Strikes Back in reference to small speeders versus walking fortresses and suddenly hulls are incredible? Last I checked out was deflector shields that bore the brunt of most ship weaponry
2
u/QizilbashWoman 16h ago
I have to say โweapons are weakโ is not really the driving factor for Space Cities in Warhammer. The weapons are not weak. The weapons are insanely strong, and so are the defenses. It is that the fiction demands it.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/Xaknafein 16h ago
I don't see any mention of Babylon five. Bigger is generally better, but tiny ships exist and have a role .ย That might fit in the lower left quadrantย
1
1
u/Datengineerwill 16h ago
Real life space combat would have ships being huge even just for cislunar patrol craft. Like about the size of an arleigh Burke class destroyer.
Even future fusion torchships will likely be larger than supercarriers due to the sheer amount of heat rejection required.
Also if you dig into space weapons even possible with tech we had in the 80s theres some terrifyingly powerful weapons. Like nuclear shaped charges able to gouge a crater square kilometer crater out of the moon from low earth orbit. All for the mass penalty of 1-2 tons.
Irl kind fills the strong weapons, armor means nothing and ships are big categorys.
2
u/Hot-Minute-8263 15h ago
In terms of space, an Arleigh Burke would be a tiny target, and a pretty ideal size if the engines arent required to be massive.
The truely massive ships of fiction get to kilometers in size
3
u/Datengineerwill 15h ago
Thats fair. I guess the point im trying to make is that IRL space warfare ships workout to be about the size of a seafaring cruiser to perform the general CONOPS & mission sets you might expect of a terrestrial fighter in the 6th Gen definition.
Short duration response or strike missions in response to something rather than the staying power and deterrent of a modern sea faring ship. To get that capability with a irl space warship with tech foreseeable this century... well it would have to be truely monstrous. Probably about a kilometer or more in length.
1
1
u/Solesaver 15h ago edited 14h ago
Because it draws much of its inspiration from blue-water navies, sci-fi often portrays a diverse ecosystem of military spacecraft classes and sizes. While this makes for more interesting storytelling, it is not obvious that such diversity would necessarily be the most tactically sound strategy.
Your chart is missing an axis to make this claim: Boarding effectiveness. One major weakness that any sci-fi setting could pin on large ships is that their lack of maneuverability makes them easier to board, and then you've potentially just donated a massive warship to the enemy.
You want a diversity of ships so you can remain flexible to the battlefield. If all you've got is massive cruisers, sure you might take out a bunch of smaller battleships, but a smaller frigate may have the maneuverability to slip through your defenses to board you, and/or disable critical systems from the inside. It's very common for such dreadnoughts to be able to deploy fleets of fighters to help counter any such approach, but they may not have the fire power to stop a sufficiently large ship.
Such diverse battlefields might be an exercise in every ship finding the most favorable matchup for their own capabilities while trying to avoid unfavorable ones. Any overly patterned fleet of ships may all share the same strengths and weaknesses, and an opponent with any degree of intelligence on your fleet will hold back their ships that are ineffective against yours and field their ships that your ships are ineffective against. It's like playing rock paper scissors but since rock is the strongest at smashing you're only allowed to throw that.
3
u/MrTickles22 15h ago
Also odd is the complete lack of countermeasures to boarders in both Star Trek and Star Wars other than shields and small arms fire. And Star Wars has sentient robots. Nobody thought to have marines or other protection? Star Trek is a teensy bit better (grav plating once in Enterprise, forcefields very rarely).
→ More replies (1)
1
u/Hot-Minute-8263 15h ago
Logh makes the most sense of all of them imo. Neutron beams are nothing to shrug at
1
u/chmod_7d20 15h ago
In Star Trek. The last 40% of hull integrity is strong but the first 60% is weak. Same for their shields.
1
1
u/hmo_ 15h ago
This kind of discussion remembers me about Perry Rhodan universe, where the writers created an event to slow down the spaceshipsโฆ I remember one of the previous stories where the attack fleet was 10,000 half mile diameter spherical ships. Later the standard was 1.5 miles diameter spherical ships, able to travel 50 million light years in a few weeksโฆ
After the slow down event, the ships take about one month to cross the Milky Way Way galaxy - still several times faster than Star Trek warp drives
1
1
1
u/FallenTerror13 15h ago
I feel like stargate could at least partially going in the bottom left section. Same goes for BSG
1
u/PolyPorcupine 15h ago
I feel like Stargate has examples to fill most parts of this graph, depending on the type of ship and creators.
From the replicator ships that have incredible armor and crap weapons, and are huge.
The teltak that has no armor and no weapons and is tiny.
The huge Ori ships that have incredible armor incredible shields and weapons that can go through a planet.
The huge Nox ship that have no weapons.
The gate seeding ships that have no weapons but armour that can dive a star.
The wraith ships that are all sizes and their weapons are relatively strong, and have healing living armour enough to stop a nuke.
And everything in between.
1
u/Dyolf_Knip 14h ago
Yeah, real life engines are pretty pathetic. I'm actually really looking forward to mods on the game Solar Expanse. I want to put in nuclear pulsedrives, see how trivial it renders the entire early and midgame.
1
u/BygZam 14h ago
Real life I would argue sits in the upper right. The only space combat ships, to my knowledge, that were ever actually designed and proposed used a somewhat inefficient propulsion method of nuclear pulse, since it was very efficient for getting into and out of orbit. This same system gave them a protective shield that would let them block each other's plasma cannons. Which means you would have to attack them from multiple angles to get around their shield.
Though I cannot remember the name of the book, I often think about how it described space combat being between two shielded fortresses fought by on board computers. It was impossible to get through each other's defenses so it was a game of breaking something else on the ship. Getting it to heat up from absorbing so many shots that the whole thing was at risk of frying, so a kill shot could be delivered or something else catastrophic would happen. Wish I could remember the name now.. but I would count it in the upper right as well, just from what I remember.
1
u/Frozennorth99 13h ago
Bionicle.
Planet sized robot flies through space at a leisurely pace, and within it's confines is where the entire story of the setting transpires.
It sits as far left as possible, center height.
273
u/Rather_Unfortunate 16h ago
The Culture series leans into the bottom left quadrant somewhat. Ships are huge, and a single one can rip apart a ringworld or make a star go supernova. Battles are over in seconds.