A FUCKING LEAF
MECHA THREAD
Alexander Morales
Camden Peterson
If you're making a single large ship then arguably yes. For a swarm of orbital drones then you'd get them to do more with a spherical design. You're also underestimating the advantage gained by having no 'front'. While your conical design can bring more guns to bear on a single target at any one time you also leave blind spots that your weapons can't fire into. You're also unable to fire at a target whilst firing your main drive unless you're accelerating directly towards it. My spherical design can instantly begin to alter course without having to pivot or reduce the amount of fire it can put into a target, making it much less likely to be hit, arguably achieving the same end goal as your sloped armour for less cost and with greater capabilities. That's before we start to consider the sphereships ability to engage multiple targets at various bearings simultaneously without any kind of problem (assuming decent fire control).
The better surface area to volume ratio would also help reduce production costs (less hull to armour) while also reducing wasted mass - which is very handy for reducing the size/power of your engines and the amount of fuel required for any given manoeuvre. If you used spherical designs as the standard for every ship in the fleet these would be major strategic and operational advantages for any kind of space campaign. The only thing that might not benefit from a spherical design would be conventional missiles, as they need to keep the warhead pointing in the right direction to actually damage their target, having said that though space nukes would benefit from the extra agility, seeing as you need to get them much closer to the target (compared to flak warheads) for them to be worthwhile in a vacuum.
Levi Jackson
They'd be useful as construction equipment and in certain logistical support roles.
Lockheeb would surely love the idea of a real-life AMBAC combat Mech requiring a trillion engineers and six gorillion spare parts a day to keep it running, while being highly inefficient at its job compared to cheaper, simpler Russian spacecraft.
Easton Wilson
This is exactly right, there are historic designs by serious people who always come up with a cylinder or cone as a orbital combat craft. For those interested minus the asshole thinking he's intelligent by pointing at my flag look up the combat station Polyus, or one of the armed space stations.
The only other design that works is a more nimble version, which looks like a giant spider, because the farther away a maneuvering thruster is from the center of mass the better torque it gets. But such designs aren't for orbital fighting.
Fighting in orbital space has nothing to do with that kind of maneuvering. You're mostly just accelerating or decelerating to shift the altitude of your orbit, there's not enough fuel to really change the type of orbit.
It's more like two trains fighting each other than two F-22s, and the trains have a few minutes every day (or week for higher orbits) when they're in weapons range.
Deep space fighting is even more different. You're thinking of this in waaaay to simplistic terms.
Ayden Flores
Fair enough.
I don't see how any of that matters.
In any significant gravitational body, because of the way orbital mechanics and rendezvous works, your tactical maneuverability basically reduces to a one-dimensional affair, the distance between 'my fleet' and 'their fleet'. You're either going to match orbits and intercept, or you're going to fly by at a relative velocity of several km/s and maybe come within a couple of clicks before you speed off just as fast as you came in.
Even something a simple as a flanking maneuver is just going to be a massive waste of delta-vee because you're fighting your own orbit. The only place I can see otherwise being possible would be near an asteroid or Lagrange point, where your "orbit" is little more than assisted stationkeeping.
Now if you're talking about random walking on approach to dodge incoming fire, that's plausible, but there's no reason the same couldn't be accomplished with lateral thrusters or RCS.
Gavin Roberts
>Desigining your weapons systems as anything other than Mass-Driver Cannons to lob large amounts of debris at supersonic speeds through space
Plebs.
Juan Ross
It's like two trains, except once you've passed by once, you can effectively predict your opponent's orbital rotation and plant debris or shoot shit at the right trajectory to hit them on the other side in a few days time if they don't waste precious fuel avoiding the hit.
Joseph Peterson
The posts above lay out preciously why missiles are undoubtedly the future of space combat. You have two fundamental problems you gotta deal with; delta-v and intercepts. Relatively close-range weapons, for example cannons, lasers, the like, require a two or three hundred kilometer digit range to be remotely accurate. How do you solve both of these issues, not using delta-v, and attacking from various directions? The answer is missiles. You can probably escape the moon five times over with a mundane modern cruise missile, reverse your orbit, do Hohmann transfer passes and the like. The future of this shit isn't going to be swarms or whatever the fuck, no fantastical retardation. It's going to be missile carriers with massive fuel tanks and an inordinate amount of point defense moving in formations with overlapping fire arcs.
Noah Miller
Somewhat less exciting, but there is some fun to be had there.
Owen Long
They would not really work in real life, they are large targets, move inefficiently, they present more of an area to fire at while that area is also harder to slope and they would not deal with recoil as effectively. Reloading would also be difficult as would carrying ammunition.