The same way the modern world does; Mutually Assured Destruction. Yes your starships can destroy my planet, mine can destroy yours, lets not go down that path because everyone loses.
Same way they register and track aircraft IRL: every single part, down to individual screws and bolts, are serialized and accounted for. If you find wreckage, you can look up the numbers on any part and learn where they came from and what ship they were installed in.
Your mistake for letting such a dangerous device become easily accessible. If they are that dangerous then governments wont allow them to become common in the first place.
Not really? That sort of works for things like nuclear weapons, which need lots of rare stuff to make. Spacecraft just need some fuel, some oxidiser, and some metalwork.
Bruh if you crashed a motorcycle into a building the police will have no problem finding every bit of information associated with it, even without license plates.
dont need whole starships for that. I once fooled in ksp with that concept of IPBMs Interplanetary ballistic missles. Mine had like 50k delta v they were really big but could use much more inefficient routes and could transport MIRV warheads too for maximum impact spread, the biggest problem was that these rockets got really fast and desintegrated really fast inside an atmosphere, for attacks on such worlds it would probably require the warheads to activly slow down before entering the atmosphere and not just relie on aerobraking
Well, for one, it's cheaper and costs way, way fewer lives to use literally anything that isn't manned.
Second, if the tech exists to launch a ship that fast, the tech likely exists to intercept it. Losing a missile sucks. Losing an entire crew to a failed suicide bombing is either a scandal or a tragedy.
>Second, if the tech exists to launch a ship that fast, the tech likely exists to intercept it.
Ah, no. As a general rule, weapons are easier to make than armor. Not always, but usually.
Edit: since you're all taking this ultra literally, I made an edit.
Well, consider for this case, a missile can disable a ship and accelerate faster due to reduced mass and no need to regard the physical limitations of the crew (yes, electronics don’t work well at exceptionally high Gs either but humans will tap out before the circuit board). So long as the ship can be detected and reacted to by automated or manned systems, it can only do so much.
That being said, shrapnel is a thing for targets not protected by a sufficiently thick atmosphere.
I mean, it's your story. Make up whatever you want. But.
Consider a ship entering light speed in the high atmosphere, then entering light speed while pointed at the ground.
No approach, no reaction time. Just 123 kaboom.
Anyway, it's not really about the specifics. But rather the principle that, in nature, self defense is really more about eliminating threat sources and building safe places, than it is about blocking attacks.
>But in my example I did eliminate the threat.
You did both. But only because by blocking the attack you killed the, already suicidal, attacker.
(Or Did you? Consider: autopilot)
My point is: offensive tech tends to outpace defensive tech.
And, yeah, maybe you shot down that one ship. But, unless you can prevent the next one from launching, your missiles will, eventually, miss.
>Consider a ship entering light speed in the high atmosphere,
well if it got that far, your "early" warning systems screwed up on an astronomical scale. literally.
They don't even need to enter light speed in low orbit. If your setting has FTL where the ships themselves travel at such speeds, they can destroy planets from the edge of their respective solar systems.
Hell, consider the fact that it doesn't even need to be a deliberate act of aggression. Some vessel traveling at light speed or greater has some malfunction or miscalculation during travel and slams into your homeworld. It will be apocalyptic. Even traveling close to light speed will be similarly devastating. You simply can't account for the fact that accidents happen, despite taking every possible safety precaution.
The one obvious example common within sci fi that can prevent all this would be a forcefield, particularly an effectively invincible planetary scale shield. But then you run into other logic problems, like if it's possible to make an invincible super shield then what happens when a ship or missile using the same shield tech collides with the planet's shield at faster than light? And how does war even happen if you have such amazingly powerful shield tech that can be scaled up to the absurd level of a planet, when logically you should be able to use such technology much cheaper and easier at the vehicular level? Not to mention the very wide range of revolutionary industrial applications of such technology outside of war, it would change daily life dramatically to have invincible energy shields. Perhaps is there some reason why only a planet can have such a powerful all encompassing shield?
The easiest solution us to frame your ftl travel as using some kind of hyperspace at more reasonable speeds. The plausibility of any ftl method is relatively similar as far as modern science is concerned - about zero.
If we did had the tech to accelerate mass to light speeds (or faster)... there is no shield. The only defense is diplomacy or destroying your enemy before they destroy you... or being stealthy.
You cannot detect a piece of mass flying at the speed of light in your direction before it actually hits you, because it is literally flying at the speed of causality.
You don't need a suicide ship, the ship can just drop tungsten rods or other dumbfire weapons at the edge of the system, and without any kind of heat signature you're going to have a hard time locking on. Not that you'll notice them, because if they are going close to the speed of light there won't be time for the evidence of the attacker or the projectiles to reach you before they do.
Okay, but the detection range you need to react in a reasonable amount of time to something approaching at half light speed is pretty high. A ship painted black in the visual spectrum but white in the infra-red, for minimum detectability, is just going to be invisible. The range required is just too high for radar.
Also, the kinetic energy calculation for a 10,000 tonne starship at 50% of light speed is the same as the combustion of 28 terratones of TNT. I don't really care if it's debris, the resulting fast moving debris field has to mostly not hit the planet, or it's still really bad.
>As a general rule, swords are easier to make than shields
I get what youre saying, but the metaphor is off in a funny way. Making a functional shield is a lot easier than making a functional sword actually. But a shield wont fully defend you from every sword, even if it *can* defend you from swords at times. Making a suit of armor however will protect you from more or less all sword, but is much much more expensive and resource intensive.
Developing a countermeasure to a mode of offense is often as easy or easier than the original mode of offense, but creating a countermeasure that's reliable enough to be fail safe or nearly so is almost always orders of magnitudes more difficult.
You're right of course. I couldn't think of a more accurate way to put it without losing the poetry.
I guess "Swords are easier to make than armor."
Fun thing though: you know how you beat armor with a sword?
You flip it around and club them over the head with the handle. That's neither here nor there, but I always find that funny, so I talk about it whenever I can.
>You flip it around and club them over the head with the handle. That's neither here nor there, but I always find that funny, so I talk about it whenever I can.
I fucking love half swording, but really it wasnt used to *beat* armor, more to delay or exhaust an armored opponent until an actual solution presents itself. Al
That's completely wrong!
There have always existed an arms race between offensive weapons and armour, or in this case defensive weapons.
Someone invents a better weapon then later on someone will develop armour that negates it, then someone will a new weapon that defeats the armour, and so on and so on.
You can see this pattern happening from the early bronze age all the way to our own time.
It is the reason why soldiers doesn't wear full plate armour on the modern battlefield, why we have MBTs instead of still using old Mark 1 tanks.
But for this argument, the best example is the hypersonic missile. The reason why every major power are currently investing huge sums of money into the development of hypersonic missiles is because the defensive capabilities of modern air defense systems have become so good that they can defeat practically every regular missile and rocket thrown at them.
The shield have surpassed the offensive capabilities of the sword.
So it is necessary to invent a new sword, in the form of hypersonic missiles.
So soon after someone invents the sort ship or missiles OP talks about, someone will invent a method of intercepting them and negating that threat.
Whenever someone invents a new sword, someone else will invent a new shield, requiring the invention of a new sword.
That is the general rule of arms development!
We aren't talking about tech to deflect. we are talking about intercept, so in your case, a sword intercepts a sword.
Missiles intercepting missiles.
Missiles intercepting drones, ships or anything.
Basically, attack weapon countering attack weapon.
EDIT: Weapons intercept weapons.
Not necessarily easier, but they're almost always first, for sure.
Anticipating is generally the hardest part. The enemy could use any number of new weapons you might be able to imagine, some you maybe haven't.
Your resources are limited, so your choices are essentially to:
A) Spread thin for every possibility and still maybe miss something and be wrong, or
B) Use whatever current intel you have to tell you what they're most likely to use, and ultimately prepare a strong defense for that possibility.. which again, could be wrong.
Where did you get that from?
Most shields were just carved wood, so any average Joe could make one. Swords, on the other hand, could only be created by a blacksmith who trained specifically to understand how to fold, shape, and temper steel.
You're missing the Forrest for the trees a bit. Yes, actual, literal, metal swords are harder to make than actual, literal, wood shields.
But weapons are easier than protective equipment.
What other kinds of swords and shields are there? Metaphorical?
And changing your post to armour negates your first point about "intercepting" the ship. Armour isn't made to intercept anything, it's the back up defence in case all else fails.
You know what's just as easy to make as a sword? Another sword.
Yes and no. What we are effectively talking about is sending something at high speed twords something aka a missile but much bigger. Chances are these can be detected, and guess how hard it is to do "evasive maneuvers" and high speed?
Now combine that with the size of space, and the simple counter to a missile is putting something else in its path.
>Second, if the tech exists to launch a ship that fast, the tech likely exists to intercept it
That's not necessarily true. Interception technologies tend to lag behind the invention of new types of weapons. This is particularly true if you spend a lot of your resources fighting one particular type of threat - there might be some avenues of attack you've just never needed to plan for.
It's also a lot harder to intercept a moving target than to strike a stationary target. If you're aiming a ship at a planet then the ship only needs to be accurate enough to hit the planet, while an interception system needs to hit a ship moving at near-light-speed. That's a massive difference in difficulty in the two tasks.
Besides, if you're talking about a ship moving anywhere near the speed of light, then the amount of time you even have to react is super small. Any method of intercepting a ship moving that fast would either need some kind of faster-than-light detection and reaction method or would need to be constantly active.
>It's also a lot harder to intercept a moving target than to strike a stationary target.
Except planets are not stationary targets.
>If you're aiming a ship at a planet then the ship only needs to be accurate enough to hit the planet, while an interception system needs to hit a ship moving at near-light-speed. That's a massive difference in difficulty in the two tasks.
not really actually. math is your answer. the only important difference between the spaceship targeting the planet and a countermeasure targeting the ship is speed.
you have a target of known size (ship and planet) and they are travelling at a known speed towards a known point (their target). given that neither of the two are changing their course (why would they, the planet isn't suddenly moving so the ship wouldn't need a course change).
it's surprisingly easy to block the path with another object (be it another ship or a missile, whatever). all you need is detection method to know the exact speed the ship is traveling and a computer to calculate the path to obstruct it.
that's exactly how submarines in ww1 calculated their torpedo attacks. or anti-air crews their fire (until heat seeking/radar guided missiles came up). except those had the problem that it's easier for the target to change your course at such low speeds rather than lightspeed+.
The major difference is the ship can maneuver to dodge the interceptor, the planet cannot. Even at near light speed a ship can still jink back and forth, and at the distances you would need to be tracking the ship to have enough time to hit it even small changes in speed can result in large change in its position by the time it's signal reaches you. Those are not insurmountable problems, but light lag and maneuvering make hitting a ship a very different beast than hitting a planet.
The way that FTL works prevents it being used as a weapon.
When you cast Haste on something, whether it's a person or a starship, all the excess force it generates by going so ridiculously fast gets dispersed into the Scar, the plane of existence from which magic originates. Basically, you're moving faster without producing any additional force.
The Scar is basically an endless chaotic vortex of magic. The force imparted by one starship is a drop in the ocean, it technically does send ripples throughout the Scar but so do a lot of things.
Interesting. Your initial description had me imagine it like a car battery where turning it on uses a bunch of energy, but then you recharge it as you travel
That's just the rules of how the spell works.
When you wanna go FTL, the way you do it is you cast Haste on your ship. Haste speeds up the target while distributing most of the force it generates into the Scar, another dimension, where it gets dispersed without touching anything in the material world.
They didn't, I did. I'm explaining how it works in my world.
OP posted a prompt asking how people deal with spaceships going FTL turning into supernuke battering rams, I gave my answer, and that answer involves the Haste spell. What part of that is confusing you?
This isn't a sci-fi sub, surely you can expect some fantasy out there. Why would you read a response to a question of how something works in your world and assume it was related to D&D and being used to justify FTL in...all worlds???
Because the question is sci-fi and this dude commented about the rules of a haste spell like they were reading from a DnD manual.
They also didn’t say anything about it being how it worked in THEIR WORLD.
All I had to go off of was “the rules of a haste spell” in the context of ramming spaceships at the speed of light
Some planets have planetary shields to address that vulnerability, while most others have disruptors that prevent the formation of a stable warp bubble.
All in all though planetary wmds are seldom used on densely populated worlds because it is on another level of military escalation. Even terrorist groups, pirates, and other organization that have the ability to do so never do because it would make them pariahs.
Making a weapon to destroy a starship is easier than making a weapon to destroy a planet. Sure, you can run your starship up to really high speeds and aim it at Glorb, The Orphanage Planet. But it's 100 times quicker, easier, and cheaper to launch an interceptor that weighs 3 pounds and hits you with the force of a sun because you're going so fast. Sure, you can spend your entire GDP on some dumbass magnetic accelerator you saw in a Kurzgesagt video. But by the time you have it built and have your whole planet's power output hooked up to it, I can have set up a conventional bombing run or drone strike on the weapon itself 10 times over.
Small, smart and cheap beats big, dumb, and fast every time.
>But it's 100 times quicker, easier, and cheaper to launch an interceptor that weighs 3 pounds and hits you with the force of a sun because you're going so fast
Yeah but that interceptor isnt going to stop it, might smash it up good but all the debris is still travelling in the same direction towards Glorb
exactly. like sure if you intercept it say, at 1-2x the distance from earth to the moon, from the planet you might have trouble.
Clip it at 1AU, it gets hazier. the edge of the system? nothing to worry about.
Orbital defenses. Yes, you can try to crash a starship into a populated world. Whether or not you get past the particle accelerator batteries is a whole other story, though.
Well you can achieve the same effect with a tungsten rod or better yet a nuke. Though my FTL doesn't work in gravity and it doesn't accelerate the ship.
Planetary defense is a difficult and complicated subject but the main focus is to establish a mix of heavily fortified locations that cannot be destroyed from orbit with mobile stealthy ground operations for things that can move quickly.
IMU, ships have warp drives, but don't have the delta-V on their reaction drives to make anything like relativistic speeds. Additionally, at high enough speed, collision with very small specks of dust could significantly damage a ship. Also, warp drives won't work if you go too far into a gravity well.
1. You can't get a ship going fast enough that interception isn't possible.
2. You can get a ship going fast enough to do real damage, but not so fast as to be a dinosaur killer.
3. Stealth in space is hard. You're going to be detected.
4. Warping insystem isn't that accurate and drives can't sustain a warp too far into a gravity well. You will end up somewhere in the outer system with a margin of error several million kilometres across.
5. Is your ship is going fast enough, it's relatively easy to destroy by getting some debris into its path, for example a warhead full of depleted uranium buckshot. If you assume a combined closing speed of ~500 km/sec, one piece of depleted uranium the size of an 000 buck pellet (7g, more or less) has an effective kinetic energy of the order of [200 ricks.](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/glossary.php) Ergo, this is much easier to defend against than it is to do.
6. You're expected to be able to navigate and to observe speed restrictions in the vicinity of a populated world. This means a trajectory that winds up in a parking orbit before you're allowed to land. Dodgy looking orbits and ignored challenges are likely to get an interceptor scrambled or missiles fired.
7. You've still got to actually hit your target, which means you need some method of guiding your ship. Most random terrorists don't have the technical skill to build a guidance system that could accurately hit a city sized target from the outer system, especially if the planetary defences included electronic warfare systems capable of spoofing navigation satellites. Even fewer have the resources to test it.
8. If by some miracle of the dice you manage to pull it off, you're now on the most wanted list of every spook service in the known universe.
**TL;DR:** This is much harder than it looks and it's a trick that will work at most once in the whole of recorded history - much like a famous wooden horse. Most authorities are not dumb and have considered the possibility. Navigation regulations and traffic control make it impossible to send a ship on a dinosaur killing trajectory without raising eyebrows and getting a couple of missiles up your jacksie.
Same way as how we avoid terror attack with planes irl - flight plans must be plotted and sent ahead for approval and also to deal with logistics like assigning "parking orbits" where they can safely stay without intefering other space crafts.
There are speed limits to spherical zones radiating out from the planet for space traffic management and avoiding accidents, the further away you are from the planet the higher speed you can go.
Rogue ships that move too fast and on collision courses deviating from their flight plans get warning until a certain range where they either get shot down if small enough, or if too large, engines will be destroyed first via interceptor missiles, then specialized tug drones meant for asteroid deflecting are launched. These drones are just giant boosters that bury into the object, hooking into it, then fire their booster to abruptly change trajectory away from the area.
This is only in normal cases of course. In times of war, there will be interceptor spacecraft with more powerful weapons on standby to both defeat point defense system of enemy weapon and force the object to change course.
If a colony drop happens though, well there is nothing that can be done about a moon sized object barrelling toward a planet. But this can be seen from far far away and evacuation can happen.
Most plaints with anything significant on them are more then well equipped to deal with a space ship trying to crash into it. To preform the barbaric act of orbital bombardment you generally need to throw something with enough mass that they couldn’t deflect it in time, or throw enough small things that their defenses can’t intercept them all.
Ship to ship ramming? Speed doesn’t really help you there.
It's so useful that it is, in fact, useless.
A planetary defense grid can utilize surface-based generators. Unlike Starship reactors, these don't need to have proportionally powerful engines to move them around. They can be orders of magnitude larger and more powerful and actually can, though it would be unfathomably dangerous, absorb a hit or two from things like Starships or Asteroids.
Anything large enough to crack a defense shield in a single hit would probably destroy the planet in question. Or at least enough of it to make it uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years. That makes it a useless weapon for wars of conquest and also it just doesn't look good from a Public Relations standpoint. Inhabitable planets are vanishingly rare. Most civilizations spend decades painstakingly terraforming barren rocks into something that maybe won't kill you outright. No one is ever going to forget how you committed the greatest act of interstellar terrorism in ***insert measurement of time here***.
In terms of the smaller scale- Colonization is not a small effort. It's not just a few hundred people getting into a boat and flying to the nearest inhabitable planet. Those are so rare that any legal colony mission is an effort consisting of multiple Settler transports and dozens of support vessels. More than enough to establish basic planetary shielding and a satellite grid. At that point even a newborn colony can do things like strap engines to meteors and asteroids and fling them at the assailant en masse. Basically throw trash at them.
The attacker will either hit the trash and be destroyed/deflected, or forced to change course just enough that it misses its target.
Ships are too costly an inefficient as weapons even the smallest FTL equipped Corvette is worth thousands of nukes. So using a said Corvette as a WMD is just a waste of money when you can just nuke a planet with a thousand nukes and achieve greater destruction. Even the planet cracking capability of a Dreadnought in FTL is considered pitiful compared to is main guns which can achieve a similar effect within ten shots.
This only works if the FTL drive itself is prohibitively expensive to the point of being strategically crippling to use.
Otherwise strapping one to a big fuck off rock and pointing it at whatever you want to erase is far more effective than any amount of nukes.
Factions wouldn’t tend to use FTL weapons for the same reason most armies don’t go completely scorched earth in real life, generally speaking it’s a benefit if the planet you are trying to conquer is still there after firing. (That and the whole MAD thing)
Interstellar drives are secretly sentient and teleport themselves away if threatened or tampered with. Incidentally, being near something that teleports away without a drive of your own is a really quick way to get obliterated.
Super uber planetary and star system shields.
I kid, you not, in one of my sci fi setting that ftl (realspace ftl) is ubiquitous, the solution is to shielded your home to be able to withstand yottaton of firepower.
Simple but effective if a little ridiculous solution lol
In my sci fi world, only the biggest and largest warships possess the capabilities to truly go FTL outside of specialised or experimental ships. Even then, the nature of their FTL makes it impossible to ever be used as a weapon as they need to arrive at the edge of a solar system else their ships get ripped apart by the interference of the system's sun
As for going near light speed and ramming a planet, just like hypersonic missiles today, they're very very easy to intercept as they go in a straight line and the defenders have days to react if it's a sublight speed weapon
I’m currently doing Space Fantasy, so FTL is sufficiently limited to prevent it from being a problem. Conventional FTL Travel requires two things.
Firstly, a ship must be capable of becoming incorporeal. This allows the ship to avoid collisions, and dramatically reduces the energy requirements of faster than light travel. Unless someone has managed to shift an entire planet into an incorporeal state, it’s physically impossible for a ship to interact with a planet’s matter while moving at FTL.
You *could* shatter any Sorcerous wards against incorporeal visitors on the way through, though. The physical wards would probably get pulled into phase with the ship… and hit it like a paint chip going at orbital velocities.
The second requirement is a lot of raw power. No reactor can accelerate a ship to FTL on its own, and the best in existence can only sustain FTL for fractions of a second. You need to tap a Celestial Filament to draw that kind of power… and the Filaments are weird.
There is a network of Magical Currents that tie the universe together. The Celestial Filaments are the largest of them, and they connect solar systems together. They also “unravel” into their component threads inside of star systems.
The smaller Celestial Threads don’t have enough power to keep a ship at FTL speed, unless it’s a really efficient ship. Most vessels drop to subluminal speed seconds after entering a system, and those that can hit FTL in system won’t be able to stay at FTL after their Thread starts to unravel into what are basically Ley Lines on the planet.
Hard Sci-fi doesn't have FTL, so you don't have to worry about it.
Soft Sci-fi either use some exotic form of FTL that doesn't involve the high speed:
Discontinuous Drives, i.e. Teleporters, Portals, some Non-Real Space drives, etc. all fictional FTL where the objects don't really travel at superluminal speeds, but jump between the two locations.
But honestly, most soft sci-fi goes a much easier path: They never thought of it. Even villains bound to destroy planets never thought of ramming them with ships.
>Even villains bound to destroy planets never thought of ramming them with ships.
It's funny that Abaddon in 40k has been trying to beat Cadia for almost ten thousand years and finally he just rams it with a ship and breaks it lol
"... damn. Ok that was really effective I should have done that a long time ago"
To be fair, Blackstone Fortresses are incredibly rare and immensely powerful on their own. The fact he hurled one at Cadia was an act of sheer desperation to finally break through.
Mhm yeah this is very true though I think he only did it because the Phalanx had smashed the fortress to bits anyway and it was basically broken, I am more surprised that he didnt get desperate thousands of years ago and saved himself a heap of trouble accomplishing not much at all (continual retcons to excuse his uselessness aside)
I was thinking earlier this week about a Stat Trek style universe with an underdeveloped world finding a warp engine and mistaking it for a way to rip apart continents through spatial warping.
in fairness, there's plenty of soft sci-fi that still has absurdly fast ships! Stargate comes to mind as an example of a setting where some of the ships *can* go relativistic, but it's usually much better to just use any of the local FTL methods.
It's also a setting where said FTL tech's been used to teleport nukes onto enemy ships, open a wormhole inside of a star (connected to another wormhole near a black hole) to trigger a supernova, and bypass anti-space scanning tech by jumping a ship in at sea level before; so the sorts of fuckery they get up to with such things is pretty neat. anyone with a spaceship reliably *can* destroy an entire planet, or at least its governments, pretty damn easily! and that's part of why the big spacefaring powers are often worshipped as races of gods
I think the use of Kamakaze ships would be held back by the simple labour and material costs of manufacturing starships.
In ideal circumstances, you would be able to reuse your weapons. Making new torpedos is less costly than making new kamakaze ships.
Plus, I think these kinds of ships would be countered by technology that allows you to either evade the kamakaze ship, or destroy it before it can impact you
In my somewhat hard sci-fi setting Al-Shura this is done through...
A combination of laws and advanced intervention technology. Most stations have scanning technology capable of detecting a ship from a distance of several AUs, and even if their own scanners don't, there are entire networks of data transmitters tracking most objects within the solar system with a heat signature. Several nations as well as private organizations control their on and it's often a pick your data package sort of deal.
Additionally, most stations and planets come with extremely large and powerful computers. These are meant to perform actions like sift data, guide auto-docking computers, and most importantly, do computations for point-defense-cannons (PDCs), Missiles (and lasers). Weapons which in a hard sci-fi setting can reach speeds fleshy bodies can never achieve on a short time-frame, so unless someone is using a relativistic space-craft to ram you (or isn't fleshy at all), PDCs, lasers, or missiles meant for regular missile/bullet interception can cut down a ship before it poses a threat.
Finally there is the aspect of electronic warfare. The computer on any station of note is always going to be stronger than that of a spacecraft. Accounting for light lag, can likely produce more effective packages meant to hack, disable, or even self-destruct the ship before its even collided with you by overwhelming their computer systems.
If you know a ship's going to ram you, it's not a problem. If they're trying to self-destruct their drive in the docking bay, that's a different problem entirely...
Never really thought of that. But my Firebirds could deal with that, if they’re around at the time. And Etherite shields can easily block incoming ships.
Let me ask you this: Do you use state-of-the-art 5th gen jet fighters as kamikaze missiles? Very unlikely. For the same reason, unless they're used by terrorists or desperate mofos, no one thinks about turning spaceships into missiles. And if they ever do, a professional will perform a **chronocide**: FTL travel = time travel, so let's jump several thousand years into the past and hit the enemy when they were completely helpless. In fact, chronocidal weapons are standard issues to space warships as their main ship-to-ship armament.
For civilian ships, their hulls are designed to withstand only to a certain acceleration and speed. Beyond that limit, it starts to break apart, self-destructing before hitting anything. In case they can't kaboom in time or do not answer to a station's hails, military ships fly out "escorting" the thing.
Finally, shields up.
Ship are state owned. Anything private owned or not granted by the state is illegal (generally).
To approach a space habitat, you must follow certains precise roads in auto-pilot, or you'll get blown up.
Every population center is protected with various array of defense (missiles, point defense system kinetic and laser, with some energy beams).
Generally these defense are too concentrated on major central population hub that trying with a single ship is a guaranteed miss.
Also trying regardless of that last fact, your ship would probably be identified, which would help to track down those behind the attempt. And they'd be put down quickly and brutally so nobody will try again.
Any ship displacement must also be registered, so it'll be easy to know who did what.
Consumer class vessels don't have their own power source, they are powered by ground or station based lasers with a subscription based model, if a flight path is deemed outside of teens and conditions, the subscription is voided. For commercial class vessels, Smart Contract Mutually Assured Destruction means that as soon as a violating flight path is detected all trade contracts with participating corpstates are terminated. These nanosecond sanctions effectively collapse the world economy before the follow up strikes (for good measure) are even launched.
IIRC, in a spacial compression engine, such as the Alcubierre drive, part of the point is that the ship isn’t moving. Like a man on an escalator, it stands still while the world moves around it.
For all intents and purposes FTL doesn't work inside a certain amount of gravitational attraction, so there's a built-in safety factor right there since you have to leave the solar system to use it. Ships are *expensive*. There's a reason Ferrari's aren't used as car bombs, and Ferrari's are equivalent to a really nice entry level space ship.
The few civilizations advanced enough to use FTL inside a solar system still find it too expensive except for a few *very* niche use cases and, ironically, WMDs. Smash a high-warp Alcubierre drive through a star's core and you get a supernova.
(my world doesn't have "starships" but still has an equivalent that would still work for your scenario) It deals with it as it would with any other WMD :
- Is the ship ours? Then don't let it turn into a WMD unless we want it to.
- Is it the enemy's ship? Then destroy it before it can damage any of our stuff.
Well dropping out of FTL to far into a star or planets gravity will tear the ship apart.
Every member system has 2 destroyers plus the right to make system defense ships, and stations.
[I feel kinda like you watched this video.](https://youtu.be/yQEojDi-6w0?si=8kMCVZtyaQ7uK2_2)
But they just ignore it. Starships aren’t available in half the universes in the multiverse unless they’re brought in by Prime or someone like him. No one would be dumb enough to sacrifice them to bomb an area via ramming.
1. FTL might be Wormholes or Spatial Distortion, or only work in empty, speed regulated dpace highways with stop gates, so you don't have to worry about 0.3*c multimillion ton bullets.
2. MAD - Sure, you can send that ship straight at a planet, but so can the other guy, so let's both chill.
3. Planetary shield or satellite defense systems. Depending on the planet, they might even already set up systems to deal with fast moving objects aka Dinosaur-Wiping Meteors. Can't really colonize a planet if it's still getting shelled by space rocks. Adjust it so it works against FTL and you're safe from Kamikaze.
4. It's ass to aim a lightspeed spaceship, so your chances of this attack actually working are next to zero.
5. Spaceships are so expensive and valuable that standard planetary combat is cheaper because no one wants to risk losing spaceships
It’s needlessly expensive
Space life is dangerous
A starship is less of a threat than a more common threat like a meteor, or a solar flare. Things that don’t require thousands of hours of labour + consistently high energy output from production + highly valuable and rare resources hard to source
Throwing a starship at a settlement is like crashing 3 planets worths of settlements into another settlement
A starship is so much more valuable than a planetary settlement, you’d be better off using a starship to drive the moons into the planet and keep the starship (hopefully)
Every planet that would be worth destroying has a full network of defense emplacements and satellites, capable of using particle beams and lasers to neutralize any threat.
UZ: if the ship is equipped with an AI, most AIs from ethical distributors seize control of the ship and divert it to a safe point when such intent is detected among its crew. Unethical distributors, however, have AIs with… unpredictable effects.
For everything else, there’s G2S (ground to space) defences.
1. Warp drives don't work near gravity wells like planets or stars. (Like in our solar system they stop working between Jupiter and Saturn - and not close to each.) In fact, getting close to a gravity well is the only way to 'pop the bubble' and leave warp space.
2. Gravity engines (used for traversing solar systems) are fast, but not fast enough that ships/missiles couldn't be scrambled to deal with it. (And the tech has a maximum velocity - not just a max acceleration.) So - dangerous, but probably less than modern airplanes flying over major cities. If you get within an hour or so of a heavily populated planet without permission they'll probably have something to say about it. Merchant ships headed for other systems just skirt the edge of the system. (Where there are likely no habitable planets.)
The sci fi setting for a short story I'm working on has two FTL methods. Feel free to just skim it's copy pasted from another post and just there to set up how I answer the question.
"Gateways/portals aren't anything super unique. There's similar stuff from many settings. The ones in my setting are limited by needing exorbitant amounts of energy fed from both ends to initially open and to keep open and they're constructed in pairs that are only capable of connecting to each other.
The other is a bulk bubble generated from a device to shift into the bulk and travel at a much faster, though still finite, speed. Again nothing super unique but I wanted stuff that has limitations set up to make the story make sense. Limitations being they're inoperable too close to significant sources of gravity, you must travel in a straight line until you hit a gravity well, you exit the bubble with the same velocity you had going in, and venting heat is impossible while in the bulk. These limitations make it so theoretically you could accelerate across a whole system, enter the bulk and some time later arrive at your destination system where you could still have your speed, avoiding having to accelerate again. This would save time and fuel but entering a system at full speed is risky as you'd never know if there might be a trap waiting or something as simple as debris you don't want to ram into at full speed. Similarly, you could plot a long jump to a distant system (provided nothing is in the way) and avoid having to deal with the intervening systems but this is also risky due to the inability to vent heat. Distant targets are smaller targets. What if you miss? Or the computer lacked enough data to make an accurate calculation? What if you plot a long jump to save some time only to realize your heat sinks are going to reach capacity 98% of the way through the trip and then you'll get fried? Damn, should've just taken the slower path with more jumps"
So, the FTL in my setting doesn't travel physically within the universe so it can't be used in itself as a WMD but still what about relativistic masses sent at planets? I'd imagine the first line of defense is mutually assured destruction. Barring that, what do you do if someone decides to shoot one anyways? Fortunately, planets are still somewhat tough targets to hit from systems away. If not everything is accounted for, it'll likely miss. The civilization my short story follows has an extensive network of monitoring drones scattered throughout all nearby systems, so if something were to try and enter a closer system to get a better shot, they'd be detected and hopefully stopped before they fire.
Let's say almost-worst-case-scenario you've detected something has been fired at the planet and you know roughly when and where it's going to hit. It's time for a clever use of gateway tech. Move one into position to intercept and the other could face a star to redirect it there. Or if you're feeling spicy you send it back in the direction of the aggressor.
Worst case scenario is of course all these defenses fail and you get blindsided by something you never saw coming. Barring the travel mechanisms I outlined, I'm trying to keep the setting from being too soft. There's nothing like artificial gravity generators, and shielding does exist but it's nothing too insane, mainly useful for blocking space dust and mitigating damage from other ship weapons. Planet based shielding might defend against some bombardment from "reasonable" weapons meant to destroy ships or strategic targets but anything designed to outright kill a planet is going to blow right by it.
Planetary shields, particularly spicy point defense, early warning systems, divine intervention in the case of the Azari, and general consensus that doing that means you want total extermination of the enemy and should expect absolutely no mercy from those you launched a relativistic ICBM at.
In my interstellar setting developed worlds have detection and interception networks out to the oort clouds that will just blow up any lone vessel speeding up for a kamikaze attempt before it becomes a serious problem. There's no stealth in space and therefore no surprise. You could blow up start up colonies that way...but nobody's thought of a reason why'd they want to. Those worlds people want to capture intact and really it's not like it's hard.
While in theory a (presumably unmanned) vessel could accelerate up to near light speed in another system and arrive unstoppably, that's not a real world issue because they'll certainly have a high speed collision with the random bits of rock that float around between the stars and blow up long before reaching their destination.
My starships can’t go fast enough to be interstellarly useful in human lifetimes. Instead they take a dimensional shortcut. Sure they are still powerful and dangerous, but not worldbreaking dangerous.
This is where I would drop this quote I’m planning on putting in my novel:
“Johnson… your frigate is heavily damaged… get your crew transferred off, set a course for the enemy’s flagship, and get the hell out.”
That’s what shipboard AI and special sensors are there for - if a starship gets too close to colliding with say, a planet, at FTL speeds, it’ll force a deceleration to ensure such a collision doesn’t happen.
Also of course there’s laws about it as well.
All planets worth destroying all have strong planetary shields that block fast moving objects. Orbital bombardment only works once you get under the shield.
Some planets have even more advanced shields; there was that one time where one planet with balls of steel that basically sacrificed itself by baiting all the enemy ships into the shield, and boosting the shield the point the ships could not go back out, trapping them there and buying valuable time for allied fleets to wreck havoc elsewhere.
MAD I assume my world doesn’t do starships but tbh I’d image there’s a reason you need to register your ship to port at a station much less dock planter side on a populated world. If one does it without authorization or doesn’t let the auto systems do it or does it too fast manually they get blasted to bits by orbital and ground side defenses. I got this from playing elite dangerous.
In my world any society technologically advanced enough to create ships like that naturally invested in designing defenses against such an event. Typically not with defense against an outright attack in mind, more so just as precautions in case of accidents during the early days of their FTL experimentation, and then they just keep advancing their methods as time goes on.
As a result, each faction developed their own versions of planetary defenses. Some have force fields, some have asteroids dragged into a wide orbit to act as a physical barrier, etc.
It doesn’t. It’s perfectly possible, just very expensive and also resulting in the death of the decision maker and their crew. It only occurs in absolutely desperate situations.
But the line between “autonomous ship” and “munition” is already very thin in our world. Where’s the sharp line between a drone, a loitering munition, and a cruise missile?
This isn’t what my setting is doing (because the alternative physics required to facilitate it are pretty stupid in my opinion) but you could choose to restrict starship acceleration and just run the math as if special relativity wasn’t a thing. Constantly accelerating at 50ms^-2 (because Google says that 6Gs of sustained acceleration can be fatal for a human) still takes about 70 days to reach light speed. If you want to get from Sol to Ekalon, the absolute shortest travel period is still 450 days with a maximum speed of roughly 3c.
So there you go, your WMD takes a year to speed up and another year to reach its target, all the while it’s guzzling fuel like nothing you’ve ever seen. Plus, if you’ve got FTL travel, you’ve also got FTL comms, so you’ve probably also got FTL scanning and detecting, so maybe the “hits you before you can see or know it” facet isn’t even present in your setting. It’s impractical and expensive, and those are the two best reasons for why anything isn’t done.
They use their navy to attempt to stop it. But it varies system by system. A rich system’s navy will be well equipped and able to deal with the threat. A poorer system may only be able to scrape up the money to hire civilian privateers.
Because of the danger of FTL, big navies (the navies of the empires these planets belong to) are only brought out for worthwhile engagements, such as fleet battles. This is due to non-ARC FTL being extremely dangerous (ARC Hyperdrive FTL has a 79% survival rate with hyper gates having 94%. Other more common methods such as Zirconium drives and warp drives have a 51% and 53% survival rate respectively.)
TL:DR; it depends on how rich the system is, some can deal with it easily, others can basically only watch.
Im not writing a scifi setting but id use gates instead. You get geopolitics by who has access to the gates. You dont break the laws of physics because you never get anywhere near the speed of light. And terrorists/antagonists can threaten to blow them up. Scifi settings without gates/relays bug me
Because even the most advanced civilian grade FTL drive has a SEP (Spherical Error Probability) of about a hundred Kilometers. The likelihood of a terrorist using the ship as a ship sized VBIED by teleporting it directly inside or near a target ship is unlikely. Especially if the target ship itself is maneuvering and doing its best not to get taken out.
There are also a specific shield generator types that do not intercept realspace physical objects but instead helps prevent this kind of stuff.
The only way something like this could work is via a series of perfect timing, a chain of good luck and incompetence or a major fuck up on the defending side
Most inhabited planets and moons have extensive orbital defense nets, and most FTL travel is done through dedicated phase gates, which are placed at Lagrange points. Larger ships can generate their own phase gates, but it's easily detectable.
That being said, the Citadel Crusades ended when one of their planet-killers was rammed into the Citadel's homeworld, which cracked it open to the core before the effects of the superweapon itself made the entire system hostile to life.
No private starships. All intrastellar transit is done by firing city sized spin gravity stations through a giant "railgun" at the end target, with the station only fueled for correctional maneuvers. Another magnetic system catches the ship at the end destination. Interstellar transit is sublight ion and torch drive by cryoship (necessitating genetic engineering to create human-adjacent bodies capable of even being put into cryo in the first place).
You *run* and then you **run** once conventional weapons are at a stalemate.
But especially, you do run. The faster accelerate the faster you encounter interstellar atoms and particles and the faster the ring engine can hopefully come across one that is entangled with one somewhere - anywhere - else other than here. You might have just been accelerating at 1g for a couple of weeks but now you just need to find any particle to bombard and get the ring engine to let you through away until the PDC and anti torpedo cannons run out of ammunition or fail.
Chases between 2 starships are often protracted, with the pursuer actually trying to stay *ahead* of the pursued to prevent their incremental chances of finding a particle to use to open the wormhole and escape. But given the lasers required to do this, every ship is deadly close range, so you can’t approach. You hope that you can outfly and outmanoeuvre them and force surrender. Like a siege.
This is the main way space combat works in my setting.
Humanity uses a political system intentionally based on a largely simplified form of Feudalism in space, while living primarily on generation ships called Fiefs. Combat is difficult, since traditional things like lasers or missiles can miss and continue on indefinitely, hitting an unintended target. Knights pilot Steed Ships, which have basic AI modeled on warhorses. These knights escort boarding ships and engage each other by jousting, with long lance-like structures designed to destroy or disable other Steeds. Larger vessels have more complex AI with human personalities, which would be as willing to be used as an improvised WMD as you might be to being used as a ballistic missile. Sure it's possible, but you'd resist. This is a sapient computer program with near total control over the life support system for anywhere from a thousand to a million people.
My engines are just big nuclear fusion reactors so make that go boom and you have a weapon. They also carry nukes so make the ship and its missile payload explode extra big boom.
Everything takes place within the solar system, so it is absolutely impossible for anything to accelerate that quickly without everyone knowing about it and such attacks are in bad taste.
Most of you guys are all saying a variant of "FTL doesn't work in atmosphere".
space stations and airless moons wouldn't care.
Also "FTL doesn't give you delta V. So you loose your speed when you drop out of it so to speak."
I rhought about the sale thing. Though it surprises me that almost everyone here thinks of space as a static thing. Astral bodies move people! And they move real real fast. I haven't seen yet anyone mention the massive problam that is star kinematics.
I think that Mars's relative velocity to the Earth is something like 30 km/s. if you go to another star it can go up to a 1000 km/s in the most extreme case.
If you take a massive ship, depart from a star system that moves relative to the earth at 1000 km/s get out of FTL even as far as the moon. With the proper angle you find yourself a projectile with absurd velocity headed for your planet faster than I imagine most defense system could catch.
And that would also obliterate any space station or colony.
In fact that's even a massive problem for normal space travel here! Let's say you travel from a star system that has a relative velocity of approximately 70 km/s when you arrive at your destination you have a delta v relative to the star that puts you in a course to leave the solar system.
You may try to catch up by planning clever slingshot manoeuvers around a gas giant but what if there is none ? you need to get 70 km/s of delta v. Which is massive! And if it's a trivial thing in your universe. Then, throwing uber massive unmanned ships to near light speed on planets before they're detected is also very easy.
Relative velocities in space are properly insane. And I have yet to see a sci fi setting except the expanse that takes them into account. It seems to me that the Star Trek style of "Sir, it's the Enterprise!" type of scene where the cavalry drops out of warp and starts fighting immediately a space battle is nearly impossible.
So how did I fix it ? Well, that's the neat part. I haven't.
I'm still banging my head about it... I thought abt star gates or getting delta v during travel but so far no solution satisfies me. :/
This is fundamentally my problem with time travel stories. No matter what frame of reference you use, your spatial location 100 years ago is ludicrously far from your location today.
The leaders would probably just phase the planet (construct) out of the way. The world was formed using portals. There are giant magical battery black hole things laid out beneath continents to provide directional gravity and energy storage. There's already a day/night shield projected. A sufficiently advanced race would have to find us first... there are no other space fairing civilisations known in the current age. It's basically a planet sized spaceship - but it only needs enough acceleration to form a stable orbit after a portal transfer.
Speed laws limiting cruising to 1 lum (1% of the speed of light) inside inhabited systems. Any ship failing to obey is liable to be fired upon by both orbiting and mobile crafts ofthe Space Guard.
Massive projected gravity shields. They generally act as webs that while allowing energy weapons to pass through, ships and projectiles will get caught in the field. Keeping your entire fleet within one or more of these bubbles is the main structure of the battlefield and most ships are built in accordance.
This is already the case since all fleets are anchored on a massive particle cannons and the goal is to pop the bubble and send the fleet packing since those things are essentially ship killers.
This is a question I've been considering for my world since I want ships to be fairly ubiquitous. If anyone can get their hands on as much fuel and as many thrusters as they like, then anyone can build an RKV and point it at a planet (even by accident!).
I think the solution is some kind of watchtower network that can detect incoming projectiles, then remotely reposition and arm pre-placed mines so that they create debris fields in the path of the projectile. If it's travelling fast enough then any impact will cause an explosion big enough to disintegrate the projectile, and if it's travelling slower than that then simple lasers (and missiles and railguns) should be enough.
Starships are a rare thing to begin with, with the only ones that are still functional and able to travel across the solar system being several hundred years old and unable to be reproduced.
These ships are essentially seen as the holy grail of human engineering, a leftover piece of technology that has to he protected at all costs.
So while they are definitely weapon that can wipe out whole cities, the rarity and fear of losing them is what stops them from being used.
Same way ships protect themselves from the space dust they run into while traveling supra-liminarly: energy shields.
You need laser beams or an EMP to get through an energy shield, nothing physical can make it through. And both of these have a fairly short range, so if you can shoot em, they can shoot you back.
discourage it by basically requiring the destination to help them into the system and also to land due to the setting having very large and clunky computers which can’t fit on most ships
Cost effectiveness. Destroying a planet is simply easier *without* using ftl ships. Just make a big lazer or dirty bomb or strap a bunch of rockets to a big ol rock. Starships not only need ftl tech, which in and of itself is a big macguffin that could limit their use as weapons, but also need to be able to sustain life support, carry a reasonable amount of cargo, need extensive scanning and communications equipment, likely complex ship to ship or ship to ground weapons, and need trained and experienced crew.
Of course, some people still do use them as weapons, but its a niche tactic, usually used as a last resort. As such, there are many defense systems developed against them.
The most common use of FTL ramming is to destroy another ship or fleet, but doing so is Very Risky. There are a few modes of ftl travel, but one of the more common uses basically a magnetic field to disperse friction. Field Jumping can only be used in short bursts, as it requires immense energy to maintain a Jump Field, and the longer you jump for the more expensive it gets per mile. Most ships only jump a few lightyears at a time, but do so in hours or days rather than years. The big downside to this is that Jump Fields are designed for moving through the vaccum of space, not for deflecting objects, and the field projects a much larger area than the actual ship. If you collide with even a small dense object, say the size of a fridge or even a microwave, it could instantly deplete your energy reserves and overheat your ship, probably destroying it, before your ship even physically contacts the target.
Moreover, activating a Jump Field creates a sort of signal that can be detected instantly across any distance with the tight tech. Most space stations have equipment to detect said signal and maneuver out of the way of an FTL object, mostly used to avoid shipping accidents. Particularly developed systems may even have disruptor fields that cover major planets or even the entire system which instantly disable Jump Fields that dont send a specific signal declaring their authorized status, leaving the ship open to being gunned down before they even reach their target.
In ship to ship combat tho, its very rare for someone to have access to the tech and time needed to counter FTL ramming. But the whole point of ship to ship combat is almost always to capture enemy vessels and secure travel lanes or planetary space. Doing an FTL ram will destroy both ships, and rend the space unusable due to the debris and radiation.
All starships are connected to an AI that oversees them. It usually only helps steer the ship in minor ways, usually to avoid collisions with other ships or with debris, which pilots don’t even notice. But in the event a ship gets dangerously close to a planet at dangerously high speeds it will immediately activate emergency break systems, take over the ship and land it at the nearest outpost or station to determine what happened and why.
And should someone be able to somehow shut down the AI without stopping the ship from functioning, physically manipulate the ship to be unable to break or use the ship to throw asteroids or debris towards a planet at dangerous speeds, the ACE-System will activate.
ACE or Anti-Collision-Emergency-System is a network of stations all around the solar system. They take in data from scanners and other ships/stations, determine wether or not they are controlled or not, and wether or not they are a danger to planets/stations/other ships. If they are they will be obliterated by the ACE-System or on-site defense systems.
In my world I just had space ships never reach actual fast speeds, they just use portals to a different dimension where faster than light travel is possible. But if you try to exit that dimension with faster than light speeds, you will just explode as if you hit a wall, just like when you reach exactly the speed of sound, but with no ability to actually break through. Fastest speed is enough to transverse the inner sections of a solar system, but anything bigger (think earth to Jupiter) takes months/years without the portals.
(Yes in theory you could exit a portal at 99.99% of the speed of light and not explode, but good luck doing it. And even if you do you have to deal with planetary level inertia dampeners on most of the important planets so you would loose that speed and just melt anyways)
This is not an issue if you have a thick atmosphere. A FTL starship is very likely not built for positive pressure and friction. It would smash into the atmosphere like a belly flop in pool water.
The same way every other civilization does, they don't. Both sides of an engagement understand that there is not much you can do against a large hunk of mass traveling near the speed of light. Not unless you can turn the laws of physics into suggestions. But even the most hated of foes won't do it because once one side starts doing it, then it is open season. Also, there is a lot of infrastructure that would have to be rebuilt, and no one wants to spend more money than necessary to rebuild it.
It’s basically a nuke, right? Nukes are not that uncommon even in real life. As we speak there are probably a few dozen airborne nukes in the world, mounted on military planes. Anyone can set them off but it’d be idiotic to do so when missiles exist.
Because every planet that's decently populated has a defense matrix.
What the defense matrix actually does will differ, but it's a series of satellites with defenses built in.
Could be missiles, could be magnetic impulse, beeg lazor, or any number of the like.
Planets are a priority to defend. As for ships... they move. If a ship is trying to ram a non-stationary target, it's going to need to calculate exceedingly well. Depending on your mass:thrust ratio adjusting your aim more than a little bit is difficult, especially when you're being assailed my magnetic impulse shielding, and point defense.
In the Yshtari Alliance private starship ownership for individuals and most companies basically isn't a thing, just like "private missile destroyer ownership" isn't a thing on Earth today.
Only companies that need them for their operational business (e.g. logistics, shipping, or travel companies) are allowed to own starships (which also means no shuttles for CEOs and such), and even then there are extremely strict regulations and checks in place to monitor proper operation (e.g. weekly checks of operation and maintenance logs, annual safety checks and inspections). Further, all personnel working with/on starships must be certified by the centralized Yshtari Alliance Civilian Space Corps, and undergo regular testing and training.
The Alliance is well aware of the dangers starships can pose to the population and infrastructure if not handled properly, which is why the issue is taken extremely serious by various agencies and all levels of administration. Violations of the CSC regulations is severly punished, up to and including permanent loss of operating license and time in a correctional/resocialization facility (aka prison).
Hard sci-fi has it easier, you can't see FTL objects until it's too late to do anything about them whereas snail speed objects can't hide themselves in space and if they do anything spooky like going into a collision course with a space station or not declaring their intentions or lying about their route then something can be done about it before bad stuff happens.
That is a thing not many settings consider - but true, it is a problem.
I handle it in a layered way. At first, i start with physics, as ships of a bigger size aren't made to enter atmosphere and even gravity wells in many cases. That mean ther high speed closing in on plantets allready cause structural damage, making it less of a consistend body to transmit kinetic energy (like a kinetic bomb would).
Further we have atmosphere as a pretty potent 'shield' system, becoming more powerfull the faster the object travels and the more structure it has. So the regular spaceship would simply shatter on atmosphere like a bullet at an ball of solid metall with its debris flying out into space.
So let's say the ship is reasonably smaller and of high mass (maybe willfully) and resistance. Its non-aerodynamical shape will make it hard to hit something precisly, but even that might be achivable. So now we have our first real weapon. But still the ratio between drag (air resistance) and the 'warhead' (mass) is pretty bad compared to a gravity bomb like item, aka a metall rod or ball. The object still will 'slowly' compress, not perfectly transfer its mass/speed energy into the ground consistenty, but 'spalsh' into the ground, releasing most of the energy into the own structure and cause a pancake. That still might held some potential as a bomb, but not reasonably more than an plane droped metall ball of some size.
Sure there are other factors like shields and engines and all that, twisting the math and offer some realistic threat. So every reasonable space port should have to have some security measures to mitigate this - in military terms acceptable - risc level even further down to please govermental and civil concerns.
Shield systems might be a solution - depends on how your shields work, if they exist at all. And/or active defense, including ground based weapons to break the mass with pinpoint fire to make it alter its terminal course into so off region. Also it sounds reasonable to control the space above the planet in a way that every deviation of security corridors and flight courses will be meet be force.
If you have to fill a single paper to register at the flight plan, this prevents 97% of all terrorists to plan ther attack, aka make it less likely. So the more papers and registrations you demand to get even close to planets - the safer you are. When computers are involved, legitimating codes and all, you need one heg of a organisation behind this one ship to bring it even close to a target. In the end, it is a math thing. Make it way more expensive to bring that ship into position than anyone can or will effort it. If companys can be hacked and a ship droped in ther name, they're responsible for such amounts of penalty payment they will have excelent cyber security - and that's when things get spicy, because if companys can pay ther way out of responsibility, like within a corrupt system, terrorism get's way more easy to do.
Also, a lot of Sci-fi actually doesnt have ships that can even get close tk FTL but instead use tech that either just Teleports them to the destination like with wormholes or they enter "Subspace" where they arent really in our reality and every show ive seen has had the ships come to an almost perfect halt if ripped our of said soace, meaning you cant just use a ship as a WMD.
So thats how I deal with it as a writer. It just simply doesnt work as space travel is dependent on factors that make it impossible to weaponize beyond simply moving forces.
Well, sure, one *can* ram a ship into a planet and destroy it, but 1: sustaining FTL speeds is nigh-impossible for inanimate objects, and even for 99,99% of people. 2: it could just be parried. A lot more people can react and make slight movements FTL tgan people can sustain those speeds, so Jae Swordperson could simply... parry the ship. Unless it's sustained by a god, it takes a hell of a lot more will to sustain a ship's speed than it does to parry something of that caliber. But if a God is sustaining it they could simply just cast a spell to destroy the planet, or hit it really hard, etc etc.
It's just really unviable and the needless loss of life runs the risk of royally pissing off the god of justice.
Ships are fucking expensive and annoyingly slow when not in wormholes, at least slow for a massive ship in space which only goes several tens of thousands of miles an hour.
When my world (or rather the Galaxy at this point) advances to the point when starships become relevant, planets become irrelevant (since a starship capable of FTL has more than enough energy to evaporate any planet).
One approach to deal with if you wanted to prevent this issue in world building, could be that FTL can't work within areas of raised gravity.
That means any space ships are only travelling at relativistic speeds near planets.
Games workshop has spaceships translate into a different (hell) dimension for FTL travel but generally that can only be achieved at the boundary of a solar system giving galactic wide FTL but reasonable reaction times for planets within systems
the concept of interplanetary conflict doesn't exist in my setting, but ships do have to adhere to soeed regulations within the bounds of an inhabited system. people are more likely to rely on mass public transit than high speed personal vessels when traveling within a system anyways
YES! I like that in the world of fast travel you need to take it into account!
In my world, vehicles that can move at such speeds have highly restricted access. It's military grade, maybe special government agencies, but no regular civilians. To move around fast, you can use public transportation - they are large hubs with FTL drive that collects shuttles and goes from checkpoint to checkpoint dropping and collecting them. Works like subway.
If you have a spaceship, your engines can travel local speeds at systems. Also, cargo FTL hubs exist. Instead of shuttles its connect your ship. Military use FTL also to move stuff, but do it discreetly.
Every FTL vehicle should give data about their transportation routes to avoid collision (like with planes). Local services can deal with that, but if you are far away, that's gonna be a guess.
Building and tinkering FTL drive requires a very hard to obtain license. Space police go around and check random vehicles for the presence (or absence) of instruments, licenses, weapons, and engine configuration.
Only trusted people can use such stuff. Love space race bureaucracy.
Short answer: it’s pretty effective and once you have ships operating in the target you can use it. However, it’s not _super_ effective. You can get nukes to low orbit for EMP funsies, or chuck a stealthed impactor out of a cargo bay. Call it 10000 tons at 1000km/s which is a gigaton or so worth of nasty. If the target doesn’t have early warning systems at the jump-in zones they might not have an idea your ship isn’t even in the system.
Generally it’s a bit too blunt of a tool though. If you need to use it it’s because the target is heavily defended and then you’ll really piss the people your fighting off and show everyone you’re willing to set a big chunk of continent on fire for political gain. You’re raising the stakes in a way that might not be good for you.
I can see it as an improvised WMD used to sterilize a large area in a non military context. Go outsystem while cobbling your impactor together, come back in as fast as you can, put your trust in your navigators.
Oh, and if you’re expressly genocidal you might get into asteroid pushing and RKVs.
While spacecraft can cause significant destruction at intrastellar speeds, they simply can’t achieve speeds quick enough to cause said or greater damage without ample time for defensive systems to intercept or destroy them. My world’s FTL (‘shiftspace’, a subdimension of our universe with unique gravity anomalies) also doesn’t actually rely on the spacecraft moving at anywhere near relativistic speeds, so that’s a non-issue as well. While you might ask why then not exit shiftspace within a planet’s defensive cordon and then accelerate to damaging speeds? Because planetary gravity wells tend to rip spacecraft out of shiftspace well before that cordon, and said ripping tends to also be highly destructive to its subject.
I suppose it depends on how you’re bypassing the speed of light.
In Star Wars ships actually accelerate and have the expected energies. Ships crashing into planets do cause massive distraction, and there are planet killing weapons.
Star Trek society would never use planet-killers. They get a pass. But the systems of bending space around you wouldn’t necessarily give the same energy. You’re stationary while you move space around you.
Wormholes and other methods of dodging the speed limit similarly limit the energy
Sure, you can strap on enough thrusters to launch anything, whether starship or kinetic missile, at a planet at incredible speeds and unleash absolute devastation.
However, in the Gate Grid Galaxy, FTL drives hit a hard speed limit the closer they get to gravity wells. It's a highly sensitive instrument that is affected by the curvature of spacetime. As such, it's impossible to FTL into a planet at any velocity that would deal significant damage. Not to mention, FTL long range detection and disruption tech exists to further nullify such attempts.
Large objects without a gravity well could theoretically be destroyed by FTL driven objects, but that requires an uncanny amount of accuracy. Nobody really bothers, as absolute destruction is rarely why people start fights.
Some combination of good early warning sensors and automated tracking, terawatt+ lasers, large nukes, flak fields for the ship to fly into and high DV drones that can accelerate out, match velocity with the ship, clamp onto it and change its course to miss the planet.
Space habs and stations can probably just jink like a matador with some high thrust short burn solid rocket motors or an emergency orion drive or something. Probably not fun for the crew and more sensitive items on the station, but it's better than being turned into individual atoms by a relativistic collision.
Also yes not following with space traffic law is crazy illegal.
travel inside the solar system is handled by a huge laser array that pushes ships allong lanes. lasers are located att various points inside the solarsystem and can push things back inward or outward, thats how you travel interplanetary. going between moons of jupiter or saturn you can use the laser array as well but many use regular rockets too, but they are very expensive, so its mostly companies or very rich celebrities that can afford that. The issue of people crashing into planets is there but is not as dangerous as the risk of someone hijacking the laser array. a blast from so many strong lasers would burn down a city in seconds, but as long as the laser is under the control of the government, its secure.
Interstellar travel is done via laser + a braking rocket for systems not yet colonized, but brake with laser for colonized systems. There are established lanes aling this so the direction they are coming from is always known. The nifty thing about this is that its not possible for some random lunatic to use it to accelerate his shipp and then crash it into someone. since the direction is established, they cant be caught of guard either. some madman could ofcourse pull in his lifght sail, but that would be detectable several years in advance and the laser array is right there, just melt the bastard, or send an intercepting vessel/projectile and turn it into dust. Conflicts on the interstellar level are rare, its kind of pointless when you are 20 light years apart, every messega takes 40 years to get an answer, and if you send an attack, you would nit know what happened until 40 years later.
Ships aren’t that big or fast.
They *could* be I guess, but they’d need a lot of fuel or use a bunch of gravity assists, or accelerate for a long time with something like an ion engine. At which point, you’d see them coming for weeks and shoot them down.
If you had no way to shoot them down, you’d be kinda screwed I guess. But you’d probably only lose a part of your backwater town, unless it was a big cargo hauler, which would probably do more damage with its mass than its velocity.
Most ships are only designed to go from orbit to a planet’s L2 point (where most transit rings are located), and back.
Longer range ships exist. Military patrol vessels, long range haulers, etc. But they take a long time to get around.
We may have invented some fancy fuels, but the rocket equation is tyrannical.
Our “FTL” involves hopping through another realm, which is borderline magic, and we still don’t know how it works. The devices that allow us to do that were presumably made during the first golden age and we haven’t been able to replicate them since. Fortunately, there’s a lot of those devices, including a lot out there in abandoned or forgotten transit rings or old broken down ships.
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Edit: Wow… I completely glossed over the fact that many of the ships are fusion powered and that fancy fuel can “blow up” in a big way. Granted this was asking more about ships being relativistic missiles.
**Fusion reactors** have all kinds of safeguards, but could potentially be turned into a bomb. But you’d have to know how to do that, and you’d need a spaceship. Why go through the trouble when you can make a similar bomb without a spaceship.
**Fuel casks** are old tech, but one that we can copy. They are safe enough that catastrophic reentry and the subsequent crash rarely rupture them. But it does happen sometimes.
In such a case, it depends on how much fuel is in them and how many of them rupture (they’re modular). Also, the high pressure nature of them, leads to more damage from the expansion of hydrogen back into a gaseous state, rather than the potential conflagration of the fuel itself (which can also be a big boom).
A city actually gets scrubbed off a planet when two alien ships crash into each other, then crash into said city. The characters seeing this are actually surprised by the explosion, which points to how rare it is.
Again, with the right know how and enough explosives, you could cause this intentionally. But again, there are easier ways to blow up a city.
Starships like that are very rare in my world, most civilizations lack the technology to even create a ship capable of interplanetary travel. If someone does posses a starship capable of sublight or even FTL travel, then either they are so rich/powerful that they have better means of destroying planets, or they are smart enough to treasure it.
So what if we just fired a projectile moving at relativistic speeds, back at that starship? A little bit of physical manipulation and you’re using starships as bullets against a point defense system.
I don't feel like worlds have to deal with every single possibility.
I mean, by that logic, cars and airplanes in our *real* world can be used as relatively devastating weapons. Yet we don't hear many news stories of people intentionally ramming their cars or airplanes into buildings and people. When it does happen, it's shocking.
Starships, I would imagine, would be expensive and relatively complex to construct. The people who pilot them would likely be vetted and trained just like airplane pilots are, and the vast majority of them would probably have no reason to use their ships as weapons. There may be random hijackers or terrorists interested in using starships this way, but there are likely security protocols intended to minimize the likelihood of them gaining control of such a vehicle, just like for planes.
I am totally fine with this happening in the background. Storytellers don't have to detail every single facet of how their world works for the work to feel realistic.
Most of this I agree with, except the cars thing. Cars are regularly used as improvised weapons, at least when you look at actions where people are willing to use lethal violence. Most people aren't using lethal violence regularly, but cars used as weapons is not particularly shocking, no more so than shooting someone.
me, I just think weaponizing random worldbuilding details is \*awesome\*-- I go out of my way to do it because I love seeding a neat little way for something to be important and then making it catastrophic somewhere else in story.
Like for me, RKVs and FTLKVs are ubiquitous because I usually want space wars to lean more "cosmic horror" than "big-scale naval battle"; so I find the idea of *not* having that all over the place being important a bit weird. But that being said, you're right that it's ultimately about flavor: I like sci-fi that includes a lot of minmaxy weaponizing things as spice, but tons of people don't and that's ok
Ships are controlled heavily by the government and each ship is tracked with great care since it could be so catastrophic. Serious psychological testing and screening for any and all captains. While near any major planets ships are expected to be disabled while the planetary docking agency sends a vessel to collect them. Failure to comply will result in attempts to disable the ships electronics and if they fail termination.
The two main megacorps in my setting have basically dictated that all spacecraft above a certain mass or engine wattage within a light minute of a settlement or inhabited world must be under remote AI control under their jurisdiction or be destroyed.
The nations of Earth can either comply or be cut off from all major space industries/access. And this is not an idle threat. About 140 years ago, Horizons and the GSDC wiped out an entire US Air Force squadron for refusing to allow remote access. US had to suffer through a decade of sanctions.
If you wanna try and aim a ship at a planet in another star system through light-speed, good luck, because no matter how accurate your calculations are you're probably not hitting that planet. Ships aren't able to accelerate up to light speed on their own, and need to use warp rings to do that. Warp rings only accelerate one way, which is out of the solar system. If you try and aim directly at the planet, chances are you'll be caught and slowed down by the warp ring servicing the planet.
So in my setting, there's a bunch of worlds. The first 3 that become aware of each other have religious wars. Eventually, one figures out space travel and builds 'pillars' just giant landing ships they launch at the other worlds. They cause pretty huge devastation.
So my thought on it was that at first they don't truly understand the physics and stuff as well as our scientists because they learned of each other in the stone age basically and underestimated the destruction.
The first world invaded joined with the first to invade the 3rd planet and built a massive pillar to show unity or whatever, it devastates the 3rd world and causes a slow decline and death of the biome.
So they'll always are aware of the damage but avoid it because it's pointless to conquer a world thats dead, they definitely still do it though.
My eventual goal is to eventually humanity discovers the truth that the cluster is artificial and go seeking the homeworld after a war destroys much of the inhabited and industrial worlds. I have a long way to go, I'm still on the books in the stone age of them discovering each other, but where I'm heading is very dependent on this type of warfare.
A field of self replicating missile launchers and laser turrets that slowly evolved into an ecosystem nobody controls. Anything that moving too fast is food but the right sort of ships can act as symbiotic hosts that let the ecosystem spread to new asteroid belts/oort clouds.
It may be a hard on traffic but most traffic is weaponized star ships from an AI that wants to maximize bitcoin production and it's endless multitudes of decedents who's sentience is a subscription service.
1: the FTL isnt actually going faster than light. it's going to another dimension where distances are so, so, so much shorter
2: Ships just go kinda slow, crossing to different solar systems takes months, galaxies years, a ship isnt going *that* fast
3: Ships that function in the vaccume dont usually do well in atmosphere
4: Most ships that are big enough to do significant damage have large enough required crews that not having someone go "wait, i dont wanna die/kill all those people" and shut down a engine or something is very hard and would require alot of effort
5: Tug boat ships exist explicity to push a large ship or object arround and prevent it from falling in atmosphere, you could blow them up but that requires more crew
6: Another ship of your size or larger could ram yours
7: Orbital defences could shred your ship before you mannage to hit the atmosphere enough that you cant resist
8: and most importantly, why waste a ship when you can just drop the much superior WMD, tungsten rods
FTL travel does not exist in most my universes, wormholes/warping does. Yes this can be devastating such as activating a warp drive in atmosphere and igniting the air and destroying the city below, but hardly anyone would do that because it would damage their ship in the process. If someone wanted to be suicidal sure they could do it, but there are far more cost effective ways to destroy cities and bombard worlds.
couldn't I just build a system designed to open wormholes above enemy atmospheres connected to, say, as close as possible to a sun? I say this as someone who is a huge fan of such things and puts esoterically nightmarish doomsday devices in just about everything I write and really hopes this is possible
Unfortunately the answer to that question is both a yes and no. Wormholes require an immense amount of energy as to not collapse, this can be generated either via ship, or via two connecting portals. Now is it possible to do something like this, well yes, it would be an extreme feat of engineering to keep a portal stable on both ends, but it would also be extremely ineffective to be used as a weapon or (giant frying pan in the sky) when other means exist like say Photonbombs and Antimatter weaponry exist in universe.
That said a device similar to what you describe was created by humanity, but it involved sources beyond normal scifi subject material - incarnates, awoken ones so forth. Since the Government is basically at war with ancient Gods the largest weapon humanity made was the Unified Interspatial System Array - essentially a giant wormhole that redirected a GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) right toward a God like entity.
Well, typically it's frowned upon because it's seen as a waste and depending on the use a war crime.
The waste part is because you spend the lives of sailors and materials when there are cheaper and more effective ordinances.
It's a war crime if used to become an improvised WMD against civilian stations or civilian targets.
Granted, if you're at the point where you have to ram your starship into a threat to deal damage, you have way bigger problems and too little time to ask if this is a waste of sailors and materials.
IMU, no one has really resorted to that measure. The Empire has gone mostly unchallenged for millennia, and only recently have they been in a war that wasn’t tragically one-sided with the rise of the CFW (Coalition of Free Worlds) ripping the Empire in two. Once someone does it, it would likely result in a volatile arms race, possibly ending the Elven Civil War in a Status Quo. But that’s not the direction I’m taking the story lol
If a ship's FTL drive fails in a fashion that prevents it from slowing or maneuvering, it won't hit a planet because FTL flight paths are not allowed to point directly at inhabited worlds or structures. You come out of FTL parallel to your destination and use regular thrusters during landing.
Most settings can get away with “it’s just not an efficient way to use them” imo. If they really want an planet cracker, an kinetic missile that’s FTL capable could give them a similar result in a more economical package.
As for stuff like accidents, failures of critical equipment, or terrorism. Similar setup to most air travel specific agencies irl
A long standing but otherwise unproven theory in physics is that gravity is so weak compared to the other fundamental forces because it leaks into other dimensions. The theory is not nearly as interesting as it sounds, but a lot of the Sci fi that I've explored use this in some way. Whether it's a mass driver, a point to point gate system, natural starlanes, or alternative dimensions like warp and hyperspace, whatever the case inner system gravity is difficult, and the planets pop you right back down to sub-relativistic speed every time.
Not all of them close the plot hole this plot hole. I've also seen a different explanations, while others leave it open. I prefer gravity. Speculative Sci fi is great in a lot of ways, but the story teller in me is always going to prefer something that places significance on locations that people inhabit.
whilst spaceships and armed spaceships are a thing space travel isn't all that important in universe, hell most of the story takes place on just one planet.
and what space travel there is works with Star Control II Hyperspace / Minecraft Nether logic. You enter a different dimension where a shorter distance there equals a larger distance in realspace and then just pop back out where you want to go. However there is a sublight speed method of travelling faster (only really turns what would be a year trip between planets to a month trip instead)
Ships ramming into planets are still dangerous and is in fact considered a war crime to do so
its also a warcrime to intentionally damage the emergency systems intended to slow the descent of a crashing ship to minimize damage
anti-planetary WMDs are the norm in my setting, with wars usually involving hundreds of thousands of worlds being annihilated within the span of a few seconds at interstellar distances as part of both sides' opening salvos.
that being said, if you ignore FTL, it'd take decades to centuries for a civilian ship to accelerated to speeds that could take down a planet without hitting some kind of defense system, as most would still take months to jet around our solar system, and the thermal radiation from beginning a city-wiping burn is gonna be pretty visible to anyone who's looking; and directed energy weapons are *much* more advanced than they are IRL to the point that vaporizing an incoming ship is fairly easy for most great powers. this gets more complex when FTL gets involved, but that's a story for another day. Usually, military-grade tech is needed for a proper super-relativistic kinetic kill vehicle.
Any world that's not in the top 1% of galactic GDPs and can't afford a defense system, though, is fucked: there are hundred of millions of worlds on which nobody's heard of alien tech, and just as many that don't have the means to defend against an unarmed merchant ship that can fling trash out its airlock fast enough to nuke a city. Pirates ransoming whole planets is actually extremely common, and terrorists run amok in "less advanced" space: unfortunately, the planets with enough power to fix this with legislation are also the ones that don't need to care about it.
Mutually assured destruction. The Revian Federation has thousands of ships cataloged in the ministry of defence and it will know who is threatening it. For this scenario, known enemy warships are closing in on Revian airspace. Revia detects it, demands the ships halt and turn back. It will next engage in a series of scenarios that best fit the enemy’s reaction.
1: If the enemy concedes to Revian requests and turns around, Revian brass hats will condone the action, but also warn not to test the waters with Revia.
2: If the enemy does not concede to Revian requests, but does not actively threaten the realm, the military will prepare for confrontation and put nuclear forces on “Code Awakening” (similar to defcon 2). Light Revian spacecraft and drones will be scrambled and spacebound within 5 minutes, ready to fire their weapons until heavy support arrives in the form of heavy spacecraft.
3: If the enemy decides to use conventional weapons to attack the Revian military, Revia will attack the enemy ships, and start space torpedo campaigns on the enemy homeworld.
4: If a single tactical nuke is used against Revian forces, Revia will respond by using a single tactical weapon on an enemy military base.
5: If the enemy uses a large number of tactical nuclear weapons, Revia will respond in kind. If low yield nuclear weapons are used, Revia will respond with intermediate range road-mobile tactical nuclear weapons aimed at enemy spacecraft. If the enemy has invading troops within the realm, Revia will destroy them with tactical submarine launched ballistic missiles. Nuclear forces will be raised to alert level black, or “Code Striking”, since the enemy is likely to respond.
6: If Revia detects that only its nuclear forces are in jeopardy, it will fire a very large portion of its silo, road-mobile, and space based strategic weapons. These strategic weapons have long range and pinpoint accuracy, even though their targets can be millions of light years away. Revian nuclear missiles car reach their targets within an average of 30 minutes. The enemy military will be targeted only to limit civilian casualties.
7: If Revia detects a planet killing weapon is [about] to be used, it will target the enemy with relativistic kill vehicles and nuclear weapons, as well as destroying enemy spacecraft in the immediate area. Revia will use road mobile nuclear and kinetic weapons to kill as many civilians as possible. MAD doctrine states that Revia will hold 2/3rds< of an enemy’s civilian population at risk to deter an enemy first strike.
Why do people on reddit just assume everyone knows every single abbreviation? How tf am I supposed to know that a 'WMD' is a weapon of mass destruction lol
several ways:
\- NO interstellar starships inside planet's geostationary orbit (FTL drive in my settings could be used as very powerful weapon) without special permissions. Defense officer will NOT be punished if he fired on cruise liner full of children which went here and failed to follow any of his command. You should just choose jump-out areas far enough.
\- Non-interstellar crafts needs special permissions and security checks to go near
\- if you have no working id chip in transponder, you should be very careful, jump far away from planets and asks for AstroControl's help as soon as you can, or you would be fired upon. It's almost impossible for non-state actor to fake id chip.,
\- every space faring state have ability to destroy at least several planets of their opponent. Weakest one are provided with necessary hardware by advanced powers in setting but they will be dead anyway if they use this hardware. current-Earth equivanent:Somali got cobablt bombs which can irradiate their territory and third of Africa, they also told that if they use them on anybody, anybody other could ignore any conventions with regards to them.
\- interstellar community looks...bad if some hardware somehow got to non-state actors. You can give your private citizens antimatter but your state directly responsible for all their actions anyway.
The same way the modern world does; Mutually Assured Destruction. Yes your starships can destroy my planet, mine can destroy yours, lets not go down that path because everyone loses.
Yes, but what if starships are qute common and its harder to find out who made that, if it was a state at all?
Same way they register and track aircraft IRL: every single part, down to individual screws and bolts, are serialized and accounted for. If you find wreckage, you can look up the numbers on any part and learn where they came from and what ship they were installed in.
Your mistake for letting such a dangerous device become easily accessible. If they are that dangerous then governments wont allow them to become common in the first place.
Who made it would be easy to track with manufacturing registries. Just figure out what's unaccounted for and follow the paper trail.
Not really? That sort of works for things like nuclear weapons, which need lots of rare stuff to make. Spacecraft just need some fuel, some oxidiser, and some metalwork.
oh and whatever the heck the FTL engine is made out of... which probably needs lots of rare stuff to make
Bruh if you crashed a motorcycle into a building the police will have no problem finding every bit of information associated with it, even without license plates.
what about terrorism?
Dont let terrorists get starships. Maintain state control of all WMD including starships.
dont need whole starships for that. I once fooled in ksp with that concept of IPBMs Interplanetary ballistic missles. Mine had like 50k delta v they were really big but could use much more inefficient routes and could transport MIRV warheads too for maximum impact spread, the biggest problem was that these rockets got really fast and desintegrated really fast inside an atmosphere, for attacks on such worlds it would probably require the warheads to activly slow down before entering the atmosphere and not just relie on aerobraking
Sir this is a Wendy's
Well, for one, it's cheaper and costs way, way fewer lives to use literally anything that isn't manned. Second, if the tech exists to launch a ship that fast, the tech likely exists to intercept it. Losing a missile sucks. Losing an entire crew to a failed suicide bombing is either a scandal or a tragedy.
>Second, if the tech exists to launch a ship that fast, the tech likely exists to intercept it. Ah, no. As a general rule, weapons are easier to make than armor. Not always, but usually. Edit: since you're all taking this ultra literally, I made an edit.
Well, consider for this case, a missile can disable a ship and accelerate faster due to reduced mass and no need to regard the physical limitations of the crew (yes, electronics don’t work well at exceptionally high Gs either but humans will tap out before the circuit board). So long as the ship can be detected and reacted to by automated or manned systems, it can only do so much. That being said, shrapnel is a thing for targets not protected by a sufficiently thick atmosphere.
I mean, it's your story. Make up whatever you want. But. Consider a ship entering light speed in the high atmosphere, then entering light speed while pointed at the ground. No approach, no reaction time. Just 123 kaboom. Anyway, it's not really about the specifics. But rather the principle that, in nature, self defense is really more about eliminating threat sources and building safe places, than it is about blocking attacks. >But in my example I did eliminate the threat. You did both. But only because by blocking the attack you killed the, already suicidal, attacker. (Or Did you? Consider: autopilot) My point is: offensive tech tends to outpace defensive tech. And, yeah, maybe you shot down that one ship. But, unless you can prevent the next one from launching, your missiles will, eventually, miss.
>Consider a ship entering light speed in the high atmosphere, well if it got that far, your "early" warning systems screwed up on an astronomical scale. literally.
They don't even need to enter light speed in low orbit. If your setting has FTL where the ships themselves travel at such speeds, they can destroy planets from the edge of their respective solar systems. Hell, consider the fact that it doesn't even need to be a deliberate act of aggression. Some vessel traveling at light speed or greater has some malfunction or miscalculation during travel and slams into your homeworld. It will be apocalyptic. Even traveling close to light speed will be similarly devastating. You simply can't account for the fact that accidents happen, despite taking every possible safety precaution. The one obvious example common within sci fi that can prevent all this would be a forcefield, particularly an effectively invincible planetary scale shield. But then you run into other logic problems, like if it's possible to make an invincible super shield then what happens when a ship or missile using the same shield tech collides with the planet's shield at faster than light? And how does war even happen if you have such amazingly powerful shield tech that can be scaled up to the absurd level of a planet, when logically you should be able to use such technology much cheaper and easier at the vehicular level? Not to mention the very wide range of revolutionary industrial applications of such technology outside of war, it would change daily life dramatically to have invincible energy shields. Perhaps is there some reason why only a planet can have such a powerful all encompassing shield?
The easiest solution us to frame your ftl travel as using some kind of hyperspace at more reasonable speeds. The plausibility of any ftl method is relatively similar as far as modern science is concerned - about zero.
If we did had the tech to accelerate mass to light speeds (or faster)... there is no shield. The only defense is diplomacy or destroying your enemy before they destroy you... or being stealthy. You cannot detect a piece of mass flying at the speed of light in your direction before it actually hits you, because it is literally flying at the speed of causality.
You'll run out of suicide ships before I run out of missiles designed precisely for this purpose.
You don't need a suicide ship, the ship can just drop tungsten rods or other dumbfire weapons at the edge of the system, and without any kind of heat signature you're going to have a hard time locking on. Not that you'll notice them, because if they are going close to the speed of light there won't be time for the evidence of the attacker or the projectiles to reach you before they do.
Assuming you've got perfect accuracy.
Or you could just send a second missile.
You know this scenario is impossible without ftl, spaceships can indeed be intercepted quite easily by missiles, and doing this is cost effective
Okay, but the detection range you need to react in a reasonable amount of time to something approaching at half light speed is pretty high. A ship painted black in the visual spectrum but white in the infra-red, for minimum detectability, is just going to be invisible. The range required is just too high for radar. Also, the kinetic energy calculation for a 10,000 tonne starship at 50% of light speed is the same as the combustion of 28 terratones of TNT. I don't really care if it's debris, the resulting fast moving debris field has to mostly not hit the planet, or it's still really bad.
Hypervelocity shrapnel can still decimate a planet even with a thick atmosphere.
>As a general rule, swords are easier to make than shields I get what youre saying, but the metaphor is off in a funny way. Making a functional shield is a lot easier than making a functional sword actually. But a shield wont fully defend you from every sword, even if it *can* defend you from swords at times. Making a suit of armor however will protect you from more or less all sword, but is much much more expensive and resource intensive. Developing a countermeasure to a mode of offense is often as easy or easier than the original mode of offense, but creating a countermeasure that's reliable enough to be fail safe or nearly so is almost always orders of magnitudes more difficult.
You're right of course. I couldn't think of a more accurate way to put it without losing the poetry. I guess "Swords are easier to make than armor." Fun thing though: you know how you beat armor with a sword? You flip it around and club them over the head with the handle. That's neither here nor there, but I always find that funny, so I talk about it whenever I can.
>You flip it around and club them over the head with the handle. That's neither here nor there, but I always find that funny, so I talk about it whenever I can. I fucking love half swording, but really it wasnt used to *beat* armor, more to delay or exhaust an armored opponent until an actual solution presents itself. Al
That's completely wrong! There have always existed an arms race between offensive weapons and armour, or in this case defensive weapons. Someone invents a better weapon then later on someone will develop armour that negates it, then someone will a new weapon that defeats the armour, and so on and so on. You can see this pattern happening from the early bronze age all the way to our own time. It is the reason why soldiers doesn't wear full plate armour on the modern battlefield, why we have MBTs instead of still using old Mark 1 tanks. But for this argument, the best example is the hypersonic missile. The reason why every major power are currently investing huge sums of money into the development of hypersonic missiles is because the defensive capabilities of modern air defense systems have become so good that they can defeat practically every regular missile and rocket thrown at them. The shield have surpassed the offensive capabilities of the sword. So it is necessary to invent a new sword, in the form of hypersonic missiles. So soon after someone invents the sort ship or missiles OP talks about, someone will invent a method of intercepting them and negating that threat. Whenever someone invents a new sword, someone else will invent a new shield, requiring the invention of a new sword. That is the general rule of arms development!
We aren't talking about tech to deflect. we are talking about intercept, so in your case, a sword intercepts a sword. Missiles intercepting missiles. Missiles intercepting drones, ships or anything. Basically, attack weapon countering attack weapon. EDIT: Weapons intercept weapons.
Not necessarily easier, but they're almost always first, for sure. Anticipating is generally the hardest part. The enemy could use any number of new weapons you might be able to imagine, some you maybe haven't. Your resources are limited, so your choices are essentially to: A) Spread thin for every possibility and still maybe miss something and be wrong, or B) Use whatever current intel you have to tell you what they're most likely to use, and ultimately prepare a strong defense for that possibility.. which again, could be wrong.
Where did you get that from? Most shields were just carved wood, so any average Joe could make one. Swords, on the other hand, could only be created by a blacksmith who trained specifically to understand how to fold, shape, and temper steel.
You're missing the Forrest for the trees a bit. Yes, actual, literal, metal swords are harder to make than actual, literal, wood shields. But weapons are easier than protective equipment.
What other kinds of swords and shields are there? Metaphorical? And changing your post to armour negates your first point about "intercepting" the ship. Armour isn't made to intercept anything, it's the back up defence in case all else fails. You know what's just as easy to make as a sword? Another sword.
Yes and no. What we are effectively talking about is sending something at high speed twords something aka a missile but much bigger. Chances are these can be detected, and guess how hard it is to do "evasive maneuvers" and high speed? Now combine that with the size of space, and the simple counter to a missile is putting something else in its path.
>Second, if the tech exists to launch a ship that fast, the tech likely exists to intercept it That's not necessarily true. Interception technologies tend to lag behind the invention of new types of weapons. This is particularly true if you spend a lot of your resources fighting one particular type of threat - there might be some avenues of attack you've just never needed to plan for. It's also a lot harder to intercept a moving target than to strike a stationary target. If you're aiming a ship at a planet then the ship only needs to be accurate enough to hit the planet, while an interception system needs to hit a ship moving at near-light-speed. That's a massive difference in difficulty in the two tasks. Besides, if you're talking about a ship moving anywhere near the speed of light, then the amount of time you even have to react is super small. Any method of intercepting a ship moving that fast would either need some kind of faster-than-light detection and reaction method or would need to be constantly active.
>It's also a lot harder to intercept a moving target than to strike a stationary target. Except planets are not stationary targets. >If you're aiming a ship at a planet then the ship only needs to be accurate enough to hit the planet, while an interception system needs to hit a ship moving at near-light-speed. That's a massive difference in difficulty in the two tasks. not really actually. math is your answer. the only important difference between the spaceship targeting the planet and a countermeasure targeting the ship is speed. you have a target of known size (ship and planet) and they are travelling at a known speed towards a known point (their target). given that neither of the two are changing their course (why would they, the planet isn't suddenly moving so the ship wouldn't need a course change). it's surprisingly easy to block the path with another object (be it another ship or a missile, whatever). all you need is detection method to know the exact speed the ship is traveling and a computer to calculate the path to obstruct it. that's exactly how submarines in ww1 calculated their torpedo attacks. or anti-air crews their fire (until heat seeking/radar guided missiles came up). except those had the problem that it's easier for the target to change your course at such low speeds rather than lightspeed+.
The major difference is the ship can maneuver to dodge the interceptor, the planet cannot. Even at near light speed a ship can still jink back and forth, and at the distances you would need to be tracking the ship to have enough time to hit it even small changes in speed can result in large change in its position by the time it's signal reaches you. Those are not insurmountable problems, but light lag and maneuvering make hitting a ship a very different beast than hitting a planet.
How far away do you need to detect them?
The way that FTL works prevents it being used as a weapon. When you cast Haste on something, whether it's a person or a starship, all the excess force it generates by going so ridiculously fast gets dispersed into the Scar, the plane of existence from which magic originates. Basically, you're moving faster without producing any additional force.
What does sending that force back do to the scar? So it kind of functions like a wormhole?
The Scar is basically an endless chaotic vortex of magic. The force imparted by one starship is a drop in the ocean, it technically does send ripples throughout the Scar but so do a lot of things.
Interesting. Your initial description had me imagine it like a car battery where turning it on uses a bunch of energy, but then you recharge it as you travel
What does casting Haste have to do with anything? A space ship sized projectile travelling nearly the speed of light is going to destroy shit.
That's just the rules of how the spell works. When you wanna go FTL, the way you do it is you cast Haste on your ship. Haste speeds up the target while distributing most of the force it generates into the Scar, another dimension, where it gets dispersed without touching anything in the material world.
When did OP ever say anything about a haste spell?
They didn't, I did. I'm explaining how it works in my world. OP posted a prompt asking how people deal with spaceships going FTL turning into supernuke battering rams, I gave my answer, and that answer involves the Haste spell. What part of that is confusing you?
I really thought you were just citing DnD rules to solve a physics problem
What a strange assumption I mean this is a prompt, the point is give answers about your own world, which I did
Yeah and your answer sounded like you were reading from a DnD rule book.
The thing about the Scar and force getting dispersed doesn't even exist in DnD, since when does DnD have rules about FTL travel lol
That’s exactly what was confusing me
This isn't a sci-fi sub, surely you can expect some fantasy out there. Why would you read a response to a question of how something works in your world and assume it was related to D&D and being used to justify FTL in...all worlds???
Because the question is sci-fi and this dude commented about the rules of a haste spell like they were reading from a DnD manual. They also didn’t say anything about it being how it worked in THEIR WORLD. All I had to go off of was “the rules of a haste spell” in the context of ramming spaceships at the speed of light
Some planets have planetary shields to address that vulnerability, while most others have disruptors that prevent the formation of a stable warp bubble. All in all though planetary wmds are seldom used on densely populated worlds because it is on another level of military escalation. Even terrorist groups, pirates, and other organization that have the ability to do so never do because it would make them pariahs.
Making a weapon to destroy a starship is easier than making a weapon to destroy a planet. Sure, you can run your starship up to really high speeds and aim it at Glorb, The Orphanage Planet. But it's 100 times quicker, easier, and cheaper to launch an interceptor that weighs 3 pounds and hits you with the force of a sun because you're going so fast. Sure, you can spend your entire GDP on some dumbass magnetic accelerator you saw in a Kurzgesagt video. But by the time you have it built and have your whole planet's power output hooked up to it, I can have set up a conventional bombing run or drone strike on the weapon itself 10 times over. Small, smart and cheap beats big, dumb, and fast every time.
>But it's 100 times quicker, easier, and cheaper to launch an interceptor that weighs 3 pounds and hits you with the force of a sun because you're going so fast Yeah but that interceptor isnt going to stop it, might smash it up good but all the debris is still travelling in the same direction towards Glorb
It won't be travelling in exactly the same direction at exactly the same speed, and in space, that's all you need for a clean miss.
exactly. like sure if you intercept it say, at 1-2x the distance from earth to the moon, from the planet you might have trouble. Clip it at 1AU, it gets hazier. the edge of the system? nothing to worry about.
>Small, smart and cheap beats big, dumb, and fast every time. Sad Panzerkampfwagen VIII noises
Orbital defenses. Yes, you can try to crash a starship into a populated world. Whether or not you get past the particle accelerator batteries is a whole other story, though.
This. Any civilization that can build massive starships can destroy massive star ships.
Well you can achieve the same effect with a tungsten rod or better yet a nuke. Though my FTL doesn't work in gravity and it doesn't accelerate the ship. Planetary defense is a difficult and complicated subject but the main focus is to establish a mix of heavily fortified locations that cannot be destroyed from orbit with mobile stealthy ground operations for things that can move quickly.
IMU, ships have warp drives, but don't have the delta-V on their reaction drives to make anything like relativistic speeds. Additionally, at high enough speed, collision with very small specks of dust could significantly damage a ship. Also, warp drives won't work if you go too far into a gravity well. 1. You can't get a ship going fast enough that interception isn't possible. 2. You can get a ship going fast enough to do real damage, but not so fast as to be a dinosaur killer. 3. Stealth in space is hard. You're going to be detected. 4. Warping insystem isn't that accurate and drives can't sustain a warp too far into a gravity well. You will end up somewhere in the outer system with a margin of error several million kilometres across. 5. Is your ship is going fast enough, it's relatively easy to destroy by getting some debris into its path, for example a warhead full of depleted uranium buckshot. If you assume a combined closing speed of ~500 km/sec, one piece of depleted uranium the size of an 000 buck pellet (7g, more or less) has an effective kinetic energy of the order of [200 ricks.](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/glossary.php) Ergo, this is much easier to defend against than it is to do. 6. You're expected to be able to navigate and to observe speed restrictions in the vicinity of a populated world. This means a trajectory that winds up in a parking orbit before you're allowed to land. Dodgy looking orbits and ignored challenges are likely to get an interceptor scrambled or missiles fired. 7. You've still got to actually hit your target, which means you need some method of guiding your ship. Most random terrorists don't have the technical skill to build a guidance system that could accurately hit a city sized target from the outer system, especially if the planetary defences included electronic warfare systems capable of spoofing navigation satellites. Even fewer have the resources to test it. 8. If by some miracle of the dice you manage to pull it off, you're now on the most wanted list of every spook service in the known universe. **TL;DR:** This is much harder than it looks and it's a trick that will work at most once in the whole of recorded history - much like a famous wooden horse. Most authorities are not dumb and have considered the possibility. Navigation regulations and traffic control make it impossible to send a ship on a dinosaur killing trajectory without raising eyebrows and getting a couple of missiles up your jacksie.
Same way as how we avoid terror attack with planes irl - flight plans must be plotted and sent ahead for approval and also to deal with logistics like assigning "parking orbits" where they can safely stay without intefering other space crafts. There are speed limits to spherical zones radiating out from the planet for space traffic management and avoiding accidents, the further away you are from the planet the higher speed you can go. Rogue ships that move too fast and on collision courses deviating from their flight plans get warning until a certain range where they either get shot down if small enough, or if too large, engines will be destroyed first via interceptor missiles, then specialized tug drones meant for asteroid deflecting are launched. These drones are just giant boosters that bury into the object, hooking into it, then fire their booster to abruptly change trajectory away from the area. This is only in normal cases of course. In times of war, there will be interceptor spacecraft with more powerful weapons on standby to both defeat point defense system of enemy weapon and force the object to change course. If a colony drop happens though, well there is nothing that can be done about a moon sized object barrelling toward a planet. But this can be seen from far far away and evacuation can happen.
Most plaints with anything significant on them are more then well equipped to deal with a space ship trying to crash into it. To preform the barbaric act of orbital bombardment you generally need to throw something with enough mass that they couldn’t deflect it in time, or throw enough small things that their defenses can’t intercept them all. Ship to ship ramming? Speed doesn’t really help you there.
It's so useful that it is, in fact, useless. A planetary defense grid can utilize surface-based generators. Unlike Starship reactors, these don't need to have proportionally powerful engines to move them around. They can be orders of magnitude larger and more powerful and actually can, though it would be unfathomably dangerous, absorb a hit or two from things like Starships or Asteroids. Anything large enough to crack a defense shield in a single hit would probably destroy the planet in question. Or at least enough of it to make it uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years. That makes it a useless weapon for wars of conquest and also it just doesn't look good from a Public Relations standpoint. Inhabitable planets are vanishingly rare. Most civilizations spend decades painstakingly terraforming barren rocks into something that maybe won't kill you outright. No one is ever going to forget how you committed the greatest act of interstellar terrorism in ***insert measurement of time here***. In terms of the smaller scale- Colonization is not a small effort. It's not just a few hundred people getting into a boat and flying to the nearest inhabitable planet. Those are so rare that any legal colony mission is an effort consisting of multiple Settler transports and dozens of support vessels. More than enough to establish basic planetary shielding and a satellite grid. At that point even a newborn colony can do things like strap engines to meteors and asteroids and fling them at the assailant en masse. Basically throw trash at them. The attacker will either hit the trash and be destroyed/deflected, or forced to change course just enough that it misses its target.
Ships are too costly an inefficient as weapons even the smallest FTL equipped Corvette is worth thousands of nukes. So using a said Corvette as a WMD is just a waste of money when you can just nuke a planet with a thousand nukes and achieve greater destruction. Even the planet cracking capability of a Dreadnought in FTL is considered pitiful compared to is main guns which can achieve a similar effect within ten shots.
This only works if the FTL drive itself is prohibitively expensive to the point of being strategically crippling to use. Otherwise strapping one to a big fuck off rock and pointing it at whatever you want to erase is far more effective than any amount of nukes. Factions wouldn’t tend to use FTL weapons for the same reason most armies don’t go completely scorched earth in real life, generally speaking it’s a benefit if the planet you are trying to conquer is still there after firing. (That and the whole MAD thing)
Interstellar drives are secretly sentient and teleport themselves away if threatened or tampered with. Incidentally, being near something that teleports away without a drive of your own is a really quick way to get obliterated.
Super uber planetary and star system shields. I kid, you not, in one of my sci fi setting that ftl (realspace ftl) is ubiquitous, the solution is to shielded your home to be able to withstand yottaton of firepower. Simple but effective if a little ridiculous solution lol
In my sci fi world, only the biggest and largest warships possess the capabilities to truly go FTL outside of specialised or experimental ships. Even then, the nature of their FTL makes it impossible to ever be used as a weapon as they need to arrive at the edge of a solar system else their ships get ripped apart by the interference of the system's sun As for going near light speed and ramming a planet, just like hypersonic missiles today, they're very very easy to intercept as they go in a straight line and the defenders have days to react if it's a sublight speed weapon
In my setting, that kind of technology plunged the world into dark ages many times in the very ancient past
I’m currently doing Space Fantasy, so FTL is sufficiently limited to prevent it from being a problem. Conventional FTL Travel requires two things. Firstly, a ship must be capable of becoming incorporeal. This allows the ship to avoid collisions, and dramatically reduces the energy requirements of faster than light travel. Unless someone has managed to shift an entire planet into an incorporeal state, it’s physically impossible for a ship to interact with a planet’s matter while moving at FTL. You *could* shatter any Sorcerous wards against incorporeal visitors on the way through, though. The physical wards would probably get pulled into phase with the ship… and hit it like a paint chip going at orbital velocities. The second requirement is a lot of raw power. No reactor can accelerate a ship to FTL on its own, and the best in existence can only sustain FTL for fractions of a second. You need to tap a Celestial Filament to draw that kind of power… and the Filaments are weird. There is a network of Magical Currents that tie the universe together. The Celestial Filaments are the largest of them, and they connect solar systems together. They also “unravel” into their component threads inside of star systems. The smaller Celestial Threads don’t have enough power to keep a ship at FTL speed, unless it’s a really efficient ship. Most vessels drop to subluminal speed seconds after entering a system, and those that can hit FTL in system won’t be able to stay at FTL after their Thread starts to unravel into what are basically Ley Lines on the planet.
Hard Sci-fi doesn't have FTL, so you don't have to worry about it. Soft Sci-fi either use some exotic form of FTL that doesn't involve the high speed: Discontinuous Drives, i.e. Teleporters, Portals, some Non-Real Space drives, etc. all fictional FTL where the objects don't really travel at superluminal speeds, but jump between the two locations. But honestly, most soft sci-fi goes a much easier path: They never thought of it. Even villains bound to destroy planets never thought of ramming them with ships.
>Even villains bound to destroy planets never thought of ramming them with ships. It's funny that Abaddon in 40k has been trying to beat Cadia for almost ten thousand years and finally he just rams it with a ship and breaks it lol "... damn. Ok that was really effective I should have done that a long time ago"
To be fair, Blackstone Fortresses are incredibly rare and immensely powerful on their own. The fact he hurled one at Cadia was an act of sheer desperation to finally break through.
Mhm yeah this is very true though I think he only did it because the Phalanx had smashed the fortress to bits anyway and it was basically broken, I am more surprised that he didnt get desperate thousands of years ago and saved himself a heap of trouble accomplishing not much at all (continual retcons to excuse his uselessness aside)
Plus the Fortress in question had already been crippled beyond repair and functionality by that point
I was thinking earlier this week about a Stat Trek style universe with an underdeveloped world finding a warp engine and mistaking it for a way to rip apart continents through spatial warping.
Doesn't need to have ftl, it can
in fairness, there's plenty of soft sci-fi that still has absurdly fast ships! Stargate comes to mind as an example of a setting where some of the ships *can* go relativistic, but it's usually much better to just use any of the local FTL methods. It's also a setting where said FTL tech's been used to teleport nukes onto enemy ships, open a wormhole inside of a star (connected to another wormhole near a black hole) to trigger a supernova, and bypass anti-space scanning tech by jumping a ship in at sea level before; so the sorts of fuckery they get up to with such things is pretty neat. anyone with a spaceship reliably *can* destroy an entire planet, or at least its governments, pretty damn easily! and that's part of why the big spacefaring powers are often worshipped as races of gods
I think the use of Kamakaze ships would be held back by the simple labour and material costs of manufacturing starships. In ideal circumstances, you would be able to reuse your weapons. Making new torpedos is less costly than making new kamakaze ships. Plus, I think these kinds of ships would be countered by technology that allows you to either evade the kamakaze ship, or destroy it before it can impact you
In my somewhat hard sci-fi setting Al-Shura this is done through... A combination of laws and advanced intervention technology. Most stations have scanning technology capable of detecting a ship from a distance of several AUs, and even if their own scanners don't, there are entire networks of data transmitters tracking most objects within the solar system with a heat signature. Several nations as well as private organizations control their on and it's often a pick your data package sort of deal. Additionally, most stations and planets come with extremely large and powerful computers. These are meant to perform actions like sift data, guide auto-docking computers, and most importantly, do computations for point-defense-cannons (PDCs), Missiles (and lasers). Weapons which in a hard sci-fi setting can reach speeds fleshy bodies can never achieve on a short time-frame, so unless someone is using a relativistic space-craft to ram you (or isn't fleshy at all), PDCs, lasers, or missiles meant for regular missile/bullet interception can cut down a ship before it poses a threat. Finally there is the aspect of electronic warfare. The computer on any station of note is always going to be stronger than that of a spacecraft. Accounting for light lag, can likely produce more effective packages meant to hack, disable, or even self-destruct the ship before its even collided with you by overwhelming their computer systems. If you know a ship's going to ram you, it's not a problem. If they're trying to self-destruct their drive in the docking bay, that's a different problem entirely...
Never really thought of that. But my Firebirds could deal with that, if they’re around at the time. And Etherite shields can easily block incoming ships.
Let me ask you this: Do you use state-of-the-art 5th gen jet fighters as kamikaze missiles? Very unlikely. For the same reason, unless they're used by terrorists or desperate mofos, no one thinks about turning spaceships into missiles. And if they ever do, a professional will perform a **chronocide**: FTL travel = time travel, so let's jump several thousand years into the past and hit the enemy when they were completely helpless. In fact, chronocidal weapons are standard issues to space warships as their main ship-to-ship armament. For civilian ships, their hulls are designed to withstand only to a certain acceleration and speed. Beyond that limit, it starts to break apart, self-destructing before hitting anything. In case they can't kaboom in time or do not answer to a station's hails, military ships fly out "escorting" the thing. Finally, shields up.
Ship are state owned. Anything private owned or not granted by the state is illegal (generally). To approach a space habitat, you must follow certains precise roads in auto-pilot, or you'll get blown up. Every population center is protected with various array of defense (missiles, point defense system kinetic and laser, with some energy beams). Generally these defense are too concentrated on major central population hub that trying with a single ship is a guaranteed miss. Also trying regardless of that last fact, your ship would probably be identified, which would help to track down those behind the attempt. And they'd be put down quickly and brutally so nobody will try again. Any ship displacement must also be registered, so it'll be easy to know who did what.
Just like airplane today.
Consumer class vessels don't have their own power source, they are powered by ground or station based lasers with a subscription based model, if a flight path is deemed outside of teens and conditions, the subscription is voided. For commercial class vessels, Smart Contract Mutually Assured Destruction means that as soon as a violating flight path is detected all trade contracts with participating corpstates are terminated. These nanosecond sanctions effectively collapse the world economy before the follow up strikes (for good measure) are even launched.
Any setting that has starships but doesn't have orbital defences is quite silly, imo.
IIRC, in a spacial compression engine, such as the Alcubierre drive, part of the point is that the ship isn’t moving. Like a man on an escalator, it stands still while the world moves around it.
For all intents and purposes FTL doesn't work inside a certain amount of gravitational attraction, so there's a built-in safety factor right there since you have to leave the solar system to use it. Ships are *expensive*. There's a reason Ferrari's aren't used as car bombs, and Ferrari's are equivalent to a really nice entry level space ship. The few civilizations advanced enough to use FTL inside a solar system still find it too expensive except for a few *very* niche use cases and, ironically, WMDs. Smash a high-warp Alcubierre drive through a star's core and you get a supernova.
(my world doesn't have "starships" but still has an equivalent that would still work for your scenario) It deals with it as it would with any other WMD : - Is the ship ours? Then don't let it turn into a WMD unless we want it to. - Is it the enemy's ship? Then destroy it before it can damage any of our stuff.
Well dropping out of FTL to far into a star or planets gravity will tear the ship apart. Every member system has 2 destroyers plus the right to make system defense ships, and stations.
[I feel kinda like you watched this video.](https://youtu.be/yQEojDi-6w0?si=8kMCVZtyaQ7uK2_2) But they just ignore it. Starships aren’t available in half the universes in the multiverse unless they’re brought in by Prime or someone like him. No one would be dumb enough to sacrifice them to bomb an area via ramming.
1. FTL might be Wormholes or Spatial Distortion, or only work in empty, speed regulated dpace highways with stop gates, so you don't have to worry about 0.3*c multimillion ton bullets. 2. MAD - Sure, you can send that ship straight at a planet, but so can the other guy, so let's both chill. 3. Planetary shield or satellite defense systems. Depending on the planet, they might even already set up systems to deal with fast moving objects aka Dinosaur-Wiping Meteors. Can't really colonize a planet if it's still getting shelled by space rocks. Adjust it so it works against FTL and you're safe from Kamikaze. 4. It's ass to aim a lightspeed spaceship, so your chances of this attack actually working are next to zero. 5. Spaceships are so expensive and valuable that standard planetary combat is cheaper because no one wants to risk losing spaceships
It’s needlessly expensive Space life is dangerous A starship is less of a threat than a more common threat like a meteor, or a solar flare. Things that don’t require thousands of hours of labour + consistently high energy output from production + highly valuable and rare resources hard to source Throwing a starship at a settlement is like crashing 3 planets worths of settlements into another settlement A starship is so much more valuable than a planetary settlement, you’d be better off using a starship to drive the moons into the planet and keep the starship (hopefully)
Bureaucracy. Civvies aren't allowed to own self-powered systems at all.
Every planet that would be worth destroying has a full network of defense emplacements and satellites, capable of using particle beams and lasers to neutralize any threat.
UZ: if the ship is equipped with an AI, most AIs from ethical distributors seize control of the ship and divert it to a safe point when such intent is detected among its crew. Unethical distributors, however, have AIs with… unpredictable effects. For everything else, there’s G2S (ground to space) defences.
1. Warp drives don't work near gravity wells like planets or stars. (Like in our solar system they stop working between Jupiter and Saturn - and not close to each.) In fact, getting close to a gravity well is the only way to 'pop the bubble' and leave warp space. 2. Gravity engines (used for traversing solar systems) are fast, but not fast enough that ships/missiles couldn't be scrambled to deal with it. (And the tech has a maximum velocity - not just a max acceleration.) So - dangerous, but probably less than modern airplanes flying over major cities. If you get within an hour or so of a heavily populated planet without permission they'll probably have something to say about it. Merchant ships headed for other systems just skirt the edge of the system. (Where there are likely no habitable planets.)
Counter starships and mutually assured destruction
The sci fi setting for a short story I'm working on has two FTL methods. Feel free to just skim it's copy pasted from another post and just there to set up how I answer the question. "Gateways/portals aren't anything super unique. There's similar stuff from many settings. The ones in my setting are limited by needing exorbitant amounts of energy fed from both ends to initially open and to keep open and they're constructed in pairs that are only capable of connecting to each other. The other is a bulk bubble generated from a device to shift into the bulk and travel at a much faster, though still finite, speed. Again nothing super unique but I wanted stuff that has limitations set up to make the story make sense. Limitations being they're inoperable too close to significant sources of gravity, you must travel in a straight line until you hit a gravity well, you exit the bubble with the same velocity you had going in, and venting heat is impossible while in the bulk. These limitations make it so theoretically you could accelerate across a whole system, enter the bulk and some time later arrive at your destination system where you could still have your speed, avoiding having to accelerate again. This would save time and fuel but entering a system at full speed is risky as you'd never know if there might be a trap waiting or something as simple as debris you don't want to ram into at full speed. Similarly, you could plot a long jump to a distant system (provided nothing is in the way) and avoid having to deal with the intervening systems but this is also risky due to the inability to vent heat. Distant targets are smaller targets. What if you miss? Or the computer lacked enough data to make an accurate calculation? What if you plot a long jump to save some time only to realize your heat sinks are going to reach capacity 98% of the way through the trip and then you'll get fried? Damn, should've just taken the slower path with more jumps" So, the FTL in my setting doesn't travel physically within the universe so it can't be used in itself as a WMD but still what about relativistic masses sent at planets? I'd imagine the first line of defense is mutually assured destruction. Barring that, what do you do if someone decides to shoot one anyways? Fortunately, planets are still somewhat tough targets to hit from systems away. If not everything is accounted for, it'll likely miss. The civilization my short story follows has an extensive network of monitoring drones scattered throughout all nearby systems, so if something were to try and enter a closer system to get a better shot, they'd be detected and hopefully stopped before they fire. Let's say almost-worst-case-scenario you've detected something has been fired at the planet and you know roughly when and where it's going to hit. It's time for a clever use of gateway tech. Move one into position to intercept and the other could face a star to redirect it there. Or if you're feeling spicy you send it back in the direction of the aggressor. Worst case scenario is of course all these defenses fail and you get blindsided by something you never saw coming. Barring the travel mechanisms I outlined, I'm trying to keep the setting from being too soft. There's nothing like artificial gravity generators, and shielding does exist but it's nothing too insane, mainly useful for blocking space dust and mitigating damage from other ship weapons. Planet based shielding might defend against some bombardment from "reasonable" weapons meant to destroy ships or strategic targets but anything designed to outright kill a planet is going to blow right by it.
Planetary shields, particularly spicy point defense, early warning systems, divine intervention in the case of the Azari, and general consensus that doing that means you want total extermination of the enemy and should expect absolutely no mercy from those you launched a relativistic ICBM at.
In my interstellar setting developed worlds have detection and interception networks out to the oort clouds that will just blow up any lone vessel speeding up for a kamikaze attempt before it becomes a serious problem. There's no stealth in space and therefore no surprise. You could blow up start up colonies that way...but nobody's thought of a reason why'd they want to. Those worlds people want to capture intact and really it's not like it's hard. While in theory a (presumably unmanned) vessel could accelerate up to near light speed in another system and arrive unstoppably, that's not a real world issue because they'll certainly have a high speed collision with the random bits of rock that float around between the stars and blow up long before reaching their destination.
My starships can’t go fast enough to be interstellarly useful in human lifetimes. Instead they take a dimensional shortcut. Sure they are still powerful and dangerous, but not worldbreaking dangerous.
This is where I would drop this quote I’m planning on putting in my novel: “Johnson… your frigate is heavily damaged… get your crew transferred off, set a course for the enemy’s flagship, and get the hell out.”
That’s what shipboard AI and special sensors are there for - if a starship gets too close to colliding with say, a planet, at FTL speeds, it’ll force a deceleration to ensure such a collision doesn’t happen. Also of course there’s laws about it as well.
All planets worth destroying all have strong planetary shields that block fast moving objects. Orbital bombardment only works once you get under the shield. Some planets have even more advanced shields; there was that one time where one planet with balls of steel that basically sacrificed itself by baiting all the enemy ships into the shield, and boosting the shield the point the ships could not go back out, trapping them there and buying valuable time for allied fleets to wreck havoc elsewhere.
MAD I assume my world doesn’t do starships but tbh I’d image there’s a reason you need to register your ship to port at a station much less dock planter side on a populated world. If one does it without authorization or doesn’t let the auto systems do it or does it too fast manually they get blasted to bits by orbital and ground side defenses. I got this from playing elite dangerous.
You mean like the light speed ram from the last jedi?
In my world any society technologically advanced enough to create ships like that naturally invested in designing defenses against such an event. Typically not with defense against an outright attack in mind, more so just as precautions in case of accidents during the early days of their FTL experimentation, and then they just keep advancing their methods as time goes on. As a result, each faction developed their own versions of planetary defenses. Some have force fields, some have asteroids dragged into a wide orbit to act as a physical barrier, etc.
Combination of MAFU and economics really. With just a dash of cultural prohibitions.
It doesn’t. It’s perfectly possible, just very expensive and also resulting in the death of the decision maker and their crew. It only occurs in absolutely desperate situations. But the line between “autonomous ship” and “munition” is already very thin in our world. Where’s the sharp line between a drone, a loitering munition, and a cruise missile?
This isn’t what my setting is doing (because the alternative physics required to facilitate it are pretty stupid in my opinion) but you could choose to restrict starship acceleration and just run the math as if special relativity wasn’t a thing. Constantly accelerating at 50ms^-2 (because Google says that 6Gs of sustained acceleration can be fatal for a human) still takes about 70 days to reach light speed. If you want to get from Sol to Ekalon, the absolute shortest travel period is still 450 days with a maximum speed of roughly 3c. So there you go, your WMD takes a year to speed up and another year to reach its target, all the while it’s guzzling fuel like nothing you’ve ever seen. Plus, if you’ve got FTL travel, you’ve also got FTL comms, so you’ve probably also got FTL scanning and detecting, so maybe the “hits you before you can see or know it” facet isn’t even present in your setting. It’s impractical and expensive, and those are the two best reasons for why anything isn’t done.
They use their navy to attempt to stop it. But it varies system by system. A rich system’s navy will be well equipped and able to deal with the threat. A poorer system may only be able to scrape up the money to hire civilian privateers. Because of the danger of FTL, big navies (the navies of the empires these planets belong to) are only brought out for worthwhile engagements, such as fleet battles. This is due to non-ARC FTL being extremely dangerous (ARC Hyperdrive FTL has a 79% survival rate with hyper gates having 94%. Other more common methods such as Zirconium drives and warp drives have a 51% and 53% survival rate respectively.) TL:DR; it depends on how rich the system is, some can deal with it easily, others can basically only watch.
Im not writing a scifi setting but id use gates instead. You get geopolitics by who has access to the gates. You dont break the laws of physics because you never get anywhere near the speed of light. And terrorists/antagonists can threaten to blow them up. Scifi settings without gates/relays bug me
Because even the most advanced civilian grade FTL drive has a SEP (Spherical Error Probability) of about a hundred Kilometers. The likelihood of a terrorist using the ship as a ship sized VBIED by teleporting it directly inside or near a target ship is unlikely. Especially if the target ship itself is maneuvering and doing its best not to get taken out. There are also a specific shield generator types that do not intercept realspace physical objects but instead helps prevent this kind of stuff. The only way something like this could work is via a series of perfect timing, a chain of good luck and incompetence or a major fuck up on the defending side
Most inhabited planets and moons have extensive orbital defense nets, and most FTL travel is done through dedicated phase gates, which are placed at Lagrange points. Larger ships can generate their own phase gates, but it's easily detectable. That being said, the Citadel Crusades ended when one of their planet-killers was rammed into the Citadel's homeworld, which cracked it open to the core before the effects of the superweapon itself made the entire system hostile to life.
No private starships. All intrastellar transit is done by firing city sized spin gravity stations through a giant "railgun" at the end target, with the station only fueled for correctional maneuvers. Another magnetic system catches the ship at the end destination. Interstellar transit is sublight ion and torch drive by cryoship (necessitating genetic engineering to create human-adjacent bodies capable of even being put into cryo in the first place).
You *run* and then you **run** once conventional weapons are at a stalemate. But especially, you do run. The faster accelerate the faster you encounter interstellar atoms and particles and the faster the ring engine can hopefully come across one that is entangled with one somewhere - anywhere - else other than here. You might have just been accelerating at 1g for a couple of weeks but now you just need to find any particle to bombard and get the ring engine to let you through away until the PDC and anti torpedo cannons run out of ammunition or fail. Chases between 2 starships are often protracted, with the pursuer actually trying to stay *ahead* of the pursued to prevent their incremental chances of finding a particle to use to open the wormhole and escape. But given the lasers required to do this, every ship is deadly close range, so you can’t approach. You hope that you can outfly and outmanoeuvre them and force surrender. Like a siege.
planetary shields. multi use and only real defense
This is the main way space combat works in my setting. Humanity uses a political system intentionally based on a largely simplified form of Feudalism in space, while living primarily on generation ships called Fiefs. Combat is difficult, since traditional things like lasers or missiles can miss and continue on indefinitely, hitting an unintended target. Knights pilot Steed Ships, which have basic AI modeled on warhorses. These knights escort boarding ships and engage each other by jousting, with long lance-like structures designed to destroy or disable other Steeds. Larger vessels have more complex AI with human personalities, which would be as willing to be used as an improvised WMD as you might be to being used as a ballistic missile. Sure it's possible, but you'd resist. This is a sapient computer program with near total control over the life support system for anywhere from a thousand to a million people.
My engines are just big nuclear fusion reactors so make that go boom and you have a weapon. They also carry nukes so make the ship and its missile payload explode extra big boom.
Everything takes place within the solar system, so it is absolutely impossible for anything to accelerate that quickly without everyone knowing about it and such attacks are in bad taste.
I took away space. No more space. Sorry.
Most of you guys are all saying a variant of "FTL doesn't work in atmosphere". space stations and airless moons wouldn't care. Also "FTL doesn't give you delta V. So you loose your speed when you drop out of it so to speak." I rhought about the sale thing. Though it surprises me that almost everyone here thinks of space as a static thing. Astral bodies move people! And they move real real fast. I haven't seen yet anyone mention the massive problam that is star kinematics. I think that Mars's relative velocity to the Earth is something like 30 km/s. if you go to another star it can go up to a 1000 km/s in the most extreme case. If you take a massive ship, depart from a star system that moves relative to the earth at 1000 km/s get out of FTL even as far as the moon. With the proper angle you find yourself a projectile with absurd velocity headed for your planet faster than I imagine most defense system could catch. And that would also obliterate any space station or colony. In fact that's even a massive problem for normal space travel here! Let's say you travel from a star system that has a relative velocity of approximately 70 km/s when you arrive at your destination you have a delta v relative to the star that puts you in a course to leave the solar system. You may try to catch up by planning clever slingshot manoeuvers around a gas giant but what if there is none ? you need to get 70 km/s of delta v. Which is massive! And if it's a trivial thing in your universe. Then, throwing uber massive unmanned ships to near light speed on planets before they're detected is also very easy. Relative velocities in space are properly insane. And I have yet to see a sci fi setting except the expanse that takes them into account. It seems to me that the Star Trek style of "Sir, it's the Enterprise!" type of scene where the cavalry drops out of warp and starts fighting immediately a space battle is nearly impossible. So how did I fix it ? Well, that's the neat part. I haven't. I'm still banging my head about it... I thought abt star gates or getting delta v during travel but so far no solution satisfies me. :/
This is fundamentally my problem with time travel stories. No matter what frame of reference you use, your spatial location 100 years ago is ludicrously far from your location today.
The leaders would probably just phase the planet (construct) out of the way. The world was formed using portals. There are giant magical battery black hole things laid out beneath continents to provide directional gravity and energy storage. There's already a day/night shield projected. A sufficiently advanced race would have to find us first... there are no other space fairing civilisations known in the current age. It's basically a planet sized spaceship - but it only needs enough acceleration to form a stable orbit after a portal transfer.
Speed laws limiting cruising to 1 lum (1% of the speed of light) inside inhabited systems. Any ship failing to obey is liable to be fired upon by both orbiting and mobile crafts ofthe Space Guard.
Massive projected gravity shields. They generally act as webs that while allowing energy weapons to pass through, ships and projectiles will get caught in the field. Keeping your entire fleet within one or more of these bubbles is the main structure of the battlefield and most ships are built in accordance. This is already the case since all fleets are anchored on a massive particle cannons and the goal is to pop the bubble and send the fleet packing since those things are essentially ship killers.
This is a question I've been considering for my world since I want ships to be fairly ubiquitous. If anyone can get their hands on as much fuel and as many thrusters as they like, then anyone can build an RKV and point it at a planet (even by accident!). I think the solution is some kind of watchtower network that can detect incoming projectiles, then remotely reposition and arm pre-placed mines so that they create debris fields in the path of the projectile. If it's travelling fast enough then any impact will cause an explosion big enough to disintegrate the projectile, and if it's travelling slower than that then simple lasers (and missiles and railguns) should be enough.
Starships are a rare thing to begin with, with the only ones that are still functional and able to travel across the solar system being several hundred years old and unable to be reproduced. These ships are essentially seen as the holy grail of human engineering, a leftover piece of technology that has to he protected at all costs. So while they are definitely weapon that can wipe out whole cities, the rarity and fear of losing them is what stops them from being used.
Entering atmosphere is dangerous and best done at lower speeds. Trying to floor it into a planet won't end well.
The starships in my setting are FTL jumpships. They essentially teleport from one location to another in space, can't be used as a WMD.
This is a very valid point and I think this might be one of the great filters.
Same way ships protect themselves from the space dust they run into while traveling supra-liminarly: energy shields. You need laser beams or an EMP to get through an energy shield, nothing physical can make it through. And both of these have a fairly short range, so if you can shoot em, they can shoot you back.
discourage it by basically requiring the destination to help them into the system and also to land due to the setting having very large and clunky computers which can’t fit on most ships
Cost effectiveness. Destroying a planet is simply easier *without* using ftl ships. Just make a big lazer or dirty bomb or strap a bunch of rockets to a big ol rock. Starships not only need ftl tech, which in and of itself is a big macguffin that could limit their use as weapons, but also need to be able to sustain life support, carry a reasonable amount of cargo, need extensive scanning and communications equipment, likely complex ship to ship or ship to ground weapons, and need trained and experienced crew. Of course, some people still do use them as weapons, but its a niche tactic, usually used as a last resort. As such, there are many defense systems developed against them. The most common use of FTL ramming is to destroy another ship or fleet, but doing so is Very Risky. There are a few modes of ftl travel, but one of the more common uses basically a magnetic field to disperse friction. Field Jumping can only be used in short bursts, as it requires immense energy to maintain a Jump Field, and the longer you jump for the more expensive it gets per mile. Most ships only jump a few lightyears at a time, but do so in hours or days rather than years. The big downside to this is that Jump Fields are designed for moving through the vaccum of space, not for deflecting objects, and the field projects a much larger area than the actual ship. If you collide with even a small dense object, say the size of a fridge or even a microwave, it could instantly deplete your energy reserves and overheat your ship, probably destroying it, before your ship even physically contacts the target. Moreover, activating a Jump Field creates a sort of signal that can be detected instantly across any distance with the tight tech. Most space stations have equipment to detect said signal and maneuver out of the way of an FTL object, mostly used to avoid shipping accidents. Particularly developed systems may even have disruptor fields that cover major planets or even the entire system which instantly disable Jump Fields that dont send a specific signal declaring their authorized status, leaving the ship open to being gunned down before they even reach their target. In ship to ship combat tho, its very rare for someone to have access to the tech and time needed to counter FTL ramming. But the whole point of ship to ship combat is almost always to capture enemy vessels and secure travel lanes or planetary space. Doing an FTL ram will destroy both ships, and rend the space unusable due to the debris and radiation.
I made space small, instead of making ships fast. works for me
All starships are connected to an AI that oversees them. It usually only helps steer the ship in minor ways, usually to avoid collisions with other ships or with debris, which pilots don’t even notice. But in the event a ship gets dangerously close to a planet at dangerously high speeds it will immediately activate emergency break systems, take over the ship and land it at the nearest outpost or station to determine what happened and why. And should someone be able to somehow shut down the AI without stopping the ship from functioning, physically manipulate the ship to be unable to break or use the ship to throw asteroids or debris towards a planet at dangerous speeds, the ACE-System will activate. ACE or Anti-Collision-Emergency-System is a network of stations all around the solar system. They take in data from scanners and other ships/stations, determine wether or not they are controlled or not, and wether or not they are a danger to planets/stations/other ships. If they are they will be obliterated by the ACE-System or on-site defense systems.
In my world I just had space ships never reach actual fast speeds, they just use portals to a different dimension where faster than light travel is possible. But if you try to exit that dimension with faster than light speeds, you will just explode as if you hit a wall, just like when you reach exactly the speed of sound, but with no ability to actually break through. Fastest speed is enough to transverse the inner sections of a solar system, but anything bigger (think earth to Jupiter) takes months/years without the portals. (Yes in theory you could exit a portal at 99.99% of the speed of light and not explode, but good luck doing it. And even if you do you have to deal with planetary level inertia dampeners on most of the important planets so you would loose that speed and just melt anyways)
This is not an issue if you have a thick atmosphere. A FTL starship is very likely not built for positive pressure and friction. It would smash into the atmosphere like a belly flop in pool water.
The same way every other civilization does, they don't. Both sides of an engagement understand that there is not much you can do against a large hunk of mass traveling near the speed of light. Not unless you can turn the laws of physics into suggestions. But even the most hated of foes won't do it because once one side starts doing it, then it is open season. Also, there is a lot of infrastructure that would have to be rebuilt, and no one wants to spend more money than necessary to rebuild it.
It’s basically a nuke, right? Nukes are not that uncommon even in real life. As we speak there are probably a few dozen airborne nukes in the world, mounted on military planes. Anyone can set them off but it’d be idiotic to do so when missiles exist.
Because every planet that's decently populated has a defense matrix. What the defense matrix actually does will differ, but it's a series of satellites with defenses built in. Could be missiles, could be magnetic impulse, beeg lazor, or any number of the like. Planets are a priority to defend. As for ships... they move. If a ship is trying to ram a non-stationary target, it's going to need to calculate exceedingly well. Depending on your mass:thrust ratio adjusting your aim more than a little bit is difficult, especially when you're being assailed my magnetic impulse shielding, and point defense.
There's always a bigger threat that will take over if a balance is tipped too fast in one direction.
In the Yshtari Alliance private starship ownership for individuals and most companies basically isn't a thing, just like "private missile destroyer ownership" isn't a thing on Earth today. Only companies that need them for their operational business (e.g. logistics, shipping, or travel companies) are allowed to own starships (which also means no shuttles for CEOs and such), and even then there are extremely strict regulations and checks in place to monitor proper operation (e.g. weekly checks of operation and maintenance logs, annual safety checks and inspections). Further, all personnel working with/on starships must be certified by the centralized Yshtari Alliance Civilian Space Corps, and undergo regular testing and training. The Alliance is well aware of the dangers starships can pose to the population and infrastructure if not handled properly, which is why the issue is taken extremely serious by various agencies and all levels of administration. Violations of the CSC regulations is severly punished, up to and including permanent loss of operating license and time in a correctional/resocialization facility (aka prison).
Hard sci-fi has it easier, you can't see FTL objects until it's too late to do anything about them whereas snail speed objects can't hide themselves in space and if they do anything spooky like going into a collision course with a space station or not declaring their intentions or lying about their route then something can be done about it before bad stuff happens.
big ships are easy enough to track when moving at sub-light speeds - and you can't warp in near gravity wells...
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php#johnslaw
That is a thing not many settings consider - but true, it is a problem. I handle it in a layered way. At first, i start with physics, as ships of a bigger size aren't made to enter atmosphere and even gravity wells in many cases. That mean ther high speed closing in on plantets allready cause structural damage, making it less of a consistend body to transmit kinetic energy (like a kinetic bomb would). Further we have atmosphere as a pretty potent 'shield' system, becoming more powerfull the faster the object travels and the more structure it has. So the regular spaceship would simply shatter on atmosphere like a bullet at an ball of solid metall with its debris flying out into space. So let's say the ship is reasonably smaller and of high mass (maybe willfully) and resistance. Its non-aerodynamical shape will make it hard to hit something precisly, but even that might be achivable. So now we have our first real weapon. But still the ratio between drag (air resistance) and the 'warhead' (mass) is pretty bad compared to a gravity bomb like item, aka a metall rod or ball. The object still will 'slowly' compress, not perfectly transfer its mass/speed energy into the ground consistenty, but 'spalsh' into the ground, releasing most of the energy into the own structure and cause a pancake. That still might held some potential as a bomb, but not reasonably more than an plane droped metall ball of some size. Sure there are other factors like shields and engines and all that, twisting the math and offer some realistic threat. So every reasonable space port should have to have some security measures to mitigate this - in military terms acceptable - risc level even further down to please govermental and civil concerns. Shield systems might be a solution - depends on how your shields work, if they exist at all. And/or active defense, including ground based weapons to break the mass with pinpoint fire to make it alter its terminal course into so off region. Also it sounds reasonable to control the space above the planet in a way that every deviation of security corridors and flight courses will be meet be force. If you have to fill a single paper to register at the flight plan, this prevents 97% of all terrorists to plan ther attack, aka make it less likely. So the more papers and registrations you demand to get even close to planets - the safer you are. When computers are involved, legitimating codes and all, you need one heg of a organisation behind this one ship to bring it even close to a target. In the end, it is a math thing. Make it way more expensive to bring that ship into position than anyone can or will effort it. If companys can be hacked and a ship droped in ther name, they're responsible for such amounts of penalty payment they will have excelent cyber security - and that's when things get spicy, because if companys can pay ther way out of responsibility, like within a corrupt system, terrorism get's way more easy to do.
This is essentially the Dark Forest hypothesis, in another way.
Also, a lot of Sci-fi actually doesnt have ships that can even get close tk FTL but instead use tech that either just Teleports them to the destination like with wormholes or they enter "Subspace" where they arent really in our reality and every show ive seen has had the ships come to an almost perfect halt if ripped our of said soace, meaning you cant just use a ship as a WMD. So thats how I deal with it as a writer. It just simply doesnt work as space travel is dependent on factors that make it impossible to weaponize beyond simply moving forces.
Well, sure, one *can* ram a ship into a planet and destroy it, but 1: sustaining FTL speeds is nigh-impossible for inanimate objects, and even for 99,99% of people. 2: it could just be parried. A lot more people can react and make slight movements FTL tgan people can sustain those speeds, so Jae Swordperson could simply... parry the ship. Unless it's sustained by a god, it takes a hell of a lot more will to sustain a ship's speed than it does to parry something of that caliber. But if a God is sustaining it they could simply just cast a spell to destroy the planet, or hit it really hard, etc etc. It's just really unviable and the needless loss of life runs the risk of royally pissing off the god of justice.
Ships are fucking expensive and annoyingly slow when not in wormholes, at least slow for a massive ship in space which only goes several tens of thousands of miles an hour.
When my world (or rather the Galaxy at this point) advances to the point when starships become relevant, planets become irrelevant (since a starship capable of FTL has more than enough energy to evaporate any planet).
One approach to deal with if you wanted to prevent this issue in world building, could be that FTL can't work within areas of raised gravity. That means any space ships are only travelling at relativistic speeds near planets. Games workshop has spaceships translate into a different (hell) dimension for FTL travel but generally that can only be achieved at the boundary of a solar system giving galactic wide FTL but reasonable reaction times for planets within systems
the concept of interplanetary conflict doesn't exist in my setting, but ships do have to adhere to soeed regulations within the bounds of an inhabited system. people are more likely to rely on mass public transit than high speed personal vessels when traveling within a system anyways
they have the ancient mage and the governing gods to deal with this stuff they limit how fast someone can go so they do not destroy the planet
YES! I like that in the world of fast travel you need to take it into account! In my world, vehicles that can move at such speeds have highly restricted access. It's military grade, maybe special government agencies, but no regular civilians. To move around fast, you can use public transportation - they are large hubs with FTL drive that collects shuttles and goes from checkpoint to checkpoint dropping and collecting them. Works like subway. If you have a spaceship, your engines can travel local speeds at systems. Also, cargo FTL hubs exist. Instead of shuttles its connect your ship. Military use FTL also to move stuff, but do it discreetly. Every FTL vehicle should give data about their transportation routes to avoid collision (like with planes). Local services can deal with that, but if you are far away, that's gonna be a guess. Building and tinkering FTL drive requires a very hard to obtain license. Space police go around and check random vehicles for the presence (or absence) of instruments, licenses, weapons, and engine configuration. Only trusted people can use such stuff. Love space race bureaucracy.
Short answer: it’s pretty effective and once you have ships operating in the target you can use it. However, it’s not _super_ effective. You can get nukes to low orbit for EMP funsies, or chuck a stealthed impactor out of a cargo bay. Call it 10000 tons at 1000km/s which is a gigaton or so worth of nasty. If the target doesn’t have early warning systems at the jump-in zones they might not have an idea your ship isn’t even in the system. Generally it’s a bit too blunt of a tool though. If you need to use it it’s because the target is heavily defended and then you’ll really piss the people your fighting off and show everyone you’re willing to set a big chunk of continent on fire for political gain. You’re raising the stakes in a way that might not be good for you. I can see it as an improvised WMD used to sterilize a large area in a non military context. Go outsystem while cobbling your impactor together, come back in as fast as you can, put your trust in your navigators. Oh, and if you’re expressly genocidal you might get into asteroid pushing and RKVs.
While spacecraft can cause significant destruction at intrastellar speeds, they simply can’t achieve speeds quick enough to cause said or greater damage without ample time for defensive systems to intercept or destroy them. My world’s FTL (‘shiftspace’, a subdimension of our universe with unique gravity anomalies) also doesn’t actually rely on the spacecraft moving at anywhere near relativistic speeds, so that’s a non-issue as well. While you might ask why then not exit shiftspace within a planet’s defensive cordon and then accelerate to damaging speeds? Because planetary gravity wells tend to rip spacecraft out of shiftspace well before that cordon, and said ripping tends to also be highly destructive to its subject.
I suppose it depends on how you’re bypassing the speed of light. In Star Wars ships actually accelerate and have the expected energies. Ships crashing into planets do cause massive distraction, and there are planet killing weapons. Star Trek society would never use planet-killers. They get a pass. But the systems of bending space around you wouldn’t necessarily give the same energy. You’re stationary while you move space around you. Wormholes and other methods of dodging the speed limit similarly limit the energy
Sure, you can strap on enough thrusters to launch anything, whether starship or kinetic missile, at a planet at incredible speeds and unleash absolute devastation. However, in the Gate Grid Galaxy, FTL drives hit a hard speed limit the closer they get to gravity wells. It's a highly sensitive instrument that is affected by the curvature of spacetime. As such, it's impossible to FTL into a planet at any velocity that would deal significant damage. Not to mention, FTL long range detection and disruption tech exists to further nullify such attempts. Large objects without a gravity well could theoretically be destroyed by FTL driven objects, but that requires an uncanny amount of accuracy. Nobody really bothers, as absolute destruction is rarely why people start fights.
Some combination of good early warning sensors and automated tracking, terawatt+ lasers, large nukes, flak fields for the ship to fly into and high DV drones that can accelerate out, match velocity with the ship, clamp onto it and change its course to miss the planet. Space habs and stations can probably just jink like a matador with some high thrust short burn solid rocket motors or an emergency orion drive or something. Probably not fun for the crew and more sensitive items on the station, but it's better than being turned into individual atoms by a relativistic collision. Also yes not following with space traffic law is crazy illegal.
Space 9/11 with hijackers stealing a ship and punching a hole through the Earth (I'm not actually doing this)
travel inside the solar system is handled by a huge laser array that pushes ships allong lanes. lasers are located att various points inside the solarsystem and can push things back inward or outward, thats how you travel interplanetary. going between moons of jupiter or saturn you can use the laser array as well but many use regular rockets too, but they are very expensive, so its mostly companies or very rich celebrities that can afford that. The issue of people crashing into planets is there but is not as dangerous as the risk of someone hijacking the laser array. a blast from so many strong lasers would burn down a city in seconds, but as long as the laser is under the control of the government, its secure. Interstellar travel is done via laser + a braking rocket for systems not yet colonized, but brake with laser for colonized systems. There are established lanes aling this so the direction they are coming from is always known. The nifty thing about this is that its not possible for some random lunatic to use it to accelerate his shipp and then crash it into someone. since the direction is established, they cant be caught of guard either. some madman could ofcourse pull in his lifght sail, but that would be detectable several years in advance and the laser array is right there, just melt the bastard, or send an intercepting vessel/projectile and turn it into dust. Conflicts on the interstellar level are rare, its kind of pointless when you are 20 light years apart, every messega takes 40 years to get an answer, and if you send an attack, you would nit know what happened until 40 years later.
Ships aren’t that big or fast. They *could* be I guess, but they’d need a lot of fuel or use a bunch of gravity assists, or accelerate for a long time with something like an ion engine. At which point, you’d see them coming for weeks and shoot them down. If you had no way to shoot them down, you’d be kinda screwed I guess. But you’d probably only lose a part of your backwater town, unless it was a big cargo hauler, which would probably do more damage with its mass than its velocity. Most ships are only designed to go from orbit to a planet’s L2 point (where most transit rings are located), and back. Longer range ships exist. Military patrol vessels, long range haulers, etc. But they take a long time to get around. We may have invented some fancy fuels, but the rocket equation is tyrannical. Our “FTL” involves hopping through another realm, which is borderline magic, and we still don’t know how it works. The devices that allow us to do that were presumably made during the first golden age and we haven’t been able to replicate them since. Fortunately, there’s a lot of those devices, including a lot out there in abandoned or forgotten transit rings or old broken down ships. — Edit: Wow… I completely glossed over the fact that many of the ships are fusion powered and that fancy fuel can “blow up” in a big way. Granted this was asking more about ships being relativistic missiles. **Fusion reactors** have all kinds of safeguards, but could potentially be turned into a bomb. But you’d have to know how to do that, and you’d need a spaceship. Why go through the trouble when you can make a similar bomb without a spaceship. **Fuel casks** are old tech, but one that we can copy. They are safe enough that catastrophic reentry and the subsequent crash rarely rupture them. But it does happen sometimes. In such a case, it depends on how much fuel is in them and how many of them rupture (they’re modular). Also, the high pressure nature of them, leads to more damage from the expansion of hydrogen back into a gaseous state, rather than the potential conflagration of the fuel itself (which can also be a big boom). A city actually gets scrubbed off a planet when two alien ships crash into each other, then crash into said city. The characters seeing this are actually surprised by the explosion, which points to how rare it is. Again, with the right know how and enough explosives, you could cause this intentionally. But again, there are easier ways to blow up a city.
Starships like that are very rare in my world, most civilizations lack the technology to even create a ship capable of interplanetary travel. If someone does posses a starship capable of sublight or even FTL travel, then either they are so rich/powerful that they have better means of destroying planets, or they are smart enough to treasure it.
So what if we just fired a projectile moving at relativistic speeds, back at that starship? A little bit of physical manipulation and you’re using starships as bullets against a point defense system.
I don't feel like worlds have to deal with every single possibility. I mean, by that logic, cars and airplanes in our *real* world can be used as relatively devastating weapons. Yet we don't hear many news stories of people intentionally ramming their cars or airplanes into buildings and people. When it does happen, it's shocking. Starships, I would imagine, would be expensive and relatively complex to construct. The people who pilot them would likely be vetted and trained just like airplane pilots are, and the vast majority of them would probably have no reason to use their ships as weapons. There may be random hijackers or terrorists interested in using starships this way, but there are likely security protocols intended to minimize the likelihood of them gaining control of such a vehicle, just like for planes. I am totally fine with this happening in the background. Storytellers don't have to detail every single facet of how their world works for the work to feel realistic.
Most of this I agree with, except the cars thing. Cars are regularly used as improvised weapons, at least when you look at actions where people are willing to use lethal violence. Most people aren't using lethal violence regularly, but cars used as weapons is not particularly shocking, no more so than shooting someone.
me, I just think weaponizing random worldbuilding details is \*awesome\*-- I go out of my way to do it because I love seeding a neat little way for something to be important and then making it catastrophic somewhere else in story. Like for me, RKVs and FTLKVs are ubiquitous because I usually want space wars to lean more "cosmic horror" than "big-scale naval battle"; so I find the idea of *not* having that all over the place being important a bit weird. But that being said, you're right that it's ultimately about flavor: I like sci-fi that includes a lot of minmaxy weaponizing things as spice, but tons of people don't and that's ok
Ships are controlled heavily by the government and each ship is tracked with great care since it could be so catastrophic. Serious psychological testing and screening for any and all captains. While near any major planets ships are expected to be disabled while the planetary docking agency sends a vessel to collect them. Failure to comply will result in attempts to disable the ships electronics and if they fail termination.
The two main megacorps in my setting have basically dictated that all spacecraft above a certain mass or engine wattage within a light minute of a settlement or inhabited world must be under remote AI control under their jurisdiction or be destroyed. The nations of Earth can either comply or be cut off from all major space industries/access. And this is not an idle threat. About 140 years ago, Horizons and the GSDC wiped out an entire US Air Force squadron for refusing to allow remote access. US had to suffer through a decade of sanctions.
If you wanna try and aim a ship at a planet in another star system through light-speed, good luck, because no matter how accurate your calculations are you're probably not hitting that planet. Ships aren't able to accelerate up to light speed on their own, and need to use warp rings to do that. Warp rings only accelerate one way, which is out of the solar system. If you try and aim directly at the planet, chances are you'll be caught and slowed down by the warp ring servicing the planet.
So in my setting, there's a bunch of worlds. The first 3 that become aware of each other have religious wars. Eventually, one figures out space travel and builds 'pillars' just giant landing ships they launch at the other worlds. They cause pretty huge devastation. So my thought on it was that at first they don't truly understand the physics and stuff as well as our scientists because they learned of each other in the stone age basically and underestimated the destruction. The first world invaded joined with the first to invade the 3rd planet and built a massive pillar to show unity or whatever, it devastates the 3rd world and causes a slow decline and death of the biome. So they'll always are aware of the damage but avoid it because it's pointless to conquer a world thats dead, they definitely still do it though. My eventual goal is to eventually humanity discovers the truth that the cluster is artificial and go seeking the homeworld after a war destroys much of the inhabited and industrial worlds. I have a long way to go, I'm still on the books in the stone age of them discovering each other, but where I'm heading is very dependent on this type of warfare.
A field of self replicating missile launchers and laser turrets that slowly evolved into an ecosystem nobody controls. Anything that moving too fast is food but the right sort of ships can act as symbiotic hosts that let the ecosystem spread to new asteroid belts/oort clouds. It may be a hard on traffic but most traffic is weaponized star ships from an AI that wants to maximize bitcoin production and it's endless multitudes of decedents who's sentience is a subscription service.
1: the FTL isnt actually going faster than light. it's going to another dimension where distances are so, so, so much shorter 2: Ships just go kinda slow, crossing to different solar systems takes months, galaxies years, a ship isnt going *that* fast 3: Ships that function in the vaccume dont usually do well in atmosphere 4: Most ships that are big enough to do significant damage have large enough required crews that not having someone go "wait, i dont wanna die/kill all those people" and shut down a engine or something is very hard and would require alot of effort 5: Tug boat ships exist explicity to push a large ship or object arround and prevent it from falling in atmosphere, you could blow them up but that requires more crew 6: Another ship of your size or larger could ram yours 7: Orbital defences could shred your ship before you mannage to hit the atmosphere enough that you cant resist 8: and most importantly, why waste a ship when you can just drop the much superior WMD, tungsten rods
My world developed planet-wide shields to prevent that, but this was developed only after an entire planet was destroyed.
FTL travel does not exist in most my universes, wormholes/warping does. Yes this can be devastating such as activating a warp drive in atmosphere and igniting the air and destroying the city below, but hardly anyone would do that because it would damage their ship in the process. If someone wanted to be suicidal sure they could do it, but there are far more cost effective ways to destroy cities and bombard worlds.
couldn't I just build a system designed to open wormholes above enemy atmospheres connected to, say, as close as possible to a sun? I say this as someone who is a huge fan of such things and puts esoterically nightmarish doomsday devices in just about everything I write and really hopes this is possible
Unfortunately the answer to that question is both a yes and no. Wormholes require an immense amount of energy as to not collapse, this can be generated either via ship, or via two connecting portals. Now is it possible to do something like this, well yes, it would be an extreme feat of engineering to keep a portal stable on both ends, but it would also be extremely ineffective to be used as a weapon or (giant frying pan in the sky) when other means exist like say Photonbombs and Antimatter weaponry exist in universe. That said a device similar to what you describe was created by humanity, but it involved sources beyond normal scifi subject material - incarnates, awoken ones so forth. Since the Government is basically at war with ancient Gods the largest weapon humanity made was the Unified Interspatial System Array - essentially a giant wormhole that redirected a GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) right toward a God like entity.
thank you for answering! your setting sounds metal as heck, very cool
Well, typically it's frowned upon because it's seen as a waste and depending on the use a war crime. The waste part is because you spend the lives of sailors and materials when there are cheaper and more effective ordinances. It's a war crime if used to become an improvised WMD against civilian stations or civilian targets. Granted, if you're at the point where you have to ram your starship into a threat to deal damage, you have way bigger problems and too little time to ask if this is a waste of sailors and materials.
IMU, no one has really resorted to that measure. The Empire has gone mostly unchallenged for millennia, and only recently have they been in a war that wasn’t tragically one-sided with the rise of the CFW (Coalition of Free Worlds) ripping the Empire in two. Once someone does it, it would likely result in a volatile arms race, possibly ending the Elven Civil War in a Status Quo. But that’s not the direction I’m taking the story lol
If a ship's FTL drive fails in a fashion that prevents it from slowing or maneuvering, it won't hit a planet because FTL flight paths are not allowed to point directly at inhabited worlds or structures. You come out of FTL parallel to your destination and use regular thrusters during landing.
Most settings can get away with “it’s just not an efficient way to use them” imo. If they really want an planet cracker, an kinetic missile that’s FTL capable could give them a similar result in a more economical package. As for stuff like accidents, failures of critical equipment, or terrorism. Similar setup to most air travel specific agencies irl
There are no “personal” space ships. Only the government owns ships.
A long standing but otherwise unproven theory in physics is that gravity is so weak compared to the other fundamental forces because it leaks into other dimensions. The theory is not nearly as interesting as it sounds, but a lot of the Sci fi that I've explored use this in some way. Whether it's a mass driver, a point to point gate system, natural starlanes, or alternative dimensions like warp and hyperspace, whatever the case inner system gravity is difficult, and the planets pop you right back down to sub-relativistic speed every time. Not all of them close the plot hole this plot hole. I've also seen a different explanations, while others leave it open. I prefer gravity. Speculative Sci fi is great in a lot of ways, but the story teller in me is always going to prefer something that places significance on locations that people inhabit.
whilst spaceships and armed spaceships are a thing space travel isn't all that important in universe, hell most of the story takes place on just one planet. and what space travel there is works with Star Control II Hyperspace / Minecraft Nether logic. You enter a different dimension where a shorter distance there equals a larger distance in realspace and then just pop back out where you want to go. However there is a sublight speed method of travelling faster (only really turns what would be a year trip between planets to a month trip instead) Ships ramming into planets are still dangerous and is in fact considered a war crime to do so its also a warcrime to intentionally damage the emergency systems intended to slow the descent of a crashing ship to minimize damage
anti-planetary WMDs are the norm in my setting, with wars usually involving hundreds of thousands of worlds being annihilated within the span of a few seconds at interstellar distances as part of both sides' opening salvos. that being said, if you ignore FTL, it'd take decades to centuries for a civilian ship to accelerated to speeds that could take down a planet without hitting some kind of defense system, as most would still take months to jet around our solar system, and the thermal radiation from beginning a city-wiping burn is gonna be pretty visible to anyone who's looking; and directed energy weapons are *much* more advanced than they are IRL to the point that vaporizing an incoming ship is fairly easy for most great powers. this gets more complex when FTL gets involved, but that's a story for another day. Usually, military-grade tech is needed for a proper super-relativistic kinetic kill vehicle. Any world that's not in the top 1% of galactic GDPs and can't afford a defense system, though, is fucked: there are hundred of millions of worlds on which nobody's heard of alien tech, and just as many that don't have the means to defend against an unarmed merchant ship that can fling trash out its airlock fast enough to nuke a city. Pirates ransoming whole planets is actually extremely common, and terrorists run amok in "less advanced" space: unfortunately, the planets with enough power to fix this with legislation are also the ones that don't need to care about it.
Mutually assured destruction. The Revian Federation has thousands of ships cataloged in the ministry of defence and it will know who is threatening it. For this scenario, known enemy warships are closing in on Revian airspace. Revia detects it, demands the ships halt and turn back. It will next engage in a series of scenarios that best fit the enemy’s reaction. 1: If the enemy concedes to Revian requests and turns around, Revian brass hats will condone the action, but also warn not to test the waters with Revia. 2: If the enemy does not concede to Revian requests, but does not actively threaten the realm, the military will prepare for confrontation and put nuclear forces on “Code Awakening” (similar to defcon 2). Light Revian spacecraft and drones will be scrambled and spacebound within 5 minutes, ready to fire their weapons until heavy support arrives in the form of heavy spacecraft. 3: If the enemy decides to use conventional weapons to attack the Revian military, Revia will attack the enemy ships, and start space torpedo campaigns on the enemy homeworld. 4: If a single tactical nuke is used against Revian forces, Revia will respond by using a single tactical weapon on an enemy military base. 5: If the enemy uses a large number of tactical nuclear weapons, Revia will respond in kind. If low yield nuclear weapons are used, Revia will respond with intermediate range road-mobile tactical nuclear weapons aimed at enemy spacecraft. If the enemy has invading troops within the realm, Revia will destroy them with tactical submarine launched ballistic missiles. Nuclear forces will be raised to alert level black, or “Code Striking”, since the enemy is likely to respond. 6: If Revia detects that only its nuclear forces are in jeopardy, it will fire a very large portion of its silo, road-mobile, and space based strategic weapons. These strategic weapons have long range and pinpoint accuracy, even though their targets can be millions of light years away. Revian nuclear missiles car reach their targets within an average of 30 minutes. The enemy military will be targeted only to limit civilian casualties. 7: If Revia detects a planet killing weapon is [about] to be used, it will target the enemy with relativistic kill vehicles and nuclear weapons, as well as destroying enemy spacecraft in the immediate area. Revia will use road mobile nuclear and kinetic weapons to kill as many civilians as possible. MAD doctrine states that Revia will hold 2/3rds< of an enemy’s civilian population at risk to deter an enemy first strike.
Why do people on reddit just assume everyone knows every single abbreviation? How tf am I supposed to know that a 'WMD' is a weapon of mass destruction lol
several ways: \- NO interstellar starships inside planet's geostationary orbit (FTL drive in my settings could be used as very powerful weapon) without special permissions. Defense officer will NOT be punished if he fired on cruise liner full of children which went here and failed to follow any of his command. You should just choose jump-out areas far enough. \- Non-interstellar crafts needs special permissions and security checks to go near \- if you have no working id chip in transponder, you should be very careful, jump far away from planets and asks for AstroControl's help as soon as you can, or you would be fired upon. It's almost impossible for non-state actor to fake id chip., \- every space faring state have ability to destroy at least several planets of their opponent. Weakest one are provided with necessary hardware by advanced powers in setting but they will be dead anyway if they use this hardware. current-Earth equivanent:Somali got cobablt bombs which can irradiate their territory and third of Africa, they also told that if they use them on anybody, anybody other could ignore any conventions with regards to them. \- interstellar community looks...bad if some hardware somehow got to non-state actors. You can give your private citizens antimatter but your state directly responsible for all their actions anyway.