Quote:
Originally Posted by PTTG
Also, a lot of space combat assumes that two forces are going to meet in a pitched battle in deep space. I think that it's more interesting if we plan space combat more like, say, urban combat. A few small ships in a place with lots of collateral damage potential. For instance, if your fight is in LEO, nuking the crap out of your enemy will mean you probably kill a large number of weather and com satellites, and you put SM+15 irradiated hulks into a decaying orbit of an essential biosphere.
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That's an extremely good point. Since I had planned for most planets to not be unified into a single polity but rather more complicated, orbit would probably reflect that, and would be extremely busy.
This might also make me change some other setting assumptions: If we assume combat to be interesting because it occurs in orbit, a reactionless drive is no longer necessary to keep travel times smaller than "too long". Meaning I could dispense with them altogether, and use something like the fusion rocket or - more extreme - the fusion torch engine. Combining this with a closer jump (maximum range for beam weaponry is 20,000 miles; we can put this out to the moon to allow for some manoeuvres plus missiles).
Putting the same engine into missiles, or - as ericthered suggested - reactionless drives, would then increase both the missile range and - if we assume a certain minimum engine size - missile size. Increasing missile size to one to ten tons (and adding some armour) would both circumvent having hundreds or thousands of micro-missiles and having hundreds or thousands of laser rifles as point defense.
AKVs would then probably present a reasonable expansion of that concept, greatly increasing lethality while not necessarily being a kamikaze weapon like the torch/reactionless missiles. I definitely have to think about that!