[Tiger]

I'm always looking for science fiction resources with good science behind them, and not just physics - economics and military science are much harder to find and probably more important from a believability standpoint. Over the years I've accumulated some resources and figured I'd list them here and see if anyone else has resources to add.

The biggest is Atomic Rockets (which includes vital and often overlooked considerations such as 'does space war, being satellites and missiles, even make military sense?' and 'what do portable fusion generators say about your economy?'). This site and its manager (the brilliant Winchell Chung of OGRE fame) are probably familiar to most of you interested in GURPS and science fiction. Particularly useful to me are his collections of realistic designs for spacecraft and the page on 'Building a Space Navy' based on the world of Weuve and David Weber.

military-sf.com is a useful website, though its formatting is decaying and the author seems focused on the e-book sources he's written, elaborating on the contents of the site.

I also have a handful of books I've found useful.

An Illustrated Guide to Space Warfare is a bit Zeerust but this point but includes designs for plausible exoterran military weapons.

Deep Space Warfare by John C. Wright is o fairly recent and it's nice because most older (serious) analysis was based on 60s technology and NEO/Lunar space. This book instead covers deep space defense and military issues. I believe Wright is also a novelist, if I'm not confusing him with someone else.

Space Warfare and Defense: A Historical and Research Guide which covers nuts and bolts considerations of the USA in it's approach to militarizing space.

Space Warfare in the 21st Century: Arming the Heavens by Joan Johnson-Freese, which covers interesting issues like avoiding space war and government in space.

Space Warfare: Strategy, Principles and Policy by John J. Klein covers what it says, delving more into core strategic issues and political approaches to them.

The Strategy of Technology by Pournelle & some other guys I've never heard of, covers mainly technological approaches to warfare, space or elsewhere.

Also useful to me are The Science of War by Michael O'Hanlon, which covers theory of military budgeting and force composition, it pairs well with the Weuve method of designing a space Navy.

One weakness of almost all of these is that the political and military model they're working from are modern nation-states and cold war empires. According to some, like William S. Lind (Fourth Generation Warfare) and Martin Van Creveld (The Rise and a Decline of the State) cast serious doubts on whether this is even accurate to today, much less a society far into the future with radically different economic, demographic, astrographic and technological inputs. The USA is not Rome in America, and it's doubtful any space empires will be the USA or UN in spaaace. The Holy Roman Empire or Renaissance Italy are possibly more apt to widely dispersed, low population arcologies which all possess the equivalent of thermonuclear weapons on their vehicles. In fact, I find it highly unlikely that such widely separated communities would have any sort of overarching state unless they were tiny outposts of an Earth superpower. Tribalism is real and humans who have no social contacted and generations of separate development just don't give well with the centralized cultures and politics of an Arthur C. Clarke future.

The Military Strategy of Small States can give some insight into a space strategic scenario that departs from the United Earth situation. Likewise any number of books on mercenaries and non-state militias (such as Hezbollah) might be more informative on the considerations of isolated arcologies than most theory that's written for a government with dozes of nuclear aircraft carriers. The objectives, resources and so forth very so much among different societies and projecting current day (actually, more like Cold War) notionsbof security and strategy is likely to be misleading and somewhat incredible (Keegan often commits this error in reverse, ascribing Vitnam-era psychology to ancient melee warfare, a dubious proposition at best).