[World Building] A Future History of Space Force

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Since Space Command was spun off into Space Force I've been thinking about the first thing that milsf gets wrong and that's pretending that space is an ocean. They use naval ranks and naval ship designations when actually if the the United States actually started to put manned vessels of war into space, it would be a spin-off of the airforce just as their air force was a spinoff of the army, which is why it has majors, colonels and generals, not commanders and admirals.

The usual reason why military space forces are portrayed as having naval traditions is that space voyages last a long time. Navies have cultural traditions and social structures that handle that, both for the crews and for the families they leave at home. For an air force, a 24-hour mission is long, but for a navy, it's hardly worth mentioning.

In the Transhuman Space setting, the US space force is part of the air force, whereas most of the other space forces are naval.