It is a truth universally acknowledged

[james_davis_nicoll]

That any thread that begins by pointing out why stealth in space is impossible will rapidly turn into a thread focusing on schemes whereby stealth in space might be achieved.

Comments

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

I love the "spaceships as subs" model of space warfar, even though it has no bearing with the reality. Sometimes, coolness triumphs the realism.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

But can't realism be cool?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

No. Pretty much by definition.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, your mind must be at least this broad: >< to participate in this discussion.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Dood, you are so missing the concept of "cool".

But you can't scare me; any discussion that you're allowed into will tolerate *anything*.

[gareth-wilson.livejournal.com]

The problem is that the impossibility of stealth makes writing about space warfare so much harder. All the easy analogies are out: no more Napoleonic ships of the line or WWII aircraft carriers. I'm not even sure if there's any historical analogue to a situation where you can always see your enemy coming and always get at least a rough estimate of how dangerous they are. Medieval land battles, perhaps.

Knowing vs. Going

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

All the easy analogies are out

Not that that stops us. Look at all the new solar-system planets "stumbled on" in early (or persistently dumb later) SF, even after centuries of astronomy.

More subtly, the meme of this new ocean, Columbus etc. has retained for some people the tacit connotations of "hey, you never know -- whole new continents!" even within the solar system. The forebrain assimilates a cold dry Mars and baking dry Venus and fiercely irradiated Jovian system, but the rest of the brain lags behind.

Of course there will be plenty of wonderful, eminently worthwhile surprises to come from both more probes and manned exploration. But the relationship between "seeing/knowing" and "going" really is qualitatively and quantitatively different for space than it was for most of terrestrial exploration, and it's taking a while for our metaphors to catch up.

Technorati OpenID Still Doesn't Work

[(Anonymous)]

The obvious analogy is with Cold War nuclear warfare; everyone has a reasonable idea of other people's capabilities, you can be certain of seeing the missiles on radar, but you can't do very much about them except fire back.

Or pre-Tactical Weapons Unit Cold War air combat, the kind of thing the F-4 and F-101 and MiG25 were designed for. Scramble, climb like hell, control vectors you near the enemy, then your RIO takes over; launch medium-range missiles, then evade. No dogfighting.

Re: Technorati OpenID Still Doesn't Work

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

On the plus side, in many circumstances you will have much longer to react than the Cold War situation allowed the Great Powers.

ObSF: Long Shot for Rosinante, where the habitat had months of warning about the incoming nuclear missile.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Ship of the line battles before and during the Age of Sail. On a clear day you could see the enemy coming long before anyone was in gunnery or ramming range. Any reasonably knowledgeable commander knew what ships he was facing in general terms if not the specific ships, what the capabilities of speed and maneuver were, effective firing ranges (after cannons were developed and on board), what the enemy could or could not do based on the wind and weather, and usually what specific maneuver the enemy was setting up.

Admittedly there was a limit on how far you could see them coming, but very rarely did fleet actions come about as a complete surprise to one side. Villeneuve, for instance, knew he was going to get attacked the evening before the battle of Trafalgar and on the morning of October 21st had a good idea of what he was facing for some hours before the battle began.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

Sure, but not automatically. And I think that making the realistic space combat cool requires a lot more work from both the author and the reader than picking a less realistic but more verisimilitudious (defined here as "feeling realistic") model, such as the subs in space; possibly more work than is worth the effort, especially if it gets into the way of a story being written.

IIRC, Walter Jon Williams' "Dread Empire's Fall" had a pretty interesting model of space combat that, while not strictly realistic, at least acknowledged things like the importance of missiles, difficulty of stealth and the likely lethality of ship-to-ship combat.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Remember, one of John Campbell's many weird ideas was that you could stick a Dean Drive or other impossible space-drive gadget in a submarine, and, presto, instant spaceship. Not quite Space Battleship Yamato, but pretty close.