Space War: Strategy and Tactics

KIRK: Spock?

SPOCK: Sporadic energy readings port side, aft. Could be an impulse turn.

KIRK: He won't break off now. He followed me this far, he'll be back. But, from where...?

Kirk looks at him, smiles.

KIRK: Full stop.

SULU: Full stop, sir.

KIRK: Descent ten thousand meters. Stand by photon torpedoes.

Starship Enterprise moves downward ten thousand meters. Khan's ship sails by overhead blissfully unaware. Enterprise rises up behind Khan's ship like a striking cobra and shoots Khan's derrière off.

"Did you know, Henlo, that certain eminent military tacticians have proved to my satisfaction that war in space is impossible?"

Henlo arched the fur over his eyes. "I haven't hear the theory."

"No, I didn't think you had," Miranid said in a rambling town of voice. "However, our present situation is a splendid example."

"Consider. If you picture the present Vilkan holdings (empire) as a solid sphere in space, bristling with weapons pointed outward, and our own fleet as a hollow sphere designed to contain and crush it, then you must allow that all Farla with half the Galaxy to help it could not supply us with enough strength to keep our sphere impenetrable from the inside at all points. With further problems of uncertain ship detection in hyperspace we could not prevent repeated breakthroughs from the inside."

"Once our hollow sphere is broken it is caught between two fires, and gradually decimated if it does not withdraw into a larger, and even more porous, sphere -- which can again be broken. Thus, stalemate, eventual disgust, and finally an inconclusive peace at an inconclusive price."

"Now, since we are not going to be foolish enough to form such a sphere the only alternative is to attempt an attack by a knife-like method. We can spit, split, slice, or whittle."

"Spitting is out of the question. If we try to drive through, we expose ourselves to attack from all sides. The splitting process gives rise to the same objections. This leaves slicing or whittling -- and since a whittle is only a small slice, or a slice a large whittle, let us discuss them simultaneously."

Miranid looked steadily at Henlo.

"I will not whittle if I can slice, but I cannot slice, and for the same reason, I cannot whittle. For this is not a clay sphere, Henlo, but a steel ball -- and red-hot, to boot. With every stroke I make, I will lose a greater percentage of my available ships than the enemy will."

"His supply lines are short -- I've shortened them for him. His ships can land, be repaired, refueled, and re-armed, their crews replaced by fresh men, and sent back into battle a hundred times for each new ship that can reach me from Farla. I have a limited supply of men, equipment, and food. With every stroke, I wear down my sharpness a little more."

He paused an instant, then went on, "Until, finally, I attack the sphere for one last time and my dull, worn knife slips off the surface without leaving an impression. So again, stalemate, eventual disgust, and no true peace -- that is, no peace which will not leave conditions immediately ripe for another useless war."

"I would say, as a matter of fact, that this same theory makes true peace impossible so long as any wars are attempted."

...When we talk of gunfire or any other means of offense, we have to hear these dizzy speeds firmly in mind. The conclusion is irresistible that scouting, tracking, range finding and relative bearings will all be observed otherwise than visually...

...Each of the combatants must compute the other’s course from blind bearings and ranges and lay their guns or point their torpedo tubes by means of a differential calculator.

However, in this blind tracking there is one peculiarity of these ships that while it is in one sense a source of danger to them, is of distinct assistance. In the fleeting minutes of their contact, neither can appreciably alter course or speed! This is a point that writers of fiction frequently ignore for the sake of vivid action, but nevertheless it is an unavoidable characteristic of the ether-borne ship.

The human body can withstand only so much acceleration and the momentum these vessels carry has been built up, hour after hour, by piling increment of speed on top of what had been attained before. In space there is no resistance. Once the rockets are cut, the ship will soar on forever at what ever velocity she had at the moment of cutting. Her master may flip her end over end and reverse his acceleration, but his slowing will be as tedious and cautious as his working up to speed. Jets flung out at right angles merely add another slight component to the velocity, checking nothing.

Rocket experts have stated that an acceleration of one hundred feet per second per second can be withstood by a human being—perhaps one hundred and fifty in an emergency. The master of a vessel proceeding at forty miles per second applying such an acceleration at right angles would succeed in deflecting his flight about one hundred miles by the end of the first minute, during which he will have run twenty-four hundred—a negligible turn, if under fire. Applied as a direct brake, that hundred miles of decreased velocity would slow him by one twenty-fourth—obviously not worth the doing if the emergency is imminent.

WITH these conditions in mind, let us imagine a light cruiser of the future bowling along at forty miles per second on the trail of an enemy. The enemy is also a cruiser, one that has slipped through our screen and is approaching the earth for a fast raid on our cities. He is already decelerating for his prospective descent and is thought to be about one hundred and fifty thousand miles ahead, proceeding at about thirty-five miles per second. Our cruiser is closing on him from a little on his port quarter, and trying to pick him up with its direction finders.

Our ship’s armament, judged by today’s standards, will at first sight appear strangely inadequate. Our most destructive weapon is the “mine,” a simple sphere of meteoric iron about the size of a billiard ball, containing no explosive and not fused. The effectiveness of such mines depends upon the speed with which they are struck by the target ship—no explosive could add much to the damage done by a small lump if iron striking at upward of thirty miles a second. Then there will be torpedo tubes amidships. and perhaps a few guns. but it may be well to post pone a discussion of the armament until we have examined the conditions at the place of battle.

Although we know in a general way where the enemy is and where he is going, before we close with him we must determine his course and speed very accurately, for our ability to hit him at all is going to depend upon extremely nice calculations. Our speeds are such that angular errors of so much as a second of arc will be fatal, and times must be computed to within hundredths of seconds.

This falls within the province of fire-control, a subject seldom if ever mentioned by fiction writers. There is no blame to be attached to them for that, for the problems of fire-control are essentially those of pure mathematics, and mathematics is notoriously unthrilling to the majority of readers. Yet hitting with guns—or even arrows, though the archer solves his difficulties by intuition—requires the solution of intricate problems involving the future positions and movements of at least two bodies, and nothing more elementary than the differential calculus will do the trick. In these problems interior ballistics, for all its interesting physics, boils down to a single figure—the initial velocity of the projectile, while exterior ballistics evaporates for the most part the moment we propel our missile into a gravityless vacuum. In space we are to be concerned with the swiftly changing relationship of two rapidly moving vessels and the interchange of equally swift projectiles between them, the tracks of all of them being complicated curves and not necessarily lying in a plane.

In its simplest statement the problem of long-range gunnery is this: where will the enemy be when my salvo gets there? For we must remember that even in today’s battles the time the projectile spends en-route to its target is appreciable—fully a minute on occasion, at sea, during which the warship fired upon may move as much as half a mile. Under such circumstances the gunner does not fire directly at his target, but at the place it is going to be. That requires very accurate knowledge of where the enemy is headed and how fast he is moving.

At positions “1,” “2,” “3” and so on, we observe the range and bearing of the target, and plot them. By noting the differences between successive readings and the second differences between those, we soon have an idea of the type of curve the rates of changes would plot into. In a short time we can also note that the rates themselves are changing at a certain rate. This is a rough sort of differentiation—by inspection—and to one familiar with such curves these trends have a definite meaning.

For example, it is apparent that the series of observed angles “Beta” are steadily opening, signifying that we are drawing past the target. Any sudden alteration of the second differences, such as occurs at “8,” at once indicates a change of condition on the part of the enemy. He has either turned sharply away or slowed to half speed, for the bearing suddenly opens nearly two degrees more than the predicted bearing. We learn which by consulting our ranges. It could be a combination of changed course and changed speed.

The ranges during the first seven time-intervals have been steadily decreasing, although the rate of decrease has been slowing up, indicating we are approaching the minimum range. At “8,” though, the range not only fails to decrease, but the rate of change actually changes sign. We know without doubt that the enemy has turned away.

The importance of having the machine grind out predicted bearings and ranges, aside from the desirability of speed and accuracy, is that at any moment smoke, a rain squall, or intervening ships may obscure the target. In that event the gunners need never know the difference—their range and bearing indicators are ticking away like taximeters, fed figures by the controlling range-keeper. It would not have mattered if sight had been lost of the enemy at “4”; the gun fire would have been just as accurate up to the time he changed course as if they had the target in plain sight.

As a matter of fact, the guns are not pointed at the target at all, but in advance of it, as is shown in Fig. 1 (a), both range and bearing being altered to allow for the forward movements of the target while the shells are in the air. The projectiles may be regarded as moving objects launched on a “collision course” with regard to the enemy vessel.

Speaking of collision courses, it is an interesting property of relative bearings that when the bearing remains constant—except in the special case of the vessels being on parallel courses at identical speeds—the vessels will eventually collide, regardless of what their actual courses and speeds are. Hence, from the time the shots of the salvo left their guns—Fig. 1 (a)—until they struck their target, the target bore a constant angle of thirteen degrees to the right of the nose of the shells. (This knowledge has some utility in estimating the penetration of armor at the destination.)

In the example above, all the movement can be regarded as taking place in a plane; the ships follow straight courses and they maintain constant speeds. Our terrestrial problems are in practice much complicated by zigzagging, slowing down and speeding up, but at that they are relatively child’s play compared to what the sky-warrior of the future must contend with.

SINCE optical instruments are useless except for astragational purposes, his range-finders and target-bearing transmitters will have to be something else. For bearings, his most accurate instrument will probably be the thermoscope—an improved heat-detector similar to those used by astronomers in comparing the heat emission of distant stars. It will have a spherical mounting with a delicate micro-vernier. A nearby space ship is sure to radiate heat, for it is exposed constantly to full sunlight and must rid itself of the excess heat or its crew will die. Once such a source of heat is picked up and identified, it can be followed very closely as to direction, although little can be told of its distance unless something is known of its intrinsic heat radiation.

Ranges will probably be determined by sounding space with radio waves, measuring the time interval to the return of reflected waves. It is doubtful whether this means will have a high degree of accuracy much beyond ranges of one light-second on account of the movement of the two vessels while the wave is in transit both ways. At long ranges the need for troublesome corrections is sure to enter.

Such observations, used in conjunction with one another, should give fairly accurate information as to the target’s trajectory and how he bears from us and how far he is away. This data will be fed into a tracking and range-keeping machine capable of handling the twisted three-dimensional curves involved, and which will at once indicate the time and distance of the closest point of approach. Both captains will at once begin planning the action. They may also attempt to adjust their courses slightly, but since the rockets evolve great heat, neither can hope to keep his action from the knowledge of the other owing to the sensitiveness of the thermoscopes.

Assuming we have, by observation and plotting, full knowledge of the enemy’s path and have come almost into position to commence the engagement, we find ourselves confronted once more with the two overwhelming factors of space warfare—great distance and immense speeds—but this time in another aspect. We have come up close to our foe—in fact we are within twenty seconds of intersecting his trajectory—and our distance apart is a mere four hundred miles. It is when we get to close quarters that the tremendous problems raised by

Another difficulty connected with gunfire is the slowness with which it comes into operation. This may seem to some to be a startling statement, but we are dealing here with astonishing speeds. When the firing key of a piece of modern artillery is closed, the gun promptly goes off with a bang. To us that seems to be a practically instantaneous action. Yet careful time studies show the following sequence of events: the primer fires, the powder is ignited and burns, the gases of combustion expand and start the shell moving down the tube. The elapsed time from the “will to fire” to the emergence of the projectile from the muzzle is about one tenth of a second. In Fig. 2 our target will have moved more than three miles while our shell is making its way to the mouth of the cannon! It looks as if guns wouldn’t do.

I COME to that conclusion very reluctantly, for I am quite partial to guns as amazingly flexible and reliable weapons, hut when we consider that both powders and primers vary some what in their time of burning, there is also a variable error of serious proportions added to the above slowness. It is more likely that the rocket-torpedoes suggested by Mr. Willy Ley in a recent article on space war will be the primary weapon of the future. They have the advantage of auto-acceleration and can therefore build up speed to any desired value after having been launched.

The exact moment of their firing would have to be computed by the tracking machine, as no human brain could solve such a problem in the time allowed. But even assuming machine accuracy, great delicacy in tube-laying and micro-timing, the chances of a direct hit on the target with a single missile is virtually nil. For all their advanced instruments, it is probable that all such attacks will be made in salvos, or continuous barrages. following the time honored shotgun principle. For the sake of simplicity, only two such salvos are shown on the diagram. but probably they would be as nearly continuous as the firing mechanisms of the tubes would permit. Any reader with a flair for mathematics is invited to compute the trajectories of the torpedoes. The ones shown were fired dead abeam in order to gain distance toward the enemy as rapidly as possible...

...Spotting, as we know it, would be impossible, for the target would be invisible, Hits would have to be registered by the thermoscope, utilizing the heat generated by the impact. The gunnery officer could watch the flight of his torpedoes by their fiery wakes, and see his duds burst; that might give him an idea on which side of the enemy they passed in the event the thermoscopes registered no hits.

If there were guns—and they might be carried for stratosphere use—they could be brought into action at about “15,” firing broad on the starboard quarter. The shells, ... would lose some of their forward velocity and drift along in the wake of the ship while at the same time making some distance toward the oncoming enemy. These guns would be mounted in twin turrets, one on the roof and the other on the keel, cross-connected so that they would be trained and fired together. If the ship’s center of gravity lay exactly between them, their being fired would not tend to put the ship into a spin in any direction. What little torque there might be, due to inequalities in the firing charge, would be taken care of by the ship’s gyro-stabilizer, an instrument also needed on board to furnish a sphere of reference so that the master could keep track of his orientation.

If upon arriving at point “16” the enemy were still full of fight and desperate measures were called for, we could lay down mines. These hard little pellets would be shot out of mine-laying tubes clustered about the main driving jets. They would be shot out at slight angles from the fore-and-aft line, and given a velocity exactly equal to the ship’s speed, so that they would hang motionless where they were dropped. Being cheap and small, they could be laid so thickly that the enemy could not fail to encounter several of them. If she had survived up to this point, the end would come here.

The end, that is, of the cruiser as a fighting unit. Riddled and torn, perhaps a shapeless mass of tangled wreckage, she would go hurtling on by, forever bound to her marauding trajectory. The first duty of our cruiser would be to broadcast warnings to the System, reporting the location of its own minefield, and giving the direction taken by the shattered derelict. Sweepers would be summoned to collect the mines with powerful electromagnets, while tugs would pursue and clear the sky of the remnants of the defeated Martian.

We now know that Research had been working on the Battle Analyzer for many years, but at the time it came as a revelation to us and perhaps we were too easily swept off our feet. Norden's argument, also, was seductively convincing. What did it matter, he said, if the enemy had twice as many ships as we -- if the efficiency of ours could be doubled or even trebled? For decades the limiting factor in warfare had been not mechanical but biological -- it had become more and more difficult for any single mind, or group of minds, to cope with the rapidly changing complexities of battle in three-dimensional space. Norden's mathematicians had analyzed some of the classic engagements of the past, and had shown that even when we had been victorious we had often operated our units at much less than half of their theoretical efficiency.

The Battle Analyzer would change all this by replacing the operations staff with electronic calculators. The idea was not new, in theory, but until now it had been no more than a utopian dream. Many of us found it difficult to believe that it was still anything but a dream: after we had run through several very complex dummy battles, however, we were convinced.

It was decided to install the Analyzer in four of our heaviest ships, so that each of the main fleets could be equipped with one. At this stage, the trouble began -- though we did not know it until later.

The Analyzer contained just short of a million vacuum tubes and needed a team of five hundred technicians to maintain and operate it. It was quite impossible to accommodate the extra staff aboard a battleship, so each of the four units had to be accompanied by a converted liner to carry the technicians not on duty. Installation was also a very slow and tedious business, but by gigantic efforts it was completed in six months...

...The first Analyzer fleet was ordered to recapture the system of Eriston. On the way, by one of the hazards of war, the liner carrying the technicians was struck by a roving mine. A warship would have survived, but the liner with its irreplaceable cargo was totally destroyed. So the operation had to be abandoned.

The other expedition was, at first, more successful. There was no doubt at all that the Analyzer fulfilled its designers' claims, and the enemy was heavily defeated in the first engagements. He withdrew, leaving us in possession of Saphran, Leucon and Hexanerax. But his Intelligence Staff must have noted the change in our tactics and the inexplicable presence of a liner in the heart of our battle-fleet. It must have noted, also, that our first fleet had been accompanied by a similar ship -- and had withdrawn when it had been destroyed.

In the next engagement, the enemy used his superior numbers to launch an overwhelming attack on the Analyzer ship and its unarmed consort. The attack was made without regard to losses both ships were, of course, very heavily protected -- and it succeeded. The result was the virtual decapitation of the Fleet, since an effectual transfer to the old operational methods proved impossible. We disengaged under heavy fire, and so lost all our gains and also the systems of Lormyia, Ismarnus, Beronis, Alphanidon and Sideneus. At this stage, Grand Admiral Taxaris expressed his disapproval of Norden by committing suicide, and I assumed supreme command.

He jerked back to reality as he entered the gigantic teardrop which was technically the Z9M9Z, socially the Directrix, and ordinarily GFHQ. She had been designed and built specifically to be Grand Fleet Headquarters, and nothing else. She bore no offensive armament, but since she had to protect the presiding geniuses of combat she had every possible defense.

Port Admiral Haynes had learned a bitter lesson during the expedition to Helmuth's base. Long before that relatively small fleet got there he was sick to the core, realizing that fifty thousand vessels simply could not be controlled or maneuvered as a group. If that base had been capable of an offensive or even of a real defense, or if Boskone could have put their fleets into that star-cluster in time, the Patrol would have been defeated ignominiously; and Haynes, wise old tactician that he was, knew it.

Therefore, immediately after the return from that "triumphant" venture, he gave orders to design and to build, at whatever cost, a flagship capable of directing efficiently a million combat units.

The "tank"—the minutely cubed model of the galaxy which is a necessary part of every pilot room—had grown and grown as it became evident that it must be the prime agency in Grand Fleet Operations. Finally, in this last rebuilding, the tank was seven hundred feet in diameter and eighty feet thick in the middle—over seventeen million cubic feet of space in which more than two million tiny lights crawled hither and thither in helpless confusion. For, after the technicians and designers had put that tank into actual service, they had discovered that it was useless. No available mind had been able either to perceive the situation as a whole or to identify with certainty any light or group of lights needing correction; and as for linking up any particular light with its individual, blanket-proof communicator in time to issue orders in space- combat. . . !

Kinnison looked at the tank, then around the full circle of the million-plug board encircling it. He observed the horde of operators, each one trying frantically to do something. Next he shut his eyes, the better to perceive everything at once, and studied the problem for an hour.

"Attention, everybody!" he thought then. "Open all circuits—do nothing at all for a while." He then called Haynes.

"I think we can clean this up if you'll send over some Simplex analyzers and a crew of technicians. Helmuth had a nice set-up on multiplex controls, and Jalte had some ideas, too. If we add them to this we may have something."

And by the time Worsel arrived, they did.

"Red lights are fleets already in motion," Kinnison explained rapidly to the Velantian. "Greens are fleets still at their bases. Ambers are the planets the reds took off from —connected, you see, by Ryerson string-lights. The white star is us, the Directrix. That violet cross 'way over there is Jalte's planet, our first objective. The pink comets are our free planets, their tails showing their intrinsic velocities. Being so slow, they had to start long ago. The purple circle is the negasphere. It's on its way, too. You take that side, I'll take this. They were supposed to start from the edge of the twelfth sector. The idea was to make it a smooth, bowl- shaped sweep across the galaxy, converging upon the objective, but each of the system marshals apparently wants to run this war to suit himself. Look at that guy there—he's beating the gun by nine thousand parsecs. Watch me pin his ears back!"

He pointed his Simplex at the red light which had so offendingly sprung into being. There was a whirring click and the number 449276 flashed above a board. An operator flicked a switch.

"Grand Fleet Operations!" Kinnison's thought snapped across space. "Why are you taking off without orders?"

"Why, I. . . I'll give you the marshal, sir . . ."

"No time! Tell your marshal that one more such break will put him in irons. Land at once! GFO—off.

"With around a million fleets to handle we can't spend much time on any one," he thought at Worsel. "But after we get them lined up and get our Rigellians broken in, it won't be so bad."...

...And with the passage of time came order out of chaos. The red lights formed a gigantically sweeping, curving wall; its almost imperceptible forward crawl representing an actual velocity of almost a hundred parsecs an hour. Behind that wall blazed a sea of amber, threaded throughout with the brilliant filaments which were the Ryerson lights. Ahead of it lay a sparkling, almost solid blaze of green. Closer and closer the wall crept toward the bright white star.

And in the "reducer"—the standard, ten-foot tank in the lower well—the entire spectacle was reproduced in miniature. It was plainer there, clearer and much more readily seen: but it was so crowded that details were indistinguishable.

Repeat this for multiple volleys of missiles, until the fleets are within a few hundred thousand kilometers when they start pelting each other with energy weapons. They can fly past each other shooting, in which case likely one side or the other will be utterly destroyed, or one side can decide it is defeated and try to break off from battle as quickly as possible, preserving what it has left. This may not be feasible depending on how remaining fuel reserves compare to their velocity.

The dominant rules of space battle are:

1. You can't hide. The enemy probably knows where you are the moment you launch.

2. You can run or fight, but you will typically have to pick one of the two long before battle is joined, and then you're stuck with it.

3. There isn't much room for tactics and strategy. Pretty much everything is automated, and the what your computers calculate as the best possible attack strategy probably really is the best possible attack strategy. If battle is joined, and both sides have a good idea of what the capabilities of the other side's ships are, the result will be a lot more predictable than we are used to.

4. If the engagement moves into short range (i.e. beam weapon range), it will probably be decided in a single pass. This is because at those kinds of ranges, it is very easy to hit the enemy and very hard to avoid being hit. Both sides will keep hitting each other with deadly accuracy until one of them is no longer capable of shooting. The exception is if both sides pass each other at _extremely_ high speed, but this isn't likely to happen if the primary objective of one side is to do as much damage to the other side as possible (in which case it will decelerate, slowing relative velocity).

5. You may know where the other guy is from extreme range, but due to lightspeed delay, none of your weapons actually have a chance of hitting him until they get fairly close. The range of the weapons themselves isn't the determining factor at all, range of engagement is determined by the size and maneuverability of the enemy. Thus, your weapons are effective against large, stationary, or slow-moving targets at far, far longer ranges than they are against the average warship.

6. Anything which can't manoeuver had better be very heavily protected, or had better not let you get anywhere near it. This tends to eliminate the "happy medium" of space stations, they die if an enemy fleet gets in close. Anything that can't move, and move fast, had better have huge amounts of shielding and lots and lots of countermeasures, point-defense, and whatnot. Only fortified targets on planets, moons, or within large asteroids have a chance of surviving a close attack by an enemy space fleet. These bases will compensate for their lack of mobility with means of defense that spacecraft cannot have due to weight restrictions. They will be extremely heavily armored (probably with most of the important parts deep underground), and have large numbers of defensive batteries that can destroy spacecraft at long range simply by putting up so much fire that something is bound to be hit.

7. The most effective way to destroy planetary installations is not by using warships, but by using the warships to clear out enemy space forces so you can bombard the planet with asteroids or mass nuclear assault. Conventional invasion is effectively impossible, since the defenses will destroy your invasion force if they are still functional, and the only reliable way to take out the defenses is with mass bombardment. A successful planetary assault will not allow you to capture any installations intact except those that are deep underground, and to capture those you have to send in ground forces that were very expensive to transport across space. This means capture of installations isn't really a viable alternative, unless you get the enemy to surrender upon the threat of destruction.

There are a few variables for space combat.

The first is drive efficiency and top thrust. If top thrust is low enough, maneuver ceases to be a tactical concern.

The second is laser ranges -- if laser ranges are long, even with high thrust, maneuver ceases to be a tactical concern.

AV:T's torch drives, while laughable from a space opera standpoint, are wildly optimistic at best. Likewise, AV:T's lasers, while about 5 orders of magnitude beyond current technologies, are perhaps conservative.