Space Fighters Atomic Rockets

Aw fer cryin' out loud! When he was making his first "Star Wars" movie George Lucas thought it would be cute to add scenes inspired by old World War 2 dogfighting movies. And ever since then sci-fi fans have lost their freaking minds. I've got new for you: in the real world combat spacecraft based on one-man fighter planes is just about the greatest military invention since the rubber spear. The concept stinks on ice scientifically, militarily, and economically. While you are at it you might as well have your starship troopers wear bright red coats with no armor, firmly resisting the urge to take cover, and fighting out in the open in...

Not like that's gonna to stop you. There are idiotic space fighter planes in both Battlestar Galacticas, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Babylon 5, Space Above And Beyond, and many many others. Not to mention the fact that it is forty freaking years after the first Star Wars movie came out and they are still making new ones jam packed with space fighters. Small, fast, highly maneuverable COMBAT SPACECRAFT. They have very limited range (never FTL), and no crew habitability to speak of; they can only operate for at most a few hours at a time. The crew is limited to one person, or occasionally two.

At least among EARTH HUMANS and ALIENS WTH FOREHEAD RIDGES, these are usually males in their early twenties, known for their swagger, coolness, and fast moves on any attractive female of an INTERBREEDABLE species. (Who REALLY ALIENS use to crew their Space Fighters is not known.) If you want to get an intuitive feel for how interplanetary combat is likely to be, there are a few simulation games that can help. Otherwise, read on: For supplementary information, please read Rick Robinson's Rocketpunk Manifesto. Specifically:

What's its going to be when space combat finally arrives? Is it going to be like WWI aircraft? That is, rickety ships with a few crude weapons bolted on as afterthoughts, flown by a few aces who are familiar with the eccentricities of their craft? (Imagine a Space 1999 Eagle Transporter as a futuristic "Sopwith Camel") Or will it be more sophisticated? Watching the evolution of space warships will be interesting as well. In the movie THE ENEMY BELOW (the movie that the ST:TOS episode "Balance of Terror" was based on) the German U-Boat commander was reminiscing.

He said that in WWI, when you submerged in a U-Boat, you were never quite sure that the cantankerous submarine would surface again. The captain would eyeball the target through the periscope with no gauges, do some arithmetic in his head, and order the torpedo fired verbally. If you were lucky, it would make it out of the tube. Among science fiction stories with space flight, the overwhelming majority are about combat, both between spacecraft and between futuristic ground troops. Not to mention the occasional starship marine assault trying to board a hostile ship while in flight. Yes, there are a few non-combat stories, mostly about exploration, but space combat is here to stay.

This is just the natural continuation of the process of militarisation of space Which naturally leads to questions about the space branch of the military of various nations. The "astro-military" in other words. Some may start out as a subdivision of an existing branch and eventually grow large enough to split off (such as how the US Army Air Corps spit off to become the US Air... Some may grow large enough to absorb other branches of the military, others may be reabsorbed into other branches. In William Keith's Galactic Marines series one of the themes of the early novels is how the US Marines fight being absorbed or eliminated.

Their solution is diversifying their mission to include performing assaults on Luna and Mars. There will generally be something like a "space navy" who deal in combat spacecraft (with a sub-branch for space fighters, even though those are unlikely). There will be "space marines", who generally are found on board combat spacecraft. They are generally elite fighters, since spacecraft usually can only carry a limited number of them. There will be a "space army", which are usually just the old ground army troops ferried to combat zones on other planets on huge lightly armed troop carriers. Finally there might be a Spaceguard.

Two on-line resources I recommend are William S. Frisbee Jr.'s Tips on Writing Military SF and William's Future War Stories. Both are almost the equivalent of college-level courses in the subject. It will take you a long time to read through the many essays and entries, but it will be worth it. If you are stuck using pathetically weak chemical rockets and but gotta have big honking slabs of delta-V, the only thing you can do is cower back to the drawing board and try to... The trouble is that a mass ratio of 15 is freaking difficult and 20 is impossible.

You will wind up with a ship made of foil and soap bubbles, but still falling short of delta V. If yer short-sighted boss won't letcha use atomic engines, your only hope is Staging. This is where your ship throws away huge expensive parts of itself when the tanks run dry. The good news is that the ol' Staging dodge can give you mass ratios of 40 or more. The bad news is you've made your ship into a disintegrating totem pole. And the ship's re-usability just went gurgling down the toilet.

If your spacecraft design needs more delta-V a glance at the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation tells you you have to increase the exhaust velocity or increase the mass ratio. Or both. Since the exhaust velocity depends upon the propulsion system, often the only option is to somehow raise the mass ratio. Staging is a desperate attempt to increase the rocket's mass ratio in order to increase the delta V to a point where the rocket can perform the desired mission. For a single stage rocket, it is very difficult to get the mass ratio above 15, and it is probably impossible to get it above 20. After all, there is only so much structural mass you can shave off before the force of acceleration will make the struts snap like toothpicks and the tanks pop like balloons.

These are realistic larger warships. For smaller fighter-scale warships go here. var name="burch_a@";document.write("<a href=\"mailto:"+name+"hotmail.com\">Adam Burch's</a>");Adam Burch's stunning images can be found on SciFi Meshes. He has studied this website while designing his ship. The Cerberus Class Frigate was designed as an Air Force operated, armed multi- purpose deep space vehicle. Ships operate as part of the Deep Space Command network and carry out scientific, military, law-enforcement, transport and errand-of-mercy missions throughout the solar system.

The ship consists of a forward sensor module, crew module, a variable number of fuel modules and a reactor and propulsion module. The name "Cerberus" denotes both the multi-mission capability of the spacecraft, as well as the physical resemblance of the mythical three headed dog formed by the forward radome, railgun and forward operations module protruding... Here's an example of how to play with the data in this site. Let's make an outline of the history of the Space Patrol. Lets' make some assumptions. The Space Patrol more or less comes into being when rockets are capable of lifting off from Terra and doing round trips to planets (Before that, they were a glorified coast guard).

There was a prior period of commercial orbit-to-orbit spacecraft, utilizing high Isp drives with thrusts of two or three humming-bird power. Those spacecraft looked like they were built of gossamer and cobwebs, and spacecraft combat was similar to encounters between Fokker Triplanes and Sopwith Camels. For an example of a different set of assumptions, read Rick Robinson's Rocketpunk Manifesto essay The Time Scale of Space. But now we have powerful rockets worthy of Tom Corbett and Rocky Jones. Assume that Space Patrol rocketships have mass ratios of 3.0. Assume that Space Patrol front-line rocketships always have the latest in propulsion, with commercial (and pirate) rockets having propulsion at best ten years behind, and much worse for tramp freighters.

There will be some ancient commercial craft retro-fitted with slightly more modern propulsion, and the occasional criminal genius scientist with rocket propulsion ten or twenty years in advance of Patrol rockets. For purposes of example, assume that advances in rocket propulsion occur at ten year intervals. You can play with the interval yourself later. In the table below, I tried to set of a progression of exhaust velocities (and thus delta Vs) that were somewhat evenly spaced. I made up the figures, only keeping them within the MAX ratings for that drive. For flavor I had some different drives with the same exhaust velocities.

The main difference will be in what sort of power fuel is needed. To get the percentage of uranium tetrabromide for the NSWR, I did a simple linear interpolation. The actual types of engines was limited to those capable of giving a spacecraft about ten g's of lift-off acceleration.

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