Warfare in Space, Part 2

Image via Wikipedia
Dear Readers,

  I have taken it upon myself to write a short series on warfare in space, given some attention that topic's gotten lately around the Internet.  The first in this series dealt with warfare using technology contemporaneous to you, and this second piece will operate under a different assumption.  The third, and final post in the series, will show up later in the week.

   Let's take the technology a little further into the imagination in this post.  Last time, we were bounded by the nasty problem of inertia.  Objects in motion prefer to stay that way, in the same direction, and that ruled out the kind of combat that is seen in movies like Star Wars.

   But what if you could eliminate inertia?  Would that mean we start to see X-wings that swoop down over vast battleships?  Today's assumption: A device has been invented that allows you to negate the inertia of a space vehicle.   You'd be surprised what that assumption does for the overall layout of the space battlefield.
   Inertia gets in the way of a lot of space maneuvering, as we discussed in the last post.  It makes the fuel to mass ratio of your space vehicle more important than most other considerations, and is the major limiting factor on maneuverability.  If you could eliminate the inertia of a vehicle, you could do some very impressive things in space, from an agility point of view.

    Now, I want to caution you.  The understanding of inertia in your time stream is far from complete, and before you are going to negate it, you are going to have to be able to understand it.  If the Higgs boson exists in your time stream (this is still up for some debate, no?), then its discovery will move this topic area forward a fair bit, but let's keep our heads here.  Inertia damping is a ways off.
   However, let's say that the correct work has been accomplished.  The inertial damper exists, and it can be sent into space.  How does that change space warfare?
 
   Things already don't have a weight in space.  With the negation device, however, their mass, an inherent property, becomes a non-factor in their movement.  At a cursory glance, spacecraft could accelerate with minimal fuel expenditure, could be of massive sizes and still be able to maneuver with equal capacity, and in the event of a retreat, acceleration would be rapid and without consequences.

    Let's look at that a little more closely.  First, the technical specifications of the negation device itself are important.  If it's the size of a house, you're going to run into problems for a variety of reasons.  It may be easy to destroy if it is that large, it would be hard to fit on small craft and still maintain a reasonable target profile, etc.  Yet, if we're to be realistic about this (of course, I know just how realistic I'm being, but I don't want to talk past you), to say that it will be very tiny seems a little absurd.  Therefore, let's say that an inertial negation device would be small enough to fit aboard anything from a missile to a battle cruiser, but would not be small enough to fit inside your pocket.
 
   That means that a ship with our inertial negation device would have problems firing bullets.  The recoil from the bullets firing would have an effect on the relatively massless spacecraft and slow it to a stop on firing.  Missiles, however, could carry a negation device and thus allow their firing spacecraft to maintain its original velocity.  Once again, we find ourselves in a space warfare battlefield that is dominated by missile warfare.

   That said, the inertial negation device leads to problems with space combat.  The vehicle that can physically accommodate the most fuel is the vehicle that wins when there is inertial negation.  It takes very little effort to accelerate further when you have no inertia, and the stress on your vehicle is also minimal.  If my spaceship is being pursued by a missile, all I must do is accelerate either in step with or slightly faster than the missile that's after me.  If velocity is a real number, I can continue to push faster and faster to near the speed of light, keeping me just ahead of the missile until it has run out of fuel.  Then I can maneuver out of its way.

   However, all of combat happens at relativistic speeds under this framework.  As the missile and my ship chase each other, the ship that launched the missile can follow at a speed that keeps us within range of its detector capabilities.  At the speeds we're talking about, time passes differently between different reference frames.  As I run from its missile, the other ship might have ten minutes in its reference frame to launch ten more missiles, all of which I will have trouble trying to evade.  I might find my fuel exhausted as I try to evade the first missile, only to discover that a split second later I have three more of them coming my way.  That's not a very good situation.

A missile-dominated future? Image via Wikipedia   It's going to be in my best interests, then, not to try and outrun the missiles that are after me, but instead to try and destroy their inertial negation devices, or somehow project a field that gives them inertia.  It stands to reason that if the device that reduces inertia is real, then the device that increases it should also exist.  All that needs to happen at that point is to turn that into a ranged device, either by creating inertia-increasing mines that can be left in the battlefield, or developing some means to project the inertia-increasing effect.

   However, once you have the inertia-increasing device, it becomes a better weapon than the original weapon you were trying to use it on!  Human beings die when they cannot overcome the inertia of their blood to pump it around their organs.  A ship with artificially high inertia will be a sitting duck.  I envision future combat happening over vast stretches of space, between roving planets that are equipped with inertial negation devices.  As these planets do battle, they increase each other's inertia via missiles, mines, and fields, until finally one is made a sitting duck and forced to capitulate or be destroyed.

  
   Always,

  
    Dr. John Skylar
    Chairman
    Department of Anachronism
    University of Constantinople