Space battles :-)

DenBeste's latest piece on space battles is only a "Part 1." I get a kick out of these updates at the end:

Update: Ye Gods. I don't suppose you people could wait to tell me what's wrong with my discussion of space naval battle tactics until after I've written that part?

Update: And the letters continue to arrive. Look, what I intend to write next will have nothing whatever to do with anything you've ever read about or seen in science fiction or video games or on TV. Please restrain yourselves. I hereby request that I receive exactly zero (none, nada, zip) letters about space battles until after I've posted the second part of this article.

That's the problem with being famous :-)

Back when I was in college I wrote complaining that SF space battles always ignored such little problems as how to get rid of waste heat after using those "magic" energy beams. Think about it: you're trying to dump energy into somebody else's vessel, and in the process of generating it you release the same order of magnitude or more within your own--and there's no air or water to cool you off. You only benefit if you can focus the energy into a smaller spot on the enemy than on yourself, to locally overwhelm any defense. Even then, you can't keep shooting for long without some very aggressive scheme for pumping heat into ejectable mass.

I also griped about the "magic" force fields that somehow manage to shield away damaging energy or matter but still allow you to see through them with no trouble. In the real world, if you had any such (presumably segmented) shield, it would have to block visible light if you didn't want to have your sensors burned by lasers. So you're blind wherever your force field is on. All the enemy has to do is fire volleys of missiles that maneuver around you and pepper your vessel from all directions to keep you completely blind and out of communication with your own drones. Thus your own drones have to have enough local smarts to figure out when you're in trouble and engage the enemy's drones and open up your communication lines again. Approximately the same model applies in combats between drones (although you're more willing to risk unmanned drones). What you wind up with, instead of duels between armored knights, is "Little Fleas have lesser fleas, on their backs to bite 'em. And lesser fleas have little fleas and so ad-infinitum."

Think of swarms of different sizes of spacecraft attacking each other in unison. Since communications will be lost from time to time, each drone has to try to predict how to fight guessing how everybody else is going to fight. You want your high value vessels as far away from the center of the action as you can manage without losing control. Think decoys. There's probably no good way to disguise yourself, but you might manage the equivalent of smokescreens using EMP.

Some critical factors include battle programming and prediction, learning algorithms, spoofing enemy communications, how fast you can field vast numbers of drone fighters, and how long they can hold out in combat.

This is all pretty obvious stuff--I'm interested in seeing what DenBeste comes up with.