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JellyBean
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I think I'd agree that kinetic weapons would be the order of the day. Unless the combatants have carefully matched velocities beforehand, chances are that they'll have a km/s or so of differential velocity, and even quite small particles will do a lot of damage against any modern armour at those sorts of velocities. An explosive warhead would be a useless extravagance - replace it with a bit of extra fuel and you've got a missile that can go faster with no significant loss in the damage it can inflict.
I like the idea earlier in this thread of a missile launched as an inert projectile, drifting stealthily with its engine off until it passes close enough to its target and starts homing in. One point that should be considered, though, is the size of the missile. Anything over a few grams is going to do crippling damage against any spacecraft without ridiculously costly-to-launch armour, but it won't be feasible for near future to miniaturise the required sensors and motor that far. So, I suspect that such missiles would be equipped with a small explosive charge to shatter them into many small fragments once they have set a collision course for their target. A cloud of tiny particles would be much harder to detect, deflect or dodge than a single coherent missile, so it would have a much greater chance of making a kill.
It would also be possible for ships to launch such clouds from maximum range, probably achieving a kill without the target being aware it was being attacked. The simple countermeasure to this is for ships in combat to constantly make minor adjustments in their course, so that any cloud dispersed enough to encompass their new position would be so dispersed as to not have a good chance of hitting it with a single particle. This would be terribly costly in fuel when not actively engaged in a battle, so a ship not already engaged would still be totally vulnerable to this sort of attack.
Lasers are unlikely to play a major role except in overloading sensors, unless it proves feasible to use a nuke to power them. This was one of the approaches considered for the SDI program - the nuke vapourises a cylinder of an appropriate material next to it, which then lases briefly before the entire contraption becomes completely smashed. You can only fire it once, but it produces a very high-powered beam, probably somewhere in the range of gamma rays. Possible defences are: several metres of lead armour (unfeasible), staying a light-minute or so away and constantly jinking (expensive in fuel) and not being spotted in the first place.
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09-06-2003 20:09
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