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"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

For unreal physics: pretty much every space battle in David Weber's "Honor Harrington" series. The tactics used are often pretty creative (or certainly seemed so on a first reading).

For slightly-closer-to-reality: the space battle in Niven's Protector. Although, I must confess this is nowhere near as creative as some of what has been described in this thread.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

I never read any Harrington novels -- "Armageddon Inheritance" and "Apocalypse Troll" convinced me I never want to read anything by Weber again. One blooper I found amusing was relativistic missiles with fusion warheads. That's like taking a 5-inch cannonball and sticking a firecracker on it.
Creative, yes, but just like Heinlein's tactic in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", packs less punch than advertised. The bullet would have hit the neutron star at about 0.5 C. M-16 bullet weighs about 8 grams. Say, it was a high-caliber rifle with a 40 gram bullet. Impacting neutron star it would produce a 200-250 kiloton explosion. I doubt that would harm a spacecraft tough enough and/or far enough away to survive neutron star's usual effects.

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Well, in his HH novels, he does point out (several times) that, if you can't maneouvre, all your enemy has to do is launch his missiles from a long way away (so that he can dodge anything you fire back) and give them plenty of time to reach very very high velocities relative to you. Then, the warhead is totally irrelevant (he calls this "kinetic strikes").

But, if memory serves, there was an even more OTT "unreal physics" tactic in E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series: essentially, they neutralised the inertia of a whole planet, dragged it halfway across the galaxy, then switched off the machine that neutralised its inertia, so it resumed its original velocity (which was, of course, very large and in the opposite direction from the target planet).

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

IIRC, the Lensmen, having a whole galaxy's planets to pick from, used them in matched pairs: the intrinsic velocity of the target then didn't matter as it was crushed between two incoming worlds...

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QQR

Am I the only one who prefers the tactic of firing daffy duck through a cannon only to leave a duck-shaped dent in the enemy craft? it's better than a guided missle because he always manages to make it inside and finds the big red "do not push" self-destruct button. It never fails. And I've never read of an anti-mallard defense system.

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Ilya wrote:

Yup, that's what I meant about the bullets in Protector. However, I'm sure that the Brennan-monster with his amazing intelligence added in the effects of the impact destabilizing the star's crust, causing a fault with consequent isostatic readustment resulting in a synergistic effect. The narrator did mention that a significant portion of the star's surface began to glow, suggesting a more widespread effect.

Never underestimate the Brennan-monster.

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Oh, yeah, I think they did that later.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

I believe many of his missiles have no warheads, their engine's fields are the weapons. In that universe to move in space the ships create a pair of electromagnetic fields, one above the ship an one below. They're slightly curved, kilometers in size thus dwarfing the ship, and slightly wedge shape thus somehow pushing the ship. They're also completely impenetrable so that nothing gets through, not even light. Thus causing the upper and lower parts of the ship to be completely protected, but they also cause big blind spots if sensors aren't used right. Any physical object the fields touch are obliterated. I also think that if two fields touch, "bad things happen" thus the no warhead missiles.

His battles try to recreate sailing ship warfare in space, with some 3 dimensional aspects added. Thus with the top and bottom protected, there's the sides and ends only open, making combat, especially single ship actions, more 2 dimensional. Shields can close the sides (but can be beaten down like Star Trek shields), however the ends are open (for most of the series). Thus the enemy commander always tries to maneuver to get the "up the skirt shop" through the unprotected stern gap. Akin to "crossing the t" of naval warfare where one side could rake an enemy ship, or line of ships, while the enemy couldn't do anything as their canons wouldn't transverse that far, and only the stern chasers of the aftermost ship could fire.

The battles get interesting at times, although the constant need to one-up the previous book started raising the bar quick and got into some rather far-fetched battles.

He co-authored the books based on the Starfire games, I can only remember The Shiva Option at the moment. It was a good series, but The Shiva Option went over the top on one-upping.

The impellers are gravitic not Em. Shaped like two planes above and below the ship and angled such that they are farther apart in front of the ship than behind. Supposedly the angle was what allowed movement.

Generic missile has a multiple bomb-pumped x-ray laser emitter as a warhead. The lasers were the damaging system, on the assumption that an impact on a ship was unlikely. The missiles are capable of pretty ludicrous accelerations (tens of thousands of g) and if the target was immoble, they would be used as kinetic weapons.

He co-authored Crusade, In Death Ground, The Shiva Option, and Insurecction.

Re: Weber's Honor series.

Yes the physics is a bit ... off, at times.
Yes some of the later books get too far into politics and info dumps and the like.
I still like them.

The grav drive system used has already been covered further up this thread. Missiles basically come in 3 warhead flavours - no warhead when you can generate an actual hit (apart from hitting a planet or as a stealth attack on a sleeping foe, not much use), nuke (out of date, getting a missile close enough to a combat ship for a nuke to be useful is extremely rare, mostly used in for cleaning up after a battle) and the x-ray laser (the missile only has to get to within 20000 km of so of the target).
Even with munitions that pull 90000 g acceleration, 6 light minute engagements give plenty of preparation time ...

That was not in HH novels -- it was in "Armageddon Inheritance" (and possibly in "Apocalypse Troll"). But what you people are saying about HH does not change my opinion of Weber. If I want to read about Age of Sail naval battles... I will read about Age of Sail naval battles.

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The other thing about the tactics in Webbers HH is that the ships are protected by both active and passive defenses - any missile boring straight in for a KE kill would not reach the target. In fact at the start of the series the technology was such that even with stand-off warheads the probability of scoring a hit against a similar warship was practically zero, and the main tactic was to try & swamp the enemies defenses.

I'm not that much of a physicist so I can accept the propulsion system and inertial dumps as handwaviums without two much problems, but I do have problems with the massive crews his ships seem to carry - 6 people to each secondary weapons system in case of control run failure does seem a bit excessive. His ships also seem to have few of the compromises seen in real life - massivly armored plus massive defences plus massive attack power in one ship would probably make his navies unfordable even fo0r multi-planetary bodies.

Mark

Hmm, yes, but if the kinetic strike is launched from far enough away, it can shut down its drives before your target picks up its gravity signature, and coast in ballistically, but with enough speed that the target has no time to respond when it picks up the missile on radar.

And, 90,000 xg does not sound so extraordinary to me. I have used a centrifuge that is capable of generating a relative centrifugal force of 400,000 xg.

I think the best thing about Weber's HH series is: it's like Age of Sail naval warfare, but with bigger guns! You just have to accept lots of arm-waving not-compatable-with-laws-of-physics stuff to enjoy them.

The nature of compromise in ship construction is touched on here and there in the novels. Heavy arms and armament versus manoeuverability versus cost. Anyway, I've already mentioned that I think some of it is quite creative, so let's see if the thread can get back on-topic...

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Ah, thanks korjik, I was having a brain freeze moment and couldn't remember what he used for the drive fields.

The "stern chase" scene from "The Gripping Hand" is a fairly good space battle scenario, discounting the shields. A lot of waiting, while everything gets to where it's going, and trying not to be too predictable but still end up where you want to.

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The Greatest Space Strategists In Military History

There's a really cool surprise at the very end.

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Somebody--Niven, I think--has a story from the Man-Kzin Wars period where Earth wishes to land an agent on a Kzin-controlled human colony world.

So they accelerate their warship to some impressive fraction of c, and jump it to the edge of the target system. It hurtles through the system in a matter of hours on a cometary trajectory, whipping around the star and back out again, where it finally jumps to safety.

Along the way, it throws off a number of nukes and particle clouds, to deal with scrambling interceptors, shoot out sensor arrays scattered throughout the system, and cause general upheval and confusion in the defense organization. In the midst of all the hustle and bustle, they deliver a stealthy shuttlecraft to the colony planet's surface.

If you can call a practically straight line a "cometary trajectory". At that speed, star's gravity deflects it very very little.
Of course, the way shuttlecraft decelerated from relativistic speed is very much a "tooth fairy physics"*.

* "In a hard SF story you are allowed one tooth fairy, but only one" -- Larry Niven

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

i like the line about how the Empire fell "in a rain of Ewok claws"..
i always kind of assumed that the Ewoks were taken out in a "rain of half completed (yet fully operational) death star debris" after the movie ended.

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There was a short story I liked from the Man-Kzin War series dealing with the first contact between a Kzin & human ship. Humans had become so pacifistic they did a bit of mental editing on the the majority of the population & the history of man's warlike beginnings was taught to only a carefully chosen few. So when the Kzin ship attacked (of course) it took the humans an long time to figure out something as simple as "Wow! They're trying to kill us. What's up with that?" Luckily one of the crew was one of the mentioned chosen few, who swung the whole ship around so their laser main drive sliced the Kzin ship in half. Examination of the wrecked ship gave them an idea of who & what they were dealing with, & they had time to rework their society into a more warlike footing before the first Kzin attack on Earth arrived.

I liked the Firefly episode where Wash tells an angry mob he will "blast em". The guys see the ship and just assume some of the pointy things must be guns and back off.

Another nice tactic from BSG is when Starbuck plans an attack on the Cylon base by hiding fighters on a small ship. The Cylons jump at the small ship first, then Galactica jumps in and the Cylons turn around leaving the base unprotected to the first ship. They sort of glossed over the fact that Galactic may have had to clean up all of the fighters after the base was taken out. The episode ended with the Cylon fighters inbound... odd ending.

My personal favorite is The Warriors by Larry Niven. The Kzin telepathically scan a ship to check on combat capabilities and don't find any because the humans don't believe in violence. When the Kzin attack, one of the humans uses the communications laser to cut the Kzin in half. Tools are weapons sometimes.

John Amalfi was a good tactician in that he usually got others to do his fighting for him. Nick van Rijn was similar.

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The best MAD one was when the Tralfamadorian test pilot, during experiments with a new fuel, pushes a button and the entire universe disappears.

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You are both talking about the same story -- "The Warriors". It is also the first story Larry Niven sold, and is rather rough around the edges.

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I've always loved all of Niven's space war tactics; the use of the communications laser as a weapon and the incredibly slow, time-delayed fight between the two Pak spaceships especially. Amazingly smart and creative!

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Haldeman's use of a collapsar to whip the projectiles into the bad guys at 0.99c, so they arrived almost coincident with their own light, no time to dodge.

John Amalfi flying the planet Hern VI into the Vegan Orbital Fort.

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The conclusion to the Farscape saga was pretty inspiring. He opens a wormhole that's connected to thousands of points in spacetime, one of which happens to be a black hole. Starts out as a tiny anomaly in the middle of a space battle, but because of the enormous amount of matter it's consuming it begins doubling exponentially in size, swallowing dozens of ships and an entire planet.

I've always liked Emperor Palpatine's plan to crush the Rebels in "Return of the Jedi". It may be true that it didn't work, but in my opinion, it should have worked. The only thing that saved the Rebels was the Ewoks taking down the shield, but those primative Ewoks and the small Rebel force, should never have been a match for the Imperial forces defending the shield generator. Slingshots and bows and arrows are no match against blasters and other advanced Imperial technology. I think that even with the shield down, the Rebel fleet was no match for the Imperial fleet.

I guess we just had to have a nice happy ending.

I keep seeing people complain about the Ewoks beating up the Stormtroopers, but I've seen one person say that that was not actually shown happening; what was shown instead was lots of scenes of Ewoks fighting the Stormtroopers but losing, not really making any progress against them, and people just recall it as if it had been different from what it really was.

I don't know myself which is more accurate. I've only seen it years and years ago.