Probably the most creative space tactic I ever read was in the (otherwise undistinguished, IMO) book "Europa Strike". It goes like that:

Evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence is found on Jupiter's moon Europa while, for unrelated reasons, tensions mount between US and China. An armed American spaceship is dispatched to Europa, while another is orbiting Mars. A Chinese ship launches, seemingly toward nowhere in particular. Few days after launch it detonates a fusion device, in a 100 megaton range, in empty space. No one in US can figure out the purpose of that, except possibly as a "message" -- demonstration of power. ("What happened to sending messages by e-mail?" grumbles one US Marine.)

What the Chinese spaceship actually did was fire an enormously powerful railgun, twice. The fusion bomb was a smokescreen -- the sleet of charged particles completely masked the EM pulse from firing the gun. Inert railgun projectiles are easy to get out of the way -- if you know they are coming. But no one does.*

One swarm of projectiles is aimed at Jupiter -- or rather where Jupiter will be some months later, when first American spaceship arrives. Needless to say, it is timed to arrive simultaneously with the said spaceship... and the projectiles have enough self-guidance to hit it. The other swarm is slower, and is aimed to where Mars -- and the second American ship, -- would be at that same time. Chancy, of course -- if that ship leaves Mars orbit in the intervening two months, it is safe, but the Chinese take this gamble. And the beauty of this is that if for whatever reason Chinese Politbureau decides to call off the attack -- no one will ever know it was underway! Just send a very short radio code to the projectiles, ordering them to miss their targets. And if they are needed, the attack is undetectable and unstoppable. Europa-bound swarm moves at over 100 km/sec, the Mars-bound one at about 25 km/sec. The course correction occurs within seconds from impact, and until then they are black, cold and silent.

*This was one of the things Heinlein got wrong in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" -- short of a nuclear detonation, there is no way to hide the EM pulse from a railgun. Manny and company could never keep their second catapult a secret.

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That reminds me of something from one of my "novels" (actually stories I came up with but which will never really be written, nevermind published). A population secretly developed surface-to-space missiles, knowing that they could and would be shot down on launch by orbiting weapon satellites. But they built a bunch and launched them together, in swarms. Each cluster's outermost missiles were indeed shot down, but having them go first protected the ones in the middle of the group because they'd just have to be hit later in the order, and it took long enough for the inner ones to reach escape velocity & altitude, drop their engines, and coast away past the satellite network on inertia alone, thus creating no emissions to alert the satellite network to their existence. Drifting cold on the trajectory they'd been given before dropping their engines, they then completed a slingshot maneuver around the moon and came back in to strike the satellites from above/behind a few days later, using only minor little lateral thrusts for final guidance.

I was always impressed with the idea of the "stasis field" put forth in The Forever War, which not only set an absolute speed limit of so-many meters per second, but which neutralized all electromagnetic activity. In the novel, this protects the soldiers inside from laser fire, bombs, and missiles, but forces hand-to-hand combat.

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my favorite tactic is when they sit nose to nose with the enemy ship, and the captain orders the deflector dish to be energized..

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My favorite is from one of Brin's Uplift books, where the dolphin ship dumps most of its water in the path of the pursuing ships,

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Hardly unique, although it was a complete surprise to Uplifted cultures. Heck in Benford's "Tides of Light" Killeen does exactly same thing with sewage rather than water. (Which has added benefit in creating spectral signatures of heated organic matter. Enemy ships interpret it as the evidence of ruptured hull, and give up pursuit.)

Novaderrik's and Romanus' examples break known physics.

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The megahuge inflatable 'bluff' ship from AC Clarke.

I think you are confusing Clarke and Cordwainer Smith: "Golden The Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh!"

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To make it clear, I want to stick to known physics. Otherwise, the most creative tactic is "hypometric weapons" from Reynold's Absolution Gap -- your enemies (or parts of your enemies, if you are feeling "creative") simply disappear. Indistinguishable from magic. And when Inhibitors adapted, hypometric weapons "simply stopped working against them". Bigger magic.

Although Absolution Gap had some creative tactics within realm of possible. Such as what happens when two relativistic starships are travelling from one star to another at same speed, one few light-hours ahead of the other? Keep in mind that "throw ball bearings in the path of pursuer" is not particularly effective because ball bearings will retain velocity and just keep on alongside the lead ship. Anything you care to throw from either ship to the other must be accelerated, and thus can not be completely invisible.

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I have a couple questions:
How big are these ships?
You have a ship that is big enough to have a railgun powerful enough to accelerate to 100kps, is that standard?
How did they hide the reaction of the firing? (the chinese ship would change course)

I keep doing that. Thanks for the correction.
http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/rediscovery.htm

I'm still waiting to hear of something cooler than Han Solo clamping onto the backside of a star destroyer.

In the real physics category, Europa Strike is pretty cool, but I'm going to have to go with pretty much the entire last chapter of Footfall - especially the gamma ray lasers

Wouldn't wrapping them in superconducting materials and a Faraday cage do the trick? Superconductors exclude magnetic fields , they can't pass through.

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The rifle bullets in Niven's "Protector".

The computer program in "A for Andromeda".

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We've taking the main guns from the Iowa, added autoloaders and wrapped a one man spaceship around each, then attached them to Michael for launch and individual fighting once we get up there.
Who is going to man them?
We have volunteers.


My favorite from that battle is definitely the stovepipes.

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It might not be cooler looking but there's an AC Clarke short story about an space-faring spy who lands on one of Mars' moons (sorry for lack of details, book not anywhere near me). He's pursued by this fully armed and operational battle..err, ship. But, because of the size of the moon, and the problems the battleship encountered in trying to turn and maintain any sort of orbit around the tiny moon, the spy was able to avoid capture simply by walking in pace with the ship, staying just at or below the horizon. Apparently, the commander of the ship was demoted or discharged and the final line of the story was (paraphrased): "They just couldn't see how the fastest ship in the fleet couldn't catch a man in a space-suit."

Only going into what I seen and read—and not in too much detail at that—I'd have to say the atmosphere jump in Battlestar Galactica and the ending of Ender's Game.

Wow...my post looks so lame compared to the ones above.

I've always enjoyed the way the troopers landed in Heinlein's Starship Troopers. (the book! not the movie!)

One of the Firefly episodes is pretty funny where Walsh is piloting the Serenity though a winding canyon to escape, and the pursuers are casually cruising above it.

tell that to Captain Picard..

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I don't think measurements were explicitely given, but my impression was on the order of modern naval shis. 100-200 meters, and fusion-powered.
Not at all, in fact unique. Moreover, the power drain of the second firing (the one toward Jupiter) slagged the ship's fusion plant -- and that was planned. High cost of the tactic was part of what made is so surprising.
Initial hydrogen bomb explosion. For a few minutes it masked both radar, and the ships was too far from any American eyes to resolve visually (or in infrared). By the time it could be seen again there was no indication of how quickly the course change happened.

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“Hide and Seek”. I always hated that story because it relies on what I consider the completely unforgivable plot device: “everyone is a moron.” The spy is heavily armed; the ship carries no personal weapons AT ALL, nor any portable detection equipment. IOW, the idea of hostile landing never occurred to anyone. Since armed individual spies are known to exist at all, the above is an absurd lack of foresight.

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Heh. The atmosphere jump was was the first thing I thought of. I loved that!

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Ok, this isn't real physics but I just remembered one I liked. An ep. of B5 whereby Sheridan opens up a jump point within a jump gate to take out a pursuing foe. He then justifies the destruction of the gate as stopping everyone plundering ancient artefacts on dead planets around there.

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It was cool for special effects, but not really any more creative than any other case of Jumping in close to a target, launching Vipers, and Jumping away again. My favorite move from that series was in the pilot mini-series, when the Galactica led the civilian fleet up from their hiding place in the gas giant's upper atmosphere, rolled out to show its back (with lots of armor and guns) to the waiting Cylon fleet, and parked there to act as a shield so the civilians could come up behind the battlestar and Jump right out from under its belly one or a few at a time until the last was gone and the battlestar finally Jumped away to join them.

Before A New Hope, Han Solo used many military tactics (he learned while he was an Imp.) to save Jabba's Sail Barge from pirates. He also used some tactics to beat Imperial Star Destroyers from destroying Nar Shaddaa by projecting holo ships to trick the Imp. Commander, then he went up behind the Imps and blew their back flanks to kingdom come!!!!!!!!! (read the Han Solo Trilogy)

My favorite tactics were the ones Grand Admiral Thrawn used against the New Republic by observing his opponent's culture before attacking them. Thrawn almost beat the New Republic with a fleet with only 5 Star Destroyers and many smaller ships. He probably would have defeated the Rebels if it wasn't for Thrawn's own bodygaurd that stabbed Thrawn in the heart.(see the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn).

Grand Admiral Thrawn is the best fictional strategist I ever read about (my user is named after him)!!!!

I don't completely remember the story and won't be defending it passionately, but I thought that the story described that while the moon was small enough to pose navigational problems for the hunter ship, it was too large to cover by personnel. Remember, the hunter ship didn't know how soon the spy pickup ship (which apparently outgunned the hunter ship quite readily) would arrive, and likely didn't want to risk having to abandon multiple landing parties if they needed to run. The hunter ship did send those two probes with cameras but the spy was able to stay relatively hidden.

Your point is taken though, the commander might've been more creative.

It's not the commander, but the entire military doctrine should have been more creative. Such as making personal weapons and other infantry equipment a standard part of any warship inventory. Even if no landing is planned, it may still happen.

Given these limitations, the commander really had no good options.

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I see Ilya's point. They should have had something like a Marine detachment aboard, even if it's a small squad. But then that'd ruin the point of the story that one person could conceivably best the height of technology.

I'm interested in knowing what you (any of you) think of Clarke's "Superiority," if you've read that.

For those who are not familiar with this story, you might say it's "The tortoise and the hare," only set in space and with explosions. There are spoilers in the next paragraph, but since there are spoilers a-plenty in this thread, I'm not too terribly concerned with it (and it's not exactly a recent work).

The story is told in retrospect from the perspective of the losing commander immediately after the war was finished. The winning side relied simply on continuing to build their space fleet as usual, but the losing side decided to take some chances with more advanced technology, based on theoretical and laboratory work. The reason the 'advanced' side lost is because getting the technology to work in the field was something that required time (to debug), but because they wanted to use the rather seductive new gadgets, they ended up wasting time and resources that would've been better spent on more marginal improvements. You might say there were plenty of creative tactics, but they didn't work as intended.

I thought "Superiority" is a good cautionary tale, but the prose and the storyline are nothing to write home about. Like all of early Clarke, for that matter.

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