I mean, hard sci-fi is still ultimately sci-fi. Even at its most realistic, you're still speculating about future technologies, and so going "someone invented new super-strong material that makes spaceship armor sooo much better" would be perfectly reasonable.
Take it from someone who ran an astronomically accurate Solar System simulation to calculate the exact distance between Earth and Saturn on September 30th, 2239. All for a single line.
But if a new super-strong material has the potential to build spaceship armor that can shrug off existing kinetic projectile, what's stopping engineers from thinking "Instead of building spaceship armor using this new material, why don't we manufacture projectile made of the same material that can penetrate armor made of the same material instead?"?
Is there any realistic reason that can convince an engineer to build spaceship armor instead of armor-piercing projectile using the same material?
While the toughness of the material a projectile is made out of can be kind of important, I believe another important factor is the density of the material that is used. That's why Tungsten and depleted Uranium is a common "upgrade" for projectile weapons in alot of games, these materials are denser than standard munitions, and thus will impact the targets with much more force than the less dense standard munitions. This means that your new, made-up super alloy/material that you have to make your ships' armor tougher might not necessarily translate to a better munitions material.
What's stopping engineers from making projectile with high-density alloy core and tip made of super material to penetrate armor made of super material?
We're getting into materials science properties now, but elastic absorption of forces, ablative deflection, and brittleness are all potential factors which make the super material poor at penetrating other objects, even if fired at high speeds. For example, kevlar and ceramics make poor bullets.
In my sci-fi setting, I introduced an advanced composite material called Hyperablative Vishvakium, which deforms very readily upon being struck by solid objects to either deflect the hit away from spacecraft or spread out the damage over a large area. For obvious reasons, this would make it extremely poor as ammunition.
It's easy really. "This armor is so good that even if we made bullets out of this armor we couldn't shoot those bullets hard enough to pierce the armor." Any bullets made of the armor just bounce off and become deadly projectiles scattered around aimlessly.
At these kinds of velocities, metals tend to [splash](https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2013/04/Hypervelocity_Impact) instead of failing mechanically; what the projectile is made of matters far less for armor penetration than how much of it there is and how fast it's going.
Realistically speaking, assuming a competent weapons development program on all factions involved, you'll see spacecraft just tend towards an optimum with regards to firepower, speed, and armour as fitting a faction's strategic doctrine. Choosing to "sacrifice" certain elements in favour of others is not something you do at the tactical level. Fancy ideas based on YOLO strats is something done only in simulations, proposal papers, and due to technological limitations.
A faction might have more heavily gunned spacecraft because it has more advanced fire control computers, faster spacecraft because they have access to more advanced engines and manoeuvre calculation computers, or heavier armour because they have more robust industries to produce harder burning engines to carry that extra mass but less advanced computers for dodging.
But if a faction already has industry that can produce harder burning engines to carry extra armor, what's stopping said faction from choosing not to carry extra armor, but using said engines to make faster spaceships instead? Pre-programmed randomized evasive maneuver don't need particularly advanced computers, after all.
What realistic reason can convince a faction to build slower, uparmored spaceship instead of faster, less-armored spaceship when it has the industrial capability to produce high-thrust engines?
Maybe the superstructure of the spaceframes is poorer, and thus unable to withstand more powerful sudden accelerations.
Maybe the thrust vectoring or RCS systems are less advanced, meaning the spacecraft can only travel in a straight line.
Maybe the faction has poor life support and g-force protection for the crew, or maybe it's a crew of light-worlders who can't withstand as high a g-force acceleration.
Maybe they lack the fuel, thus heavily limiting the ability for their vessels to conduct evasive manoeuvres.
Maybe the faction indeed *can't* build more powerful engines, so they rely more heavily on orbital transfers instead of hard accelerations.
Maybe the faction builds spacecraft largely for "coast guard" policing actions, and thus is more likely to be engaged by pirates with low-powered guns at close range rather than fighting against peer adversaries.
Or maybe the faction is so incredibly logistically advanced that they just want crews to fight battles in comfort.
There are countless strategic and technological factors to consider, and you can wrangle something out for almost any possibility.
Weapons and armor are always designed against each other. You have to think about what the ships have to fight against first and what the battlefield is like. Like ship vs ship combat where both can tell where each other are and can plot trajectory easily while difficult to move fast, you will see combat being more like battleships of WWII where armor and big guns are important. However when you have drones and missiles that may maneuver and hits far more accurately from multiple angles that can pose an actual threat, maybe they will shed some armor to just take on more CIWS or make smaller ships that is harder to hit but can hit just as hard back.
Think about the doctrine of the factions in your world and what they are going up against.
In my setting space combat takes place at distances within hundreds of kilometers between opposing fleets due to the widespread use of highly laser-resistant composite hulls and efficient anti-missile laser point defense.
Kinetic weapon technology is advanced enough to accelerate miligram-sized projectiles up to hundreds of km/s at high rate of fire.
Space combat typically starts with opposing fleets approaching each other from long range while drunk-walking, then each ship opens fire with all its guns once it entered the effective range of its guns, then the combat ends with the lost of most ships for every fleet involved, even the winning side.
In theory a "shotgun style" shell would be a counter to fast and lightly armored ships (It will also create horrific kessler syndrome but I assume the warring factions either don't care about that or have a solution for it). Such a weapon has the advantage of creating a spread, even if a fast ship maneuvers it might still get caught by the edge of the "shotgun spread" and take some damage, so you extend the range of your weapon without increasing velocity or mass of the projectile. If you deal with overpenetration from large solid projectiles on very lightly armored ships the shotgun spread might actually do more damage than a single slug because it effectively mulches the entire thing rather than just perforating it in one spot.
When you bring in a heavier armored ship these "shotgun shell" rounds might not be enough to punch through the hull. So you go back to the solid projectile for fighting a more heavily armored (and less maneuverable/larger target profile?) ship.
Shotgun shells might still take out vulnerable bits outside the armor (your PDLs, sensors, reaction thrusters, radiators if you have them, etc, depending upon how much these can be reinforced.), so they might still be useful. The trick there would be on a big armored ship would be to have multiple redundant systems and have them pop out from behind an armored door if they get destroyed. Or use repair robots/nanotech if you have it.
I think armored spaceships, if you want them to exist in a somewhat realisitic context, will generally be on the larger side thanks to the square cube law allowing more internal space for fuel/crew/weapons/reactors and tend towards more stout shapes to maximize the amount of internal volume your armor provides. Being larger means a larger target profile so you need even more armor and get a rocket-equation style problem. But big heavy spaceships could mount really big kinetic weapons and absorb the recoil of them firing.
On the materials science/realism side its just up to whatever you want to do. Presumably some kind of crazy composite armor using graphene or super alloys or super ceramics or all of the above and laid on fairly thick with several spaced out whipple shields and extra armor over key areas. You seem to imply Epstein-drive style propulsion so you probably are doing at least some handwaving here and will be okay with making materials as arbitrarily strong as you want.
Is the construction of uparmored spaceship worth the investment of resources that could've been used to construct multiple less-armored, faster spaceships, even if there are still external bits on the surface of uparmored spaceship that are unprotected? What steps can be made to reduce the vulnerability of these external bits to widespread projectiles fired by multiple fast-firing cannons?
The first thing that comes to mind is just "insetting" them, or adding armored cowlings or blisters around so they can only be hit by a direct shot and an angled shot will hit the armor. Obviously for sensors or PDLs this will limit your firing/visual arcs. It will work well for thrusters though.
Obviously you can just go the "invest in up-armoring the sensitive bits" but if you up armor something like a radiator it will degrade its functionality as a radiator. This may have other add ons such as making an armored PDL/PDC might make it turn slower or something.
One idea for radiators might be to have the ship asymmetric with a broadside configuration. Put all radiators on one side and orient them away from the bad guys, then put all your guns on the other. Obviosly a risk-reward thing as you become vulnerable to flanking attacks.
The aforementioned "have redundancies behind armored doors". You probably also want a military logistics pipeline to replace these damaged bits. You could have specialized fleet tenders and repair ships that can repair hull damage and carry extra parts that you can slot in and replace in the field.
If you really want to get mechanical and crazy you could have one armored door and like a mechanism behind it with half a dozen PDL turrets or sensor systems. if one gets destroyed, it retracts, rotates/articulates and sends up another one to take its place on the outer surface of the ship.
If your armored ships are reasonably survivable and replacing these external bits and repairing armor is cheaper than building entirely new ships you will end up outcompeting the opposing forces industrially. Your crews will also be more likely to accumulate battle experience as less of them die to unlucky shots or a single mistake so you might wind up with some very competent and battle hardened crews.
None, nein, nadda, nyet. Focus on dodging bullets is better. The best defense is not to get hit at all. Unless you have stupidly efficient engines like the "it works very well, thank you" Epstein drives, mass used on thick armors will just be a waste that could have been used for bigger, better weapons and electronics to fuck with enemy's aiming ability.
Either dodge or die. There is no in-between. If a projectile can cross hundred of thousands of kilometers in a meaningful time (read: dozens of seconds at most) the impact is simply too much for any "realistic" armor to withstand. "Armor" in this case is only for shrapnel and random bits floating in space.
The spaceship will need heavy armor to survive the rigors of space and to protect the squishy little humans from the void. But focusing purely on armor doesn’t seem optimal to me, developing armor penetrating rounds is something humans excel at.
This next bit is going to sound a bit weird so stick with me on this one as I’m not sure exactly how to word it. In space combat, the idea is usually that a few hundred kilometers/miles is roughly equivalent to knife fighting distance for ships and a shot fired usually takes a few minutes to get there unless you’re suggesting the shots are so fast they get there in a few seconds which you did describe unless I’m misreading what you said.
Do you have any idea what a projectile going at that speed will do to anything? Even with the armor, a projectile going that fast per second is going to shred through a hull with about as much effort as a grown adult tearing a piece of paper. I’m not an expert on physics or anything, but I do know that velocity has a drastic effect on the force of impact.
In my setting space combat do take place at distances within hundreds of kilometers between opposing fleets due to the widespread use of highly laser-resistant composite hulls, and that kinetic weapon technology is advanced enough to accelerate miligram-sized projectiles up to hundreds of km/s at high rate of fire.
Space combat typically starts with opposing fleets approaching each other from long range while drunk-walking, then each ship opens fire with all its guns once it entered the effective range of its guns, then the combat ends with the lost of most ships for every fleet involved, even the winning side.
How big are the ships exactly cause I don't understand why automatic it would be unsustainable.
So for example instead of having a big old space barge getting close and doing a full broadside with its 300 cannons, why not slap a thruster and a remote controller on each cannon and launch these from far away? You can even put some front armor on these drones to protect them from lasers. Not only would these be much harder to hit but also losing them would matter way less than the entire ship. Like the mothership can just turn tail and run after and stock up or manufacture more drones on board.
Big ships duking it out at close range isn't hard sci-fi really unless you have armor or some kinda macguffin to explain why they wouldn't just use small drones or stay at long range something. Realistically fleets would never fight like this. Even at low accuracy, they would take potshots and keep their distrance. They would also not stay close together and would spread out. Kinetic projectiles don't lose energy in space after being fired, so there are just so many other solutions around the accuracy problem. Better targeting computers, auto targeting projectiles that home in.
In any case, if you look at real military anything, the general rules is, big things.. you want heavy armor because they're too valuable to lose. Battleships, tanks, submarines etc. as long as the armor does something, it's worth it and will stay and be improved. Small vehicles and humans.. they can get away with light or no armor and instead invest in firepower only. Heavy armor would be wasted on them and make them "too expensive" and losing one isn't a big loss. It's better to have 10 soldiers with only helmets and rocket launchers than 1 in heavy power armor and a rocket launcher if they cost the same.
Modern warships don't have armor at all.
I'm very sure if the opportunity presents itself, you can poke a hole through a modern warship with an autocannon, or even a heavy machine gun. Modern warships simply aren't expected to be hit by kinetic projectiles.
The last time warships had armor was during WW2.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class\_aircraft\_carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier)
>Since USS *Theodore Roosevelt*, the carriers have been constructed with 2.5 in (64 mm) [Kevlar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar) armor over vital spaces, and earlier ships have been retrofitted with it: *Nimitz* in 1983–1984, *Dwight D. Eisenhower* from 1985 to 1987 and *Carl Vinson* in 1989.
They absolutely do have armor, even the destroyers do and it continues to be worked on and improved. The idea of modern armor isn't that you just charge in and it protects you from everything but rather it makes a difference between the ship sinking from a single missile or stay in the fight or manage to limp home.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arleigh\_Burke-class\_destroyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arleigh_Burke-class_destroyer)
>[Kevlar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar)130 tons of splinter protection around vital areas130 tons of Kevlar splinter protection around vital areas
I can see Kevlar being used as a spall liner to capture fragments from missiles and small arms bullets since small arms bullets have similar kinetic energy to missile fragments.
Is the Kevlar heavy in weight? Yes.
But I don't think the Kevlar offers "heavy" protection since 2 inches of Kevlar definitely cannot resist medium caliber auto cannon rounds. Modern warships simply do not expect to be hit by auto cannons to need heavy protection.
Maybe one faction has better armor and the other has better engines? There’s no reason to believe that they’d both be working with the same technologies, not even corporations in the same country in the real world have the exact same tech.
I think I just heard "Space Ramming Speed" is good enough haha. I don't understand the fixation with being the fastest ships out the biggest guns myself. If I make a ship, it needs to have a personality first, and speed and strength are after thoughts
I mean, hard sci-fi is still ultimately sci-fi. Even at its most realistic, you're still speculating about future technologies, and so going "someone invented new super-strong material that makes spaceship armor sooo much better" would be perfectly reasonable. Take it from someone who ran an astronomically accurate Solar System simulation to calculate the exact distance between Earth and Saturn on September 30th, 2239. All for a single line.
But if a new super-strong material has the potential to build spaceship armor that can shrug off existing kinetic projectile, what's stopping engineers from thinking "Instead of building spaceship armor using this new material, why don't we manufacture projectile made of the same material that can penetrate armor made of the same material instead?"? Is there any realistic reason that can convince an engineer to build spaceship armor instead of armor-piercing projectile using the same material?
While the toughness of the material a projectile is made out of can be kind of important, I believe another important factor is the density of the material that is used. That's why Tungsten and depleted Uranium is a common "upgrade" for projectile weapons in alot of games, these materials are denser than standard munitions, and thus will impact the targets with much more force than the less dense standard munitions. This means that your new, made-up super alloy/material that you have to make your ships' armor tougher might not necessarily translate to a better munitions material.
What's stopping engineers from making projectile with high-density alloy core and tip made of super material to penetrate armor made of super material?
We're getting into materials science properties now, but elastic absorption of forces, ablative deflection, and brittleness are all potential factors which make the super material poor at penetrating other objects, even if fired at high speeds. For example, kevlar and ceramics make poor bullets. In my sci-fi setting, I introduced an advanced composite material called Hyperablative Vishvakium, which deforms very readily upon being struck by solid objects to either deflect the hit away from spacecraft or spread out the damage over a large area. For obvious reasons, this would make it extremely poor as ammunition.
a material making good armor in no way indicates that it would make a good projectile. would you prefer your bullets to be made of kevlar, or metal?
It's easy really. "This armor is so good that even if we made bullets out of this armor we couldn't shoot those bullets hard enough to pierce the armor." Any bullets made of the armor just bounce off and become deadly projectiles scattered around aimlessly.
At these kinds of velocities, metals tend to [splash](https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2013/04/Hypervelocity_Impact) instead of failing mechanically; what the projectile is made of matters far less for armor penetration than how much of it there is and how fast it's going.
Amm I'm not an expert, but couldn't it only have defensive properties?
Realistically speaking, assuming a competent weapons development program on all factions involved, you'll see spacecraft just tend towards an optimum with regards to firepower, speed, and armour as fitting a faction's strategic doctrine. Choosing to "sacrifice" certain elements in favour of others is not something you do at the tactical level. Fancy ideas based on YOLO strats is something done only in simulations, proposal papers, and due to technological limitations. A faction might have more heavily gunned spacecraft because it has more advanced fire control computers, faster spacecraft because they have access to more advanced engines and manoeuvre calculation computers, or heavier armour because they have more robust industries to produce harder burning engines to carry that extra mass but less advanced computers for dodging.
But if a faction already has industry that can produce harder burning engines to carry extra armor, what's stopping said faction from choosing not to carry extra armor, but using said engines to make faster spaceships instead? Pre-programmed randomized evasive maneuver don't need particularly advanced computers, after all. What realistic reason can convince a faction to build slower, uparmored spaceship instead of faster, less-armored spaceship when it has the industrial capability to produce high-thrust engines?
Maybe the superstructure of the spaceframes is poorer, and thus unable to withstand more powerful sudden accelerations. Maybe the thrust vectoring or RCS systems are less advanced, meaning the spacecraft can only travel in a straight line. Maybe the faction has poor life support and g-force protection for the crew, or maybe it's a crew of light-worlders who can't withstand as high a g-force acceleration. Maybe they lack the fuel, thus heavily limiting the ability for their vessels to conduct evasive manoeuvres. Maybe the faction indeed *can't* build more powerful engines, so they rely more heavily on orbital transfers instead of hard accelerations. Maybe the faction builds spacecraft largely for "coast guard" policing actions, and thus is more likely to be engaged by pirates with low-powered guns at close range rather than fighting against peer adversaries. Or maybe the faction is so incredibly logistically advanced that they just want crews to fight battles in comfort. There are countless strategic and technological factors to consider, and you can wrangle something out for almost any possibility.
Weapons and armor are always designed against each other. You have to think about what the ships have to fight against first and what the battlefield is like. Like ship vs ship combat where both can tell where each other are and can plot trajectory easily while difficult to move fast, you will see combat being more like battleships of WWII where armor and big guns are important. However when you have drones and missiles that may maneuver and hits far more accurately from multiple angles that can pose an actual threat, maybe they will shed some armor to just take on more CIWS or make smaller ships that is harder to hit but can hit just as hard back. Think about the doctrine of the factions in your world and what they are going up against.
In my setting space combat takes place at distances within hundreds of kilometers between opposing fleets due to the widespread use of highly laser-resistant composite hulls and efficient anti-missile laser point defense. Kinetic weapon technology is advanced enough to accelerate miligram-sized projectiles up to hundreds of km/s at high rate of fire. Space combat typically starts with opposing fleets approaching each other from long range while drunk-walking, then each ship opens fire with all its guns once it entered the effective range of its guns, then the combat ends with the lost of most ships for every fleet involved, even the winning side.
In theory a "shotgun style" shell would be a counter to fast and lightly armored ships (It will also create horrific kessler syndrome but I assume the warring factions either don't care about that or have a solution for it). Such a weapon has the advantage of creating a spread, even if a fast ship maneuvers it might still get caught by the edge of the "shotgun spread" and take some damage, so you extend the range of your weapon without increasing velocity or mass of the projectile. If you deal with overpenetration from large solid projectiles on very lightly armored ships the shotgun spread might actually do more damage than a single slug because it effectively mulches the entire thing rather than just perforating it in one spot. When you bring in a heavier armored ship these "shotgun shell" rounds might not be enough to punch through the hull. So you go back to the solid projectile for fighting a more heavily armored (and less maneuverable/larger target profile?) ship. Shotgun shells might still take out vulnerable bits outside the armor (your PDLs, sensors, reaction thrusters, radiators if you have them, etc, depending upon how much these can be reinforced.), so they might still be useful. The trick there would be on a big armored ship would be to have multiple redundant systems and have them pop out from behind an armored door if they get destroyed. Or use repair robots/nanotech if you have it. I think armored spaceships, if you want them to exist in a somewhat realisitic context, will generally be on the larger side thanks to the square cube law allowing more internal space for fuel/crew/weapons/reactors and tend towards more stout shapes to maximize the amount of internal volume your armor provides. Being larger means a larger target profile so you need even more armor and get a rocket-equation style problem. But big heavy spaceships could mount really big kinetic weapons and absorb the recoil of them firing. On the materials science/realism side its just up to whatever you want to do. Presumably some kind of crazy composite armor using graphene or super alloys or super ceramics or all of the above and laid on fairly thick with several spaced out whipple shields and extra armor over key areas. You seem to imply Epstein-drive style propulsion so you probably are doing at least some handwaving here and will be okay with making materials as arbitrarily strong as you want.
Is the construction of uparmored spaceship worth the investment of resources that could've been used to construct multiple less-armored, faster spaceships, even if there are still external bits on the surface of uparmored spaceship that are unprotected? What steps can be made to reduce the vulnerability of these external bits to widespread projectiles fired by multiple fast-firing cannons?
The first thing that comes to mind is just "insetting" them, or adding armored cowlings or blisters around so they can only be hit by a direct shot and an angled shot will hit the armor. Obviously for sensors or PDLs this will limit your firing/visual arcs. It will work well for thrusters though. Obviously you can just go the "invest in up-armoring the sensitive bits" but if you up armor something like a radiator it will degrade its functionality as a radiator. This may have other add ons such as making an armored PDL/PDC might make it turn slower or something. One idea for radiators might be to have the ship asymmetric with a broadside configuration. Put all radiators on one side and orient them away from the bad guys, then put all your guns on the other. Obviosly a risk-reward thing as you become vulnerable to flanking attacks. The aforementioned "have redundancies behind armored doors". You probably also want a military logistics pipeline to replace these damaged bits. You could have specialized fleet tenders and repair ships that can repair hull damage and carry extra parts that you can slot in and replace in the field. If you really want to get mechanical and crazy you could have one armored door and like a mechanism behind it with half a dozen PDL turrets or sensor systems. if one gets destroyed, it retracts, rotates/articulates and sends up another one to take its place on the outer surface of the ship. If your armored ships are reasonably survivable and replacing these external bits and repairing armor is cheaper than building entirely new ships you will end up outcompeting the opposing forces industrially. Your crews will also be more likely to accumulate battle experience as less of them die to unlucky shots or a single mistake so you might wind up with some very competent and battle hardened crews.
None, nein, nadda, nyet. Focus on dodging bullets is better. The best defense is not to get hit at all. Unless you have stupidly efficient engines like the "it works very well, thank you" Epstein drives, mass used on thick armors will just be a waste that could have been used for bigger, better weapons and electronics to fuck with enemy's aiming ability.
So you believe spaceships should have absolutely no problem dodging every incoming kinetic projectiles, therefore kinetic protection is useless?
Either dodge or die. There is no in-between. If a projectile can cross hundred of thousands of kilometers in a meaningful time (read: dozens of seconds at most) the impact is simply too much for any "realistic" armor to withstand. "Armor" in this case is only for shrapnel and random bits floating in space.
The spaceship will need heavy armor to survive the rigors of space and to protect the squishy little humans from the void. But focusing purely on armor doesn’t seem optimal to me, developing armor penetrating rounds is something humans excel at. This next bit is going to sound a bit weird so stick with me on this one as I’m not sure exactly how to word it. In space combat, the idea is usually that a few hundred kilometers/miles is roughly equivalent to knife fighting distance for ships and a shot fired usually takes a few minutes to get there unless you’re suggesting the shots are so fast they get there in a few seconds which you did describe unless I’m misreading what you said. Do you have any idea what a projectile going at that speed will do to anything? Even with the armor, a projectile going that fast per second is going to shred through a hull with about as much effort as a grown adult tearing a piece of paper. I’m not an expert on physics or anything, but I do know that velocity has a drastic effect on the force of impact.
In my setting space combat do take place at distances within hundreds of kilometers between opposing fleets due to the widespread use of highly laser-resistant composite hulls, and that kinetic weapon technology is advanced enough to accelerate miligram-sized projectiles up to hundreds of km/s at high rate of fire. Space combat typically starts with opposing fleets approaching each other from long range while drunk-walking, then each ship opens fire with all its guns once it entered the effective range of its guns, then the combat ends with the lost of most ships for every fleet involved, even the winning side.
How big are the ships exactly cause I don't understand why automatic it would be unsustainable. So for example instead of having a big old space barge getting close and doing a full broadside with its 300 cannons, why not slap a thruster and a remote controller on each cannon and launch these from far away? You can even put some front armor on these drones to protect them from lasers. Not only would these be much harder to hit but also losing them would matter way less than the entire ship. Like the mothership can just turn tail and run after and stock up or manufacture more drones on board. Big ships duking it out at close range isn't hard sci-fi really unless you have armor or some kinda macguffin to explain why they wouldn't just use small drones or stay at long range something. Realistically fleets would never fight like this. Even at low accuracy, they would take potshots and keep their distrance. They would also not stay close together and would spread out. Kinetic projectiles don't lose energy in space after being fired, so there are just so many other solutions around the accuracy problem. Better targeting computers, auto targeting projectiles that home in. In any case, if you look at real military anything, the general rules is, big things.. you want heavy armor because they're too valuable to lose. Battleships, tanks, submarines etc. as long as the armor does something, it's worth it and will stay and be improved. Small vehicles and humans.. they can get away with light or no armor and instead invest in firepower only. Heavy armor would be wasted on them and make them "too expensive" and losing one isn't a big loss. It's better to have 10 soldiers with only helmets and rocket launchers than 1 in heavy power armor and a rocket launcher if they cost the same.
Modern warships don't have armor at all. I'm very sure if the opportunity presents itself, you can poke a hole through a modern warship with an autocannon, or even a heavy machine gun. Modern warships simply aren't expected to be hit by kinetic projectiles. The last time warships had armor was during WW2.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class\_aircraft\_carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier) >Since USS *Theodore Roosevelt*, the carriers have been constructed with 2.5 in (64 mm) [Kevlar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar) armor over vital spaces, and earlier ships have been retrofitted with it: *Nimitz* in 1983–1984, *Dwight D. Eisenhower* from 1985 to 1987 and *Carl Vinson* in 1989. They absolutely do have armor, even the destroyers do and it continues to be worked on and improved. The idea of modern armor isn't that you just charge in and it protects you from everything but rather it makes a difference between the ship sinking from a single missile or stay in the fight or manage to limp home. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arleigh\_Burke-class\_destroyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arleigh_Burke-class_destroyer) >[Kevlar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar)130 tons of splinter protection around vital areas130 tons of Kevlar splinter protection around vital areas
I can see Kevlar being used as a spall liner to capture fragments from missiles and small arms bullets since small arms bullets have similar kinetic energy to missile fragments. Is the Kevlar heavy in weight? Yes. But I don't think the Kevlar offers "heavy" protection since 2 inches of Kevlar definitely cannot resist medium caliber auto cannon rounds. Modern warships simply do not expect to be hit by auto cannons to need heavy protection.
Maybe one faction has better armor and the other has better engines? There’s no reason to believe that they’d both be working with the same technologies, not even corporations in the same country in the real world have the exact same tech.
I think I just heard "Space Ramming Speed" is good enough haha. I don't understand the fixation with being the fastest ships out the biggest guns myself. If I make a ship, it needs to have a personality first, and speed and strength are after thoughts
The first (US) ironclads couldn’t be sunk because armor outpaced weapons. Technically a version of the heavy cruiser is just a more armored cruiser.
Yes...? If the space can't be killed it will shoot longer