Starships designed for ramming

I am thinking of space fantasy setting as an outgrowth of my medieval fantasy. Now, one of mechanics I had implemented is a magical energy field which prevents anything above certain velocity and energy treshold from passing through (so sunlight is fine, but laser gets rejected). What this means is that infantry and naval combat are both based on Middle Ages tactics - warhammers, swords; and in space, ramming and boarding.

So what would a starship designed with such tactics in mind be like? I am thinking of something similar to Roman trireme or ships used in Battle of Lissa, where a ram is mounted at prow tip of the ship's keel (although starship's keel is likely to be placed in center of the ship).

 

It's not easy hitting a moving target, especially in the vastness of space. Are you referring to ramming a stationary ship?

 

If you make it difficult to accelerate or decelerate a (larger) spaceship quickly then I imagine it would be possible for a smaller, more maneuverable spacecraft with pilots trained to endure higher g's to match velocity and indeed ram the bigger ship. Their speed relative to one or another star or planet may be kilometers per second but it doesn't matter as long as their relative speed to each other is low enough.

I wouldn't know about spaceship design, though. A ram sounds fine. Maybe something like a chainsaw? Or something that drills a hole into the other ship's hull and inserts an explosive device?

An essential difference to sea ships would of course be that space battles are 3-dimensional.

 

The tactical advantage for rammer should possibly be lightweight, small crew. So the outcome is low cost high gain.
The tactical disadvantage of target is high cost and high risk, and slow response when large crew is busy with coordination.
The balance can be provided by counterattacks against rammer ships with even lower cost non piloted ram drones.

The combat outcome could be mostly dependent not on the ships, but on the marines who are reaching engagement. So naval tactics for large target is to evade the boarding: pushing away the rammers, hiding in landscape, posing as decoy or hospital ship or civilian barge.

 

Right. Boarders will be better. I thought of rammers because read too much about ramscoop drives.

 

Unless the ramming portion was designed to take advantage of vacuum welding. When two pieces of the same metal come into contact in space, with out a protective layer of oxides, they will fuse into one piece of metal. So if the ramming portion was made to remove and penetrate any paint or surface layers, it could work similarly to a Roman corvus. Once attached, the ship could send over boarding parties, or simply fire point blank into their hull.

 

Warhammer 40K has breaching torpedoes loaded with Space Marines.
Breaching ships are a common thing in more Military based and Space
Opera type stories and shows. Though the common method seems to be
one that latches on to the hull of the target vessle and either drill with a
coned drill bit into the hull to prevent causing atmospheric leak, or by
using charges to blow a hole that is sealed by some type of gasket system
to achieve the same effect as the drill method.
A plasma barrier can be used as a 'shield' of sorts to keep the breach from
leaking precious oxygen in theory, due to it's properties.
I am sure that even Star Trek has some kind of breach pod that uses their
magical non-explained shielding to a similar effect.
You have to consider the application of such a craft: Is it for assault or for
investigative purposes?
Military will want something that works quickly and is suited for fast entry.
while investigative can rely more on cutting into the hull by means of a plasma
cutter to allow for the time to not effect a good lock seal dock. Though in either
situation it is low in odds that an enviro-suit will not be employed as an extra
level of safety to the breaching party, cause there is no way of knowing if the
area is pressurized with breathable gasses or simply left sealed off to the
vacuum of space due to damage or non critical parts of said vessel being breached.
Further more you have to know if the ship that is to be breached is using either a
kinetic defense or magnetic one to counter attacks/space debris. Cause unless you
Star Trck/Star Wars it where the mythical shielding does whatever the plot demands
it too, then breaching will be far harder in the long run on either side.
Though I would think that magnetic shielding would be the more common of the two
since it can deflect the staple plasma/laser/particle accellerator weapons that are too
common in Sci-fi in the extreme majority of cases, which will not stop kinectic projectile
of any kind, provided it isn't a mechanical guided one with unshielded systems to counter
the electro-magnetic effects. Though most Sci-fi sheilds act as both kinetic and energy/beam
based denial systems. So in the vast majority of cases you have to overload the generators by
bombardment to wear them out, so a breach can be done while they are 'active'.
Realistically, ships of most nature would rely on thick hulls for shielding against even the
basic day to day navigations, to counter the many tiny impacts from debris while traveling
in space. A better counter for both types (Civilian and Military) is to have a dual hull, with the
outer thick and resilient, and a thinner to capture what ever kinetic energy is left with a gap
between them. Or more likely on the Warship end, it has an extremely dense hull several meters
thick all around a central command/housing core, which will be virtually impenetrable by most
attacks due to having to chip away at it slowly, and would have to basically work one section
of focus near something vital to be even remotely effective.

Good luck.

 

No, I am talking about space combat tactics. As I noted, defensive fields limit relative velocities of ships - you can have velocity relative to e.g. a planet as high as you like (unless planet itself also has a defensive field), but unless you reduce velocity relative to another starship, they just bounce away.

So a tractor beam / grappler hooks, and a prow-mounted hatch with something capable of drilling / burning through the hull?

And yeah, I know it has been done. But I want my galley warfare in space.

That would work, but how quickly does vacuum welding happen? Quickly enough to prevent ships from bouncing away from each other?

One idea I had was that essentially that they use gravity bubble / warp drive for propulsion, which also has the effect of curving weapons fire around the ship. But I rejected it after realizing such a manner of propulsion would also render the ship blind.

 

You'd have to do research, but if I remember correctly, it happens the because of the way metals molecular bonds work. So as long as the portions to be joined touch, sharing their electron shell, they bond more or less instantly. Which could be good or bad, depending.

 

Yeah, makes sense. Though I guess you would also want to separate ships afterward without ripping something apart, so it might not be very practical.

 

That I don't know. I remember watching a physics video
on how it works in theory, and the warp bubble has enough
gravitational force to crush a planet if the ship stops too close
to it.

 

Isaac Arthur (an absolute genius futurist whose YouTube videos you should watch) talks about the physics of spaceships and space warfare, and there are two key lessons:

1) There is no stealth in space.
2) Slowing down or changing direction is a major challenge.
3) Speeds are silly (thousands of kilometres per second).

Under known physics, making one object ram another over vast distances at intense speed would be impractical: either it would miss (very likely) and travel hundreds of thousands of miles for a second shot, or be a suicide mission, creating an enormous debris field - and if that debris falls, God help the planet! If someone was going to do it, they'd use a conventional blob of matter with sails - propelled by a laser - instead of a manned vehicle.

But seriously, you should look at Isaac Arthur's videos on space warfare.

 

Timed release projectiles. So a projectile flies in under the levels protected against and then has a secondary launch function which activates after being past the forcefield.

 

If they could get something to work with missiles or small craft, that would likely have more flexibility than ramming. Ramming is a rather all or nothing tactic, especially given the distances and speeds involved. Space isn't just big, it's way bigger than we would imagine, and that's just local distances between planets in one solar system.

 

Read about the Sun Crusher.

 

Yeah, that is a problem as well.

I am aware of that. Which is why I am looking for ways to make space ramming at least somewhat practical. Right now, combining Galactica-stype jump drives with velocity-limiter fields seems to be the only option. And it is not the only reason why I am considering such a setup; see my reply to Matt E.

Yeah, I know. As I replied to Gallogdah, I am now thinking of combining velocity-limiter fields with nBSG-style jump drives. You see, one of inherent problems with space warfare is that any ship, given enough time, can become a planet cracker - no need for a Death Star! So you either need planetary shields - but how do you attack the planet at all if it can shrug off a multi-million-ton relativistic projectile? - or you need to somehow limit the starship performance, at least in proximity of a planet.

 

My semi-educated reader mind would call bullshit on instantaneous vacuum welding on a scale needed to stick two ships together. The various space stations dock with supply ships regularly, astronauts space-walk and repair satellites etc. That's not to say that it might not be possible in the real world, but it would require more convincing than I think you'd be able to do in space opera setting.

The relative velocity thing reminds me of the personal shields in Dune. One thing that doesn't exactly fit the bill but is similar is the "pebble swarms" in Kim Stanley Robinson's.... ummm, 2302 maybe? The city on Mercury had a laser defense system that would blast any incoming meteors greater than a certain size while counting on normal kinetic armor to deal with smaller bits and bobs, but the bad guys (spoiler) figured out that by very precisely targeting the city with a whole bunch of small objects that arrived at the same instant, they could create an impact equal to that of a larger rock without triggering the defense systems.

I think for actual ramming you just need to do a whole lot of hand-waving and hope the space opera enthusiasts like it. There was some movie series or other that had space wizards fighting each other with laser-swords that did all right as I recall

 

Hyper space in SW originally made the ship and occupants intangible to normal space,
and this prevented things like misc. collisions with other ships and other things in space
from affecting the FTL travel. Though there are instances in the EU that two ships in
hyper space can interact the same way ships in normal space could.
Then Disney McGuffined the whole thing up, just to make the plot work in the movie
that used hyper space speed to destroy the dreadnought. In the original cannon, they
would have just fazed right though the ship, causing nothing to happen.

 

What you say is true, from a certain point of view. In the series' hyperspace still works the same, and going by the rules established in the films it still works the same. But even in extended universe, ships had to bring themselves up to just under light speed before they could launch into hyperspace. So getting to hyperspace speed without going into hyperspace should have done far more damage than what was pictured.

 

I'm confused by the concept of a type of shield that will deflect bullets but allow a spaceship to pass. Bullets travel at a thousand miles an hour, spaceships travel at a thousand miles a second. Without some radical new types of materials, ramming spaceships would not work; the amount of energy in such a collision would just be too high. Especially if you are close to the speed of light. I calculated here: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/interstellar-war.149991/page-2#post-1521615 that if the shuttle hit the earth at .99999c, it would be an extinction-level event. This would melt the Earth's crust at the impact location, which is several miles thick, so no amount of armor will save you. It could be useful for a kamikaze-style attack though. If you plowed a canoe into an aircraft carrier at near the speed of light, you'd certainly sink it (there would probably be very little left to actually sink.)

 

Yep, a ship about the size of an average house going C-ish would destroy
the earth on impact.
A canoe going C hitting an aircraft carrier would probably send shrapnel
for a thousand miles or so, possibly bits entering orbit. But they would see
the vapor trail as the water turned to steam behind the canoe, since the
heat of friction would flash boil the water at those speed.

 

Weird as it is, this is a pretty common trope in sci-fi. They're usually called something like kinetic shields or something, and the principle behind them is that they dissipate an amount of kinetic energy, usually tailored so fast moving but small objects like bullets can get stopped pretty easily by them, but larger, slower objects can pass through. It has some practical applications, like having ships that can resupply without completely dropping their defense, with the downside being that the things being protected by them are usually disabled or crippled by piloting a ship or rolling a grenade underneath it. It sounds counter intuitive to how you'd think sheilds should work, but in reality it's pretty much exactly how water works when you fire bullets into a pond. The more force behind the bullet, the faster water will dissipate it.

 

It depends on how large/fast the ships in question are. When you’re talking something traveling at hundreds or thousands of kilometers per second, as any space craft that hopes to make trips in a reasonable amount of time, even a glancing impact will have enough energy to turn the objects into gas and dust. Obviously, you can write in magic, or super strong materials to justify ships not disintegrating on impact, and if so, more power to you.

As for design, they’d include some kind of tractor beam or physical grapnels, for boarding actions. Perhaps magnetic clamps, or something as simple as a harpoon. For ramming, the bow would need significant reinforcement, either powerful magic reinforcement, or an absurdly thick and strong material to keep the ship from crumpling on impact. Even then, barring word of god, the energy involved in the ramming would cause enough structural damage to the ramming ship that it probably wouldn’t want to do another one anytime soon.