I agree on the robotics bit, but I think you made the right choice having people in the ships. If there are no people, you end up with a story that’s pretty dull to readers (No humans = no empathy engaged ) and a very cold story without much dramatic sweep. Death by remote control, etc. (Incidentally Nikolai Tesla predicted this sort of battle long before DARPA and predator drones). The “all computer” situations in The Forever War work because they’re not the centerpieces, they’re in the “travel” sequences and there to break up the dullness of travel with suspenseful combat (in a story / reader experience / writing sense). You also get the tension of the characters having to relinquish control in a deadly threat and sit still hoping. I’m not sure how that could be pulled off in this story, so like I said, I think having people in it was the right choice.

If I understood right, they’re orbiting earth, with the level of orbit chosen to coincide with the three waves of attackers. I think I need a few more references to that during the story if I’m really going to get that, as it is, it felt a little deep space. You could have one of the alien waves decelerate or accelerate and the manned earthships react to that maneuver by shifting to higher or lower orbit, also, but that’s depending on how complicated you want to make it.

Nice work.

The incident with the missile could actually be fairly complicated – and, as with everything in this story, I didn’t do out any of the calculations to see exactly what all that would take. You’re right that the EDF fighter is more massive and therefore gets less acceleration per unit force applied, but it might have a higher-thrust engine than the missile, or larger propellant reserves. It might also have expended enough propellant earlier in the battle to throw off the missile guidance’s estimates of the fighter’s maneuvering capabilities. Dodging the missile, though difficult and expensive in terms of propellant, is not out of the question.

Yes, the fighters have three crew: a pilot who is responsible for maneuvering, weapons fire, and general command of the fighter (the main character); a systems officer whose job is to manage all the internal systems of the fighter, monitor performance, and perform damage control if possible (Gonzales); and a tactical officer who handles communications, sensors, and data coordination between the other fighters and platforms (Cooper). Gonz and Coop are likely very involved doing a lot of behind-the-scenes things that the main character doesn’t relate to us. For example, Cooper sets up a data feed from Platform Gibraltar and integrates that information into the EDF fighter’s computer so that the main character can get his fancy heads-up display with all the alien ship’s positions. I picked a three-man crew because the combat situation and spacecraft management are complex problems that likely require more than one person to handle.

If space robotics advances a bit, then the combat fighters could be roboticized. In that case, the humans would just be on the platforms and would make the strategic decisions, which the robotic fighters would then implement. However, for this story to take place in ~2020, space robotics would likely not quite be at that level.

My personal favorite space combat are the torpedo sequences from The Forever War. I know, No Humans Involved = static, but reasoned, I find those sequences to be hard SF. Since it takes humans too long to react, the whole thing is computer controlled, and the officer just tells them what may happen. (torpedo and anti-torpedo arms race).

- “High Orbit” probably takes place around 2020. We have all the necessary technologies to build the EDF fighter today; the most farfetched one – so far – is the virtual reality helmet projection. The platforms are more of an issue, technology-wise.
- The aliens don’t necessarily have a smart plan of attack. Their attack was designed to give the intrepid crew of Blue Four a fighting chance to do some cool stuff in the story, and to illustrate some things that might happen in such a battle.
- I intentionally left some periods in the story when I don’t tell the reader how many minutes it is to anything. That is my concession to the fact that I didn’t calculate out all the fighters’ orbits, and a way to sweep some of the boring periods under the rug and make the story more exciting (though I include some bits about the between-fighting intervals). In reality, it takes 90 minutes to orbit the Earth at Space Shuttle altitudes, and longer in higher orbits (by a factor of the ratio of orbit radii to the 3/2 power). The alien attack groups’ insertion point was likely in the same place over the Earth with respect to the Sun and stars, so there would have been some multiple of 90 minutes between each interception, and the third wave’s mid-course correction would have shifted the point over the Earth where the alien dreadnaught came in.
- Typically, spacecraft don’t just do one burn to raise or lower their orbits. They would do a Hohmann transfer: two burns, one that puts your spacecraft on an eccentric, elliptical orbit that goes to the desired orbit, and another that “circularizes” the orbit at that point. Most of the times when I talk about course corrections in this story, it’s just one burn. That might be the case for relatively minor corrections (probably okay for this story, since most of the action takes place in Earth’s equatorial plane), but it might be the case that when things are moving quickly, you don’t care about recircularizing your orbit, you just want to get from one point to another.
- “Gimbal lock” is something any spacecraft with CMGs has to worry about. It would actually be possible (for some CMG array designs) to knock a combat spacecraft around so hard that its gyros line up in such a way that it loses maneuvering capability, at least temporarily.
- The flak gun would change the orbit of the fighter slightly, but as long as some technology like that in a recoil-less rifle is used, it might not be that much.
- Really, Blue Four should have died from that missile. It runs out of fuel before they do because…plot device. Still, there is that hope: once the missile runs out of propellant, it can’t follow the target, so the name of the game would be to perform maneuvers that your ship can accomodate within its fuel margin but the missile can’t. At least this impacts things later on, when Blue Four can’t respond to Fuji’s distress call.
- We would probably be able to see the enemy spacecraft coming in from the orbit of Mars or so. However, we wouldn’t know the size or disposition of the enemy forces until they were pretty close to Earth. To get the masses of celestial bodies, scientists watch how they orbit each other, but in an outer-planets-to-inner-planets transfer orbit, the aliens would be orbiting the Sun, which means we’d have to know the Sun’s mass to extraordinary precision to be able to tell how big the alien ships are. The EDF forces wait for the aliens’ EOI burn because that burn would have to be HUGE if they’re coming in all the way from the Kuiper belt.
- NASA used the melting-wax cooling system on the Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle’s batteries in the early 1970′s. The wax melted as it absorbed heat from the batteries, and when the astronauts returned to the Lunar Module to sleep, they opened up a radiator panel to let the wax freeze again while the rover was not in use. I haven’t done out the calculations to see what it would take to get such a system to work on a space fighter under the thermal load of a crew cabin, an engine, and a firing gun, but here I can lean on science fiction principles a little and suggest that materials scientists might have developed some new and interesting substitute for the wax. It helps that the cabin is depressurized, which keeps a lot of the worst heat load inside the crew’s pressure suits!
- A number of Gizmodo readers, and readers of my own blog, commented that IR sensors would be the way to go for combat spacecraft, because any ship with a nice room-temperature cabin would emit so much thermal energy that it would stand out like a beacon against the 2.7 Kelvin background of space. I thought about that for a while (since I forgot thermal issues entirely in my original musings!) and I think that, while Ir would be important, it won’t be the be-all, end-all detection system of space combat for the reasons in this story: spacecraft can include thermal management systems that might reduce their temperature signature (at least from some directions) to, say, 100 K or lower. If you want to detect a 100 K object, your detector optics had better be colder than 100 K so that their own thermal radiation doesn’t swamp the signal you want to pick out, and if they’re even colder, that improves your chances. So you would need to cryocool the IR sensors, which means a whole slew of other thermal management issues for your space fighter. They’re not impossible to solve, but you might end up with exactly the situation mentioned in this story: only the big spacecraft, with their mass, power, and surface area, would have high-quality IR detectors. The small ships have visible-light cameras for human use, and radar similar to the Apollo LM’s ascent radar, which homed in on the orbiting Command Module for rendezvous. Fortunately, Cooper can tie in to the data from the platforms’ IR sensors to get targeting information.
- I’m not sure how practical the floppy-mirror sensor countermeasure would be. But it was an interesting idea, so I wrote it down.
- Since there’s no air in space, a stricken fighter would likely not explode outright; rather it would get punctured all over by the bullet strikes that hit it. It would only explode – perhaps “disintegrate” is a more precise term – if it was struck with the energy from a missile in the story. So, I think it’s actually not farfetched that the crew of a “destroyed” combat spacecraft would survive as long as they hadn’t been hit directly, and you get the scene in my finale. Rescue pods, stand by!
- Several people on Giz and here commented that flak cannons would be a terrible idea, because they would make the orbital debris situation so bad that just about ALL the spacecraft would be wiped out. Flak in space might be as bad as land mines on Earth. I absolutely agree that the debris would get out of hand very quickly in a space battle, and collateral damage and friendly fire would be HUGE issues. But I still think that flak is the way to go for destroying enemy spacecraft if you don’t have missiles available. Really, whenever a spacecraft gets destroyed, it creates so much debris that the flak is probably a drop in the bucket – and the flak is probably on an orbit that will deorbit and burn up relatively quickly, since it was launched from a gun pointing in some odd direction. In addition, it takes at least an orbit for the debris from an explosion in space to spread out enough to create more than a localized hazard (e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyG3zqLyW8k ). This debris is probably the real reason for combat spacecraft to have armor, not enemy gunfire.
- I still stand by all my previous arguments about why nukes wouldn’t be used in dedicated space combat. However, we have a lot of ICBMs available to us right now, so if the aliens DO attack around 2020, that’s what we’ll launch. They would do just as much damage by simply striking the alien ships as by detonating, but maybe the radiation blast would help damage their systems.
- There aren’t any robotic drones in this story (at least on the human side) because we don’t really have mature enough space robot technology yet. We’ve only accomplished automated rendezvous and docking a handful of times, and our most successful space robots operate on commands relayed from the ground hours or days previously. Combat drones would have to make all their own tactical decisions, with occasional strategic data uplinks. That is not to say that we won’t get there eventually – but I hope those are autonomous explorer robots and not combat robots.
- You might have guessed that the platforms correspond roughly to the big space agencies active today. I named them after big, rocky landforms, since they got carved up from bits of asteroid.