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This is essential reading.





Read to find out! Lots of awesome theorising.

Well those battles will naturally be nothing like the ones in LotGH... but its a pity you know, there is a certain romanticism in the whole space is a sea idea... generaly I mean.

LotGH gets points for using the environment around them at times. It's been a while since I've seen it but I remember a black hole or some other phenomena being used in a strategy?

I remember Reinhard using a sun in the mutineer arc of the Gaiden too... and Yang really liked using asteroid fields to his advantage...

If you are curious about the conclusion of that plot you just need to watch Fang Of The Sun Dougram. Plot similar, colony form earth also wants independence from earth.

There were some points I hadn't quite thought of there. So that's really useful info for me if I ever get back to that book I was wanting to write. But that's a big if, of course...

I'd say it's best seen as combat between submarines that are in plain sight of each other. A single hit will rip the ship apart.

I found the article via digg.com, and in the talkback some dude mentioned why we never see ships attacking each other from all kinds of angles, like upside down and whatnot, which is a good point. But then another dude said that solar systems are laid out like a dish and so some kinda Universal Re-orientator on every ship could still make sense in that scenario.

Like, I want to see a face-off with four ships all aiming at each other in a cross formation. Just for the hell of it!

Didn't they have a cross formation for fighter groups in Homeworld?
The only real problem in Homeworld in regards to the full usage of 3d space was the fact that you couldn't really physically position your ships however you liked. I remember in HW2, in the mission where you're attacking a Space Station held by the Vaygr, in which I sent my entire fleet far above the station in order to evade the brunt of the enemy defenses.
However, when I issued the attack order, my ship just sort of descended "down" towards the target with their "bottoms" still facing "down", which made it seem a bit silly.But in space, you might not be in plain sight, and even if you see the enemy, he might not be at the same spot once your shots arrive at the target area.
Whether or not the ships are ripped apart also obviously depends on the armour and the power of the weapons used.

The single most important thing in space battles would likely be intelligence. Whether that means spies within the enemy military or drones and listening posts, you would need to know within reasonable accuracy where and when the enemy would appear before even moving out.
Of course, that would obviously be influenced by the orbit physics as mentioned in the article and obviously the locations of points of interest, mining facilities, colonies, planets or space stations. But even so, in a desperate war, you might always have enemies movin from completely unexpected directions only to surprise you even if there aren't many strategic targets there.

And of course, stealth. Jamming the enemy sensors or hiding in asteroid belts while launching AI controlled drone fighters that double as missiles would be a splendid tactic.
So I'd imagine that if there were to be any space warfare, you'd end up with a small number of large baseships carrying a large number of drones to create a sphere of surveillance and offense/defense while trying to conceal themselves as best as possible, only emerging from hiding to strike the finishing blows with lasers or something.

The solar system is not completely a dish though. Only the sun and major planets operate on one plane, but comets and semi-planets (whatever you call those smaller planets since the reclassification of planets in 2006, Plutoids?) do not necessarily do so. If there was space warfare, i'd say that those types of objects would become relatively more important due to the minerals that they might hold which are perhaps rare on the planets and moons of the solar system, which are relatively uniform in their elemental make-up.

A couple of other interesting sources of this sort of thing that I'm aware of (being very unscientific, I can't vouch for their content) are Atomic Rocket and Rocketpunk Manifesto.