Yes, but (speaking in general) that isn’t necessary to show that theories are incorrect.
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This brings me to the following question. Obviously machinery and technology always bring the edge on this kind of warfare, but with the use of drones and AI for bombing and dog-fighting protective actions, isn’t it going to the next level? By that I mean, are we taking away the human factor from warfare per se? Is it all going to depend on who has the most resources and better technology and AI?
Looks like the human factor will get reduced to tactical (in a major war scenario) and mechanical-maintenace-design, but not in the fighting itself.
And collateral damage, of course.
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The question can boil down to “do you want futurism or a WWII game?”.
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Outer space is excellent for maintaining social distancing. Now would be the time…
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One big consideration there is that if your people aren’t coming back in body bags your incentive to end the war is sharply reduced, to the merely economic. Some might argue that this has already happened.
To be fair, when designing a setting that’s a question one should be answering anyway. (Or a Napoleonic game, like Star Trek.)
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Absolutely! Even if you are aiming to design the most realistic projection of future whatsits that you can devise, and planning to discover and be content with whatever gaming or narrative opportunities it naturally affords, that’s a choice, a personal answer to a question.
(Or a Napoleonic game, like Star Trek .)
Or a Victoriana setting, like Niven & Pournelle’s CoDominium and Empire setting.
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Ah, but war can be very economically profitable for some… but that gets us into the murky waters of economics and war… better leave them untouched.
I just don’t want to think that it would be like if we remove the pilots from Formula 1 by AI, probably nobody would be interested in watching it… but somehow I hope you get my point. Would you be interested in a game where your decisions are not saving lives but… microchips?
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At that point the interesting decisions are at a higher level: where do we send our robot soldiers in order to achieve our aims?
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Well, maybe.
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If a game has really good gameplay at the abstract level I might be interested in that, even if the theme were not compelling. For example, Go works very well with no theme I can discern, and I really enjoy Scrabble. I seem to recall that Star Fleet Battles was a bit of fun back in the day, even while we were joking about its
WWIWWIIin SPAAACE theming at the time, and there were no characters involved. -
As for RPGs Transhuman Space, for example, makes a solid effort at getting the players to think that maybe chips are people too. I admit that I don’t play THS myself, but it clearly works for some people.
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I know that if the game is good, it doesn’t really matter, I would play it (in the end it will be tokens or minis). You can always think of “reducing future casualties” or “expanding my dominion”. But the cost of lives does give things an edge.
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I think I’m not interested in a tactical wargame of the nonsapient robots attacking other nonsapient robots.
On the other hand I might be interested in a game in which you set up the tactical software for your robot and then saw how it did against the opposition, a sort of less comical Robo Rally. (Very demanding on the players though.)
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In my mind, sci-fi that is too real isn’t really interesting. Give those robots personalities and desires and suddenly I’m on board. I like science fantasy best, I guess.
I think Gratuitous Space Battles is kinda like this concept of ‘see how my designs fare vs. other people’s designs’, but it’s a video game. That being said, it being a video game makes it do all the heavy lifting.
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Ah, Star Fleet Battles. Where the rules look like tax forms, but include interesting lines like “The Mauler cannot be swung across the map, a la lightsabre.”
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Realistically speaking, I don’t think a space force would very closely resemble the navy or the air force; space has a few interesting points of it’s own. While centralizing command into a capital ship might be cheaper, the redundancy of many small ships would be an advantage for them, and much more in line with actual space projects. So I envision the space force structure like this: The bulk of the fighting is done by small automatic drones; but for each 100 or so drones, you might have 20 or so manned command ships, with 2 or 3 people each, as cutting the time lag on orders would be a massive advantage. Of course, this would make them a target of the enemy drones, so they’d never be true armchair captains, but loss of life would be minimized. Ultimately, targets would be colonies and space station s, which would also be mostly manned, so there would be infantry and artillery units as well, to protect those, though most of the soldiers would be officers commanding the robots, not actually pulling triggers.
Fundamentally, war is only important as it affects the civilian population, so making it a total abstraction will never happen.
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There’s an interesting passage in the “Lost Fleet” series about humanity’s tendency to make big orbitals despite how completely useless they are in a fight. As soon as you know the position of an orbital, it’s dead: just throw a slug (with the appropriate artillery-computations to determine where it will be when your slug intercepts it) and you’re done. Maybe a few dozen slugs per target, depending on the ability of things to intercept your unguided, dumb hunks of metal flying through space.
Ditto with planetary targets, really. The trick would be not accidentally extinguishing all life while fighting around gravity wells.
(Although that leads into an amusing article somebody once wrote for WH40K where an administrator is trying to explain to a fleet captain that “throwing rocks at planets”, specifically extinction-level asteroids, is significantly more expensive than viral-bombs or fusion-bombs… mostly due to fuel, time, and towing)
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This was always my understanding of how space combat would work.
“Sir, one of our drones has located the enemy ship. We’ve Iaunched 2 tonne of ball bearings / waste product at the target, and will update you if they change course in the next two weeks.”
About the only good use I can think of for one or two manned space ‘fighters’ would be as relay stations for sensor drones?
In saying all that, my favorite space setting will always be Bristol Blenheim’s in Space (or should that be SPAACE!). Largely cause I understand it without thinking too hard.
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Ona side note, in my work I occasionally speak with military types funding reasearch.
In one presentation on R&D somebody used the phrase “machine-speed warfare is coming, and we must be ready.” In a recent exercise, the explained a team of cheap drones had locked down a battlefield, with their human opponents unable to leave cover for six hours. I would guess that your vision is pretty close to the mark, with the majority of action being carried out with cheap, expendable drones, backed up by better autonomous decision-making. This would allow the control centers to be ever smaller in fleet proportion, and further from contact for longer.
In another meeting a more senior advisor gave a talk about the ethics of cyber-warfare in the “information domain”, mentioning that “we want to shut down their power, but we don’t want to switch off their hospitals.”
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