Let’s talk about aircraft carriers for a moment – I promise this is going to come back around to spaceships (though some of you may well enjoy the waterships just as much). The problem isn’t the model it’s the false certainty with which it gets presented.

It may be right! But I find the relative confidence with which this model is often offered as more than a little bit misleading. It’s actually handy for encapsulating this view of space combat that The Expanse essentially reproduces this model.Īnd, to be clear, I am not suggesting that this vision of future combat is wrong in any particular way. Evasion is typically dismissed as a possibility and with it smaller craft (like fighters) with potentially more favorable thrust-to-mass ratios. The assumptions run very roughly that, without some form of magic-tech (like shields), space battles would be fought at extreme range, with devastating hyper-accurate weapons against which there could be no real defense, leading to relatively ‘thin-skinned’ spacecraft. What I found most striking through was a relative confidence in how space battles would be waged in general, which I’ve seen both a little bit here in the comments and frequently more broadly in the hard-sci-fi community. The comments for that post were very active with suggestions for technological or strategic situations which would or would not make orbit-to-land operations (read: planetary invasions) unnecessary or obsolete, which were all quite interesting. Only time will tell if that is a successful strategy, though my teaching is all-online in any case!įor my musing this week, I wanted to actually return to some of the comments on the last Fireside’s musing. Those who pay less attention to higher education news may be surprised that the semester is starting so early, but most colleges (including the institution I am teaching at) have moved their schedules up and compressed them (by removing all of the holidays) in order to get the fall semester done before Thanksgiving, as a way (hopefully) to reduce the threat of COVID-19 outbreaks. I had hoped to have it ready to go, but the start of fall semester teaching has pushed that off until next week.

Hey folks! Fireside this week – sorry for those of you who were waiting patiently for the last post on cereal farming.

Space warfare xv rocketpunk manifesto