Naval warfare on Earth at one time was a battle of getting the most tonnage in the water. From Galleys to Biremes to Triremes. From Cogs to Galleons to Men-o-War. The battleship race. Bigger ships could carry bigger guns and take more of a pounding. Now we are in the age of smaller ships, due to technology, with the exception of those floating airbases known as Aircraft Carriers. But bigger ships are on the drawing boards, and while they won’t carry the same sort of guns that battleships once did, they will have very long range engagement envelopes with rapid fire weapons.
One of the things that caused a change in naval warfare was the introduction of the torpedo, and the ability of small torpedo boats to put a fish into the side of Capital Ships. Then came the Torpedo Boat Destroyer (commonly known as Destroyers) to escort and protect the bigger ships. Aircraft also changed the equation, and capital ships soon became floating AA platforms surrounded by smaller AA cruisers and multipurpose destroyers. These combinations were very hard to hit at sea, contrary to the belief of most people who do not study WW2 history.
Now it’s my belief that size will matter in space. A bigger ship can carry bigger weapons and more protection. Of course this comes with a caution. If weapons are such that one hit will destroy a ship, no matter how big, then smaller vessels will be the norm. But in most imaginable Universes that will not be the case for several reasons.
Let’s look at armored protection. For the sake of simplicity I am going to make all the vessels in this demonstration cubes, and the fields around them cubes, though the principles hold true for spheres, diamonds, triangles and just about any other shape you want to make your ship. So let’s have a ship that’s a one hundred meter square. It has a surface area of 10,000 square meters and a volume of a million cubic meters. Now let’s make that ship two hundred meters square. Now we have a surface area of 40,000 square meters, four times that of the smaller ship. But the volume is eight million cubic meters, eight times that of the smaller ship. The larger vessel can carry the same thickness of armor protection as the smaller ship while having eight times the amount of propulsive power (though of course some of that goes into moving the mass of the interior around). Or, even better, it can carry twice the thickness of armor for the same mass penalty as compared to its engines.
The same with force fields. Now in Exodus I use cold plasma in an electromagnetic field for protection, since I have no reason to believe there are other forces that can be used (but maybe gravity like in Weber?). Still, the larger ship would generate twice the amount of power per square meter of its shield than the smaller vessel, whether it was an electromagnetic field or a traditional magic type field from Star Trek.
The same with defensive weaponry. A larger ship would be able to carry eight times the magazine capacity, or four times the number of surface emplacements. Which would make its defensive fire much more difficult to breach. Of course this can be carried to extremes. The Death Star was the ultimate power in the Galaxy, but there was only the one (at a time). That made it the priority target. Putting all the military eggs in one basket would be a bad idea. One lucky hit could equal one catastrophic kill. Three battleships, not as likely. A hundred, no way.
And what about a catastrophic hit? Big ships of today and the recent past could take a pounding. The same would probably be true of the vessels of future space. In the Battlestar Galactica miniseries the Galactica took a hit by a nuke and survived. Armors should become much tougher with new alloys and nanotech. I would doubt a single hit by anything short of a gigaton device would knock out the space battleship of the far future. Fast moving objects, like hundred ton missiles striking with relativistic velocities might be another story.
So would really large ships be the only ones deployed in this future navy? I don’t believe so. Fifty battleships can only cover so much space at once. Border patrols, anti-pirate expeditions, escorting convoys, these would probably be left to much smaller vessels, which could also be used as screens to keep the battleships from being hit. Now in the cold hard equation of war a smaller ship with hundreds of crew that took less than a year to build is much more expendable than a larger vessel with thousands of crew that took multiple years to construct. If a destroyer catches a missile instead of the capital ship it’s a bitch for the escort, but an investment that paid off for the fleet.
The larger ship will rule, but it won’t be able to do everything. Let’s say you invest everything in a Death Star, and it is the most formidable thing in space. You have an Empire wide revolt, across tens of thousands of star systems. But your massive planet killer can only be in one system at a time. Maybe you can kill enough planets to make everyone else toe the line. Or maybe the probability that they won’t ever visit your planet might be enough to keep the revolt going. So it would be useful to be able to have military power stationed around your digs, even if you are not a despotic empire.
What about fighters, used so often in science fiction. Basically any beam weapons they carried would be useless against a heavily armored or shielded vessel, while every weapon a warship used would blot out a fighter. And remember, with no atmosphere, there can be no banking maneuvers that might throw off a shot. Unless you set up something like Weber did in The Shiva Factor, where the ether of space actually exists. The only use I could see for fighters would be as small missile carriers that come streaking in at high velocity, fire, and go racing out. It’s a type a warfare that would be hard on the fighters, with heavy losses, but in the cold calculation might be worth it. Losing two hundred fighters and four hundred crew versus a ship that masses hundreds of times more than the conglomeration of small spacecraft would be well worth it.
One last thing I like to include, something that drives me wild in many movies and TV shows. Despite all the protection, it is likely that something will penetrate the ship, maybe not in a catastrophic manner. But enough to turn a habitable area of the ship into a vacuum. So I think the crew would wear some kind of protection, not just space suits, which can be easily punctured, but some kind of armor. And if you’re going to wear armor, why not powered armor? It would be really useful to be able to lift heavy objects, like fallen pieces of metal that trap other crewmembers, or be able to open doors whose mechanisms are no longer working. And built in propulsion would also be a good thing to have, to cross those gaps created by weapons opening the hull, or to prevent being pulled into space by the evacuation of atmosphere.
In the next segment I will discuss my views of space weaponry, what would work and what really doesn’t, in my opinion.