TODO: This page should have a lot of it's content moved to the technology pages, and instead focus on the use of fighters, missiles, etc.
This page contains some information about the NorAellians and how Humanity got subspace drives that no longer matches up with canon. This needs to be brought in line.
All starships operate under a single, unifying limitation: mass. The more mass you have, the more energy required to move. (If moving is not your goal, then you're a space station, not a starship.) Because mass is the limiting factor, acceleration is the primary statistic most starships care about. It doesn't matter how large or well armed your ship is, as long as you can beat another ship's acceleration, you can get close enough to shoot them, eventually.
Practically, there's plenty of other concerns (like energy output, armor, inertial compensation, armament, etc.) but the most fundamental thing two ships need to fight is the ability to close within range. This also means that the faster your ship can accelerate, the less likely it is someone will be able to close to shooting distance (all other things being equal).
The majority of military tactics are predicated on a ship's motion. Ballistic trajectories, acceleration, entire schools of battle are based entirely in defining the movement of starships. This makes a ship's propulsion king. You can have enough firepower to destroy a planet, but if your enemy can dip in range, shoot you, and dip back out before you can bring it to bear, it doesn't matter.
Starship propulsion has been the single most important technology and area of research over the last 700 years. After all of that time, there's exactly two propulsion types that remain in dominance, ion drives and gravity drives. Both offer their own unique tradeoffs, and are seen in very levels depending on ship type and race.
Ion drives date back to some of the earliest eras of spaceflight. They are incredibly energy efficient, but until the last two hundred years, they have had a very low maximum thrust. Scaling ion engines prior to gravitic manipulation quickly gave diminishing returns, limiting the maximum mass of starships to around a hundred thousand metric tons.
As gravity manipulation was in it's infancy, it's high energy cost made it ineffective as a direct source of thrust. However, using gravitic lensing, ion engines were able to achieve a huge multiplicitive effect, for a nearly fixed increase in energy cost. As the engines scaled, the emergency cost raised roughly with it's square, while the thrust raised to the 10th.
At the same time, fusion powerplants were becoming more common, making the increased energy requirements significantly more manageable..
Very few craft are made without ion engines, even if it's just attitude thrusters. Given the power output of modern reactors, ion engines are considered extremely economic for the amount of thrust provided. Their main problem is that they provide thrust along a single vector. While they can be vectored, their thrust drops with angle, and there is a hard limit (depending on the design of the engine).
The other limitation is that they require reaction mass. Generally, a ship carries far more reaction mass than it could ever use in a battle, but every few months they do need to refuel. Unfortunately, under fire, losing your reaction mass is a very real problem. The tanks are heavily protected, and have multiple failsafes, but a direct hit to a ship's fuel stores can cripple or even strand it.
Gravitic manipulation was hailed as the herald of "the modern era", much like nuclear power centuries before. In truth it was so energy intensive that for the first several decades, it was barely useful at all. It was only after NorAellian contact (and the subsequent trading in technologies) that reactor technology reached the point where gravitics could be used in a more practical sense.
Initally, gravitics were used developed solely for the purpose of proving (or disproving) the the existence of 'faster than light' travel. This was a point of tension between governments, as each assumed the other had already had the breakthrough required. However, it wasn't until the creation of a stable, commercially viable fusion reactor was built that sufficient gravitic manipulation was even possible.
The first FTL drive was a crude thing, not even qualifying as a subspace drive, but it proved what physicist has suspected for centuries: the speed of light was only a speed limit in the local frame of reference. This major breakthrough opened up the possibility of reaching the inner planets within days, not months. Almost immediately a war was started using these drives.
After trade with the NorAellians became more commonplace, it was noticed that their FTL drives didn't seem to behave anything like Humanity's. Not only were they faster, but they seemed to operate on their own rules. They could operate much closer to a center of mass, and they could even be used for defense from attack. It didn't take long before a shady deal landed humanity a working model. Within months, the first subspace drive was built.
Subspace drives work on the principal of folding space-time on itself, creating an artificial wormhole to tunnel into higher spacial dimensions. The deeper a ship tunnels into subspace, the 'straighter' the path it can travel between two points. At the same time, higher dimensions are tightly curved on themselves, meaning that the distance required to travel is exponentially shorter. By traveling in the 8th or 9th spacial dimension, it is possible to move at only a small fraction of the speed of light, while arriving at your destination as if you has traveled several hundred times the speed of light.
Additionally, objects with mass have 'shadows' that extend into other dimensions. The larger the mass, the 'deeper' it's shadow. If a ship is caught in an object's mass shadow, it's tunnel through subspace will be distorted, and the ship will need to exert more power to maintain the tunnel. The stronger the mass shadow, the more likely a ship is to burn out their subspace drive.
Subspace drives wrap the ship in a pocket of tightly curved All starships operate under a single, unifying limitation: mass. The more mass you have, the more energy required to move. (If moving is not your goal, then you're a space station, not a starship.) Because mass is the limiting factor, acceleration is the primary statistic most starships care about. It doesn't matter how large or well armed your ship is, as long as you can beat another ship's acceleration, you can get close enough to shoot them, eventually.
Practically, there's plenty of other concerns (like energy output, armor, inertial compensation, armament, etc.) but the most fundamental thing two ships need to fight is the ability to close within range. This also means that the faster your ship can accelerate, the less likely it is someone will be able to close to shooting distance (all other things being equal).
The majority of military tactics are predicated on a ship's motion. ballistic trajectories, acceleration, entire schools of battle are based entirely in defining the movement of starships. This makes a ship's propulsion king. You can have enough firepower to destroy a planet, but if your enemy can dip in range, shoot you, and dip back out before you can bring it to bear, it doesn't matter.
Starship propulsion has been the single most important technology and area of research over the last 700 years. After all of that time, there's exactly two propulsion types that remain in dominance, ion drives and gravity drives. Both offer their own unique tradeoffs, and are seen in very levels depending on ship type and race.
Ion drives date back to some of the earliest eras of spaceflight. They are incredibly energy efficient, but until the last two hundred years, they have had a very low maximum thrust. Scaling ion engines prior to gravitic manipulation quickly gave diminishing returns, limiting the maximum mass of starships to around a hundred thousand metric tons.
As gravity manipulation was in it's infancy, it's high energy cost made it ineffective as a direct source of thrust. However, using gravitic lensing, ion engines were able to achieve a huge multiplicative effect, for a nearly fixed increase in energy cost. As the engines scaled, the energy cost raised roughly with it's square, while the thrust raised to the 10th.
At the same time, fusion powerplants were becoming more common, making the increased energy requirements significantly more manageable..
Very few craft are made without ion engines, even if it's just attitude thrusters. Given the power output of modern reactors, ion engines are considered extremely economic for the amount of thrust provided. Their main problem is that they provide thrust along a single vector. While they can be vectored, their thrust drops with angle, and there is a hard limit (depending on the design of the engine).
The other limitation is that they require reaction mass. Generally, a ship carries far more reaction mass than it could ever use in a battle, but every few months they do need to refuel. Unfortunately, under fire, losing your reaction mass is a very real problem. The tanks are heavily protected, and have multiple fail-safes, but a direct hit to a ship's fuel stores can cripple or even strand it.
Gravitic manipulation was hailed as the herald of "the modern era", much like nuclear power centuries before. In truth it was so energy intensive that for the first several decades, it was barely useful at all. It was only after NorAellian contact (and the subsequent trading in technologies) that reactor technology reached the point where gravitics could be used in a more practical sense.
Initially, gravitics were developed solely for the purpose of proving (or disproving) the the existence of 'faster than light' travel. This was a point of tension between governments, as each assumed the other had already had the breakthrough required. However, it wasn't until the creation of a stable, commercially viable fusion reactor was built that sufficient gravitic manipulation was even possible.
The first FTL drive was a crude thing, not even qualifying as a subspace drive, but it proved what physicist has suspected for centuries: the speed of light was only a speed limit in the local frame of reference. This major breakthrough opened up the possibility of reaching the inner planets within days, not months. Almost immediately a war was started using these drives.
After trade with the NorAellians became more commonplace, it was noticed that their FTL drives didn't seem to behave anything like Humanity's. Not only were they faster, but they seemed to operate on their own rules. They could operate much closer to a center of mass, and they could even be used for defense from attack. It didn't take long before a shady deal landed humanity a working model. Within months, the first subspace drive was built.
Subspace drives work on the principal of folding space-time on itself, creating an artificial wormhole to tunnel into higher spacial dimensions. The deeper a ship tunnels into subspace, the 'straighter' the path it can travel between two points. At the same time, higher dimensions are tightly curved on themselves, meaning that the distance required to travel is exponentially shorter. By traveling in the 8th or 9th spacial dimension, it is possible to move at only a small fraction of the speed of light, while arriving at your destination as if you has traveled several hundred times the speed of light.
Additionally, objects with mass have 'shadows' that extend into other dimensions. The larger the mass, the 'deeper' it's shadow. If a ship is caught in an object's mass shadow, it's tunnel through subspace will be distorted, and the ship will need to exert more power to maintain the tunnel. The stronger the mass shadow, the more likely a ship is to burn out their subspace drive.
Subspace drives wrap the ship in a pocket of tightly curved space-time. While a subspace drive is active, interactions with objects in normal space are impossible; location needs to be inferred from the position and strength of mass shadows. (Most common locations have a beacon in subspace identifying its location.) Objects in subspace can interact with each other, but such interactions are complicated and given the energies involved, most interactions end up with mutual destruction.
Once the energy requirements for subspace drives were able to be met, gravitics started being used to replace ion drives as the primary means of propulsion. They had the advantage of not requiring reaction mass, allowing a ship to devote its precious mass to more cargo, larger engines, heavier armor, or more firepower.
The downside was that while maneuvering, there's less power available to do anything else. While not a major issue for transports, it's a significant problem for military ships. This lead to the saying, "You can move, or you can shoot, but not both."
Besides the obvious use of traveling faster than the speed of light, subspace drives both made military use of starships practical, and infinitely more complicated. It allowed them to get within range of each other in a relatively short span of time, but it also gave ships a way of defending themselves.