Aircraft Carriers in Space (Article)

Thanks, that was a really good article!

That was a really interesting article. Thank you for sharing it!

From the article: " If you do a fairly simple extrapolation of current technology, what you end up with is space combat as sort of ponderous ballet with shots fired at long distance at fairly fragile targets where you have to predict where the target is going to be. You don't end up with space fighters. You don't end up with lots of armaments. "

Anyone here read Jack Campbell's "Lost Fleet" series? (Well, okay, really John G. Hemry...) That's pretty much his scenario, with a few adjustments. Their weapons include "hell-lance" energy weapons (for shorter range work, iirc), missiles, and good old "grapeshot" (which, given that ships are moving at a measurable fraction of the speed of light, can cause incredible damage should you slam into it before you see it coming). But ship formations do high-speed passes at each other rather than 'sniping' from long distance, so that's a difference from the article.

It's interesting how, when ships arrive in a new sector (via jump gates) in 'his universe', they start to calculate how long until the ships in orbit around the system's sun can see them, based on being so many light-minutes out, etc. His space battles tend to be a bit more three-dimensional than most, as well, and he seems to have thought out 3D ship formations fairly well.

Thanks!