Modern Space Warfare

Qhevak's Clades and mercenary organizations operate a wide variety of military spacecraft due it's decentralized nature. There is a great deal of variety in design, but most of these details tend to be true for combat spacecraft. =Propulsion=

Military spacecraft built for direct combat typically use large Z-Pinch shear flow fusion "torch" drives. Deuterium-Helium3 (with a Helium3 excess to reduce neutron flux) reactions are triggered at a rate of several dozen to hundred times per second, with spin polarization used to mostly eliminate waste heat issues, and the plasma is channeled through a magnetic field to generate thrust. Propellant is usually piped in to boost thrust to combat levels at the expense of specific impulse - this is normally made out of a dense, viscous slurry similar is composition to wet concrete. Exhaust velocities are typically around 1-10% c, with combat accelerations typically ranging from 3-12 gees.

A starship's torch drive is usually often also it's primary combat power source, with electricity extracted from the fusion plasma via MHD. A ten million ton warship can typically draw around one to two hundred terawatts of power from the drive system to run its energy weapons.

=Weapons= The primary ship to ship weapons used are lasers and particle beams - gun-fired kinetics are far to slow to be effective against anything with active defenses. Lasers are typically directed phased arrays operating in the low visual to high ultraviolet range, normally used mostly as defensive, blinding and flanking weapons as sloped pyramidal armor can reduce frontal penetration by a massive factor. These can project broad spectrum EM emissions to jam and dazzle enemy sensors across the spectrum, which are normally modulated to encode highly infectious memetic viruses.

Primary anti-ship weapons are typically ultra-relativistic electron beams fired at a high enough fraction of the speed of light (within a percent) to drop beam divergence to near zero out to light-minutes, with effective ranges of light seconds against maneuvering targets. These are devastating against most targets, capable of cutting through tens to hundreds of meters of protecting while releasing enough high energy radiation to heavily disrupt enemy sensors and weapons. At point blank ranges of a hundred thousand kilometers or less, these can be used to fire positrons at a much lower velocity of 1-10% c, increasing destructive power by two to four orders of magnitude at a corresponding loss of long range effectiveness.

Missiles are too ineffective at penetrating point defenses for contact/proximity detonation, but can be useful in a support role. Typical warheads include large combat mirrors for focusing beams from larger warships onto targets at long range, bomb pumped x-ray lasers for saturating sensors with radiation, and shaped-nuclear-accelerated-kinetic warheads (using a small magsail to focus a large portion of the energy of a nuclear blast into a kinetic projectile moving at a thirtieth of lightspeed) for shipkilling. Due to the relatively short effective range of a few tens of thousands of km the latter is most effective against warships with heavily dazzled sensors, though also quite strong - a typical anti-ship submunition masses just over three tons and can sling a half ton projectile at ten thousand kilometers per second for a 25 petajoule impact.

Nukes are still the primary weapon of choice for engaging large terrestrial targets, though antimatter catalysis enables a significant reduction in radioactive contamination. Heavy bombardment bombs can have yields ranging from gigatons to low teratons. For extremely hard to crack targets, multi-teraton or even petaton yield antimatter "crustbusters" can be utilized.

=Armor=

Warship primary armor is typically made out of layers of tungsten and high performance hyperdiamond adamant, covered in a layer of quantum wellstone programmable matter that can change form to a wide variety of elements or molecules (including supermaterials not possible with conventional atoms), to perfectly adapt to attacks. Armor is typically sloped in a ridged pyramidal shape to massively reduce beam intensity. Even this is typically insufficient to take ultra-relativistic particle beam hits - therefore most vessels are built with propellant tankage around other internals, forcing the beam to penetrate tens to hundreds of meters of slurry before reaching more sensitive components.

Due to weapon lethality, ECM is critical in any serious combat. Phased arrays are the primary line of defence before armor, attempting to both barrage jam sensors via multispectral dazzling and hardkill missiles and kinetics directly with high energy focused pulses. "BoomBoosters" - miniature Orion style pulse units, are also used for rapid jinking, enabling rapid sideways vector shifts of hundreds of m/s^2. Last ditch defence against kinetics is "dustguns", hypervelocity macron accelerators that can spit out massive clouds of sub-gram projectiles at hundreds of kilometers per second.

=Heat Dissipation=

While traditional radiators and heat sinks are still mostly used by civilian spacecraft, the conventional radiators necessary to dissipate the waste heat of multimillion ton warships generating terawatts of waste heat would be overly vulnerable, while heat sinks would limit combat endurance to a matter of minutes. Current generation warships tend to deal with this problem using electrostatic droplet radiators, sending massive plumes of 2500K molten nickel out kilometers from the front of the ship before drawing it in with high power electrostatic fields, enabling effective operation under high combat accelerations. The size and low density of the plumes makes them very difficult to disrupt with weapons fire, and plume mass can easily be replenished from large internal stocks of nickel. Heat loads on modern Qhevaki warships are lower than one might think - modern chaotic system steering techniques enables DEW efficiencies on the order of 96% or higher, though final thermal loads are still nearly quadrupled by heat pumping requirements given the low temperatures particle beams operate at. Lithium heat sinks are used for temporary storage, though can not last long under serious combat conditions.

=FTL=

Faster than light travel involves manipulation of the 10th spacial dimension to create dark matter, and riding on the ensuing wave of expanding spacetime within a so called "warp bubble". FTL is capable of high transit speeds, capable of crossing the galaxy in a year, but can be disrupted but high gravitational force - it becomes slower and less accurate closer to planetary wells, and FTLi spacetime metric disruption can block travel within a radius dependent on the generator size. FTLi interdiction radius increases proportionally to the cube of the applied power, with ranges of a most a few light seconds for the largest warship mounted devices, and light minutes for the largest strategic interdictors. Tachyon based sensors can give larger warships fractional lightyear detection radii against other FTL craft, also precision of such sensors is rather low unless a large dedicated inferometer is utilized.

FTL transit speeds are on the order of 100,000c or more for modern drives in interstellar space, but are slowed by high gravitational tidal forces, which put strain on the structure of warp bubbles. A maximum speed of around 10c can be maintained by a modern warp bubble at 1 AU from Sol, with top viable speed increasing linearly with distance up to a maximum of 100,000 times the speed of light at 10,000 AU.

=Tactics and Strategy=

Modern warfare tends to be fought relatively near large planets or habitats, as the greater radius of strategic interdiction gives defenders more time to prepare while the opponent is in realspace. Tactical combat at a large scale typically involves use of larger dedicated fighters to provide large scale EM jamming and standoff UREB shots against enemy craft at ranges of 5-10 lightseconds, while autonomous missile swarms and dedicated particle beam "lance fighters" move in under jamming cover to attempt to achieve shorter distance kills.

Fusion power, nanorepair and energy weapons generally make logistics somewhat less important relative to earlier wars, but nevertheless very large logistical craft are needed to support the propellant, missile load and spare part needs of warcraft on larger missions. These almost always make up the largest portion of a fleet and are its most vulnerable element, usually being kept at random spots in deep interstellar space several tens of lightyears behind the main front.

=Warship Classes=

Fighters
Fighters are spacecraft purpose built for destroying opposing spacecraft in ship-to-ship combat. Contrary to common perceptions of the word, fighters are actually the largest class of mainline combat spacecraft in Qhevak - the fusion power and directed energy weapon systems that dominate space combat get more efficient at larger sizes.

This class is mostly divided into general purpose space superiority fighters, ECM fighters, and smaller "lance fighters" built around a single heavy spinal.


 * HAV-190 Archangel
 * MAV-172 Mikha'Il
 * MMR-044 Raging Bull
 * XMAV-202 Ramiel
 * OyT Asabikeshiinh
 * Type 02 Kappa

Cruisers
Cruisers are midsized spacecraft intended to perform a variety of roles in and out of wartime, including scouting, raiding, showing the flag and expeditionary missions. These are typically the largest warcraft other than fighters.


 * LGV-215 Seraph
 * Ba-59 Gallatin
 * LGV-1 Cherub

Planetary Assault Craft
Planetary Assault Craft are exactly what the name implies - craft designed to carry and support attack forces in assaults on planets or large space habitats. Due to the need to operate in close proximity to enemy forces, PACs are typically small by the standards of warships, with high thrust at the expense of Isp and impressive EWAR suites for their size.


 * Ba-71 Grizzly
 * Type 04 AiNoi
 * TTI-44A Roc
 * Ba-99 Wraith

Gunships
Gunships are small multirole spacecraft designed for short ranged operations in the vicinity of planetary bodies. Common with mercenaries, they often lack FTL, and are typically armed with short ranged but very high yield weapons.


 * Ta-19 Yrthak

Autowars
Autowars are autonomous fleets designed to independently self replicate in the absence of larger infrastructure. They are necessarily relatively simple designs and stand little chance against more conventional warcraft without extreme numerical advantage, but are extremely useful for commerce raiding and harassment purposes.


 * Type 05 Nanakoi
 * Ba-77 Locust

=Experimental Technology= These weapons are currently in the experimental phase, most under development by the Order. None are currently in service, though are under testing, and most would see some use in an emergency scenario.

Matter–Antimatter GeV Graser Rocket
Through the collapse to ultrahigh densities of proton–antiproton pairs in the center of a relativistic high current, these pairs can become the upper gigaelectron volt laser level for the transition into a coherent gamma ray beam by proton–antiproton annihilation, with the magnetic field of the collapsed pinch discharge absorbing the recoil momentum of the beam and transmitting it by the Moessbauer effect to the spacecraft. This can provide extreme thrust at an exhaust velocity of c with little waste heat.

This propulsion system is under testing in the XMAV-202 Ramiel, and is likely to see field use soon.

Mobile Wormholes
Visser wormholes have been used broadly for long distance transit, and are becoming more and more miniaturized over time, but are still dense, expensive and difficult to transport at high accelerations. Research into wormhole applications therefore typically involve the use of very small Visser wormholes for instantaneous communication between the carrier ship (mostly HEV-190Bs) and a home base, enabling instant communication across an entire galactic front, providing an enormous OODA loop advantage.

A longer term possibility is portable non-orientable wormholes, enabling on the fly antimatter manufacture for weapons, propulsion and power.

Nonlocality Network
Use of quantum energy teleportation to transmit large quantities of energy at lightspeed via broadcast is widespread in habs, allowing technology to charge from the local grid anywhere it has a network connection. Military use has been limited, however, by difficulties with maintaining effective transmission over distances of more than a few kilometers. Some experiments have managed distances of a few tens of thousands kilometers - if mass produced, a single warcraft with a comm-gauge wormhole would be able to instantly provide it's entire formation with energy from a much larger reactor back home, enabling significant increases in power.

Hypometric Beam Cannon
It is unclear if this weapon exists. In the event that the Entangled Order had figured out how to use warp bubbles to manufacture limited pp-waves, generating a lightspeed beam of singularities that erased spacetime as it traveled, this would no doubt be a quite terrifying weapon.