Ship-to-Ship Combat

## **Transcribed from Professor Chung’s Lecture at the UMC Naval Academy, Earth (2242)**

Good afternoon, cadets. Be seated.

Over the next six weeks, you’ll receive the finest education the UMC can

muster on the means and methods of ship-based combat. Fighting in space isn’t twice as hard as fighting in air or water. It isn’t three or four times as hard. It’s an entire order of magnitude more difficult.

Zero-g is a non-intuitive environment for the human brain. Even if you grew up on a ship or station, as some of you have, there are aspects of inertial maneuvering you will not understand without proper instruction. And no matter how sharp you might be when it comes to good old slower than light, FTL throws those rules out the airlock and stomps on them until they’re a bloody mess.

The maneuvering capabilities of your vessel and those you fight alongside will determine where you can fight, who you can fight, and—if needed—the requirements of retreat. Space, as has often been stated, is not only large, it’s larger than you can imagine. If you can’t close the distance between you and your target, they are invulnerable to your fire. This is why it is often advantageous to drop out of FTL with a high degree of relative motion. But not always. Circumstances vary, and as officers, you will be called upon to make those sorts of judgment calls.

You will learn the capabilities and the limitations of our fusion drives. You will learn why—despite what you may have seen in games or movies— the concept of personal combat space vessels is not only outdated, it never was a thing. A drone or missile is not only cheaper, it is far more effective. Machines can withstand far more g’s than any human. Yes, on occasion you get a radicalized miner or a local cartel member who uses a smaller spaceship for piracy or the like, but when confronted with a proper warship such as our new cruisers or battleships, they always lose.

When you do engage the enemy, combat will be a strategic interplay between the different systems of your ships. A chess game, where the goal is to inflict enough damage on the hostiles to disable or destroy them before they do the same to you.

Every weapon system we use has different advantages and disadvantages. Missiles are best for short- to medium-range attacks, but they’re too slow and carry too little fuel for longer-range engagements. And once you fire them, they’re gone. Point-defense lasers can stop incoming missiles, but only a certain number and only until the laser overheats. Casaba-Howitzers are also short- to medium-range weapons, but unlike missiles, lasers can’t stop them once they’re fired. In fact, nothing short of a solid wall of lead and tungsten ten or twenty meters thick is going to stop the radiation beam from a Casaba- Howitzer. The downside is their mass; you can only carry so many Casaba- Howitzers in your ship magazine. Also, at long range, the beam from a howitzer will widen, leaving it about as powerful as a wet fart in a blizzard. Medium to long range, you rely on your keel laser. But again, you have to worry about overheating, and your enemy can counter with chalk and chaff to disperse the incoming pulse. Mass drivers and nuke-powered penetrators can be used at any distance, as kinetic weapons have effectively infinite range in space, but they’re really only practical in close-range engagements where the enemy doesn’t have time to evade or long, long-range attacks where the enemy doesn’t know you’re shooting at them.

No matter which weapon or weapons you choose to employ, you will have to balance their use with your ship’s maximum thermal load. Do you fire your keel laser one more time or do you execute another evasion burn? Do you risk extending your radiators during a firefight in order to shed a few extra BTUs? How long can you risk cooling down before jumping to FTL if the enemy is chasing you?

Ship-to-surface combat has different requirements than ship-to-ship. Stationary installations such as orbital defense platforms, hab-rings, and converted asteroids all require unique strategies. If you choose to board an enemy vessel, how best to protect your troops as well as your own ship? Along with physical combat, you will have to contend with electronic warfare. The hostiles will be trying to subvert your computer systems and turn them against you. Jamming may not protect you, as the hostiles could use a line-of-sight beam to initiate a system handshake.

All these things and more must be taken into account when engaging in space combat. The environment wants to kill you. The hostiles want to kill you. And your own instincts and lack of knowledge will kill you—and everyone around you—if you don’t master these fundamentals.

Now, some of you are thinking, “Won’t the ship mind or our pseudo- intelligences handle most of these things?” The answer is yes, they will. But not all the time. A ship mind doesn’t have hands. What they can move or fix is limited, and that goes double for pseudo-intelligences. In an emergency, some things can only be done by a human. And there have been numerous cases where the ship mind or the ship’s computer system has been disabled by enemy action. When that happens, these decisions will fall to you, the next generation of UMCN officers.

The next six weeks will be some of the hardest six weeks of your lives. That’s by design. The UMC doesn’t want anyone who is unqualified to step onto a spaceship where they can endanger not only their own lives but the lives of their fellow crew. Better that you wash out now and go back to being swabbies who only have to worry about keeping their boots polished and their jaws off the deck. If you don’t think you can handle this sort of responsibility, get up and leave. The door’s right there, and no one, not me, not your superiors, and not the UMC will think any less of you for walking out now.... No? Alright then. Over the next month and a half, my staff and I are going to put you through the wringer. You will wish you gave up. But if you do the hours, work hard, and learn from the mistakes of those who paid for their knowledge with blood and lives, then you have a good chance of wearing your officers’ pips—wearing them and doing justice to them.

So study hard, and at the end of this program, I expect each and every one of you to impress me with your knowledge of space-based combat.

That will be all. Dismissed.