i remember watching on the discovery channel, or one of those, that in space there is no air acting on the ship. So, the size of the ship would not matter on maneuverability. To turn you would need an thruster or engine or some sort of blast to fire off to make the ship turn

It's a little thing called inertia.

Yes Inertia means that the mass of an object will affect its manoeuvrability. In a vacuum it’s shape that doesn’t matter because of lack of friction with the air.

Zyxpsilon Play Nice Or All The Ship Will Run And Hide     

It's true that larger ships with more mass would be less maneuverable (assuming all other things being equal, like ratios of engine size and power generators to hull size), but why would it be difficult to target and hit a smaller, more maneuverable ship? We're talking about advanced, space-faring civilizations here. They're not going to be aiming and shooting by hand (or tentacle, claw, whatever).

Beam weapons work (presumably) at light speed, so they hit where you point them. Missiles will be self-guided, and home in on the target. Projectile weapons like mass drivers are technically slower and unguided, but still fast enough to act like a beam weapon at the very close distances modeled in the combat screen. They could be designed to counter evasive maneuvers by firing in a "spread" or cloud, instead of a single line of projectiles. Maneuverability in space won't keep you from being hit. If it did, we'd have only tiny and small ships in the game, and that would be boring.... all other realism issues aside.

Anyway, I like the way the current game mechanics favor larger ships. I think real space combat, if it ever happens, will revolve around capital ships as the main players, and not the WWII fighter theme seen in so many movies and space games. Also, as someone said in another thread, since larger hulls take longer to research and cost more to build and maintain, they should have some advantages.

An interesting question. Even todays aircraft are not anymore limited by air friction or inertia. The weakest part is a human. More that 5-10G acceleration and the whole crew becomes unconsciousness or dies.

This means ships in space will either move the same as now, or outmaneuver their pilots to porridge. Forget about evade. And probably means huge and smallest ships will have the same maneuverability, given enough engines. But not the same turn around speed. No need too, since big ships=turrets on all sides.

Rockets however are both fleshless and have more fuel and speed than current rockets, since they do not need to combat air friction. This means it should be more difficult to evade missiles in space.

Iztok Bitenc

The same way. all three are moving at finite speeds, just that light is pretty fast. But in that feature we ARE able to move faster than light. With a warp engine. So a little warp sensor giving warning of an incoming laser. and a little hyperspace jump taking us out of the line of fire hehe.

I agree this is the current direction airborne military hardware is going (i.e. robotics), but I don't think it necessarily extends to far future scenarios in space, especially if the game is including sci-fi tech like "shields." Bigger ships mean more power and stronger shields. It means you can carry more anti-missile defenses, and thicker armor. If my hulking battleship has all that, then it doesn't need to maneuver at high G's to evade your fighter's puny weapons.

Besides, you're ignoring the obvious extension of the "robotic fighter" -- past a certain point, you're basically talking about a self-guided missile. Those are already in the game. I think it's one of the stronger arguments against more powerful small ships, or the carrier idea that people continually suggest.

BTW, for some reason the forum quote function picked up part of your post that didn't appear above. Anyway, here it is, and a reply:



We can already bounce a laser off a small, static mirror left on the moon by the Apollo missions. The U.S. and China can already target kinetic hit-to-kill missiles against satellites, with "smart" autonomous aiming in the last second before impact. Those aren't targets trying to do evasive maneuvering, but hey... we don't have starships either. By the time we do have starships, these technologies will be much more advanced.

So it doesn't make sense (to me anyway) that hitting a small target maneuvering at high G's is going to be such a big problem for advanced space-faring civilizations. In space there is nowhere to hide,. Engagements are going to be FAST. That laser beam fired from the Earth hits the mirror on the Moon in just 1.2 seconds, and that's much further away than ships are shown in the game's tactical combat screen. You're not going to evade something that moves that fast. Speed (or auto-homing missiles and projectiles) will be a necessary feature of any space-based weapon. I think the game does a fine job of abstracting this in the combat screen, even if some of the other aspects are a bit flaky (like the lack of turreted weapon fire).

Size does matter.

Engines are for straight-line thrust. They are not for maneuverability.
Thrusters are what would actually change the ship's direction.

Size = mass. So to turn the ship or to increase speed, the power of the thrusters and engines has a great deal to do with maneuverability.


Funny.
I have never seen main engines placed in a reversed position in any sci-fi.

Engines are always placed at the rear, to give forward thrust.
But what would check that speed other than engines facing in the opposite direction?
After all, there is no 'reverse gear'.
What would slow you down other than inverting your ship's forward attitude by 180 degrees?

Bab5 probably had the physics most correct with the little fighters. But even that left something to be desired with the larger ships.