What future space combat would really look like

Re:What future space combat would really look like by pavel_lishin on Tuesday December 27, 2011 @01:11PM (#3396647)

I imagine that the individual ships themselves will also be very small. In fact, if a fleet is big enough, the communications gap becomes a problem - space battles may end up looking like a fight between two ant colonies, with small independent ships working together as a swarm, without any central guidance.

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Re:What future space combat would really look like by j_baker on Tuesday December 27, 2011 @02:13PM (#3396948)

You never know. I'm sure you could have a more "distributed leadership". I'm sure this could be accomplished with a clever enough application of paxos.

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Re:What future space combat would really look like by potatolicious on Tuesday December 27, 2011 @04:45PM (#3397570)

I agree with the author in that it's unlikely we'll get a Star Trek scenario where a single ship can continue taking hits without much consequence. In all likelihood the first hit a spacecraft takes will destroy it.

In that environment you really want as many small ships as possible - large capital ships really work against you. Any centralized command system would also be trivially easy to destroy by concentrating fire on the command ship.

A swarm of distributed ships seems much more viable in this system.

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Re:What future space combat would really look like by j_baker on Thursday December 29, 2011 @01:44AM (#3402804)

Right, but with Paxos, you could elect a new leader as soon as the old one is destroyed.

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