I Think High Casualty Scifi Battles Are Unrealistic

[Bab5space]

In scifi, space war often features high casualties, and I tend to think that is unrealistic. Here is why:

Space war favors machines and robots over crews... any day of the week. Why? They weigh less overall and can pack far more weaponry and better engines.

If you take for example a battle between two nuke pusher plate Orions, the only difference being one has a crew and the other has no crew and traded all life support for extra weapons payload, then the crewed vessel will be at a serious disadvantage.
No matter how advanced scifi tech becomes, crewed space warships with large numbers does not seem reasonable when noncrewed vessels fight better.

Extreme high tech seems to make it worse, and that is needed for much of scifi to work anyway.

I can see a small command vessel with a tiny crew sure, protected by a fleet of heavy noncrewed warships yes.

So the casualties of space war should be few if any.
Orbital bombardment is another story.. however there is a way to have high casualties in space war that is legitimate to me.

Planet issued low orbit strikes. It is a relatively easy thing for a jet or plane today to launch satellites via missiles into low Earth orbit. For that matter they can also launch missiles into orbit to kill them. So a passenger liner or a troop transport could be wiped out by a barrage of missiles orbiting in the opposite direction.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I Think High Casualty Scifi Battles Are Unrealistic

Unlike, say,

1. Human/Alien Hybrids
2. Magic Rocket Propellant
3. Immortality
4. Alien Elements
5. Light that is faster than light
6. Hyperspace time variances
7. Random overnight mutations

just to pick a few.

 

[DaveC426913]

War tends to be a race to get a strategic edge over the opponent in what is otherwise often a close match of capabilities resulting in a near stalemate. You'll notice how even 21st century Earth military will throw billions of dollars into gaining even the slightest edge over opponents.

If real-time human tactics and strategizing provides even the smallest edge over crewless fleets, then crew will start being added to gain that edge.

Assume what you are seeing in stories is the inevitable long-term outcome of that arms race - both sides have realized that crewless fleets just can't quite compete with crewed fleets. And here we are in a story about human combatants.

 

[Bab5space]

The only similarity is that all concepts are present to fulfill the needs of any given plot.

The difference is I see is that little is lost without large crews plotwise.

Without large crews involved in space battles, it's just less bloodshed. Which seems to be a win-win that cannot be ignored.

I tend to view matters the way people would actually living in a given universe. So if it it does little good, why do it?

 

[DaveC426913]

Additionally, consider the Observation Bias that applies to all larger-than-life stories.
How is it that Captain Kirk and the Enterprise had all the best adventures, even though there's dozens of other ships in the fleet?

Well, because history doesn't tell the stories about run-of-the-mill ships/crew - they tell the stories of the legends - the stories worth carrying down through the ages.

So, the stories about humans wars are the ones that get told. Machine wars may occur, but they're background to the human story.

Like the Clone Wars. Massive, massive war or millions of clones. What story gets told? The one about the humans. The clone/machine war is still there - it's just the backdrop for the real story.

 

[Bab5space]

War tends to be a race to get a strategic edge over the opponent in what is otherwise often a close match of capabilities resulting in a near stalemate. You'll notice how even 21st century Earth military will throw billions of dollars into gaining even the slightest edge over opponents.

If real-time human tactics and strategizing provides even the smallest edge over crewless fleets, then crew will start being added to gain that edge.

Assume what you are seeing in stories is the inevitable long-term outcome of that arms race - both sides have realized that crewless fleets just can't quite compete with crewed fleets. And here we are in a story about human combatants.

I made allowance for a crew albeit a tiny one in a small command vessel, protected by larger robotic warships.

 

[DaveC426913]

Finally, consider that all stories - by definition - are not meant to be about real life.
They are about the essence of real life.

If they were about real life then we would spend a third of the story watching them sleep, and an uncomfortable amount of story watching them perform their ablutions.

 

[DaveC426913]

I made allowance for a crew albeit a tiny one in a small command vessel, protected by larger robotic warships.

If adding a small crew in a command vessel gives a tactical advantage, then surely having a slightly larger crew in a slightly better-equipped vessel would provide a slightly better tactical advantage.
And if a slightly larger crew provides a tactical advantage then surely an even larger crew...

See where this is going?

Wars distills the impurities in strategy, leaving only the source of advantage.

 

[Bab5space]

If adding a small crew in a command vessel gives a tactical advantage, then surely having a slightly larger crew in a slightly better-equipped vessel would provide a slightly better tactical advantage.
And if a slightly larger crew provides a tactical advantage then surely an even larger crew...

See where this is going?

Wars distills the impurities in strategy, leaving only the source of advantage.

I can not think of any way a large crewed command vessel would be superior to a small command vessel other other than protection, which is still at a disadvantage due to pressurization (insert explosive and it pops like a balloon, vessels without internal air won't pop ad easy).

It is a big target, made slower than most due to slathering lits of armor on it.

It would make sense if they simply were living on the ship to expore, but even then roboships working at the command of fleet protected command vessels could obliterate them easier than a crewed vessel would.

 

[DaveC426913]

Those are all suppositions, based on the history of war, economics and technology in your specific story.

Again: if human strategists provided an advantage in battle, then no expense would be spared on technology that could facilitate that.

That's what you are doing when you are world-building - determining how the warring civilizations arrived at the current point, and why the wars and technology take the form they do.

You can't truly build a realistic war story without first building the political, economic and cultural history that drives the reason for the war in the first place. It'll shape everything right down to the very design of the spacecraft .

(And now you start to see why most sci-fiction writers strike a balance between realism and just making up cool stuff. )

...at a disadvantage due to pressurization (insert explosive and it pops like a balloon, vessels without internal air won't pop ad easy).

Is "inserting explosives" easy?
How do you insert explosives with no infantry?
Who says the crew are in shirtsleeves, as opposed to pressure suits? Who says the craft is pressurized at all?

What is the scope of the battlefield? Orbital? Interplanetary? Interstellar?

Are your battles long range with huge delta Vs, or short range dog fights?

If long range, why not just fire kinetic energy weapons such as relativistic shot? A cubic decametre of pebbles expanding and moving at .1c can be very effective and very difficult to dodge. It will have the same effect on a small vessel as a large vessel.

(In a Man-Kzin war, the Kzin stripped a spacecraft of everything except engine, and loaded it up with cannonballs. A ship's relativistic velocity is its weapon. They were all set up to scour planet Earth to its bedrock with nothing but a cargo of cannonballs moving a a fraction of c.)

 

[DaveC426913]

To clarify: I'm not trying to overwhelm you, I'm simply nudging you to the conclusion that far-reaching generalizations such as the opening post can't be made. The circumstances surrounding any war are determined by the factors that lead up to it.

And your job as a writer is to lay down enough (and only enough) background details to provide plausibility to whatever flavour you want your story to be.

 

[stefan r]

In scifi, space war often features high casualties, and I tend to think that is unrealistic. Here is why:

Space war favors machines and robots over crews... any day of the week. Why? ...

You are making the assumption that a "person" has to be a sack of protein and water that poops. The term "casualty" applies to any mind effected by the conflict. Your wording could imply biocentrism, speciesism, or anthropocentrism. Of course calling it speciesism implies that an uploaded mind or a cyborg is not one of our species. That is in and of itself an indication of prejudice. This prejudice is very common in our current society and I fall into it myself.

Primitive homosapiens-sapiens are likely to have difficulties under various circumstances. However, the absence of people who poop should not be a reason to suggest that the people on board a spaceship or in a fleet are not "a crew".

Winning a war requires that there is a surviving mind capable of replication. In strategic warfare one or both sides choose to eliminate the enemy minds, or the enemies ability to replicate, or both. Eliminating the enemy prevents them from being able to think that they have won the war.

 

[DaveC426913]

You are making the assumption that a "person" has to be a sack of protein and water that poops. The term "casualty" applies to any mind effected by the conflict. Your wording could imply biocentrism, speciesism, or anthropocentrism. Of course calling it speciesism implies that an uploaded mind or a cyborg is not one of our species. That is in and of itself an indication of prejudice. This prejudice is very common in our current society and I fall into it myself.

I'm not sure where you're going with this speciesism thing, but you make a valid point about the motive of the war.

It may well be that the war has gone past remote battle between bots, and has come to the very home planet for extermination.

If battleships are at your doorstep, intent on destroying your civilization, then you'll be defending it with your lives. And sometimes, lives are the only resource left.

 

[essenmein]

No matter how advanced scifi tech becomes, crewed space warships with large numbers does not seem reasonable when noncrewed vessels fight better.

Extreme high tech seems to make it worse, and that is needed for much of scifi to work anyway.

I can see a small command vessel with a tiny crew sure, protected by a fleet of heavy noncrewed warships yes.

So the casualties of space war should be few if any.

No matter how high tech it becomes?!

If you have anti gravity all the squishy occupant concerns go away.

If you are not killing the enemy, but destroying their remote control toys, is it a war or a game?

Wars a fought for a reason, you might need to fight through robo ships to get to the enemy, but if you are not taking down the actual enemy at some point you are not achieving the reason for being at war. You are just playing battle bots.

As someone else eluded to, what is an "occupant"? Either these robo ships are dumb and remote controlled (by what in space with large distances that radio control takes minutes?) or they are approaching general AI levels where they can autonomously engage, evade and so on. At which point do these autonomous things become "beings"?

 

[Bab5space]

I'm not sure where you're going with this speciesism thing, but you make a valid point about the motive of the war.

It may well be that the war has gone past remote battle between bots, and has come to the very home planet for extermination.

If battleships are at your doorstep, intent on destroying your civilization, then you'll be defending it with your lives. And sometimes, lives are the only resource left.

If space battleships are at my doorstep I do the one smart thing left. Leave if I have the resources to do so. With whatever nonfighting spaceships I have that are optimized for speed and people transport. Letting my reserve robotic spacecraft screen my back as I make my daring escape.

Crewed vessels offer little advantage against an AI force of the same strength UNLESS the crewed vessels have superior weapons to begin with. That is why human players beat CPU players so much in gaming by the way, because CPU players seldom get all the awesome power-ups human players get. This a single player defeats hordes of enemies when they would stand little chance if the playing field was made equal.

All things being equalized, the only advantage a crewed ship would have would be tactics involving deception, which AI are likely to be fooled by. Still the crewed ships are a weakness because:

1. Robot vessels won't worry about g-force and can thrust much harder and outmanuver crewed vessels.
2. They can stock more firepower and fuel too.
3. This sounds morbid, but the only other tactical advantage a crew can offer is if you shoot them out a cannon for ammo.In space war spacecraft are the soldiers, and better armed soldiers who can run faster and have more ammo will put soldiers who are slower with less ammo at a serioys disadvantage. Did I mention suicidal tactics are far more likely with robotic craft too, something crews will often try to avoid?

War is in it's most basic sense, a way to get what sombody wants. It is nearly similar to the reason for robberies. They want it, but the other won't give it, so they take it by force. Suicidally putting lots of crew on vessels when robot vessels will do the job better does not even jive with survivival instincts.

About the one place where having literal soldiers on the ground pays off is during occupation of planets. So many places to hide that wreck a robot, plus bombs that,are hidden.

Space had few surprises as a battlefield. It's like tailor made for an AI battleship.

 

[DaveC426913]

Well I can't argue with your views - you're the one writing the story. You're dealing the cards and if you deal them the way you've mentioned here, then the game is certainly going to end the way you expect.Just one bit of advice then:

Crewed vessels offer little advantage against an AI force of the same strength UNLESS the crewed vessels have superior weapons to begin with. That is why human players beat CPU players so much in gaming by the way, because CPU players seldom get all the awesome power-ups human players get. This a single player defeats hordes of enemies when they would stand little chance if the playing field was made equal.

I'll take your word on that - the most combative video I play is SimCity.

But if you base your idea of war on how video games work, then your story is going to read like a derivative of video games.

 

[GTOM]

In civil war, i think high casuality is pretty realistic.
Also many SF worlds had some sort of robot rebellion, so they don't trust robotic soldiers.

 

[hmmm27]

During the Cold War, both the USA and USSR had nuclear ballistic missiles capable of taking out the "other side" several times over... and they both also had - orders of magnitude more expensive to operate and maintain - crewed long range bombers.

 

[Daveallen10]

I think you're probably right overall that many of the tasks of human crews will be replaced by computers in space combat. "Drone" vessels would be able to react faster to some situations and pull high-G maneuvers that crewed vessels could not.

But unless there is true AI with human or above-human level intelligence, you would need some kind of local command and control with the ability to analyze and direct events. You mentioned as much, so I think you are on an interesting path there.

 

[Bab5space]

Human command or it's scifi race equivalent is needed to direct attacks most efficiently.

I have a feeling that deception will play a huge role if tech is good enough for scifi staples such as casual FTL or warping between systems.

Ever play Stratego? This is just like that but on a massive scale.

If one can build a large fleet, they can build an even cheaper larger fleet without all the bells and whistles and pretend it is a high value target.

Thus the need for intelligence, since robots will gladly waste missiles on large enemy vessels that hold mostly... nothing but an engine inside.

As opposed to the real threat that is being diverted elsewhere that is heavily armed.

I may send a massive scrap fleet to the enemy system while sendimg my heavy armed vessels in smaller numbers to the target I want to hit.

Every now and then I will mix it up to confuse my enemy further.

And if it is just robots I am up against, they lose... hard. They lack any common sense or the means to see through deception and what is not immediately obvious.

 

[GTOM]

Human command or it's scifi race equivalent is needed to direct attacks most efficiently.

I have a feeling that deception will play a huge role if tech is good enough for scifi staples such as casual FTL or warping between systems.

Ever play Stratego? This is just like that but on a massive scale.

If one can build a large fleet, they can build an even cheaper larger fleet without all the bells and whistles and pretend it is a high value target.

Thus the need for intelligence, since robots will gladly waste missiles on large enemy vessels that hold mostly... nothing but an engine inside.

As opposed to the real threat that is being diverted elsewhere that is heavily armed.

I may send a massive scrap fleet to the enemy system while sendimg my heavy armed vessels in smaller numbers to the target I want to hit.

Every now and then I will mix it up to confuse my enemy further.

And if it is just robots I am up against, they lose... hard. They lack any common sense or the means to see through deception and what is not immediately obvious.

The engine is the most valuable part.

 

[essenmein]

Human command or it's scifi race equivalent is needed to direct attacks most efficiently.

I have a feeling that deception will play a huge role if tech is good enough for scifi staples such as casual FTL or warping between systems.

Ever play Stratego? This is just like that but on a massive scale.

If one can build a large fleet, they can build an even cheaper larger fleet without all the bells and whistles and pretend it is a high value target.

Thus the need for intelligence, since robots will gladly waste missiles on large enemy vessels that hold mostly... nothing but an engine inside.

As opposed to the real threat that is being diverted elsewhere that is heavily armed.

I may send a massive scrap fleet to the enemy system while sendimg my heavy armed vessels in smaller numbers to the target I want to hit.

Every now and then I will mix it up to confuse my enemy further.

And if it is just robots I am up against, they lose... hard. They lack any common sense or the means to see through deception and what is not immediately obvious.

You'd have to think that if you have FTL then sensor tech would have be very advanced as well. Surely an unarmed vessel would look different either in its emissions, or xray etc etc.

Missiles are still cheaper than your decoy ships.

Then, if these robots lack common sense and are easily deceived, how is it that they are still at war?

 

[GTOM]

You'd have to think that if you have FTL then sensor tech would have be very advanced as well. Surely an unarmed vessel would look different either in its emissions, or xray etc etc.

Missiles are still cheaper than your decoy ships.

Then, if these robots lack common sense and are easily deceived, how is it that they are still at war?

It isn't magic to determine the mass of a ship if it uses thrusters. (Emitted energy and acceleration)