Space Wars Won’t be like Star Wars: The Science Behind Space Combat | Entropy Rising Episode 6

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In this episode of Entropy Rising, Jacob and Lucas dive into the fascinating and brutal world of space warfare. Forget the epic dogfights and flashy laser battles of Hollywood—real space combat will look more like a terrifying game of high-stakes chess. From the impossibility of stealth in the vastness of space to the challenges of dissipating heat with massive radiators, we explore how physics—not drama—will dictate the battlefield.

We break down the role of missiles, lasers, and decoys, examine how thermal management could make or break a ship, and discuss whether wars between planets or colonies are even realistic. Packed with deep insights, hard science, and a touch of humor, this episode gives you a front-row seat to what war might actually look like among the stars.

Don't miss this thrilling look at the future of combat beyond Earth's atmosphere.

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Transcript

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some of the science fiction I read, they talk about having megawatt and gigawatt lasers. that's the power demand of a pretty large city, and that produces a lot of heat. You might need five to ten kilometers of radiating surface just to disperse the energy generated in one of these lasers, for example, Hello and welcome to Entropy Rising, where we talk about science and futurism. I'm your host Jacob, and I'm here with my wonderful co host Lucas. Lucas, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Jake. Thank you for asking. Yeah, I'm happy to hear that. So today we are diving into the fascinating, I think, topic of space warfare. Yeah. Fascinating and brutal. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely brutal and ultimately governed by physics as all warfare is, but space warfare particularly. So yeah, it introduces a lot of new situations that people might not think of. yeah, I think one of my favorite quotes is from the mass effect series. I believe it's from mass effect is that, sir Isaac Newton is one of the deadliest people in space. All right. So, one of the things that, I think we should highlight before we dive into this is that. The conventional idea of war in space, that you see in like Star Wars and even like Star Trek is just not at all what it's actually going to be like. Yeah, you're not going to be able to see ships lining up side by side and loading artillery and lasers into each other. And like an old naval combat scenario. Exactly. I mean, likely you're not even going to see the enemy at all. Yeah. realistically, when you're talking about ranges of engagement here, you're probably talking about hundreds to thousands of kilometers for, A vast majority of any conflicts happening in space. Yeah. you think of warfare now today, especially air warfare, you oftentimes don't see your opponent, you let loose your missiles and fly back to base before you ever see anybody. Yeah. And I mean, same thing with naval warfare in today's world too. You never see the enemy ship, they're typically. several miles away and you're just firing missiles. It's just going to be that on a whole other order of magnitude for space battles. so yeah, this notion that you're going to be having two ships slugging it out and you're gonna have fighters all twirling around in the mix. It's just not actually how it's going to be at all. no, unfortunately it would be cool if it was that way. That's not how it's going to work. Absolutely not. One of the biggest differences when you're talking about fighting in space versus, how we fight in Earth is that in space, you really have no way to be stealthy at all. Now, I haven't even really thought of that, but, how so? There's a couple of reasons for it. One of the biggest and most obvious ones is that to move your ship, you basically have a gigantic controlled explosion coming out of the back of it, which is going to be the brightest thing in the sky by several orders of magnitude. we could detect a current rocket, at the end of our solar system with our modern technology. And that's not even talking about that in the future, like what you see in maybe the expanse series, those ships are a lot more powerful and produce a lot more light and radiation. And in the future, the detecting sensors are going to be even better. so it's very probable that in the future we would be able to detect a modern rocket and another solar system, much less one of these like ships from the expanse. you might be able to see a ship like that, Several light years away. Just because it's going to be brighter than most stars, at least when it's that close to the earth. So there is zero way you're going to be maneuvering your ship, in any kind of way that doesn't shine up like a, basically an explosion. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. from what it sounds like, even with just your naked eye, you would be able to see an entire fleet heading towards you, to fight yours. Oh yeah, you could probably see most of these from, fairly far away, like I said, it's going to be brighter than most stars, so even a ship in the outer solar system firing these engines, at least, if you're talking about the size of ships we see in the Expanse with that type of power, and just for reference for the people who haven't seen it, We're talking about ships that are in the thousands to tens of thousands of tons range. ships that are comparable to modern day warships in size, moving at between 1 and 15 G of gravity. That amount of energy, yeah, you would see that from Earth with your naked eye. Even across the solar system. Yeah, it would light up the sky. And even if you can get around that, if you can somehow hide your drive plume, which you're not going to be able to do, but let's say you can, the biggest issue you've got is that you also light up like a Christmas tree, on the infrared spectrum. Every single object releases infrared radiation proportional to its heat. Even a human releases about 15 times the infrared radiation as the cosmic background normal. A ship is going to be even more than that. And there is no way with Thermodynamics to hide that it's just physically impossible by all known modern physics. Yeah. So if there's no chance for them to be able to hide it, what's a different method that you could use, I guess would be decoys then. yeah, absolutely. if you can't take the silence approach, you might as well take the be so loud that they get confused approach. And I do agree with that. Yeah. But even then you have to think if you're trying to create, a grouping of decoys to look like a fleet that's heading towards them and they're expending that energy. they might still not be able to move in a way to where, you can fool the enemy. So you would mostly just use those to try and throw off their ordinance. Yeah, absolutely. Presumably, if you've got a warship, you've probably got that thing to run as efficiently as possible for the amount of energy it expels. So you might be able to generate a similar size signature in the spectrum by taking a much smaller decoy and running it a lot less efficiently. Okay. So you could potentially, yeah, you could set up some fake decoys that are going to look like ships, at least in terms of drive signature, and maybe even throw off a bunch of heat in the IR region, to try to trick your enemy into thinking you're somewhere else, or at the bare minimum, make them split their ordinances, because, you can't hide either, but if they have to pick two targets, that's at least, hopefully, half of the stuff coming at you. Yeah, absolutely. without any way for us to really stealth ourselves, what do you think, is there anything else that these ships would be able to use to get an edge in warfare like that? as far as on the stealth front, no. There's just, there's really nothing you're going to be able to do to try to mitigate that. it's a lost cause, you might as well just accept that. All right. Yeah, I mean that's very interesting. I really haven't thought of that before now But other than that, really the only edge you can do and I don't think this would work very long But if you have a newer ship design that your enemy doesn't know, you know You might try to not let them see what your maximum acceleration or your maximum thrust is Oh, you know maybe save that for a trick or something, but There's not much you can really do, Space warfare is a lot more like chess than it is like traditional warfare. You're kind of laid bare to the enemy, and really the only thing that determines win or lose Is strategy more than tricks that absolutely makes sense So what kind of strategies would be employed right and in space warfare? Are we talking like ender's game type strategy where because even then it's still you know You can see your enemy and you're making adjustments. I think the best strategy that's gonna be employed is However, many guns your enemy has try to have more You know, all right, that's a fair point. Yeah. only idiots pick fair fights in war. And ideally you're not picking on somebody your own size. You're picking on someone much smaller, but unfortunately I do think a lot of these battles are going to come down to just who has more, a lot of modern conflict comes to that too. And I'm not going to say there aren't going to be some grand strategies that happened and there might be, but I am by no means a war strategist and When it comes beyond just the sheer physics of how it works, you start to get outside of what I can predict in my realm of expertise, if I'm being honest. of course, I just know you read a lot more than I do. So wondering if you've seen any of these crazy stuff in any of your science fiction novels. okay. Now, earlier you were talking about the amount of heat that these sheep, that these ships are putting off and that they're being able to see, how are they going to be able to dissipate? That heat. that's a good point. And something that gets overlooked and I would say, I would go as far as a majority of science fiction is the thermal aspect of running a ship in space. there's three ways we can dissipate heat. You can do conduction, convection, and radiation. In space, you can't conduct or convect away because you have to physically be touching an object or be within a fluid in a, in our case, our atmosphere acts as the fluid. So in space, the only one you've really got is radiation. Which is unfortunately also the least powerful way to get rid of heat. So one of the things you're going to see in space warfare or in realistic space ships is massive, gigantic radiators whose sole purpose is to try to expel all the heat that you're generating on your ship. as fast as possible. Okay. So these radiators we would have mounted on the ship, of course, circulating some kind of fluid throughout the ship and then trying to disperse that heat. but they would have to be massive because the fluid would just have to travel along the metal to try and disperse the heat out into the atmosphere instead of just letting radiation take it, which could take years. Yeah. Well, ultimately it is radiation that's going to take it, but you're going to want to collect as much heat. away from your ship into these radiators as possible. You want to concentrate that heat energy. Because the amount of heat you can radiate it's squared proportional relationship to the temperature of the object. So if you can get a an object twice as hot, it's radiating away four times the energy. if you can take all the heat energy in your ship and collect it in a fluid and then concentrate it in these radiators, you have a much more efficient way of radiating the heat. You want these radiators to be as hot as you can get them. Okay. how big are we talking on these radiators then? Yeah, they could potentially be huge. when you're talking about some capital ships, you are probably going to have square kilometers of radiators to get rid of all that energy. some of the science fiction I read, they talk about having megawatt and gigawatt lasers. that's the power demand of a pretty large city, and that produces a lot of heat. You might need five to ten kilometers of radiating surface just to disperse the energy generated in one of these lasers, for example, is the types of sizes we're talking about, depending on how efficient, the we are in the future with our technology, and, just the ship that it has in it. Smaller ships will obviously have smaller radiators, and ships that don't need these massive weapons won't need as big radiators either. Now, lasers is interesting, especially when we're talking about trying to radiate heat, because in order to power a laser, you have, you're superheating something. Yeah. To direct that energy. when I think about that and how it would be to dissipate the heat of that, you pretty much would just have one shot. how would the weapon systems and the engines really dissipate that heat into the radiator? Yeah, I mean, it'd probably be the same thing, you're going to cool them with some type of liquid and it might work how a lot of, coolers and computers work, where you have a fluid that gets turned from the liquid phase to a gaseous phase, then it goes into the radiators and it condenses, that just lets you move more, more heat around. I see. But one of the things I've seen in some science fiction, and it is an idea that can work, is you could potentially have giant water reservoirs that when you fire your laser you just dump all of that waste heat into this water reservoir turning it into superheated high pressure steam and then you can actually release all of that steam vented into space and that is actually another way you can remove heat from your ship is just to dump all of that heat energy into some form of mass and then expel that mass from your ship. Yeah, but then it's only finite, right? You only have so much of that you can dispense. But I feel like that would be a much better method, especially for high intensity combat situations like, Oh, we only have so much water to where we can turn it into steam and expel it. But that allows for us to fire our laser six more times. Exactly. if your radiators get damaged during battle, that might give you a little bit of thermal overhead to maybe fire a shot back in retaliation or the bare minimum, burn like hell to get out of that zone, Yeah, not melt your life support systems. yeah, exactly. When you're trying to run. But yeah, that would not be a, I think, a viable method for any type of long-term thermal dissipation. It would really be just an emergency reserve or maybe to handle high peak demand. And, even then, it's really only gonna be working on large ships. But I did do the math before we came to this meeting, and, I found that you can dissipate about three to 4 million. kilojoules of energy by just having one ton of, water ice at exactly zero C, and then turning that into superheated steam and releasing out of your ship. That's a lot of energy. It is. So it is not an, like an impossible thing to do for very large ships that have mass to spare. 3 million kilojoules of energies. That's no joke. No, not at all. just, for an idea like your average. Bullet that is being fired out of a projectile is producing anywhere between 30 and 80 joules, usually exactly. So it's a lot of energy and you can do better if you have something like liquid hydrogen because It takes about four to five times as much energy to raise hydrogen one degree Celsius as it does for water. So you could potentially do better with something like liquid hydrogen, if you really did want to go that route. Although, liquid hydrogen has some issues. For one, it needs to be kept under really high pressure, which is adding even more mass to your ship. And two, it's, hydrogen, so if It's dangerous. Yeah, exactly, yeah. If they get exposed to oxygen and a spark, you've just turned your ship into a giant bomb. Yeah, but, realistically, out in the vacuum of space, if you get hit by something, you're dead. You're probably not going to make it anyways. Yeah, but I would be concerned having that much hydrogen on your ship, especially to use it for that. Because, I feel like you're just, if that starts leaking into your ship, then again, you might be using it as a fuel source anyway. So maybe you've already got it and, seeing it as a, an expendable resource. in emergency situations to dump heat into. maybe that is possible. Yeah, that would be a lot of energy management of your hydrogen, though. It would be, yeah. You use it for fuel and for expending energy. we see that with large natural gas ships today. they transport the stuff and they also use it, so it's not Unheard of, but it is, I agree. It is, it seems a little dubious to be using your fuel sources, also an energy dump. Yeah, but it definitely could be perfected. who knows what, if we're having space wars, we probably have figured out a solution to that. Very possibly. though. You do have to be a little careful with that because presumably your enemy might already know how much fuel you can carry on board. And the amount of fuel you have is going to limit what you can do, especially with orbital trajectories. So if your enemy sees you venting liquid hydrogen, they're probably going to really quickly start adjusting their models on potential moves you can make and narrowing down where you could possibly escape to. So yeah, tying back into, chess, you're more just planning on those moves that they could make and then capitalizing on that. yeah, no, that's a great point, that does tie back into that analogy because in space you, you are playing chess in that sense, too. you do have a limited set of moves you can make. we talk about having, delta v, which I mentioned in an earlier episode. it's this concept of change in velocity. And It's basically a number that dictates how much you can accelerate in any given direction. And when you're in an orbit of a planet, there's a certain delta v required just to break that orbit. So if an enemy can make an estimate to how much delta v is left in your ship, they might be able to outmaneuver and outflank you if they have more delta v than you and they have delta v to spare. Okay. Yeah, that, that does make a lot of sense. Now that would be affected though, based on where they're fighting. in the solar system. Well, all kinds of things, you know, ultimately doesn't matter where you are, you have the same amount of, delta v to spend. It's almost like money, no, no matter where you are, you have the same amount of money, but depending where you are, that money can go further or not as far. if you're in a really massive gravity well like Jupiter, it takes a lot more delta v to break that orbit than if you're in orbit of something like, Jupiter. So it's the same number, but what you can do with it changes a lot depending on where you are. Now, that is interesting to think about. Now, do you think that we would use orbital bodies, in that space warfare? Either as shields to block in engagements or as, using gravity wells to, pick up more energy using the pull of the gravity to launch your ship or catapult it? Oh yeah, I think without doubt. there is There's no getting around the orbital bodies in general, you're always going to have to be planning your courses and trajectories around them. Even if you have some energy rich future, how the Expanse has it, where they're not really concerned about fuel and they can just do straight burns everywhere they're going, that gravity's still going to play how your ordinances are affected, how your ship is affected, and you just have unlimited free energy, why would you not pick up a free gravity assist where it's available? Absolutely. And I just, because I haven't seen anything about it yet, I'm going to assume that energy will not just be free to expel in the future. And even if it is, you probably still need some sort of reaction mass to fire out the back of your ship. so even if you have, fusion energy, you still need to use that energy to kick something out of the back of your ship. And that thing's not free. And even if it is free, you still have to carry it on your ship. So you have a limited amount of it. So really there's no way around it. You need to expel either mass or energy to move your ship. Now, that is cool. Now. Thinking about these ships and how you said, the enemy will probably know already how much fuel or munitions you can carry and how you can move, based off of the gravity of anywhere right on these planets. it's just like thinking about fighting in our solar system, would this be like a war between us and Mars, right? I think, of a Mars Earth conflict, I would say it's relatively unlikely in the near future, in the near future being several hundred years, because we're not going to see a situation where Mars catches up to Earth on an industrial base for, I think, centuries. unless we develop some magical super Space technology that allows us to lift millions of people at a time from Earth into Mars. It's, it, the population is not going to be there. it's going to be almost like a small colony trying to attack the entire United States. it's been done before in history. It, yeah, it has been done before. I know not on that level, but, you know, this is just assuming that Mars even gets to a point to where it wants to erect its own military as an independent colony. Yeah, exactly. it was just, an example, like it could be a rogue space station or a ship production plant. And that's not to say you're not going to have wars with colonies or wars with, neighbors, that could definitely happen. And, If it does though, it's probably not going to be resource related and realistically it's probably going to be some political thing just because of the vast amount of resources that are available on these planets and the solar system as a whole. Or like control of a, another sector in the solar system. but I guess that wouldn't make sense because that would be for resources. Yeah. And resources don't really make sense because there's so many resources out there and the earth also has a ton of resources. the earth has more resources than, the asteroid belt and all of the moons combined. So you're not hurting for resources on earth. And Mars has also a ton of resources too, and not a big population. So they're not hurting for resources. So realistically, if you are going to war with Mars or a colony, it's going to be for a political reason, right? Okay. So then let's say just in another scenario, we're fighting from one end of our solar system to the other, Now me thinking about it, we're going to be engaging them, like I said in the beginning, long before we ever see them. What are the range capabilities of our ships, and how are those engagements going to look, do you think? it depends how you're firing. when we're talking about space warfare, we have three classifications of weapons we think about. you've got Lightspeed weapons. These are things like lasers, grazers, anything that moves at the speed of light. Particle beams kind of fall into that category. They're sub light, but they're so close to light you can call them that. we have dumb kinetic missiles. These are things like railguns, bullets, and then smart kinetic missiles, or smart missiles. Missiles, basically missiles, these are things that not only can you fire them from your ship But they can make course corrections as they're going downrange And so depending on how you're fighting or depending on what you have available is going to dictate your range So lasers, for example, are they're really poor at range because they drop off with distance So you're going to be rather limited with lasers, even though they are, you know, they're moving at the speed of light. Same thing with, I would say, kinetic missiles. While you don't have drag in space, if you fire a railgun, it's not going to slow down. It'll reach your enemy in terms of distance. But the further you are away from them, the more time they have to move out of the way. So railguns also probably aren't going to be an effective tool for anything more than short range, maybe some slight medium range applications. So I think for the future. For missiles, that's when you're really starting to talk about long range engagements. you could potentially fire missiles. There's really not a limit how far away you could fire missiles, Especially not in space. Yeah, exactly. the only limit of missiles, again, will tie into how much delta V they have. So when we talk about range with a missile, it's not really distance. It's going to be more how much velocity can they change? Because if you and an enemy, let's say, are passing each other at, let's just call it 1 percent the speed of light, and you fire a missile at your enemy, You might be two feet from them, but if your missile can't reach 1 percent speed of light, it's never going to catch them. Yeah. So they need to be able to travel faster than the enemy that they're going after. because then you're just hoping that they'll just keep flying towards your projectile, which isn't going to happen. but also they would happen, in like a two stage, you would get the missile to the velocity that you need for it, but then you would have conserved fuel. to be able to have the missile move at a direction to correct itself and still hit the target. Yep. So when you're talking about range of engagements for missiles, you really need to know how much velocity does that missile need to kill just to catch up with them and how much reserve, fuel is not going to leave the missile to, Accelerate toward them and do any evasive maneuvers. So it's not really a distance range, it's more of a relative velocity range. If your missile has, let's say, a thousand meters per second of delta v, and your enemy's traveling at 999 meters per second relative to you, your missile's not going to have any fuel really left over once it reaches there to avoid them shooting it down. Now, shooting it down is interesting because really the only defense that those ships would have would be decoys or point defense systems. Yeah, I mean you've got a couple of options for point defense. you've got a good old fashioned point defense cannon that we see on modern warships now, which will just fire a bunch of cannons. Lasers actually do make a good application here. You can potentially fire lasers at these missiles when they're coming in. Either try to knock out any sensors they have or just straight up melt them. those are the two biggest ones that I see. Yeah, absolutely. Or decoys, like you were saying. Yep, decoys are, good. Chaff is a good one. Just good old flack, firing that out. Just shotgun blast the, just hope that it hits it type of thing. I do. I do wonder how well decoys are going to work. because I imagine that this, we're already AI is so common now. I imagine any future missiles are going to have AI recognition systems on there looking for your target. So the only way your decoy is fooling the missiles, if it can also fool the enemy ship, I would say. Maybe they will be that good. I'm just saying, it's not going to be the old fashioned method of firing flares out the back of your ship. You're really going to have to imitate your own ship in a lot of different ways, especially as the missile gets closer. they could have, like cameras on there that just sense to make sure that it's the same size or it's the same type, it could have artificial intelligence on it. It's likely already got your ship's profile loaded into its memory and it's constantly sensing your ship and various different wavelengths of light. from the infrared to visual to, probably using all types of LIDAR, tons of different sensors, probably has some type of neural network that's feeding it back into its guidance system. And it's going to take a lot to trick, I think, even today's missiles, but especially missiles, a couple hundred years in the future. Yeah. really, you're going to be deploying. An entire other ship as an effective decoy, or you're just deploying that decoy and trying to get far enough away from it to where the missile runs out of fuel. But think point defense particularly is going to be one of the most common things we see. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Cause kinetic weapons would be next to useless. Well, guided kinetic weapons work, but yeah, you're right. Dumb kinetic weapons. Not next, not completely useless, but they do have limited applications. When you get to longer distances. Yeah. talking about like the distances of these engagements, like there, you, chances are you won't ever see them firing a dumb kinetic weapon. It's not going to be like earth where you can, fire a weapon that's large enough to where it'll hit the ground and destroy what's around it. Yeah. you either, you miss, you miss. Yeah. There's no, yeah, there's no types of damage done for getting close enough. So you're absolutely right about that. Unless you use the weapon that simulated that. And once it got to the predicted range, just opened up and released projectiles. Yeah. Yeah. You could absolutely have something like that. you still need to get relatively close because if it opens up too early, any projectiles that have, they're going to disperse too much and just the odds of you hitting the ship are low, so it would still need to get relatively close, I would imagine. Plus not to mention the collateral damage that could happen. you just fire it off and you're just pelting Jupiter and you take out a city on Earth just on accident. fortunately, very unlikely to happen. But yeah, you are right. When you fire those missiles, someone, somewhere, sometime is going to have a bad day. yeah, that's right. It's just a mass effect quote, or a paraphrase of a mass effect quote. But yeah, no, you are right. The issue with those is it presumably takes a good amount of energy To get those kinetic weapons up to a high enough speed, to have enough kinetic energy to do damage, so it's very visible when you fire it, and that light is reaching your enemy well before the missile does, so they have plenty of time to move, some of these engagements could even be at the late second range, so they might have whole seconds to move after you fire. So now talking about, using all these weapons and, firing them at each other, those weapons have to come from somewhere. And hopefully these ships are rearming in some way. Oh, they have to. So now the warfare that would be happening, Or you preparing for that warfare, you would probably prepare for it much far in advance and try to just have everything calculated because trying to get ships out to resupply, these ships that have already fired, their weapons would be And I'm imagining incredibly long and arduous tasks. And then it's going to be difficult because depending on how far away you are, you have to communicate that you want those resources first, get a response that they're coming and then wait for the ships to come. Yeah. Potentially. I mean, communication isn't as huge of a deal. there is light delay and depending on how far out in the solar system you are, that light delay can get up to a day or so. That's not a huge deal when you're months of travel time away. I don't think for organizing a resupply, but you are right. If you are going, let's say you're leaving Earth and you're going to be intervening with a fleet in Neptune's orbit, you, you could be months, six months, years of travel time away, depending on what kind of technology you have available, to you and how the orbits line up. And you do have to play a fine game of, you really can't. You gotta take everything you're gonna need to that battle with you, so you want as many ordinances as you can possibly carry, but the more stuff you carry, the more fuel you need to get that stuff there. You're limiting your possible delta V like what we were talking about earlier, and so it's a really fine game of carrying enough to do the engagement, but also not carrying so much that you make yourself a huge vulnerable target. Now, just because, I originally was thinking that this is how it would work is that these ships would, fly from wherever the attacking ships were at, and then they would bring those resources to the ships to resupply, but it wouldn't make sense. What would make more sense is to just send more ships, right? Or supply drops. Supply drops. So what do you mean by that? If you're preparing for an engagement far away from your planet and you don't want to carry a bunch of resources with you because you don't want to ruin your own delta v it may be your home base sends a whole ordnance drop full of all the munitions and stuff you can have on a ballistic trajectory a month or two after you leave so that after You finish that trajectory, you can go and pick these up. And presumably, if they send the ballistic trajectory, they don't have to put any type of transponder or anything on it, just from the trajectory and all the orbital math, you can find it and the odds of anyone stumbling across that on accident are slim to none. that is interesting. So you, you would have essentially just like a, let's say a pod or a capsule filled with munitions that you would fire two months later that would travel faster than the fleet. You could do it faster, slower. just depends when you want those supplies to get there. And then they You might fire it faster. That way that ship could do a higher G burn to get to the enemy and then pick up the supplies and router when it's near the end of that acceleration phase. That way it didn't have to pay to accelerate all of that mass. That's actually really interesting. I always thought that it would be, next to impossible to resupply. once they fought, once they were out of their weapons or fuel, it's just time to begin the two year long journey home. Yeah, there's no reason you can't send supplies out. And I think realistically. if we're talking about a colonized solar system, kind of like what you see in the expanse, then you're probably going to have supply depots all around your solar system just to aid with stuff like that. that is also true. I did think about that and I was thinking B is for these space battles to make sense for me, it's going to have to be like across solar systems. So our systems are our solar system across other solar system. you're starting to get into like interstellar warfare. because why would we be fighting a fleet that's sitting on Neptune? Yeah. and why would we countries engage each other in earth's orbit? Yeah. there's all kinds of stupid political reasons. Yeah, no, you're right. I'm not going to underestimate humanity's stupidity, but, it just doesn't seem rational to me. I think that's just because war inherently is irrational. Yeah, I mean it definitely is. So yeah, of course it doesn't. But yeah, I definitely think we could still see it even within our own solar system. We can definitely do another episode on interstellar warfare, which I think we should. But it's going to be a whole other can of worms and unfortunately I just don't think we would have time to do that. Yeah, that is definitely fair. okay, so how lengthy do you think these engagements would be? Oh, I don't know. It depends on what you define as an engagement, really. you're probably leaving to go to one of these engagements months in advance, and you might be preparing the battlefield well before, you actually get there, maybe firing some missiles out on, again, ballistic trajectories, unpowered. in hopes that they'll overshoot the enemy and be able to outflank them and come from behind once the engagement starts. you could potentially be doing all kinds of stuff to prepare the battlefield, but the actual engagement itself I don't expect would be very long for a variety of reasons. One being thermal management. how long can you really maintain, your fire rate and all of that. How much mass can you carry for ordinances is going to be another limiting factor. And just how long until someone gets a lucky shot and takes out the enemy. So probably months of intense waiting and then, a few minutes to hours of intense battle and that's it. Pick up the pieces and go declare your victory. So do you think that this would play out more of like a gentleman's game? Like how warfare was in the late 1600s up until the late 1800s. or, a little bit before than like mid 1800s. Where they would be like, okay, this is our field of battle. I know that you're coming, that I'm coming. we'll all, get in our positions, fire projectiles and whoever has the most ships left wins. I doubt it would be that gentlemanly, but in a sense it will be, you're going to know where you're going to be meeting probably, like I said, months in advance, just based on the trajectories they have and the trajectories that you have. Especially as you get closer and closer to the engagement, there's only so much you can do to change that trajectory you're on. So everyone's going to know where you're meeting at, but I don't think they're going to be communicating that and planning for it, and I doubt they're going to have these nice, beautiful, let's all match relative velocities. In fact, it might be, just a few seconds that you End up flying by each other at interstellar speeds or not interstellar, but, solar orbital speeds and dropping all your ordinances and then patiently waiting to see how many of your missiles can make it to their flack. And if any of your rail gun shots caught up with them and, might literally be a few seconds of passing each other. And then 20 minutes of trying to shoot down all the missiles they launched while they passed you and frantically watching your sensors to see if one of your missiles gets by. And then saying, We missed, we both survived. let's see, orbitally we'll be back around in two months. Like, uh, like, uh, orbital dogfight that they're essentially playing. And, it sounds honestly terribly boring for warfare. yeah. Warfare can be incredibly boring, until it's not boring. And then it's really not boring. Yeah, and then you get that five minutes of, man, I wish I wasn't here. Yeah. It's a lot of being more bored than you've ever been in your life and then more scared than you've ever been in your life. Yeah. that's, warfare's terrible, kids. Yeah, don't do a war. Don't do a war. All right, awesome. Awesome. I think that was a really interesting topic. if you enjoyed this and you like these types of discussions, please consider following us on your favorite podcast platform of choice. I do enjoy seeing that number go up so much. And you'll be notified when we release new episodes, which is very nice. Also consider following us on threads. We are very active on there and our threads is just entropy rising podcast and we usually post topics. I at least do one a day, sometimes two a day, and I try to be very engaged with the comments. We've actually done some posts regarding space warfare on there already. Thanks for listening. And I typically will start posting about an episode when I'm in the research phase of it because I'm interested and I have a lot of, concepts. So, you know, if you follow us on threads, you might be able to parse out what our future episodes will be about. And, if you have any interesting topics that you'd want for us to go over, please feel free to drop them in threads and talk about them. Yeah, exactly. thank you so much for joining us and Lucas, have a wonderful rest of your night. I have a wonderful rest of your night too, Jake. Thank you.