Space Dreadnoughts

INTRODUCTION A QUICK LOOK AT BATTLE FLEETS David Drake

One of the problems with figuring out how ships are going to fight in space (assuming that we have ships in space, which isn’t as likely as I wish; and, that we’re still fighting when we get there, which is unfortunately more probable) is that there are a lot of maritime models to choose from.

It’s also true that some of the maritime models came from very specialized sets of circumstances; and a few of them weren’t particularly good ideas even in their own time.

And it’s also true that some of the writers applying the models have a better grasp of the essentials than others. That isn’t limited to writers of fiction. For example, I recall two essays which were originally published about fifty years ago in Astounding.

In the first of the essays, Willy Ley, a very knowledgeable man who had been involved with the German rocket program, proved to my satisfaction that warships in space would carry guns, not missiles, because, over a certain small number of rounds, the weight of a gun and its ammunition was less than the weight of the same number of complete missiles. The essay was illustrated with graphs of pressure curves, and was based on the actual performance of nineteenth-century British rocket artillery (“the rockets’ red glare” of Francis Scott Key).

As I say, the essay was perfectly convincing… until I read the paired piece by Malcolm Jameson.

Jameson’s qualifications were relatively meager. Before throat cancer forced him to retire, he’d been a United States naval officer—but he was a mustang, risen from the ranks, rather than an officer with the benefit of an Annapolis education. For that matter, Jameson had been a submariner rather than a surface-ship sailor during much of his career. That was a dangerous specialty—certainly as dangerous a career track as any in the peacetime navy—but it had limited obvious bearing on war in vacuum.

Jameson’s advantage was common sense. He pointed out (very gently) that at interplanetary velocities, a target would move something on the order of three miles between the time a gun was fired and the time the projectile reached the end of the barrel. The rest of Jameson’s essay discussed tactics for missile-launching spaceships—which were possible, as the laws of physics proved gun-laying spaceships were not. Ley could have done that math just as easily. It simply hadn’t occurred to him to ask the necessary questions.

Light-swift beam weapons were a fictional staple in Jameson’s day (he used them in his stories about Bullard of the Space Patrol) and a realistic possibility in ours. And the advent of the electrically-driven railgun has brought even projectile artillery back into the realm of space warfare.

Present realities don’t prevent a writer from building any number of self-consistent constructs of how space war will work, however.

At one time, boarding and hand-to-hand combat were common notions in military science fiction (which, in the 1920s and 30s, was rather a lot of science fiction). Boarding has a long naval tradition as, at times, the heaviest available weapons were not by themselves sufficient to sink major warships. When oared warships grew sturdy enough to be equipped with rams, however, ramming replaced boarding as the tactic of choice…

Until sailing ships replaced oared warships. Sailing ships can’t mount effective rams because their masts and rigging would come down with the shock. The guns available during the next five centuries weren’t effective ship-killers, and boarding returned.

As guns became more powerful and ships were designed to mount large numbers of them along the sides, the sort of melees that characterized the Armada battles and the meeting engagements of the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the seventeenth century gave way to formal line-of-battle tactics. Opposing fleets were expected to sail along in parallel lines, firing all their guns at one another, until something happened.

Mostly, nothing much happened. A typical example is the action between the fleets of DeGrasse and Graves in 1781 in Chesapeake Bay. This was the crucial battle that decided the fate of the British army at Yorktown—and, thus, the Revolutionary War. It was a draw, with no ships lost on either side (which turned out to be good enough for the American rebels, of course).

Nelson changed matters by what amounted to assertiveness training for the British navy. His captains were expected to close with the enemy and board if necessary, instead of staying at a reasonable range and letting noise and smoke stand in the place of doing real damage. Nelson’s opponents never beat him. In the end, they were able to kill him; but even dead he led his forces to victory.

The appearance of steam and armored warships in the nineteenth century gave rise to an amazing number of theories and some of the most outlandish warships ever built. What didn’t emerge were major battles between the new vessels.

At Lissa in 1866, an Austrian fleet humiliated an Italian fleet of more modern and powerful ships, proving that competence and leadership had more to do with victory than equipment alone. (Nelson must have smiled from his grave.) Lissa proved little or nothing about the new hardware (theorists of the time thought otherwise; they were wrong), but it was as good a test as the century provided.

Ships generally mounted mixed armaments of large and mid-sized weapons, though there was a brief fad of equipping battleships with small numbers of very heavy guns. This was partly in the hope that a single huge shell could smash opposing armor (in the unlikely instance that such a shell hit its target); and partly because the planners wanted an easily quantifiable marker for their arms race. (The dangerous buffoons in the Pentagon and Kremlin with their “My throw weight is bigger than your throw weight” arguments had nineteenth century predecessors.)

Incidentally, as soon as steam removed the necessity for masts and rigging, rams returned as well. There were few successful examples of ramming in war. but in peacetime, rams sank almost as many friendly naval units as decomposing smokeless powder did.

The only real test of nineteenth century warships came in the twentieth century—1905—at the Strait of Tsu Shima, where a Russian fleet that did nothing whatsoever right met a Japanese fleet that did nothing important wrong. The Russians were massacred, and it was heavy gunfire alone that did the butchers’ work.

An idiosyncratic genius named Jackie Cooper was running the British admiralty at the time. He came up with the first good idea in warship construction since Ericsson put a turret and screw propeller on the Monitor: Cooper built the Dreadnought.

The Dreadnought was big and fast and carried ten of the most powerful naval guns available, with none of the mid-sized weapons that had proved almost useless at Tsu Shima. Every battleship built after the Dreadnought is more similar to her than the Dreadnought was similar to anything that came before her.

Having had a brilliant idea. Cooper went on to have a lethally bad one: the battle cruiser. The battle cruiser was a dreadnought (the name became generic for all-big-gun warships) which had lighter armor and more powerful engines than a battleship, and was therefore faster. The theory was that “speed is armor.” The reality was quite different, and thousands of sailors (mostly British) died in the two World Wars (the Hood was a battle cruiser) because a clever slogan can’t repeal the laws of physics.

The dreadnought brought back the concept of the line of battle. It didn’t work any better in the twentieth century than it had in the eighteenth, because both sides had to agree to play the game and the weaker side—the Germans, in this case—would inevitably lose. The German admirals of the World Wars were less than brilliant, but they weren’t stupid. Besides, the fleets of World War II were dominated by aircraft. The one major battleship-to-battleship fleet action of the war occurred at night in the Surigao Strait. It was a close copy of Tsu Shima, with the Japanese playing the part the Russians had forty years earlier.

There is enough in actual maritime history to provide models for almost any form of space warfare a writer wants to postulate. Because there are so many possibilities, writers can find a solidly-grounded situation that suits their story, rather than forcing the story into a narrow matrix.

And that, I think, makes for some very good stories.

Dave Drake,

Chapel Hill, North Carolina