Cry Havoc!
Lately AMC has been showing Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and on the SciFi Channel I've seen advertisements for some manner of sequel to Starship Troopers. Oh, yes, and on SpikeTV on Friday nights one can catch two-part episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "uncut and back-to-back," as they say. The result of this recent, relative glut of space combat is that I have been thinking and speculating about futuristic war in space, and what it might actually look like when it comes to pass.
Space combat has generally been portrayed in one of a few, archetypal ways. The television episodes and movies of the original Star Trek generally showcased ship-to-ship combat of a distinctly submarine character. In fact, the original series episode "Balance of Terror", which introduced the Romulans, was basically an interstellar version of the movie The Enemy Below, about the deadly battle of wits between an American destroyer captain and a German U-boat skipper in World War II. The battle between the Enterprise and the Reliant in Star Trek II, in which the Mutara Nebula has crippled the sensors and disabled the shields, is easily the high-water mark of these portrayals, and is a clear analogue to such combat as we have seen in movies like The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide.
The Star Wars movies, Babylon 5, and the Dominion War arc in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine all showcased a space combat ethic that represents a marriage between the most dramatic parts of naval warfare in World Wars I and II. You have the capital ships blasting away at one another, in the manner of the Battle of Jutland, and you have the fighters streaking around fighting one another and shooting at the capital ships, in the manner of the Battle of Midway. This ethos is also dominant among computer games (the inimitable Wing Commander series being emblematic).
And lastly, as a further development (some might say regression) of the World War I + II space combat genre, we have the movie Starship Troopers, in which the paradigm is rather stilted towards the Battle of Jutland, but we have the additional element of the orbital equivalent to amphibious assault. There may be other examples in this family, but they escape me at the moment.
When we actually stop and think about the shape of war in space, though, the really striking thing is how unrealistic all of these concepts are. A spaceship large and heavy enough to take any kind of punishment in battle is also going to be far too cumbersome to propel, and far too heavy to have actually been constructed for anything like an acceptable amount of money or in an acceptable amount of time. The paradigm for ship-to-ship combat in space is not naval, but aerial; we're not talking battleships or submarines, but rather the "First look, first shot, first kill" ethic of the F/A-22 Raptor. One very large hole in a spaceship is all it takes to make one very large problem. Likewise, with the exception of the A-10, aircraft are not renowned for their ability to absorb damage.
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