Category: [TECHNOLOGY]
Type: [Doctrine, Weapons and Tactics, Legal Framework]
Canon Tier: Tier 2 (proposed for Tier 1 on Council approval)
Tags: [NEW-TECH] [NEW-INSTITUTION] [PLOT-DEVICE]
Space warfare in the Terran Sphere c. 2460 is short-ranged, hot, slow and bound by law. Without sensor-proof stealth or faster-than-light weapons, shooting is limited by one inequality: a target that can dodge by a hull length before the shot arrives cannot be hit. That fixes engagement ranges at kilometres for small craft, tens of kilometres for starships and a few hundred kilometres for capitals. Heat, not ammunition, is the budget. Every Torch plume is a weapon and a beacon, every slide rings a gravitational-wave “bell” that port arrays hear, and every charged hull is a potential bomb. The Interstellar Navigation Conventions (INC) [NEW-INSTITUTION] wrap all of this in a legal frame that nearly everyone observes, because the alternative is mutual ruin. Nobody fights in a hush-zone, nobody uses the bubble torpedo twice, and those who must fight deniably hire a free company [NEW-INSTITUTION].
Engagement envelope. A shot misses once the target’s random displacement $\tfrac12 a t^2$ exceeds its size $L$. With flight time $t = d/v_p$ for projectile speed $v_p$:
\[d_{\text{eff}} \approx v_p \sqrt{\frac{2L}{a}}\]| Engagement | Inputs | Effective range |
|---|---|---|
| Small craft vs small craft, autocannon | L 15 m, a 30 m/s², $v_p$ 1.5 km/s | c. 1.5 km (band 1-5 km) |
| Small craft vs small craft, coilgun | $v_p$ 4 km/s | c. 4 km |
| Starship, coilgun | L 40 m, a 0.3 g, $v_p$ 10 km/s | c. 52 km |
| Starship jinking at a 3 g surge | a 3 g | c. 16 km (band 10-50 km) |
| Capital, coilgun | L 300 m, a 0.25 g, $v_p$ 10 km/s | c. 160 km |
| Capital, spinal railgun | $v_p$ 20 km/s | c. 310 km |
Directed energy and heat.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Laser spot, 1 m aperture at 1.06 µm | 0.26 m at 100 km; 2.6 m at 1,000 km |
| Waste heat, 10 MW beam at 35% efficiency | 18.6 MW |
| Heat battery (shared by combat and escape) | $1.5 \times 10^{11}$ J; absorbs 18.6 MW for c. 2.2 h |
| Radiator area at risk | Brightwing wings c. 2,100 m² at 1,800 K; courier FTL panels c. 1,400 m² at 600 K (8.2 MW); Atlas sails 26,000 m² |
| Surge left after arrival (3 g class) | 8c: 5.2 s; 12c: 4.3 s; 20c: 2.3 s; 30c: none |
Torch plume (2.1 TW, c. 15° half-angle): intensity falls with the square of range.
| Range | Intensity | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 km | 9.3 MW/m² | Structural damage |
| 10 km | 93 kW/m² | Lethal to radiators |
| 100 km | 0.93 kW/m² | Sunburn-grade |
Torch line scales with drive power. The torch line is where the plume falls to the same sunburn-grade intensity (≈ 0.93 kW m⁻²), and since intensity goes as $P / r^2$ for a fixed cone, the line goes as the square root of the drive’s fusion power:
\[r_{\text{line}} \approx 100\ \text{km} \times \sqrt{P_{\text{drive}} / 2.1\ \text{TW}}\]| Drive | $P_{\text{drive}}$ | $r_{\text{line}}$ | Intensity at 1 km |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micro-torch (small craft, 150 kN) | 14.7 GW | 8.4 km | 65 kW m⁻² |
| Ten micro-torches ganged | 147 GW | 26 km | 650 kW m⁻² |
| Half a courier plant | 0.7 TW | 58 km | 3.1 MW m⁻² |
| Brightwing (courier) | 2.1 TW | 100 km | 9.3 MW m⁻² |
A micro-torch plume reaches the Brightwing’s “lethal to radiators” intensity (93 kW m⁻²) at 0.84 km and its “structural damage” intensity (9.3 MW m⁻²) at 84 m. Small craft live inside those distances, which is why their drives are a weapon at ramming range and a nuisance beyond it.
Gravitational-wave “bell.” 99.98% of a jump’s energy leaves as gravitational waves. Strain is $10^{-15}$ at 1 km, $10^{-21}$ at $10^6$ km and $6.7 \times 10^{-24}$ at 1 AU.
Unshielded 5 Gy radius of a quench (1 m of water cuts the prompt dose by a factor of 100-1,000):
| Hull | Charge | Radius |
|---|---|---|
| Courier | 72 kt | c. 120 km |
| Bubble torpedo | 48 kt | c. 100 km |
| 3 kt freighter (12c) | 310 kt | c. 250 km |
| Atlas | 1.8 Mt | c. 600 km |
Sphere inventory (c. 2460, approximate). About 3,850 FTL hulls: 2,400 couriers and light ships, 1,200 freighters and escorts, 250 capitals.
Space is big and ships are loud. A torch plume is visible across a system; a slide rings the bell; radiators glow. Stealth is therefore a matter of running cold (radiators retracted, drive off, coasting on stored heat) rather than hiding. Because a cold ship cannot shed heat, running cold has a time limit. Fights happen where one side cannot avoid them: at a port, at a convoy’s rendezvous, at a derelict both want. The envelope above gives the geometry. A starship at 0.3 g that is expecting fire adds a 3 g surge and cuts its exposure range from about 52 km to about 16 km, but the surge lasts at most five seconds and spends heat from the battery that the same ship needs for escape. “Fight or flee” is one budget.
Kinetic. Autocannon, coilgun and, on capitals, the spinal railgun, a cousin of the mass driver. Ammunition mass counts and recoil torques the hull, so gunnery officers argue about slug mass the way old admirals argued about powder.
Directed energy. Pulse and beam lasers. Beam divergence is no obstacle at combat ranges (0.26 m at 100 km), but waste heat is: a 10 MW beam dumps 18.6 MW into the shooter. Every shot is paid for in radiator area.
Ordnance. Missiles, mines and naval nuclear warheads. The last are banned near habitats and rarely carried by anyone but the Commonwealth Federal Navy (CFN) and Directorate Security Fleet (DSF).
Point defense. Lasers and canister flak. The inflatable Whipple bumper works against debris only, not slugs.
Electronic warfare. Jamming, spoofing and decoy transponders, all limited by the grey line. Sealed cores have ROM-burned input and output, so the field wisdom is “you can’t hack a sealed core, only lie to its sensors.” The Greycode Clause [NEW-TECH] makes wildcode as a weapon the gravest crime in the INC, a direct legacy of the Wildcode Crisis.
Improvised. Torch plume, ramming, mass-driver slugs and impactors. Habitat lawyers have opinions about every one.
The torch plume is the one weapon every ship has. The torch line [NEW-TECH] is an exclusion around habitats, 100 km for a Brightwing-class drive and shorter for small craft (see below); the Torch Code forbids lighting inside it or turning a plume on the living. Departing a standoff at 0.05 m/s² on RCS alone takes about 33 min of continuous thrust to cross 100 km from rest (about 47 min if you stop at the far side), which is why habitats run tugs to clear departing ships past the line, and why no captain lights early. Hammer pulses are 1-3 s burns. A nugget torch’s gamma flare blinds sensors across thousands of kilometres and a Brightwing pulse flash dazzles out to hundreds. Combat rhythm is burn, blind, coast, reacquire.
The line is not a constant. It is the rated torch line printed on every drive’s certificate (the drive certificate described in Ship Module Standards) and broadcast by the ship’s transponder (see Comms Array). The Torch Code forbids lighting inside the lighting ship’s own rated line of a habitat or berth, and prescribes 100 km as the default for any drive with no certificate. A 45 t skiff with a rated 8.4 km line may therefore light 10 km from a port; a courier may not light inside 100 km. The same arithmetic runs the other way: a skiff must stay outside 100 km of a lit Brightwing, while a starship needs to keep only 8.4 km from a lit skiff. Ports with mixed traffic run two lanes, a small-craft lane with its 8 km line and a starship lane with its 100 km line, and a skiff that crosses 8.4 km on RCS alone at about 1 m s⁻² needs about 3 min and, if she stops at the berth, about 1.9 t of water (see RCS Thrusters). Small craft therefore pay for tug service like the big ships, or buy the water.
Small craft against Brightwing-class ships. The asymmetry is the whole of small-craft tactics. A lit starship is a 100 km hazard to a skiff, but a lit skiff is only an 8.4 km hazard to a starship, and an interceptor’s plume is a 0.84 km knife: the starship’s coilgun envelope (about 52 km) is far wider than the interceptor’s own reach (1.5 to 4 km), so the small craft must close, and it closes unlit, on RCS, inside the starship’s thermal blind side. Lighting to chase blinds your own sensors and puts your wings in the target’s view. Interceptors are the one class that chooses when to be seen.
Radiators are targets. A ship’s thermal control suite can fold wings, but with radiators folded every joule of waste goes into the heat battery. Even a courier’s battery starting cold, with all $1.5\times10^{11}$ J of headroom, absorbs a 10 MW laser’s 18.6 MW of waste for only about 2.2 h; then the shooter must unfold its radiators or cease fire, so the side with more headroom can simply wait. Captains speak of “spending ice”, with the water jacket and battery as a single purse.
Port arrays (see FTL Interface Port) fix the time, place and size of every jump (energy scales with mass times speed). A slide outruns its own departure signal, so the destination learns of it only at the merge, leaving about 30 s of ring-up warning. The resulting bell drill [NEW-INSTITUTION] sends port crews and nearby inhabitants to storm shelters. Ports sit at least 400 km from habitats (capital ports at least 2,000 km) with a 5 km hush-zone around the merge.
A merge cannot be aborted, so a blockade cannot stop arrivals; it can only meet them. Blockade doctrine is to hold the 400 km standoff lane (about 12 min of flip-burn at 0.3 g) and the torch line. Open-space arrivals are legal but leave the arrival energy uncaptured, which ports regard as theft.
A quench releases the full charge. The Charged-Hull Rule [NEW-TECH] keeps charged warships out of habitat standoffs and defines a deliberate quench as a weapon of mass destruction. A spill [NEW-TECH] (part of the CID leap) empties a charge through a sub-light null envelope instead: it radiates as gravitational waves over 1-2 min, rings the bell, still deposits a fraction of the energy as heat and wastes the glass. Crews practise spills the way old navies practised flooding magazines. A charged ship under fire has a terrible option and a poor one.
Illicit, single-shot and unreliable. Minimum energy is $E_{\min} \approx 2 \times 10^{14}$ J (about 48 kt), the misfire rate is 35%, and they arrive at rest and quench deliberately as area and terror weapons. Each costs 0.30 kg of slide catalyst plus 2.8 h of arming at 20 GW, during which the launcher sits lit and pinned. They are banned by the Gate Covenant [NEW-TECH]. The SCA’s glass ledger doubles as anti-proliferation machinery, since charge-hours that don’t match the ledger draw inspectors.
Nothing material crosses the wall of an FTL envelope, and outbound radiation leaves only as diffuse thermal emission (part of the CID leap). So: no fighting inside the envelope, no interdiction fields, no relativistic kill vehicles (exit is at rest), no cheap FTL missiles ($E_{\min}$). The Rapidity-Gate vetoes plots that bring two envelopes into closed-timelike-curve geometry, so fleets slide at staggered slide intervals [NEW-TECH] of minutes. Range is 6 ly per charge for couriers and 10 ly for Atlas-class capitals, so interstellar campaigns are months-long and logistics-bound. Tactical in-system slides are possible (1 AU in about 42 s at 12c), but the ship arrives hot, at rest and belled. They are used for reinforcement or escape, never assault.
Boarding is by grapple, breach or airlock; the Vesta Prime Consortium’s net-tugs capture disabled raiders. Cabin air is 65 kPa at 30% O₂, so fire is the real enemy of the boarder, and venting repels boarders. The lights-on surrender (radiators fully out, torch cold) is respected under the Ceres Protocols [NEW-EVENT]: lights-on quarter, prisoners, white-hull rescue ships, habitat and life-support protections and lifeline compute.
The INC (signed 2352 at the Treaty of Epsilon Eridani, revised 2393) contains the Hush Convention (ports are neutral; no fire in a hush-zone or at a ship in merge), the Gate Covenant (the Rapidity-Gate is mandatory; bypassing it is a universal crime), the Torch Code, the Charged-Hull Rule and the Ceres Protocols. Polities may issue letters of marque only in declared hostilities. In practice, the way anyone fights deniably is the free company: a licensed security contractor with a flag nobody can quite read. The guilds (Guilds of the Sphere) keep their halls neutral under the Hall Peace, which includes a rule that crews hired there cannot be pressed into service.
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