war in heaven

                           By Fletcher Pratt

                    Who is going to use death-rays
                    when solid-shot and space-mines
                    will bring far cheaper victory?
                    An article about space-warfare.

    _Virtually all science fiction authors and most of those who
    read the stuff have speculated at one time or another upon
    space-warfare. How will it be waged? What will the ships be like,
    the weapons, the tactics? Fletcher Pratt, even more renowned as a
    military and naval historian and student than as a science fiction
    author here take a peek into an all-too probable future and comes
    up with some well-thought-out answers that are guaranteed to
    surprise all would-be spacemen._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                  Fantastic Universe June-July 1953.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


    _The mighty ship released a flashing sheet of energy but the
    Uranian space-vessel's beams were met by a counter-energy screen
    that caused its blinding heat to ricochet in flashing showers
    from a barrier invisible against the star-studded black wall of
    space...._

Oh, yeah? It reads well--or has a few thousand fictional times--but it
doesn't make sense in a too-real future.

Look chum, a searing bolt of flame has to have something that will
support combustion or it will go out. And what do you mean "sheet of
energy?" How do you generate it? How do you expect to keep radiation in
a tight beam across a couple of thousand miles of space when you can't
even prevent a beam of light from spreading after a couple of thousand
feet?

The tractor and repulsor beams, screens of force and death-rays of
high-power interplanetary stories simply aren't going to work. At least
not according to any science we know now. About the only kind of "ray"
that might be dangerous would be ultra-violet.

But the Sun itself produces ultra-violet faster and in greater quantity
than any generator man could build and unless the crews of space-ships
are very thoroughly protected against it there won't be any space-ships.

Maybe the BEMS from Arcturus will come around with something more
serious but it is a better-than-even-money bet that they can't do any
more about the laws governing radiation than we can. And if they can't
space war will have to be fought with far more mundane weapons.

Well, what kind of weapons? That depends upon the kind of ships. You
don't expect an earthly battleship to carry torpedoes because she
will never get close enough to the enemy to fire them--or a destroyer
to mount 16-inch guns because she can't carry them. So the problem
of space-war begins with that of designing a space-warship. And that
brings up some interesting questions.

The first of them is the shape of the ship. The torpedo-shape with
brief wings, the type usually pictured, is very attractive. It is
the only shape that could take off from earth and go out through the
atmosphere. It keeps the machinery well away from the living spaces.
For landing on the moon or an asteroid it is quite all right because it
can be turned over and set down on its tail jets.

But when space-warfare really gets going the torpedo-shape will take
a back space before a vessel built in space (probably at a satellite
station) to operate and fight in space. And the shape of that ship
will be a sphere. It is the strongest, the most economical for the use
of the contained cubic capacity, but these are not the main reasons
for building space-warships round. The reasons are those of military
efficiency, which take precedence over all others when it comes to
designing fighting equipment.

In the first place a sphere can be given more than one rocket exhaust.
With more than one the spherical ship would have a maneuvering ability
making immeasurably superior to the long, graceful torpedo. The latter
would have to sweep around in curves of hundreds or thousands of miles,
or change its course on gyros, which would take nearly as long. But the
sphere, with a simple opposite-direction blast from its rockets, could
halt, change course and be off.

Probably only two exhausts are necessary, but those we have to have. I
am aware that the engineering problems of building a space-ship that
way are very severe but so are the engineering problems of building an
atomic submarine or a carrier to carry jet planes. However, when there
is urgent military necessity for something, neither expense nor the
difficulty of the problem is ever really allowed to stand in the way.

In the second place a sphere can be built with no blind angles of
approach. The fighter airplane of today, with an enemy on his tail, is
in trouble--and so will be a space-ship with an enemy on its exhaust.
Of course, turrets can be mounted above or below the exhaust on a
torpedo-shaped ship but they will never give quite the same protection
as not having any blind angles at all.

In the third place the sphere is the most convenient shape for landing
on the Moon or asteroids and they are going to be important as bases.
And in the fourth place the armor of the sphere can carry the main
structural stresses, making the interior structure light.

Using a spherical shape means size, of course, but so do several
other necessary factors and it is impossible to avoid them all. This
means that the warships of space will not be divided into classes of
battleships, cruisers and destroyers like warships of the ocean. With
an exception to be noted later all will be battleships. There is no
reason for making them anything else.

Oceanic destroyers gain speed by sacrificing armor but there is no
comparable gain in a space-ship. Once the jets are started and the
original inertia overcome the heavy ship will travel as fast as the
light one because the limiting factor is how much acceleration the crew
can stand physically--and it's the same for both.

On earth the design of a ship is a compromise between the demands
of armament, protection, speed and cruising radius, with the last
the least important. For the space-ship speed will make its demands
but they will not have to be satisfied at the expense of the other
characteristics. However, cruising radius is something else.

The ruling consideration in the radius of action of an earth-ship is
the ability to carry fuel. Stores for the crew were seldom a problem
during the war, even though the food did sometimes run down to Spam and
those incredible dehydrated potatoes. Ammunition became a problem in
only a few cases. But in the space-navy all this will be changed.

Fuel does not look like a particularly serious problem. A given
space-ship will be burning lots while she is using it but most of the
time she'll be coasting on gained acceleration and will need fuel only
for short bursts of maneuver during action. The true limiting factor in
the radius of action of a space-warship is the stores for the crew--not
food or water but most specifically air.

The problem with water is not supplying it but getting rid of it.
For every five pounds of food you eat two pounds of water is the
minimum result, exuded in various ways. And water is ridiculously
easy to purify by distillation. Food itself can be carried in various
concentrated forms but it is impossible to carry reserve air except in
oxygen bottles under compression and it is very difficult to get rid
of surplus unwanted carbon dioxide.

For stations in space air-purifiers have been suggested, consisting
of algae operating in a churned water-tank. This would be all right
for a station which has a steady motion in a determined orbit. But the
space-battleship in action will be subject to violent gyrations which
would do no good to the air-purifying system even if considerations
of weight and space made it practical to install such a system in the
first place.

Then there is the added danger that a single hit in so vital an
installation would put the ship out of action for keeps while a few
oxygen bottles blown up would not matter. So the space-battleship will
probably have to depend on bottled air, like a pre-snorkel submarine,
and the quantity she can carry will determine her radius of action.

This does not mean that she cannot make quite long voyages, since a
ship of the dimensions we are contemplating could store quite a lot
of air. But it does help to determine the strategy of space-warfare.
It will be fundamentally a struggle for bases where more oxygen can
be obtained. Not through going down into the atmosphere of Earth or
the thin atmosphere of Mars or the questionable one of Venus. It means
bases on the Moon and the asteroids.

The Moon and asteroids are made of rocks, on the surface at least, and
practically all rocks are loaded with oxygen--47% in the crust of
the Earth for example. With the kind of power that will be available
by time we get space-ships, it will be a comparatively simple matter
to separate these rock materials from their oxygen electrolytically.
Carbon dioxide is partly oxygen, of course, but so stubbornly bonded
that no ordinary electrolytic process will break it and it has the
unpleasant quality of being a gas under electrolytic conditions.

Since the oxygen-producing machinery will be too heavy and bulky
to carry aboard the space-ship the job will have to be done at
air-refueling stations and these advanced bases will be the key of
space-campaigns. Naturally, they will be powerfully fortified against
attack from the enemy's space-fleet. Equally naturally they will be
logical points of attack in the hope of limiting the enemy's operations
by cutting his bases from under him.

Thus the overall strategy of a space-campaign will somewhat resemble
that of the Pacific War, with each party trying to destroy or
neutralize the enemy's bases while extending his own. If both have
bases on the Moon or Mars there may even be ground campaigns in support
of those in the skies. And getting control of one of those erratic
asteroids that come within the orbit of Mars will count for ten.

What about armament? In stories of space-warfare that get away from
those improbable rays there is usually some kind of hyper-super-duper
torpedo, rocket-propelled. But this only demonstrates that the authors
of the stories are thinking in Earth-terms instead of space-terms.

It is perfectly plausible to include some torpedoes, probably with
atomic warheads, in the armament of a space-ship--something that would
knock out an enemy base or destroy a space-battleship at a single blow.
But the torpedo will always be what military men call a weapon of
opportunity.

They can't be used at all angles--it would be fatally easy for one of
them to make a near-miss on the enemy craft and atom-bomb your own Moon
base or some part of the Earth you didn't want atom-bombed. Earth's
gravitational attraction would pull such a torpedo in from quite a
distance out.

There is also the point that on Earth the torpedo is a comparatively
short-range weapon, fired from concealment or under conditions where
the torpedo-carrier approaches so rapidly it cannot be stopped--by
a submarine under-water, by surface ships at night or from behind
smoke-screens, by torpedo-planes that attack at ten times the speed of
the target-ship.

None of these conditions can be realized in space-warfare. Even if
the space-ship were painted black and operating in a planetary shadow
(as in some stories) radar would pick it up at a distance at least
equaling that from the Earth to the Moon.

And even black coloring would make the space-ship visible as it
occluded the practically continuous blanket of stars visible in open
space. You can't make a smoke-screen in space--you can make it, but
it wouldn't hang and wouldn't be any use against radar if it did.
Comparative speeds that would permit the torpedo-plane type of attack
are simply unattainable.

Finally naval experience shows that fire is always opened at the
greatest possible range where there is any chance of doing damage--and
that range is usually maintained in the hope of avoiding hits. Only
when one party has been so badly pounded that defeat seems inevitable
is there an effort to close the range for torpedo or gunfire.

In space-war, given high visibility and the fact that there will be
neither gravity nor air resistance to slow up shells, fire will be
opened at extremely long ranges--hundreds of miles. At this distance, a
rocket-torpedo, clearly indicating its presence by its trail of fire,
will be quite easy to intercept--by shooting smaller rockets or shells
with proximity fuses at it.

The time it will take the torpedo to cover the distance is the major
factor. And running in to launch a torpedo from close range will be
very difficult because of the low speed differential between the two
parties and again because of the distance. So it is probable that most
space-actions will be fought out with guns.

I said guns. But a very different type of gun from those most of us are
familiar with, because this is another point where Earth-thinking must
give way to space-thinking. When the breech-block of a gun aboard one
of our cruisers is swung open to receive a new shell there is a brief
moment when the gun forms an open connecting tube from the inside of
the turret to the outside air.

       *       *       *       *       *

This will never do aboard a space-ship--there is no air outside and the
air from all over the vessel would rush in a tornado to escape into
outer space. There will have to be some device for loading the gun in
a vacuum or, since this might give trouble in case of a breakdown or
a misfire, more likely an automatic tompion to close the mouth of the
gun until there is another charge in the breech. This would have the
advantage that the rush of air into the gun, evacuated by the previous
firing, would automatically clean it of residual explosion products.

But this is not all. Since there is no air to set up resistances to
take a projectile out of its proper path, there is no particular
reason for rifling the gun. In fact it would be rather better not
to. And while shells were mentioned, in connection with beating off
rocket-torpedoes and would be very useful for that purpose, there is no
reason whatever for employing them against another space-ship or the
dome of an enemy base.

The reason for using a shell against an Earthbound ship is that after
it gets through the side it explodes there and messes things up for a
considerable radius. But a space-ship is vulnerable in a way that no
Earth-ship ever is. If it loses its air it's the finish for everybody
aboard.

A high-velocity solid-shot, penetrating the side of a space-ship,
could tear holes in several compartments and connect them all with the
outside, causing disastrously rapid exhaustion of the air. It would be
much more damaging than any shell, which would only ruin one or two
compartments. For that matter it was discovered during the last war
that a solid projectile which penetrated a tank and ricocheted around
inside was quite as effective as a shell-burst.

A solid-shot would have more penetrating power because of its greater
mass and unwillingness to break up against armor. And there is also
the law of military economics that requires you do everything with the
least expensive weapon that will accomplish the purpose. A cast-steel
bullet with a soft iron head to "grease" its way through armor will be
both cheaper and more effective than any type of shell.

As an alternate type of ammunition for use against ships with
exceptionally heavy armor, there might be some projectile using the
shaped-charge principle. There's nothing wrong with carrying several
different types of projectile for the same guns--both ship and field
artillery do it right now.

The type and purpose of the projectiles also determine the size of the
guns. The reason for using large-caliber guns on Earth are two--to get
a bigger bursting charge at the receiving end and to obtain greater
range by a larger driving charge in the breech.

But in space a projectile would have infinite range, unless it fell
into the gravitational attraction of some body, and the big bursting
charge is not required. So the gun need be only just big enough to make
the driving charge give it a very high muzzle-velocity.

Considering the question of ammunition stowage and supply, probably the
best caliber would be between 3.5 and 6 inches, 90 and 155 millimeters.
Liquid propellants give higher muzzle velocities than solid and would
have the advantage of making a better seal around the projectile in the
breech. They could be pumped in from metered tubes.

After the air-tight doors have been closed the men who serve these
guns will go into action in space-suits, breathing the air around them
but having the suits fitted with automatic valves that will close down
the moment the compartment begins to lose air. Damage-control parties
will have special apparatus for patching holes--probably quick-drying
viscous plastics with a silicone base, because of their imperviousness
to temperature changes.

What about fire controls? The calculations for them will be arduous
because of the distances and speeds involved. But Dr. John D. Clark has
pointed out that two space-ships engaged in a fight, no matter what
courses they are traveling with relation to the Sun or the planets,
are in a single plane with relation to each other and so are all the
projectiles fired by both of them.

This plane may tilt violently as they maneuver but at the moment of
firing the line from gun to target, or predicted position of target,
is a perfectly flat and straight line. This is a much easier ballistic
problem than in any Earthly firing, where gravity, air resistance and
for long ranges even the curvature and rotation of the Earth must be
considered.

The guns will certainly have automatic radar controls and a high
rate of fire. The only trouble is that the calculations fed
into the controls will have to be made at lightning speeds, in
micro-seconds--which means electronic computers. And this brings up
another difference between space-warfare and the kind we know, though
it may extend to war on Earth.

It is possible to make an electronic computer non-functional by
overloading it with data or to drive it electronically insane by
feeding it undesirable data. Space-warfare is therefore bound to
include all sorts of decoy devices--small metal balloons have been
suggested--that will register on the enemy's radar as space-ships and
set his guns swinging wildly or firing at phantoms.

The only type of ship to which all that has been said does not apply
is the space-minelayer. These can be quite small as compared with the
battleships, need carry no armor and can use the torpedo-shape for
operating from an earth base. Some years ago Malcolm Jameson suggested
small iron spheres as mines, strewn along the enemy's path where he
would run into them--but the matter is not quite that simple.

If the space-minelayer merely dumped the spheres overboard as
an Earthly minelayer does they would become part of a new small
gravitational system around the minelayer, and would follow her around
like Mary's little lamb.

The mines of space-warfare will have to be provided with some kind of
power that will take them into a predetermined orbit around Earth,
the Moon or an asteroid after the minelayer has dropped them. Only
enough to set up the orbit, mind--after that they could take care of
themselves.

Also it is doubtful whether a mere ball of solid iron would smash up
the works of an armored space-ship unless she met it at high speed
on an absolute collision course. The more normal event would be for
the mine to be picked up by the small but perceptible gravitational
attraction of the space-ship and travel with it as a satellite. So the
mines of space will probably have to be fairly large and contain heavy
explosive charges, probably with proximity fuses.

Still the advantages of mining are so great that they will undoubtedly
play a large part in space-warfare. Asteroid or Moon bases can be
defended by minefields, which would keep an enemy at a distance until
he had painstakingly located the pesky objects and shot them up, during
which time the ship would be an ideal target for guns on the ground.

       *       *       *       *       *

And one striking feature about this space minefield must always be
remembered, a feature that makes it different from anything encountered
on the ocean. The fields will be constantly moving. Fixed in an orbit
25,000 miles above the Earth a space-mine would always remain over the
same Earthly spot and there is a similar critical distance for the
Moon, Mars, and the asteroids.

But few of the mines will be at exactly that distance. Unless they
are they will be tiny satellites, revolving around their primaries at
greater or less speeds, constantly on the go. A space-ship won't have
to hit them. They will hunt it up.

There is also the fact that mining in war is not merely a defensive
tactic. In World War I the German subs were pretty thoroughly mined
in by the barrages across the North Sea and English Channel. In World
War II what was left of the Japanese fleet was immobilized in its
harbors by mines. Space-mines would serve a similar purpose of closing
a planetoid or an area to all access.

They could serve a tactical purpose as well by limiting avenues of
approach. Not that they couldn't be eliminated--rocket-torpedo fire
would be something quite different and more effective than the same
kind of fire against a space-battleship capable of striking back.

But this would take time and time is the one thing no one can afford to
waste in a kind of war where everything will move at speeds exceeding
those of the planets.