"Do We Have Spaceship Gaming All Wrong" Topic

Space vessels are designed to travel long distance. Therefore, it has be to self-sustained. Expect ships to be hugh. Problems with all the spaceship games are that they are not fighting in true 3D.

If one were to take current military hardware in both air and sea and extrapolate far into the future, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that spaceship warfare would be conducted by small frigate class ships armed with long range ballistics, drones, etc.

Assuming an onboard nuclear reactor of some type, the time/distance/shielding formula still applies. This will make for a fairly long ship (depending on what you carry for shielding). Also, the need for 6+ months of consumables will argue for large-ish ships.

I honestly assume that what we will end up with for long-duration missions is going to be fairly large (easily 200m long, maybe 300), and about 50m in diameter across the centrifuges. 40m is a big enough centrifuge to avoid severe coriolis effects, and I'd bet that you only need .5 gee for maintaining bone density. Even if you needed a full G, that's only 6.7rpm on a 20m radius centrifuge.

"Also, the need for 6+ months of consumables will argue for large-ish ships."

Pah – all meals will be taken in pill form…

…and everyone will have a flying car, and we will be ruled by damn dirty apes!

On topic, I feel that

(a) unmanned drones and missiles will play a role, especially in asteroid belts or on/near planets

(b) ships will come in only a few sizes – *expensive big battleship with omg laser/s* for stand-up fights and *cheaper, smaller version of said battleship* for patrolling and showing the flag

(c) electronic warfare will be important

I don't think drones will be a necessary in asteroid belts since the ones we see in movies and TV are complete BS.The size of the asteroids are accurate but in reality they are spaced out so far you could pass though a belt with out even seeing one. However drones might be useful for scouting any large asteroids you do come across to see if there is any on them.

1) thats just our asteroid belt- we have no reason to be sure that there aren't 'asteroid fields' like the ones seen in movies in other places (in fact they almost definitely exist- when a moon gets shattered, for example, for a pretty long time thats more or less what the remains look like).

Maybe not quite as packed as in the movies but close.

2) Rings of planets are actually like this, but with most of the 'asteroids' being smaller… more like small rocks you find in the yard. But there are some bigger moonlets in there, too, and in as of yet unseen rings of distant planets you could definitely find more 'recent' ones that are much more like movie belts.