SPACE DREADNOUGHTS
Edited by
David Drake with Charles G. Waugh and Martin Harry Greenberg
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the editors
Ace edition / July 1990
All rights reserved. Copyright © 1990 by Martin Harry Greenberg.
Cover art by Walter Velez.
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Introduction copyright © 1990 by David Drake.
“The Only Thing We Leam” by Cyril M. Kombluth. Copyright 1949 by Standard Magazines, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc.
“C-Chute” by Isaac Asimov. Copyright 1951 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation; © renewed 1979 by Isaac Asimov. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Allamagoosa” by Eric Frank Russell. Copyright © 1955 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the agents for the author’s Estate, the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.
“A Question of Courage” by J. F. Bone. Copyright © 1960 by Ziff-Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.
“Superiority” by Arthur C. Clarke. Copyright 1951 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright renewed © 1979 by Arthur C. Clarke. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.
“Hindsight” by Jack Williamson. Copyright 1940 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.; renewed © 1968 by Jack Williamson. Reprinted by permission of the Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc.
“The Last Battalion” by David Drake. Copyright © 1977 by Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Shadow on the Stars” by Algis Budrys. Copyright 1954 by King-Size Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Time Lag” by Poul Anderson. Copyright © 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue. New York, NY 10022.
Space Dreadnoughts
Edited by David Drake with Charles G. Waugh and Martin Harry Greenberg
“Introduction: A quick Look at Battle Fleets” (1990) by David Drake
“The Only Thing We Learn” (1949) by Cyril M. Kornbluth
“C-Chute” (1951) by Isaac Asimov
“Allamagoosa” (1955) by Eric Frank Russell (won the Hugo Award for best short story in 1955)
“A Question of Courage” (1960) by J. F. Bone
“Superiority” (1951) by Arthur C. Clarke
“Hindsight” (1940) by Jack Williamson
“Shadow on the Stars” (1954) by Algis Budrys
“Time Lag” (1961) by Poul Anderson
“The Last Battalion” (1977) by David Drake
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).