I enjoyed your article on fighting in space, and don't really disagree with the idea of using an "Orion" style ship to fight, but why use a "battleship" at all?

A few points to ponder on the similarities:

1. You have a HUGE volume of space to deal with, even in orbit.

2. You have true 3D capacity (like submarines).

3. After launch, you have options for propulsion that can be "stealthy" and radiate very little energy.

4. You can not really "aim" weapons over the distances and physical environment you have to deal with. There's no Star Wars-style "turrets" blasting away at a target you can see. If you're that close, you're already dead. (Yes, there are depth charges, but no sub commander will let you get close enough to use them from a ship)

5. Like submarines vs. surface ships, your enemy can maneuver faster than you and has better weapons and sensors.

I could see more of a "battle by remote," where a control station or ship unobtrusively away from the main battle uses passive and active "buoys" to find the enemy, then sends a swarm of smart and semi-smart weapons at them.

Your firepower is all away from your control, and there's no big gaudy ship to shoot at. Lasers would give you very directional and difficult-to-jam communications to keep this all together.

4 to 6 "CICs in space" could give you redundancy, bombs, missiles, rail guns, lasers -- all in a web, in effect giving you a "battleship" of huge size and survivability.

Finally, instead of one launch with a very large energy signature, you get hundreds of smaller launches, hopefully overwhelming the bad guy's tracking and suppression capability.

Some launches would be weapons, some sensors, some dummies and EMP burst weapons to confuse and hopefully burn out some of the bad guys sensors, and one or two direct nukes tossed at the "battleships" to keep them busy and give your net time to deploy.

All makes for a far better chance of getting into space.

Move this 50 years into the future and you have launches from the moon and Earth to deal with, another enhancement to the chances of getting your net out where it can engage.

I realize that this is very un-sexy to a movie maker. ASW (despite Tom Clancy) is not an exciting exercise 98% of the time either, but it is real, and a very exacting type of warfare.

The other problem with all of this is you need a LOT of launches to do this, a luxury we may not have with the evil Galactic Overlords hovering over the planet, but then again making an "Orion" type ship will take time too.

Everything I proposed with the possible exception of a bomb pumped lasers is "doable" with present technology or a logical extension of what we have now. It would take only a few years to develop it all.

Keep up the articles, I enjoyed your article and the website in general.

-- Patrick Cooper

Pretty innovative.

I think it is very important that humanity starts looking for new propulsion systems. We might need it one day -- maybe not because of alien invasion, but because earth's resources are too low.

I hope one day humanity works together in the name of science and technology.

-- Nick Maes

I just read the article about space battleships on your site, and I'm a little unimpressed by the writing and the research behind it.

The idea proposed by Bryan Palaszewski that a nuclear propulsion shield could be made of lead is simply ridiculous. I have not heard of a NASA scientist thinking of using lead in a ship design for years.

Lead is one of the more problematic (not to mention dense and massive) materials to use in a space-going vehicle.

As the craft was maneuvering through space, it would pass through stray radioactive emissions it had just released. The entire ship would have to have lead shielding, which would make its mass ridiculously huge.

I am also surprised that no mention was made of the fact that many companies have decided to abandon the idea of a solar sail, due to the fact that no one has been able to come up with a material that is strong enough and thin enough.

I recently read of one such sail being researched that was around 6-10 miles in diameter, and its weight was in the area of 5 tons -- even at a thickness of only 5 millimeters. Many researchers have realized that this method is so difficult and unwieldy that it would be ineffective as a means of propulsion.

There was, however, an article I read recently about a NASA-funded scientist who has designed a new "solar-bubble" engine.

The engine is about the size of a very large pickle jar, and it produces an electro-magnetic bubble that would allow, if used, a craft the size of the Voyager probes to travel twice as fast as the shuttle, with no fuel (save electricity) used in the process.

-- Eddie Lloyd