Here's a ramble

As I was driving home, I was thinking about drawing spaceships and how to go about it without being cliché.

It occurred to me that the bulk of it would be all sorts of modules cobbled together on a keel based on the necessity of functionality rather than constraints like gravity, hydrodynamanics or aerodynamics. Think of this from Star Wars.

But what if the front were shielded by a smooth angular plate, such that the radar cross-section was minimized from the front. Cheap conditional stealth. So then when engaging missiles, the standard procedure would be to turn in towards them, to minimize target size and radar reflections. Just like the days of yore.

Then I thought about how there's a certain romance to ships of a line, slugging it out with cannons and shot, that often brings space battles in fiction back to it. But how would you bring about something like that without being anachronistic?

Well, of course space is big, projectiles would have a lot of travel time giving the enemy time to respond and evade. So then the weapon of choice would be lasers. Photons. The fastest projectile in the universe. Lasers take a lot of energy and they only travel in straight lines, so you need a big powerplant and many many lasers to increase the probability of a hit (because space is big) and also to maximize the damage dealt in a first strike (because if you shoot, everyone will know where you are). The most efficient way of getting a lot of lasers into space and powering them all would be big battleships with big broadsides.

Countermeasures. What wrecks directed energy weapons most in real life is atmospheric conditions. Obviously if you discharge a gas in space, it'll disperse quickly. But what if you discharge colloidal particles? And they're charged so that when they disperse, not only will they stop beams by direct impediment, but they're scattered at a distance apart that optimizes wave interference from reflected beams. Except the colloid will render your own beam weapons useless, so in a head to head battle, neither side will use this unless they're looking to disengage. Like a futuristic smokescreen. Next is that big battleships move slowly, so even if they are turning in, to avoid missiles, it might not be fast enough. So we can have a bunch of smaller ships whose job is to screen the battleships and they will be bristling with point defense systems, rail guns perhaps or even smaller lasers to engage incoming missiles (the missiles can't be steathy because they'll be emitting radio waves, which can be homed in on). Destroyers.

Missiles have limited maneuverability, because to close the distance they would have to be traveling extremely fast, and to turn around would take too much propellant, which makes them easy to pick off. The corollary would be that if a ship gets hit by a nuke-tipped missile, they are done. Fighters are not useful because humans cannot take the gees and their reaction times are too slow when everything is happening at large fractions of lightspeed (and also, at lightspeed).

There would be development into some novel technologies, like photon cannons that shift frequency to get through the colloid shield or ships that are stealthy from all sides, but the previous represents the most practical and economical technologies of the time.

And that's how I would bring future fleet engagements back into the early 20th century.

Man, I should write a novel. It'll be like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, but sensible.