You hate having to deal with an automated voice recognition system when calling customer service? Well we put it in an app and called it AI and now you piggies love it. That’s right, eat your slop.
You hate having to deal with an automated voice recognition system when calling customer service? Well we put it in an app and called it AI and now you piggies love it. That’s right, eat your slop.
Oh don’t worry, in anything resembling a real space fight everything will happen either so slow there will be time for everything or so fast no human will be able to react anyway. Most likely both, at different phases - space is fucking big and everything move really fast.
I know right? Try doing high g evasive manoeuvres whilst an enemy ship peppers you with hypervelocity kinetics from 10,000 klicks away.
Lost Fleet series have many interesting fleet encounters where everyone moves with 10-20% c and protagonist who commands entire fleet of something over 200 ships just going to nap or pray or eat (or all three) in the hours between few milisecond long encounters in the same battle.
That sounds great.
Iain M Banks had great ship battles. I really enjoyed the battle with the needle ships in the Algebraist.
All the ships are at 99% c and two fleets are converging on one and other. The whole battle hinges on predicting what the other fleet will do and spraying smart munitions everywhere to do the actual killing.
Everyone is swaddled in shock gel and there are no buttons whatsoever.
Basically the same in Lost Fleet, they try to predict opponent moves and react to them in the shortest possible term before battle to concentrate fire where the enemy is weakest and remove their own ships from places where enemy is about to concentrate fire. Weapons being pretty primitive compared to Culture, some particle beams, missiles and swarms of ordinary steel balls (for depleting shields).
Also, while protagonists are usual murican-like corrupted-but-lesser-evil shitlibs, opponents are surprisingly not any proxy for China/DPRK/Russia/USSR, but Real Ancaps, which means they have worst traits of military junta, gigacorpo-turned-state stage of monopoly and mafia in one package.
Story itself is a sci-fi take on classic Xenophon’ Anabasis, with protagonist being essentially isekaied war hero from century ago.