Electronic Warfare in Science Fiction
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
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Spacedock delves into the topic of electronic warfare in sci-fi space combat.
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How about no.
As a user of this app I love how it never looks, works, plays or performs anywhere close to what the footage claims.
i've waited for this video for so long that i screamed with joy when it dropped
I'm sorry, but I genuinely *DON'T* recommend anyone plays STFC. The grinding is abysmal, lots of bugs that just don't get fixed and the monetization of the game is ridiculous and has no sense behind it and their support team takes weeks to respond to any kind of issue. Plus, the game locks you to a server after a certain level, after you actually have a chance to learn about it, and a bad server and literally kill any chance you have to make progress. Oh, and promo codes like this one have about a 50% chance to just not work on a new account, with support refusing to do anything about it or fix the issue.
Don't play this game. Support Spacedock, but don't play STFC
I already have Star Trek fleet command but I will request a breakdown on the aircraft carrier from paw patrol the mighty movie
I think the Battletech universe encapsulates the issues best: Yes, EW exists but it's a higher tier of rulesets for more advanced players, while more casual players are free to ignore them.
I joked on a BT video that cramming a Raven's EW suite into a Charger would make for a REALLY funny Wild Weasel mech...
@@templarw20I am totally going to try this... This is going to be a fun horror movie in a way
@vonneely1977 - While I like where you are going - I'm going to argue - for the best Space Battle using Electronic Counter Measures (ECW) and even ECCM (Counter-Counter) you want to check out Star Fleet Battles, they dive very deep into that. Battletech is amazing and a heavy-heavy rules battle game - but if you dig that you are in heaven - and you will be in that with SFB.
Even some of the Battletch games tried to reproduce aspects of the more advanced EW. With Mechwarrior: Living Legends being a big lighlight of that.
@@templarw20 Still results in a weapons platform whose motto is "You gotta be f'n kiddin' me," I hope!
“Cue the Spaceballs clip“ Damn man, that was the perfect combination of timing, delivery, and the clip used. I had to pause the video because I was laughing so hard.
Lonestar!
I can't explain how disappointed I was going to be if the clip, or even a passing reference, wasn't used to that scene.
I'd just re-watched Spaceballs a few hours ago! xD
We lost the bleeps the sweeps and the creeps
I remember in Bablyon 5, John Sheridan mention during the war, no Earthforce ship could lock on to any Minbari ship given it had some form of 'stealth' capability. In a later episode, a renegade Minbari cruiser intentionally turned off its stealth as it wanted to fight with humans in a bid to die in battle.
Ahh, yes, Minbari stealth tech. Also known as the only reason the Minbari only suffered single digit ship losses. Because without it a Nova and Shoalin are pretty evenly matched, and Earthforce had *a lot* of Novas.
That's the same episode. its his introductory episode. season 2 episode one. That's what clued him in something was wrong.
@@hanzzel6086actually, the Nova had a very short range with its heavy plasma guns, while a Sharlin could turn it to scrap with its antimatter beam from a long distance. So it wasn’t just the stealth tech. The first human ship that could stand toe-to-toe with the Sharlin is the Warlock. I’m guessing the Excalibur is also up there
@@artembentsionov A significant part of that short range was having to manually aim them using the Mark-1 eyeball. While the Shoalin was longer ranged, without it's "stealth" a Nova actually stood s chance of getting in range. Admittedly, it would probably take at least two (or three) in order to reliably get one into range reasonably intact, but I'm pretty sure Earthforce had (at least at the start) those numbers. And the Minbari were already horrified by the unsustainable levels of causalitys they where taking (because they basically couldn't afford any, because they hadn't actually built a warship in a millenia), so, yeah a very different and quicker end to that war.
@@hanzzel6086 No the range issue was mostly Plasma vs Fusion Beams. Plasma does not have a very long range at all, the Minbari "slicer beams" on the other hand did. The Minbari also had the bad habit of waiting till the EA ships fired before killing them. In a serious war without stealth tech, the EA would have lost even harder than they did. At no point in the Earth Minbari war did the Minbari take the humans seriously. If they ever decided to... I shudder to think.
Remember they have been in space thousands of years longer and have anti-matter as a by product of their power generation and a backup obsolete tech while the EA is not even up to using anti-matter at all yet. That is a MASSIVE difference in power, by several magnitudes. At their first meeting the main Minbari ship was hit by dozens of Plasma, pulse cannon and laser hits and only lost a small number of people, conversely a single slicer beam hit kills or cripples any and all EA ships.
One of my favorite subjects. Electronic Warfare was my Rate in the US Navy. It is easily misunderstood and overlooked.
your rate was my autistic hyperfixation for a few years! It is too easily overloooked, but theres a group of nerds eager for scraps i promise ya
Which is probably a contributing factor to why it’s overlooked, because a lot of the information about what EW does and how it works is classified.
Perum had a video talking about what items were doing more than their fair share in the Russian invasion of Ukraine (both sides). On the Russian side their EW vehicles (Krasukha?) were ranked top of the list as they kept Ukrainian drones from getting near enough to target artillery on other Russian formations. Thought you might like that ranking.
Trying to explain people that EW isn't a magical shield that automatically disable weapons in working radius is pretty hard
since chaff would move along the vector of the vessel it's launched from, its effectiveness in space would likely depend on how long it takes to disperse, and how the vessel that launched it moves around the cloud.
if your particles are big enough and moving fast enough, chaff might also double as flak, which may be either good or very bad depending on how much you use and whether you want that orbit to be safe to access after the fight.
Assuming you want it to disperse. They could all be laced into a web so that they stay together.
@@jakeaurod There's a lot you could do with a conductive net...
Oh, that makes me think it'd be pretty effective in space.
Cos in atmosphere chaff decelerates very rapidly after release, and doppler radars can distinguish a fast plane from a slow cloud of chaff unless the plane is moving perpendicular (no doppler shift) to the radar beam.
But in space the cloud will just keep going forever and can prolly stay together for a decent time if you release it gently.
@@user-bw6jg4ej2m Using the net idea, and hook a transmitter into it, you could generate one or more decoy signals too.
You could keep the cloud of chaff together if it is magnetic and the dispenser can generate a large magnetic field to then keep the chaff together and have it move around in certain ways to help increase its effectiveness.
The thing with electronic warfare, is that when your side is winning you don't/barely notice it exists, but when the enemy is winning you likely only notice after it's resulted in you get blown up or shot.
I can't believe Nebulous fleet command wasn't mentioned once in this video! EW is a huge part of that game, with you being able to put radar jammers and countermeasures on your ship to disrupt your enemy's detection capabilities and to defeat enemy missiles.
I cannot believe I completely forgot about Nebulous when we were making this video, it was the original inspiration for doing a video on this topic in the first place!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana very sad best Ewar game not included
@@televized1781 Forgive me
@@hoojiwana It's funny because when you mentioned using stealth in conjunction with EW to increase the noise and make stealth easier, I was immediately reminded of one of my builds in that game which does exactly that.
Or even funnier, a battleship that masquerade as a Destroyer, and a destroyer that emits signature of a battleship 😂
Ah yes, my autistic stealth battleship that have speed of a space turtle... sadly the OSP autism mine spam was useless in newer updates...
Bodacious Space Pirates is one of the few anime I've seen that engaged in electronic warfare. This was a fairly normal thing for space pirates to do and an early battle featured one ship trying to take over another ship remotely, with the two sides fighting for control while the attacking ship worked to get closer. EW was important to pirates as they needed to be able to capture their targets without destroying them.
Was about to mention them.
Several of the Gundam series have the Mobile Suit power plants double as electromagnetic jammers, usually by emitting some sort of macguffin particle or wave (e.g. Minovsky Particles in UC, GN Particles in 00, Ahab Particles & Ahab Waves in IBO) that prevents the employment of long-range guided munitions.
In some Gundam Universes, it also prevented Nuclear Fission so it effectively made nuclear weapons obsolete (looking at you SEED)
Not just preventing the use of long range guided munition, but also targeting and wireless communication, difficulting coordination and effectively making remote controlled weapons like drones useless
I like that it Minovsky interference was an accidental byproduct of the reactor while also being the thing that made close range space combat viable in the canon.
Some earlier Star Wars novels handwave the dogfights by explaining that everyone's electronic warfare is too good and homing missiles are basically useless, except for all the ones that aren't.
Modern Star Wars goes even harder on this, ironically. The canon explanation as to why TIE Fighter targeting is so weird is literally that the ECM of the other fighter fights against the TIEs targeting system.
Thrawn also says the reason ships have such exposed bridges is because all sensors can easily be jammed or spoofed, so you need to actually see normally
The beyond visable range missles I guess.
The ones that work are super expensive, massive thrust capacity, droid brained missiles. Everything else is basically visual range supported or dummy so as to avoid it being turned off or turned against the user. If it is cheaper to fly a dozen fighters close and launch bombs with the same strike efficiency, then why not do that.
@@Boopity7739 Ghost
@@littlekong7685But not use droid missiles?
7:35 SEAD is in the true NATO spirit of "scissors beats rock".
In the The Expanse books, electronic warfare plays a somewhat important role, with jamming and laser dazzling being employed. This was mostly Naomi's job on the MCRN Tachi, but the TV show glossed over it, probably because of either screen time considerations or because they thought viewers would have a hard time understanding it. Also, a torpedo getting blown up by PDC fire looks way cooler than a torpedo becoming stupid and vanishing into the void because it lost its target lock due to jamming.
Spent a large part of my USAF career maintaining EW systems for the Wild Weasel squadrons, and later getting deep into the theories / implementation. Great video / content!
Oh, this reminds me of my homeverse's missile tactic.
If you're using torch missiles and for some reason try to get a direct hit on the target, you can have the missile turn around and start retro-burning shortly before impact to dazzle or damage sensors, mitigate or completely stop point-defence fire and maybe do some extra damage to the target's protection before the actual warhead hits.
One of the sci-fi which puts the most focus on EW I can think of is Heavy Gear. Where all of the mechs have some EW equipment as a defensive layer and then most mech squads and companies will have a few dedicated EW platforms for more powerful/specilised/offensive work.
I played a bunch of heavy gear 2 back in the day, and it was always a good question as to how much ECM and ECCM to put on your mech...
The ECM package would usually screw your radar up when it was on full power, so it had to be used carefully to be stealthy but still have info on your enemy.
Btw, this is the PC game, not the tabletop.
Heavy gear did a good job with that, for sure. I think Nebulous: Fleet Command models EW warfare even better.
I find an interesting wrinkle in the evolution of electronic warfare exists in the lore of the Universal Century Gundam series.
Early particle researchers working on the reactors that made space flight and even mobile suit construction possible discovered an unintended (at first) side effect; the reactors emit a radiation that, while harmless to humans, is VERY unhealthy for traditional radar and radio signals, and even visible light.
This "Minosvski Particle" caused the massive step backwards in EW evolution that brought back close-combat with fighters and suits, as well as space battleships launching, effectively, cannon broadsides at one another at ranges which would be laughably small in other space combat series.
It's the entire justification for big robots flying at one another in space, and I believe it's as fair a reason as any to justify them, when in storytelling perspetives, they stand as a metaphor for old infantry combat in general, as much as a revival of it.
War gets a lot harder when you have to actually be up close with your target, that's part of the point of the series.
I'm glad somebody mentioned this.
They kind of brought it back, to a degree, in Gundam OO, where the GN Particles could interrupt conventional radar (It was quickly overcome part way through the first half, but it still applies).
I'm honestly shocked that nobody in Iron-Blooded Orphans thought to mask the identity of the Ahab reactors before they introduced the Vidar in the second half, too.
wasn't that one of the reasons that they ended up going with the ground sonar tank in 8th MS team?
@@hughsmith7504Indeed it was.
As I recall, the creator realized, in the late 70s no less, that if technology continued then eventually we'd reach a state where the human element was removed from warfare entirely. Hence, he made the Minovsky particles to counteract that. Reading about that was what inspired me to come up with something in my own setting, with the same purpose of preventing AI from taking over everything in war. In my own sci-fi setting, electronics warfare is so advanced it has a habit of making electronic targeting useless, thus necessitating living beings who can make decisions over whether their computer readings are correct or not, or do things manually if they just can't get the systems to work.
When one side DOESN'T have that... well, speaking of Gundam, Gundam Wing had its Mobile Dolls, which could pretty much curb-stomp any pilot that isn't a main character in a stupidly advanced prototype.
@@EbonyManta Not to mention, without the need to rely on human pilots, Mobile Dolls could usher in a never-ending age of war, with as many forces as you had resources to build. That, If I remember right, was part of the plot too; if war didn't have a reason to end, it never would, so the colonists and the Gundam pilots in Wing were trying to remove OZ, who were making reasons NOT to end war (no human involvment in the fighting being one of them with the MD program) so they could direct and profit by the struggles.
I really want to watch the whole series again. I've got the DVDs, I could do so :)
Loved the brief inclusion of EVE Online, would love to see you do videos about analyzing EVE!
In the Expeditionary Force series, there are a handful of scenes from the POV of some heavily upgraded missiles where they talk to each other (literally) and sacrifice some missiles to blind enemy sensors so the remaining missiles can reach the target, or have one missile blasting out active sensors to provide guidance to stealth missiles so they can get through enemy point defense. A huge part of the series combat is centered on electronic warfare, including hacking enemy ships. IT's an excellent series and well worth the read.
One faction in the Lost Fleet series uses computer worms planted in enemy ships to erase any evidence of them being there, giving them the appearance of being very good at stealth.
One great example of EW was in the Battle of Chintaka in Deep Space Nine. The used their own systems to trick the weapon platforms into reading the power station as an enemy combatant.
One example that might be used here was in the German Serie Perry Rhodan. During the third cycle, the heroes encounter a race of sentient robot called the Posbis. Aside of their powerful "transformer canon", their main advantage over the heroes was a device that dephased their ships four hours into the future. In short, even if you knew where they were, you still could not hit them, aside of a lucky shot here and there; while they could hit you with impunity.
Is there a reason you can't fire a missile into their position and set a 4-hour timer?
@@RorikH they tried but due to the nature warfare, usually they hit you before you had a chance to fire back. The heroes won because they realized they were caught in a crossfire of a more ancient war and managed to convince the biological part of those hybrid robot that were on the same side. ( which was true).
EW is mentioned in Star Wars often enough. for example, in Return of the Jedi, Calrissian realizes they are being jammed when they are unable to detect the status of the Death Star's shielding (immediately before the famous "it's a trap" scene).
An interesting take on scifi EW comes in the form of Eldar holofield and cameleoline tech. Both obviously have visual-based elements, a cameleoline cloak is basically an active-camo cape for a soldier to hide under meanwhile holofields are, well, hologram emitters that hide the ship and project an image of it in a different location. The EW aspect comes in when we consider that in 40k, auspex (equivalent to radar/sonar) is widely used across imperial forces, from navy sensors and weapon targeting to handheld infantry versions to vehicle-mounted arrays.
Holofield emitters contain targeter-confusing and auspex-baffling technologies, meaning you're essentially firing blind and looking for auspex "ghosts" (partial/glitchy returns, which only appear intermittently if at all), meanwhile on the infantry level, cameleoline has nanotech weaved into the physical cloak itself which distorts all but the most powerful auspex returns making it almost impossible to find the wearer simply through scanning. In both cases you're forced to either try and eyeball it (hard enough in an infantry fight, basically impossible in a starship battle), or make educated guesses AND know what you're looking out for, OR know exactly where the eldar are hiding and focus all detection efforts on that area.
It would be awsome to see SciFi version of wild weasels squadran.
Wing Commander 5 had some missions where you have "wild weasel" load outs, heavy in anti-radiation ordnance, to soften big targets.
There's also a mission in the HBS Battletech PC game where you have an EW mech, and your (under-gunned) quartet has to take out a facility by sneaking around. The EW prevents attacks from indirect fire weapons (like the heavy missile turrets around the target) unless something (like the opposing forces wandering the streets) has a direct line of sight.
Hopefully they use the original Unofficial Motto of the earliest Wild Weasel crews "YGBSM" attributed to Jack Donovan.
This was the natural response of an educated man, a veteran EWO on B-52s and the like, upon learning that he was to fly back seat to a self-absorbed fighter pilot while acting as flypaper for enemy SAMs.
There's a game called Nebulous: Fleet Command that features electronic warfare heavily, in pretty much all aspects mentioned here except for pure stealth tech. Getting good radar tracks on the enemy can be the deciding factor in a fight, and missiles use a variety of seeker heads to avoid jamming and verify trargets against countermeasures. The solo dev used to be an intelligence officer in the US navy, so it's incredibly accurate, I highly recommend checking it out if you're into this sort of stuff.
In a sci-fi setting I'm building, everyone takes EW to heart. They're heavy on mosaic warfare and everything that looks like a wing or blade on a ship is a transmitter or receiver. Ships daisy-chain comms lines and datalinks together to get through noise that blankets the whole battlefield, and the bigger a ship is, the better its sensors and the more of the battlefield it can influence. And of course, such oversized directionalized emitters can be used as powerful weapons to burn through enemy networks once you've figured out who to blind first. They're so big on fighters partly because you can see and influence a huge section of space for relatively cheap with wings of them on the same network.
There's only one man who dares give me the raspberry.
SPACEDOCK!
Surprised you didn't mention the use of electronic anti-hijacking measures, such as Kirk's infamous use of the USS Reliance's prefix code to remotely trigger the other ship to drop their shields. Seems like a major pertinent example of electronic warfare in scifi.
That's probably a VERY good example of the hacking type, before that sort of thing was in popular culture.
"Mouretsu Pirates" (or "Bodacious Space Pirates" in English) is a sci-fi anime about pirates where electronic warfare plays a massive part in the storyline.
A relate sci-fi trope would be drive signatures. where ships drives or reactors have a, depending on the setting, a more or less unique fingerprint by which they can be identified. This makes it desirebable to change the drive signature in one way or the other. Or to use decoys if the signature are less specific and/or not know to the enemy.
Like the Pella in the Expanse's finale
One of THE BEST examples I've seen of this, is in the anime Mouretsu Kaizoku (Bodacious Space Pirates). Almost all ships have EW Suites designed to protect, counter, and attack other ship's systems, and are pivotal in battles, as the EW specialists have to balance between preventing system intrusion while disrupting enemy ships with their own intrusion, causing ship weapon accuracy to dynamically shift over the course of battle. They also depict it visually in a simple enough way for the viewer to understand what is happening. There is even a point where one opponent gets hacked too fast, so they turn off all methods of intrusion and fly blind, relying purely on visual means to track their target.
Reminds me of "A Fire upon the Deep", though a somewhat more aggressive flavour of electronic warfare. Or Giant's Star
It seems more broadly literature is more likely to go into that direction.
EW comes in to play in the Honorverse, both the signature reduction to get closer in the ambush at Hancock Station and also the active where the untrained Masadans put the active EW on auto to confuse the missiles till the Weapons officer catches on and smashes contact nukes into the transmitters by having them seek the jammers since they were repeating a pattern.
And of course, the ECW/ECCW arms race between Haven and Manticore throughout their wars, especially dealing with missile guidance and ship to missile comms.
God Honorverse is so good.
Nebulous Fleet Command has some excellent EW mechanics. A powerful jammer can overwhelm enemy sensors and hide your ships, enabling you to move in relative stealth, although the enemy will absolutely know they are being jammed. Jamming is also effective at both decreasing the accuracy of enemy missile salvos, and also at screening your own missiles by hiding their signature from enemy fire control radars. Some expensive missiles even carry their own radar jammers and chaff decoys to overwhelm enemy fire control radar and screen for the missile salvos.
Robotech (macross saga) used EW regularly. I'll talk about one use of each side.
The humans had their planes hide in an asteroid belt (more of a stealth option here) and the aliens failed to scan them.
The aliens had a specific battle pod that jammed the Battleship while it flew ahead of an attack force. It worked so well it jammed things that were supposed to show up (and were innocent 'white noise') so the Battleship had a small precious window to scamble fighters to fight "whatever was coming" as they fought that battle blind.
About wild weasel while it's a funny term i think sead and especially dead which are the official acronyms also sound very good
@Spacedock there is an Anime series "Bodacious Space Pirates" that brings EW front and center repeatedly in the plot and is much better than you might initially expect. Particularly Episodes 3-5 center around a battle that is 95% fought using electronic warfare going as far as utilizing social engineering as part of their EW efforts. Their are a lot of very well thought out concrete tactics and potential consequences of using EW in a battel discussed and or implemented in this series. for example there is a discussion where they talk about possibility that if you loose at EW an enemy ship might just open all of your ships external airlocks, and it doesn't matter how good your armor and weapons' are if that happens.
No mention of Wraith jamming the Asgard beaming tech? Disappointed! 😂
Very funny to include the Unicorn Gundam's NT-D system here, because, despite its usual function of increasing the performance of the mobile suit when active in response to a Newtype, at higher outputs(?) of the system, its pilot has taken control of enemy remote weapons in a manner similar to hacking, with less computers and more psychic powers.
Interestingly enough, a better example of electronic warfare in the Gundam Franchise is in The Witch From Mercury, in which multiple mobile suits, most notably the Aerial Rebuild in conjunction with Quiet Zero (whose function would most likely be defined as an electronic warfare platform), make use of 'data storms' to disrupt and take control of enemy weapons.
Minovsky Particles are also basically EW as well. It's just absurdly powerful and indiscriminate to the point of shifting the entire military doctrine of the setting
Yeah Minovsky Particles are basically why Mobile Suits and Battleships in the Universal Century have to get close to fight. In the real world it would take away the advantage of aircraft like the F-22, who normally could kill beyond visual range, forcing a lot more dogfights.
There's tons of examples today of cyberwarfare done without deliberate backdoors, ranging from just crashing remote systems to deny service, all the way up to using advanced infiltration techniques to attack high value systems by jumping through low value systems. Imagine a sci-fi spaceship where the internal systems are networked together and someone finds a flaw in the system's communications software that can be remotely exploited with a speciality crafted signal sent to the ship, they could then use their remote access to the comms system to control or attack other systems in the ship.
I think a good example of electronic warfare in star wars is the imperial interdictor cruiser.
While not outright stated in the show, it is heavily implied and outright said in the books, Legend of the Galactic Heros has incredibly strong ECM as the main reason for the style of space combat. When 95% of your information is from line of sight and your main weapons are particle cannons it makes for an interesting shift in space strategy. Probably outside of Gundam one of the biggest shows where ECM defines warfare, though more so for explaining why battles happens they way they do instead of being a core conflict/mechanic.
Star Wars may have a fighter called the electronic Warfare.
In The Clone Wars when they used to stealth ship they fired flares.
In the Stargate Atlantis season 3 final when they launch the weapon housing the nuclear warheads at the replicators homeworld it had decoy weapons also.
That boer war example is sooo fascinating
The ECM/ECCM arms race between the Manticoran and Havenite forces in the Honorverse went into some details of the Electronic Warfare- as well as other angles, like the Keyhole and Apollo systems, (deployed sensor platforms and missile system which had a sensor relay platform "missile" with the damaging missiles in the swarm)
I just want to commend you on a very good and well presented video. I am a retired US Air Force Electronic Warfare Officer with over 30 years served. Your explanation of the basic concepts was outstanding. Due to the sensitive and otherwise highly classified nature of the subject I have struggled to explain my job to others. I think for now on I will just show your video. Thank You.
That hovering rocket looks like my first attempt at a proper rocket in space engineers
Glad you mentioned the Defence Onion, because it also applies to hacking. Apparently no one on Caprica was familiar with that concept LOL. System backdoors can be mitigated by firewalls. See also, Colonial Fleet could simply have turned their radios off. Backdoor no longer accessible. Of course they'd be less effective without comms, but sure beats being a sitting duck.
Lancer has pretty advanced EW that you even get to play with yourself with entire frames like the Goblin dedicated to it. Though in Lancer EW goes a bit further as the paracausal tech used with it can actually rewrite reality.
And the ship to ship NHP fights get horrifying to comprehend. A ship's firewall giving you trouble? Cause a ripple in time that causes there grandfather to explode as a child. Problem solved!
The Honor Harrington book series makes great use of EW in space fleet battles. For a time, long range missile exchanges dominated, overshadowing much shorter range beam fire. EW was king with vast arrays of decoys and such giving the hi tech advantage. The lower tech side eventually countered with the "Triple Ripple", a barrage of crude nuclear warheads with no target at all beyond X volume of space. Not enough to damage heavily shielded ships, sure, but all the external/remote fancy electronic doodads in that volume ate sht. This turned the subsequent battle into a low tech analog slugging match.
X-COM music by Michael McCann, right? You gotta update the descriptions in your recent videos because they still say Battlezone II Music by Carey Chico.
In Battlestar Galactica, battle scenes where the Pegasus was involved showed incoming missiles going haywire when in proximity of Pegasus. This would've been due to their ECM systems, and was a subtle way of showing how much more advanced the ship was than Galatica.
Faking ship signatures was used a lot in Star Trek, like making a Runabout look like a freighter on sensors. Also communication jamming was done by enemies when the plot needed it. And don't forget when Geordi's Visor got hacked or the Enterprise was infected with an Iconian virus. Jamming and computer viruses were also a thing in the Stargate series. I mean they met replicators or whole entities in their computer systems.
i've messed a bit with the idea of some form of remote hacking, not so much to take over the target like BSG but more to just degrade the targets combat capabilities and interfering with targeting. Also since space tracking is going to heavily rely on tracking targets via heat sources such as IR i've pondered things like massive space flares during which the targeted ship switches off its drive(s) and uses low heat thrusters or rcs to nudge itself onto a new course. We see similar in the Expanse where ships kill transponders and drives and sneakily maneuver onto a new course, but without the "flares"
My buddy was talking about Nebulous Fleet Command that has basics of Electronic Warfare including jamming. Gundam had the Plavsky Particles, which was just a world building element to explain why the sci-fi franchise wasn't using more advanced self guided munitions and WWII tactics but it was a consistent element used in much of the franchise. Battletech likewise has Electronic Warfare but it's incredibly simplicity as the original creators of the franchise ether hand waved or flat out ignored then modern prevalence of such technology and it's future implications (it's the one thing that has always dated the franchise but hey, giant stumpy robots)
Electronic warfare is a major part of space combat in Honor Harrington. My favorite are the Manticoran Dragon's Teeth EW platforms, they are basically missles that create the illusion of dozens of other missles to fool counter missles and laser clusters.
I love the EW in The Last Angel series, very fun, especially the upper levels of hyper advanced powerful yet ‘dumb’ computers vs nimbler and adaptive AI’s
I think IR spoofing/camouflage might be a interesting technology that would be highly useful for space warfare. I believe it's already being experimented with on tanks to disguise them as trucks when looked at using IR cameras. For a spacecraft, making your warship look like a freighter or support vessel on the enemy's cameras is rather handy.
the earliest example in a movie I remember was from the original Star Wars; during the attack on the Death Star the base on Yavin warns the attacking Rebels that "we've picked up a new group of signals, enemy fighters are headed your way"
One example is from the movie Wing Commander, where the Killwrathy fire a torpedo the Cloaks travels to its target while from time to time uncloaking to gets it bearing.
The Skipper missile
One of my favorite examples comes from Neal Asher’s Polity Universe (if you remember Snow in the Desert from Love Death Robots, that was written by him and is a short story in that universe or a version of it). Their electronic warfare is literally just the logical extreme of combining hacking and the em warfare, they can transmit and assemble viruses and other attacks with lazers by i think manipulating the quantum states of computers. Super cool.
Interesting timing - I just picked up French Battleships 1922-1956 by Jordan & Dumas, and was intrigued to find out Richelieu had an electronic warfare system installed around 1944-45 to counter the Fritz-X guided bomb.
That's actually a really cool topic to dive into. After Warspite got hit with one the Royal Navy started looking into it and actually started using their radios to transmit known Fritz X freqs whenever a German bomber was nearby to throw off the guidance.
Another cool one was a French Radar detector that the Germans put on their U-Boats. But, the Germans didn't know that the British had cracked Enigma, so they attributed so many losses to the detector thinking the French had designed it to be a tracker. So they stopped using it and lost even more U-Boats.
The book 'Warriors and Wizards: The Development and Defeat of Radio-Controlled Glide Bombs of the Third Reich' goes into the Allied efforts to develop countermeasures against Fritz-X and Hs 293. I'm not sure if Richelieu got one of the later (effective) sets or one of the earlier attempts (which probably didn't do much)
@@jonathan_60503 FV1 antenna, installed in late '44
"Of course they are jamming us, do you expect our enemies to stop behaving like enemies, why do you think we have assigned courier shuttles?"
-Kaiser Longarm Von Reinhard of the Galactic Empire.
Wild Weasels mentioned! Part of my favorite lore behind them is their "unofficial" motto, YGBSM. As in, "You've Gotta Be Shittin' Me", after the immediate, reflexive, and honestly *correct* remark upon hearing their mission plan from one Jack Donovan, a veteran B-52 EWO who was assigned to the Weasels for one of their earliest missions. Full quote per Lt. Col. Dan Hampton's memoir: "You want me to fly in the back of a tiny little jet with a crazy fighter pilot who thinks he's invincible, home in on a SAM site in North Vietnam, and shoot it before it shoots me? You've gotta be shittin' me!"
In the Halo novels, it's said that Cortana was made for hacking.
Aye, computer tech was one area where humans actually had the advantage. Even in the games, Halo 2 had Cortana enter High Charity's network to clear the Chief a path.
I have been waiting for this since it was announced! So excited!
I can not explain how happy i am that the Spaceballs clip was used.
Idk about shows ot movies but nebulous fleet command has probably the most realistic depiction of EWAR, you've got jamming, home on jam, etc
The best example is that star wars rebels episode when chopper used his wireless charging feature across space and time and electrocuted an imperial cyborg on his own ship... Lol
Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex has online guided missiles, for some insane reason. The runaway tank in the second episode has an EW package that can connect to them, hack them and has a 60% + chance of sending the missile back into the shooters face.
A Sky Full of Ships has a supplement containing a faction which can use EW; Full Thrust has other ways, including EMP batteries. Quadrant 13 by TooFatLardies has the option of assigning an EW technician to your units; They can use specialist sensors, jam comms, if their tech level is 2 higher than the enemy they can attempt to disrupt equipment, and attempt to disrupt enemy operators.
The Peleus system in Wing Commander IV where you're forced to fight without radar, shields or tracking missiles until you manage to destroy the jamming capship.
One SciFi game worth looking into regarding EW in my opinion is "Star Fleet Battles" (and it's PC adaption "Star Trek: Starfleet Command").
There you have electronic countermeasures (ECM) to disrupt weapons lock, electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM) to regain weapons lock and wild weasel shuttles to lure seeking weapons like drones/missiles and plasma torpedoes away from a target.
The original board game even gets deeper into EW with things like ECM drones or scouts lending ECM or ECCM to allied vessels.
I first heard about chaffs and flares in "Star Wars: X-Wing vs TIE Fighter" and "Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance" with the former dispersing an incoming missile and the latter actively attacking it.
The "Wing Commander" series of games also uses EW a lot.
Not only does it have decoys against missiles but there's a particular series of missions in the 4th main game "The Price of Freedom" in which an EW vessel is actively jamming your sensors and seeking weapons as well as disabling your shields.
Setting I bounce back to frequently uses guns and missiles to fight as a back up to the end goal of most starship fights. Dominion essentially being complete spectrum dominance. A ships ai with dominion can open FTL gates wherever it wants,, casually knock out opposing systems in preparation for boarding or pretty much anything else it wants. Capital ships tend to have greater processing power than smaller ships outside of specialist frigates.
I particularly loved the Babylon 5 example, where the Minbari warship active sensors were so powerful they blinded the human sensors (active or passive) thus effectively becoming jammers.
Also interferes with their hyperdrives. It’s how the war started. The Minbari flagship scanned the human fleet, unaware at how primitive their systems were. The humans thought it was an attack, especially with the Minbari opening their gunports (without charging weapons) in the Warrior Caste’s traditional gesture of peace, except humans couldn’t tell weapons weren’t charging because of the unintentional jamming.
It didn’t help that the CO was said to have a bad track record with sensitive missions.
The human volley damaged the Minbari flagship, killing their spiritual leader. The Grey Council was tied on whether to declare a holy war on the humans or investigate what happened. The leader’s protégé cast the deciding vote in anger, starting the war
In the Sci-Fi I'm writing, the MC has tech installed in them to run ships. As the MC learns to use it, they also use various forms of EW offence and defense. From faking fuel exhaust to mimic a different type of ship, to making electronic decoys, masc signatures (yes, a battletech reference), and even using drones to take over enemy ship computers and running remotely. Also, for hiding knowing the enemy scans patterns and frequencies.
To give a very simplified explanation of how a radar or sensors work,
Imagine being in a dark room and using a flashlight in order to see something. That flashlight is a good representation of how radar works with your eyes being the sensors.
Going low tech these same things apply. For instance the Red Herring was used to distract the noses of dogs. The sensor being the dogs and the Red Herring being the countermeasure.
Minovsky particles in Mobile Suit Gundam were always cool to see. Both sides during the one year war would flood battle zones with the particles in order to jam radar
Also meant everrything was via visual identification. Zeta, ZZ and CCA made great use of decoy ships, suits and asteroids since electronic idenification was so hard.
EW is actually a key part of Eldar naval warfare in Warhammer 40k with holofield and mimicfields.
A real world example that I loved was during Desert Storm. Elements of the British and American forces drove around the desert behind the Iraqi lines broadcasting to each other. Iraq troops could detect that the signals were coming from behind them. In addtion to the actual coalition comms that were coming from in front of them.
I imagine that it was a bit unnerving.
Like the couple of seconds of B5 in here. The major contributor to Earth “losing” in the minbary war was that they couldn’t target the enemy ships.
In the anime, Bodacious Space Pirates (the title is sometimes translated as Miniskirt Space Pirates), electronic warfare plays a HUGE role in space battles, to the point that entire battles can be decided before a single shot is fired by well-used EW or ECW. In particular, a lot of attention is given to how the proper use of signals can be used to hijack control of targeted ships, giving the one doing the hijacking complete control of the other ship’s systems, including propulsion, weapons, and life support. For a series about a high school girl inheriting a space-pirate captaincy, it adds quite a bit of depth and nuance to the setting and the battles that take place therein.
Of all the unlikely places to find it modeled, the mostly comedic anime "Bodacious Space Pirates" had a strong emphasis on EW and hacking, with it leading off any hostile encounter.
At 5:17 that is the USS Rancocas (aka "the Cornfield Cruiser").
My favorite moment when radars or scanners is being jammed is Spaceballs with literal jam. And it’s raspberry
3:04 Only one man would dare to give me the raspberry! LO..O..O..NESTAR!
I'd put lightspeed lag somewhere in EW, also, for sci-fi. Universes where the FTL tech allows you to get close to your target (Wars/Trek/Gate) means most weapons and sensors don't have to take into account thousands or millions of kilometers of distance, and the lag it creates for lightspeed sensors and comms. You can see your enemy, and even launch weapons that could reach them, but you have to take into account it's only where/what they were doing seconds or minutes ago. Trek's Picard Maneuver is the only one I can remember where it was used outside of 'hard' scifi settings.
You don't see it much in modern series, but I recall the original Gundam used inflatable decoys to distract long range scanning and detecting. Mostly in the shape of asteroids, IIRC.
the Expeditionary Force novel series has a huge focus on EWar. Great audiobook series!
Another excellent discussion.
The Blue Planet: War in Heaven campaign for FreeSpace Open features EW quite extensively - sensor jamming, stealth ships, flares, electronic countermeasures, uploading viruses, hacking, comms manipulation, AWACS and E-warfare craft etc.
In The Honor Harrington Series, EW plays a big part and is also refered to as EW
In my own sci-fi setting, electronics warfare is so advanced it has a habit of making electronic targeting useless, thus necessitating living beings who can make decisions over whether their computer readings are correct or not, or do things manually if they just can't get the systems to work. I basically use it to keep the human element in war - and because I like a "meta" so to speak, where the height of technology is to make other technology useless.
There is an anime called Bodacious Space Pirates, which features remotely hacking enemy vessels and defending against such attacks as a key element of space combat.
Nebulous: Fleet Command, EW and countermeasures are a portion of that game that can play a big roll in the matches played.
The hard sci-fi book series Expeditionary Force involves a lot of space based electronic warfare. It does push the boundary of the hard sci-fi genre, since the main character is an artificial super intelligence that's millions of years more advanced than any of its adversaries. Still a fun read with lots of plausible physics involved.
Another example of EW in science fiction would be the Battle of the Line in Babylon 5. With the press of a button, the
mimbari ships couldn't be targeted by earth sensors. It was some sort of sensor nullification on demand, although
normally during non-combat operations their ships could be tracked normally.
In the classic Doctor Who episode “Earthshock” the doctor manages to jam a bomb detonation signal sent by the Cybermen leading to very hammy “MORE POWER” from David Banks as the Cyberleader
Stealth methodology comes in two types.
Type 1: Sneaky sneak sneak
Type 2: All the flashbangs
About a third of the USS _Sulaco's_ hull space was devoted to advanced sensors and computer cores designed to identify and target enemy ships. She and others of the 'Conestoga' class also carried an array of defensive EW systems. One of these helped get the _Sulaco_ a reputation as something of a cursed ship.
The system in question is a magazine of huge inflatable decoys designed to mimic the sensor signature of the _Sulaco._ These things include a small maneuvering engine to help keep up the illusion, and they're programmed to run interference for the warship. After all, if the balloons never moved after launch, it wouldn't exactly be hard for the enemy to tell their radar systems to focus only on the moving targets.
However, in _Sulaco's_ case, the ship was too smart for her own good: during one engagement, _Sulaco_ - operating in automatic mode - launched a decoy, but then started circling the balloon, acting like the decoy itself by trying to protect it. This behavior was unexpected - and nearly disastrous: the enemy weapons did indeed go for the "decoy", leaving poor _Sulaco_ riddled with damage from near-misses.