As cornflakes said, any ship in space is visible to thermal radars (and many other ones) from millions of kilometers or miles away. On earth we have some tech to minimize heat signatures of airplanes or helicopters and so on, but in space you are shining against almost absolute zero background.
And really... there is no "other asteroid" to hide behind.
Of course, i dont mean to say you have to do it that way, i was just speaking from realism point of view. Accelerating and changing vectors would be somewhat useful in such a combat, but not anything in close proximity to the enemy, not anything like dog-fighting maneuvers.
Right so that was my point with low emissivity. A mirrored coating or any kind of zero-emissivity deployable veil could hide your emissions, no?
Nah,... at best, theoretically - you could trick the enemy into thinking its a bit smaller vessel while its actually a destroyer, but you would be visible even in such a fantastic case.
Etsu wrote:
Hitting an enemy spaceship through long distances seems unlikely and risky, and I'm not sure if we have that kind of weapons. There are also legal and political considerations, possible treaties and the like. Maybe will be that kind of space combat, with unexpected long-distance attacks, but then there could be groups that prefer to perform some kind of guerrilla war too.
Such weapons will be developed for space combat simply because the environment will necessitate it. If you dont, the other guys will and so on.
Its just a matter of what kind of range you can get. Energy beam weapons can easily have range from hundreds to thousands of kilometers, small drone missiles and such could coast by inertion and change vectors only when needed, etc, etc.
Nothing of it would be unexpected. If its guerrilla warfare then its not done in spaceships. Any pirate who tries to make some sort of sneak attack would be visible to the whole solar system. And he would have nowhere to hide.
These are the real and very big reasons why in "my game" there would not be any combat between ships themselves, which would be realistic.