Space Fleet - New Thought

Sorry about the light posting. I've been thinking a bit more on space fleet combat and what happens when you try to engage in a beam on beam fight. At first it looked like a simple task of being able to put out a more concentrated beam of laser energy than your opponent, so you could directly eliminate his optical system. That would just devolve into a WW-I type combat, which isn't all that interesting unless it really is the game to play.

However, with lasers there are still clever tricks you can use so that you can hit without getting hit in turn, such as making the optical path from your laser to your opponent one way only. This requires fast moving optics and fairly long distances, but does look like it will work. Think of it as a volleyball game with two balls. You fire off a laser pulse toward a rotating, spinning, or otherwise moving reflector. The reflector isn't exactly aligned properly till even after your beam is launched, so in effect it's doing a moving intercept, just like a volleyball player. That reflector bounces the beam to another, which wasn't even in the correct position when the pulse was first fired. That second reflector might even bounce your shot to a third moving reflector before it finally proceeds to the target. An enemy laser could fire on the final reflector but the time reversed path doesn't work because by the time the final reflector is lined up, the previous reflector is already moving out of its path, as is the reflector prior to that. So just as you couldn't slam a volleyball back and expect the player's hands to be in the same orientation that they were originally in to make a path ending in a shot at you, you can't fire down the "barrel" of this optical system and get back to the enemy's laser.

If you had multiple reflectors in a cloud around your ships then they could be moving and spinning in a pattern that you'd programmed. You'd have control over fine tuning the time and angle of their aim, and your ship's lasers are timed to take advantage of the paths that line up. If you squeeze down the size of your cloud to where they can't move sufficiently to create a miss (the light is covering the small distance quickly and you're not getting sufficient movement to prevent partial hits on your own laser) then you can use a large number of them to create a targeting problem for the enemy, as only maybe 1% or so are lined up at any one time. The enemy can wear down the number of your reflectors, forcing you to continually change your patterns. If you play this game it probably becomes one of encryption, so the enemy can't predict your next pathway and fire back down it. What's interesting is that it takes you from the very simple tactics of WW-II to very sophisticated mathematics and design where brains can overpower brawn.

If these tricks work then instead of trying for the reverse shot, "target enemy weapons!" - which will just reflect your beam energy off into empy space, you'd directly target their ship with a thermal or burning attack. However this raises another question of whether your fleet could be deployed in depth and pass beams forward, much like volleyball. However, I'm not sure you could beat the diffraction limit on the original transmitter in your rear, so it might not buy you much. It might be possible to directly transmit energy to your forward ships and thus save them the necessity of generating all their own laser and maneuver power, thus making them more powerful and more agile. I'll have to think on that though.