You can afford to put a lot more mass into your environmental recycling so your ship can go further and stay out longer. The larger your ship is, the more it can benefit from economies of scale. Your Handwavium powered spacecraft would have the same benefit. Modern Aircraft Carriers benefit from being SO huge and expensive already just to do what they need to do, that adding a nuclear reactor to run the whole thing becomes not only feasible, but very beneficial from a cost/benefit perspective. Now more mass = more POWER to move it, and that doesn't necessarily add mass. If you have a reactionless drive, that changes everything. This means no armor, which means no space battleship. It's a tyrannical equation that, as long as it is the primary constraint to propulsion in space, will ensure that the MOST critical design element of any spacecraft is making it as light as possible. More Mass to move = more reaction mass to move it. The biggest reason that a space battleship makes no sense under current or proposed technological limitations is because of the demands of reaction drives. You actually solve your own problem right here. High volume black box non-reaction handwavium drive to power the whole thing. I'll also permit artificial gravity to reduce the distractions from the core problem. Defined as too big to put it in a fighter, and not directly usable as a weapon itself.

Or can they still be justified in light of the limitations on the factors that made them redundant on Earth.Īssume no great deviation from current understanding of physics apart from a high volume black box non-reaction handwavium drive to power the whole thing. Was the era of space battleships over before it even began? So in the great trade off between drone carriers, missile boats, and battleships: The concept of 'over the horizon' is totally non-existent.

A simple slug or contact explosive shell has 'unlimited' range, where a fighter still has a strictly limited flight time. 'Range' has an entirely different meaning. However in space, there's no stealth, so no submarines. On Earth battleships became big white elephants with high cost and minimal use, vulnerable to every submarine, aircraft carrier, and missile boat in the sea.

We all know and presumably love enormous space battles with vast battleships doing minimal damage to each other for hours before being blown up by a single fighter.

World of warships space battle ships