Space Combat

[sunnyside]

Wow. I'm the lone vote for battleships.

Here's why I think missiles might not be the weapon of choice in space; lasers.

I don't mean sci-fi maser/phaser whatever, we have marginally effective anti missile lasers right now. Some of the major limitations for them are:

Having todetect and fire through the interferance of the atmosphere
Missiles being able to come in "low" or being able to hit non-mobile land targets with a nuke even if their guidance mechanisms are wrecked
size of the vessel carrying them

Space eliminates all of these problems, and so with advances in laser technology on par with everything else to get us to that point, I see vessels with large reactors powering banks of laser weapons that don't even have to act as point defenses, they can eliminate incoming missiles from a great distance out.

Though point defenses of many types would also likely be in use.


Of course being cheap I see "torpedo boat" type missile ships for use in the "brown waters" of space.

Lasers might be kill weapons if the "battleships" are required to be thin skinned for weight reasons. But if no I see the ship killer weapons being fairly small metal slugs accelerated to reletavistic speeds. Very little time to react, a tiny target to intercept, and still packing a whole lot of punch. Note that due to energy and rate of acceleration requirements the guns for this would have at least some length to them and even a large ship wouldn't be able to mount very many.

[Lighthawk]

So who voted for the carriers?

*raises hand*

Here's my thinking, on carriers and various other things discussed...

Speed: Over interplanetary distances, yes, a larger ship is going to be faster by simple means of having more fuel and being able to accelerate longer. On shorter scales though, smaller ships should be faster by means of having a lower mass to thrust ratio, and thus be able to accelerate at higher Gs. Also a smaller ship would likely be able to handle more G load than a huge vessel. Scaling issues are going to put limits on how much a capital ship can accelerate so long as gravity is out of our control. Plus a smaller ship only has to worry about the G force effects on a very small number of people, all of whom are likely to be in immediate communication with each other. On a ship with dozens if not hunderds of people, once you start getting over 3-4 Gs, your putting your crew at risk, and you might not get an alert that so-in-so in such-in-such department just went into cardiac failure and the ship needs to be slowed so they can rush him to med bay until he's already toast.

Point defenses: Obviously these are going to be damn important. We've already got these things on modern ships, such as the Phalanx CIWS. And they are testing laser based defense systems, like the THEL. Put enough of these things on a ship, and the only two ways you're going to get a hit is by overwhelming them with numbers, or slipping a strike in stealthy. Which brings me to the next point...

Stealth: I think this is going to be a big part of space combat. Once you're away from a planet, the only concealment you have is distance. I think a lot of space battle is going to be more like sub combat, keeping yourself hidden from your opponent. And that's where fighter craft, or at least smaller ships, are likely to come in.

I don't think one man fighters are going to be major players, but rather something more along the size of a modern medium bomber. 2-4 man crews, and big enough to carry it's own point defense and stealth systems, as well as missiles big enough to harm a captial ship, or perhaps build the craft around a large rail gun.

So now we have two (or more) cap ships slinking around "silently", deploying wings of scouts and attack ships to locate and engage or "paint" targets for the cap ship to engage.

As for point defenses, if you have to run silently, these systems are going to be a lot less useful. A missile might give off enough noise to be targeted, but a rail gun shell, dumb fired, is going to be damn hard to shoot down without turning on some kind of active system, and if everyone is running silent, including the attack ships, then even if the cap ship detects the magnetic burst of a rail gun, by the time they get the active systems back up, that shell might well have hit. And even if they shoot it down, they just gave away their position to the enemy cap ship and any other attack ships it might have launched.

Missiles vs rail guns: I can see both being used, as Tyyr said, missiles at a distance, RG up close and in mass. As for using a rail gun like launcher to shoot missiles...I'm not sure on that. The thing is, how much G force can a missile take? A simple solid chunk of metal is going to be able to be accelerated a lot faster than something that has internal parts that could be torn up. Also you'd need to shield the missile's electronics from the magnetic fields wouldn't you?

Other thoughts
Ship design: What do you think ship design is going to be like? Are we going to stick with the modern idea of a ship/rocket, long but narrow? The obvious advantages of this design is it puts the engines behind the entire mass of the ship, so you really only need to worry about compression forces during acceleration. At the very least I'd imagine if this design is used, the flooring needs to be rotated 90 degrees, so that the engines are at your feet. That way during acceleration, you'd have the simulation of gravity. Downside to this design though is that any turning you do is going to have to be gentle, or you could break the ship.

I think (and could be wrong, I'm no expert) that a more rounded ship would make more sense. I believe that a circle is the shape which you get the most volume per surface area, right? Also if you have to turn the ship, it makes the stresses pretty well equal across the ship, and I believe a honeycomb support structure could be used to spread the forces out across a wide area. Downside would be making the ship a fairly big target from any angle, but then again, with the distances, speeds, and advanced homing and targeting devices involved, I'm not sure how much the shape of something as relatively small as a ship is really going to matter.

[Coalition]

For fighters:
They will require 4* the delta V of a missile. A fighter has to accelerate to the target, decelerate to fight the target, accelerate back to its carrier, then decelerate so it can land. A missile only has to accelerate towards the target,and either impact, or detonate nearby (with either a shrapnel or nuclear warhead).

Carriers:
Carriers might be used in a manner, where the Carrier is composed of the strategic equipment. I.e. months of fuel, life support, food, repair shops, etc would not be used in combat, but would be vital to the survivors afterwards. Better maintain a good defense, otherwise if the enemy pops your carrier the attack craft are SOL.

Ship design:
Check out Attack Vector: Tactical. The engine is separated from the main body of the ship by a set of trusses (using distance to reduce the amount of radiation the crew received), along with a mass shield reducing some of the radiation away from the crew as well.

Unlimited laser usage:
True, lasers don't use ammunition, but the larger lasers in use these days (aka the ones you want to use when hurting someone/thing) tend to be about 33% efficiency. That means every Watt you put on target is 2 Watts you have to dissipate. Getting rid of heat in space is a problem also. You can't use conduction (space being annoyingly empty), you can't use convection (no air currents in space), you can only use radiating. That is the slowest method for getting rid of heat.

Larger vs smaller ships:
Sorry, larger ships use just as much fuel per ton when accelerating. The fun part a large ship can take advantage of is that hundreds of small combat ships can carry hundreds of the same repair kit (aka hundreds of hammers and hull patches) while a larger vessel can carry a small machine shop. Smaller vessels will use less of their mass for the same acceleration potential (structural strength is based on cross-section, vs mass based on volume). Smaller vessels will have to use radio or laser communications to coordinate, while larger vessels merely run more fiber-optics (or other physical communications cable). Smaller ships can be built faster, plus you get the benefit of mass-construction (cutters), vs larger ships needing more time and being slightly different designs (modern US carriers).

Sneaking around in space:
Not going to happen in fairly hard sci-fi. If you are using a nuclear drive of some kind, you will be spotted anywhere in the solar system. You are using an engine with an exhaust in the several hundred to thousand degrees, against a background of 3 Kelvin. Your exhaust will be spotted, your reactor will be spotted, your radiators will be spotted. By the time you settle down on course, the enemy will know to the nearest hour when you will arrive.

Here is a page on space warship design. Heck, the whole sight is a fun read.

[Vic]

Artillery shells are allready to the point of having terminal guidance systems, both active and passive. I have a feeling that such shells in production would still be cheaper than a missile of equivalent destruction.

Edit; Excalibur put out by Raytheon and Bofors, and Saber designed by Alliant Techsystems (not in service yet).

[Reliant121]

I think fighters/bombers/gunships, which I will term "Auxiliary Combatants" are going to be the air support for ground troops. Have a carrier in orbit launching some 100 fighters and bombers armed with (relatively speaking) low yield mass driver/railgun/laser/plasma bomb or whatever armaments and use them to support troop engagements. Have bombers to soften the enemy defences with energy charges, have fighters to dog it out with the enemy in the air, and then gunships to hover over the battlefield with some form of light gattling cannons and maybe an AT cannon to mow down enemy infantry or provide anti-armour support.


In space, I can see a combination of missile weapons and rail guns. Rail guns don't necessarily have to fire a solid particle, they can use the magnets to accelerate some particle-of-the-week, or maybe plasma at the enemy. Missiles are more powerful but more susceptable to PD fire. Perhaps Missiles will be the interstellar artillery of the future?

[Graham Kennedy]

Personally I don't think ship to ship combat is going to be possible for a long, long time. But when it happens, I'd speculate that carrier types of ships will be the winners, for much the same reason they are right now.

A fighter can carry a warhead as big as anything a ship can reasonably fire from a big gun, but it has the added advantage that it can carry it across a bigger distance and be a lot more flexible about getting it where it wants it. Battleship types are just not going to keep up with that unless there's some game-changing technology change. If I want to invade Mars it's always going to be better to launch fighters with a hundred warheads while I hold my main ship back than it is to take my main ship into danger and fire those hundred warheads.

But for me, I do love to see big ships with big guns just WHUMPing away at one another. Long may sci fi continue to serve it up!

[Coalition]

Personally I don't think ship to ship combat is going to be possible for a long, long time. But when it happens, I'd speculate that carrier types of ships will be the winners, for much the same reason they are right now.

A fighter can carry a warhead as big as anything a ship can reasonably fire from a big gun, but it has the added advantage that it can carry it across a bigger distance and be a lot more flexible about getting it where it wants it. Battleship types are just not going to keep up with that unless there's some game-changing technology change. If I want to invade Mars it's always going to be better to launch fighters with a hundred warheads while I hold my main ship back than it is to take my main ship into danger and fire those hundred warheads.

But for me, I do love to see big ships with big guns just WHUMPing away at one another. Long may sci fi continue to serve it up!

Fighters will have the same/less range than a capital ship. Space has it where everything uses the same environment, the same engines, the same fuel, etc. This is not like fighters on Earth, where fighters can achieve speeds over twenty times higher than a coresponding capital ship (a fighter traveling 600 knots, vs a capital ship traveling 20 knots). A smaller ship though, will have less flexibility in what sort of repair equipment it can carry. Hundreds of fighters would have hundreds of hammers and repair kits, while a larger vessel will have a small machine shop on board.

Life Support after IIRC 5 months is more efficient to use gengineered algae than stored food. So if a ship will be out for more than 5 months, it will have algae tanks. Less than that, and you'll have tailored meals. From here. This will make for a practical demarcation in terms of long-range and short-range vessels.

The key area is when you start loading up shipkiller missiles on everything. At that point, your main 'warship' will be the smallest practical design to carry those shipkiller missiles. From there, both sides will deploy smaller warheads, as the targets are smaller. This will be followed by both sides deploying ships big enough to survive the smaller shipkillers, followed by both sides deploying larger shipkillers, etc.

Now the annoying part about fighters is that they can likely be built in any small factory, and can be deployed to cover/threaten multiple areas, while a larger ship can only be in one location at a time. So depending on economy, you could have the smaller asteroid mining complexes with dozens of fighters to defend against roving pirates (who don't have a proper warship, you hope), while industrialized planets will have starships defending (and attacking) them.

In combat, the larger ship can destroy a few of the smaller ships in a pass, then as they accelerate to meet again, it will have time to repair. Destroyed fighters cannot be repaired.

[Mikey]

All of that is true, but irrelevant. I don't think anybody's talking about independently-operating fighters; rather, I think we're all talking about carrier-borne fighters (or strike fighters, or F/A's, or whatever.) Thus, the only life support a fighter needs is long enouch for a single sortie; same with provisions, fuel, etc., etc. Maintenance kit is irrelevant, as the fighter can avail itslef of the carrier-borne machine shop to which you refer.

Range is a non-issue, as the fighter's range is the carrier's plus its own.

[shran]

If the crew can aford it to throw away waste, they could pump heat into the waste, then get rid of the waste and excessive heat. And it creates a nice heat decoy.

[Captain Seafort]

All of that is true, but irrelevant. I don't think anybody's talking about independently-operating fighters; rather, I think we're all talking about carrier-borne fighters (or strike fighters, or F/A's, or whatever.) Thus, the only life support a fighter needs is long enouch for a single sortie; same with provisions, fuel, etc., etc. Maintenance kit is irrelevant, as the fighter can avail itslef of the carrier-borne machine shop to which you refer.

However, the fighter still needs to carry life support, and requires enough fuel to accelerate away from the carrier, decelerate onto the target, attack, and then repeat the process in reverse. A missile can simply keep accelerating until it either a) hits the target or b) detonates. The result: it gives your opponent less reaction time, you can carry a far bigger warhead (or simply more mass if you're using KKVs) and you're not putting an individual's life at risk.

[sunnyside]

On waste heat, while it spoils the idea of infinite firing, it would be easy enough to go up with some water and boil that off.

Additionally if we're talking about a battleship with significant mass or armor one could simply use the armor as a radiative heat sink. While that would still be a slow process, the heat capacity of the hull would provide for quite a bit of firing before it becomes an issue.

Anyway I suppose the answer depends on exactly how things shake out tech wise.

Fighters would be dominant if there is functional "stealth" technology that doesn't scale up to full sized ships and is to expensive to utilize on indavidual munitions.

Missiles would be dominant if you don't have stealth fighters and anti missile systems are unable to successfully intercept a swarm of incoming missiles.

Battleship types would be dominant if anti missile systems are sufficient to defeat an incoming barage and you don't have stealth fighters, and railgun or some other kill weapon technology is effective.

Though you may also get a combination fighter/missile scenario where the fighters act as a re-usable but still expendable first stage for the munition, alowing the carrier to remain further from the target while keeping the cost of the munition lower and the munitions smaller. In many ways this is the situation we are in today.

Out of all of those, I believe, as stated earlier, that the battleship scenario is the most likely one.

[Coalition]

If the crew can aford it to throw away waste, they could pump heat into the waste, then get rid of the waste and excessive heat. And it creates a nice heat decoy.

That heat decoy will be drifting, cooling, and will not be shooting at me. A decent system will make a note to ignore it as a target within a fraction of a second. If any of that changes, it becomes a target again. If the mounting ship is also drifting, cooling, and not shooting at me, I will assume they either surrendered, or are dead. If they are playing possum, I will keep my targeting systems on them. From there, if I am feeling annoyed, or have other issues, I kill the target ship.

If I am feeling nice, and the enemy has a habit of playing fair, I send over an Ensign with a nuclear self-destruct hooked to several fail-deadly options. If the enemy ship does anything that is suspicious, such as jamming my signal, taking the nuclear charge, or knocking out the Ensign, the warhead detonates. If I think the enemy has a tendency to do those things, there is no need to waste an Ensign, I will simply kill you. Sending the Ensign over is a hint that I trust you and think that you can be dealt with as an equal.

If the enemy has some way to inhibit nuclear detonations, I don't, and I still managed to beat them, I will cut their ship into pieces with my ship's weapons, an take it back as salvage.

On waste heat, while it spoils the idea of infinite firing, it would be easy enough to go up with some water and boil that off.

Those are basically heat sumps, which will eventually fill up. They would be fairly standard on hard sci-fi warships. They can absorb some heat, and it provides water for the crew to drink (clean water too, as anything bad has been killed). If you were boiling it internally to keep the water usable for later, then you will have to stop once the water cannot reliable hold more heat. At that point, you have four options:
1) stop firing to cool off
2) open the vents to let the water boil away, giving you time in battle, but removing the ater from later (open-cycle cooling)
3) Extend radiators to cool off, effectively signaling your surrender (having your radiators shot off in a space battle is like shooting your car radiator while the engine is running, only faster and more melty)
4) Watch your ship melt

Now the fun option is for orbital bases, that are attached to an asteroid. They spend the weeks/months/years between attacks with their radiators extended, trying to cool down the asteroid as much as possible. When combat finally arrives, the radiators retract (or are shot off), and the shooting begins. The station has the entire asteroid to dump heat into, so it will last longer and/or be able to shoot more. The rock can also serve as armor. The downside is that stations don't move too well.

If you have the engines to move a rock from one planet to another, it only takes a little math to make the rock hit the planet, instead of going in orbit to bombard.

Additionally if we're talking about a battleship with significant mass or armor one could simply use the armor as a radiative heat sink. While that would still be a slow process, the heat capacity of the hull would provide for quite a bit of firing before it becomes an issue.

Check the heat density of various metals, to see how many Joules of heat per kilogram they can hold. Now compare this to water. The other fun part is that you need a hot radiator to reliably dump heat into space. That radiator will tend to be hot on both sides, meaning you could have baked crew if you aren't careful.

Fighters would be dominant if there is functional "stealth" technology that doesn't scale up to full sized ships and is to expensive to utilize on indavidual munitions.

Depends on the setting. You'd need some kind of supertech to hide the exhaust of your engine, which will be several thousand degrees Kelvin, against a background of 3 Kelvin. So if you had a source of Culture-level engines that were only good enough for fighters, that would be one good reason.

Missiles would be dominant if you don't have stealth fighters and anti missile systems are unable to successfully intercept a swarm of incoming missiles.

The other fun part of missiles is that as long as they have reaction mass, they have infinite range. I assume after battle that there is an effort to go around and clean up/note trajectories of debris.

Battleship types would be dominant if anti missile systems are sufficient to defeat an incoming barage and you don't have stealth fighters, and railgun or some other kill weapon technology is effective.

Though you may also get a combination fighter/missile scenario where the fighters act as a re-usable but still expendable first stage for the munition, alowing the carrier to remain further from the target while keeping the cost of the munition lower and the munitions smaller. In many ways this is the situation we are in today.

Look up the Space Carrier notes on the page here:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3as.html
It has lots of fun stuff concerning ship design, heat dissipation, etc. It evenincludes your idea for a space carrier. In this case the 'fighters' are more like short-range gunboats, than one-man fighters.

I'd use a 'battleship' but firing a combination of missiles, and some railguns/coilguns, or lasers. The Direct fire weapons would be for both engaging the enemy, and smaller versions for point defense. At longer ranges I'd be using missiles launched from magnetic systems to keep the enemy maneuvering to burn up reaction mass and keep their radiators enclosed. Depending on missile warhead intelligence, it would be keyed to detonate when the radiators are extending (various limits/triggers TBD), for maximum annoyance.

As the enemy gets closer, I start to switch to my direct fire weapons based on enemy predicted positions. I try to keep a minmal profile to enemy fire, though this also limits my maneuvering.

Of course, the enemy is likely doing the same thing, making the battle 'interesting'.

[sunnyside]

That heat decoy will be drifting, cooling, and will not be shooting at me.

Actually another advantage of a "battleship" over missile or carrier based ships is that you might not be able to tell if fire is coming from them or any given decoy. Particularily if they are firing laser based weapons, but also to a degree with coilguns.

Those are basically heat sumps, which will eventually fill up.

We agree on all that. I wasn't trying to imply infinite firing. Probably something a bit closer to "ammo" for laser systems I suppose. Though again it allows for some level activity with no loss.

Additionally if we're talking about a battleship with significant mass or armor one could simply use the armor as a radiative heat sink. While that would still be a slow process, the heat capacity of the hull would provide for quite a bit of firing before it becomes an issue.

Check the heat density of various metals, to see how many Joules of heat per kilogram they can hold. Now compare this to water. The other fun part is that you need a hot radiator to reliably dump heat into space. That radiator will tend to be hot on both sides, meaning you could have baked crew if you aren't careful.

Water is good stuff for heat storage and disipation, but the hull is already there, potentially substantial, and able to radiate to space.

It would be hot on both sides, but reflecting heat is pretty easy (you can probably get a decent thermal blanket at Wal Mart).

Fighters would be dominant if there is functional "stealth" technology that doesn't scale up to full sized ships and is to expensive to utilize on indavidual munitions.

Depends on the setting. You'd need some kind of supertech to hide the exhaust of your engine, which will be several thousand degrees Kelvin, against a background of 3 Kelvin. So if you had a source of Culture-level engines that were only good enough for fighters, that would be one good reason.

True enough, though that doesn't say anything against closing in silently on inertia, or coming in with the sun or some other source to your back

Missiles would be dominant if you don't have stealth fighters and anti missile systems are unable to successfully intercept a swarm of incoming missiles.

The other fun part of missiles is that as long as they have reaction mass, they have infinite range. I assume after battle that there is an effort to go around and clean up/note trajectories of debris.

I'd use a 'battleship' but firing a combination of missiles, and some railguns/coilguns, or lasers. The Direct fire weapons would be for both engaging the enemy, and smaller versions for point defense. At longer ranges I'd be using missiles launched from magnetic systems to keep the enemy maneuvering to burn up reaction mass and keep their radiators enclosed. Depending on missile warhead intelligence, it would be keyed to detonate when the radiators are extending (various limits/triggers TBD), for maximum annoyance.

As the enemy gets closer, I start to switch to my direct fire weapons based on enemy predicted positions. I try to keep a minmal profile to enemy fire, though this also limits my maneuvering.

Of course, the enemy is likely doing the same thing, making the battle 'interesting'.

I do agree that the ships would likely have mixed weaponry. No reason not to have some missiles for certain situations, and at least some ships boats for various things.

I would still call it a battleship so long as it's "big" and direct fire weaponry constitutes the primary armament.

[Graham Kennedy]

Fighters will have the same/less range than a capital ship. Space has it where everything uses the same environment, the same engines, the same fuel, etc. This is not like fighters on Earth, where fighters can achieve speeds over twenty times higher than a coresponding capital ship (a fighter traveling 600 knots, vs a capital ship traveling 20 knots). A smaller ship though, will have less flexibility in what sort of repair equipment it can carry. Hundreds of fighters would have hundreds of hammers and repair kits, while a larger vessel will have a small machine shop on board.

It makes little sense to talk about the "range" of fighters or cap ships. Both have a range only limited by how long they can support their crew, which is quite possibly indefinite.

It's not necessarily true at all that fighters and cap ships will have the same mobility, though. Fighters may have a far higher thrust to weight ratio, i.e. far higher acceleration. That would let them proceed ahead of the main ship and return in a way not dissimilar to how fighters operate today.

The key area is when you start loading up shipkiller missiles on everything. At that point, your main 'warship' will be the smallest practical design to carry those shipkiller missiles. From there, both sides will deploy smaller warheads, as the targets are smaller. This will be followed by both sides deploying ships big enough to survive the smaller shipkillers, followed by both sides deploying larger shipkillers, etc.

No, your FIGHTER will be the smallest design to carry a shipkilling missile. Your capital ship will carry those, plus fighters, plus sensors, plus fuel, plus a hundred other things.


The annoying thing about this is that it all depends very, very much on what tech is available at the time, which is something there's just no real way to know. All we can do is speculate.

[Coalition]

It makes little sense to talk about the "range" of fighters or cap ships. Both have a range only limited by how long they can support their crew, which is quite possibly indefinite.

It's not necessarily true at all that fighters and cap ships will have the same mobility, though. Fighters may have a far higher thrust to weight ratio, i.e. far higher acceleration. That would let them proceed ahead of the main ship and return in a way not dissimilar to how fighters operate today.

Why would they have a higher thrust to weight ratio? Both ships and fighters will be using similar engine technology, unlike modern fighters and ships.

For scouting purposes, both sides will know where the enemy is weeks or months away thanks to infrared sensors. Even keeping the ship at the temperature of ice will still make it visible for over a light-minute. With current technology, a human being seeing from minimal aspect (.1 square meters) frozen into ice (273 Kelvin) can be detected from about one light-second away. Detection range increases as the square root of surface area, but with the square of the temperature. So if you have a surface area 4* larger, it can be detected twice as far. If you triple the temperature, the detection range is 9 times higher.

Thrusting with the engines boosts this much higher.

Here is where you can read more, and find the equation I used for detection range.

If you actually have to check out behind a moon, and you don't want to risk your ship, a sensor drone would be better. The sensors are just as good, it can maintain higher acceleration, you don't have to worry about recovering it, and if you want you can kamikaze it into any enemy detected.

No, your FIGHTER will be the smallest design to carry a shipkilling missile. Your capital ship will carry those, plus fighters, plus sensors, plus fuel, plus a hundred other things.

So the capital ship is the strategic component, and the fighters are the expendable combat unit? The Space carrier design that I linked to show sunnyside earlier comes to mind.

Actually another advantage of a "battleship" over missile or carrier based ships is that you might not be able to tell if fire is coming from them or any given decoy. Particularily if they are firing laser based weapons, but also to a degree with coilguns.

I receive an impact, and my ship moves in Y direction. The enemy who was at the opposite bearing is the one who fired a solid projectile at me. Lasers will be trickier, as I'd have to have a way to detect the beam in the ablated/vaporized metal on my hull. Off-hand, I'd assume the enemy ship that has the Captain mooning me over the video comm, or tried to send me a Basilisk is the enemy.

Water is good stuff for heat storage and disipation, but the hull is already there, potentially substantial, and able to radiate to space.

It would be hot on both sides, but reflecting heat is pretty easy (you can probably get a decent thermal blanket at Wal Mart).

True. The fun part is when you try to keep the crew quarters under 313 Kelvin, while the reactor is at several hundred Kelvin. You have some physical connection, so heat will conduct itself inside the ship. The air conditioners will have their jobs cut out for them. Cooling off a starship, with an engine running, is a very interesting exercise.

Here is some fun stuff about why radiators will be necessary.
Here is an idea of how much surface area you'd need. It listed a 10 GW reactor needing a radiator about 1.4 million square meters, or a square 800 meters on a side, and radiating from both sides. If you put this on a sphere, you wwould need a sphere just over 1100 meters wide.

To see what sort of reactor you'd need, you use a basic equation:
Mass of ship in kilograms * acceleration of ship in m/s² * Specific Impulse * 4.9 = Power in Watts.
This is assuming a perfect efficiency, which will not occur.

Now what I want to find is an equation where you take in temperature in Kelvin, and get output in Watts/m². That would be a nice find.

True enough, though that doesn't say anything against closing in silently on inertia, or coming in with the sun or some other source to your back

There is no stealth in space without super-tech. The best way to sneak up on someone is to use an existing schedule, and a political back-stab. I.e. two planets are allied, and one sends reinforcements to its ally. When the reinforcements arrive, it turns out that they had been in secret negotiations, and the new arrivals announce their presence with an unhealthy dose of open fire.

A decently industrialized world with proper high technology should be able to launch an expendable probe into orbit, and send it at a right angle to the sun. This will give them a chance to view your ship. If the planet doesn't have that capability (aka nuclear or other high Specific Impulse engines) then you have a strategic and technological advantage, and don't need to sneak around as much/at all, and could actually just hover in orbit, popping off satellites with your lasers, while keeping the radiators extended. Repeat until you run out of satellites, or the planet finally agrees to surrender.

I do agree that the ships would likely have mixed weaponry. No reason not to have some missiles for certain situations, and at least some ships boats for various things.

I would still call it a battleship so long as it's "big" and direct fire weaponry constitutes the primary armament.

There will be small craft of course, it is just that single-person fighters won't be useful in combat. You'd see 'gunboats' with a dozen people, launching missile buses at the enemy, instead of trying to launch and recover fighters. I'd want several people, so if one person gets knocked out, someone else can do First Aid. You can't crash in a deep space battle, but leaving your fingers on the thrust button for too long means you have built up too much velocity to be rescued. At that point, they tell you to take the Happy Candy in the emergency pack, so you at least die with a smile, instead of suffocating in your own CO₂.

For ship names, you could go with the 3-way chart here:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3as.html
Look for Classification Example. Lots of fun names there.