Drone warfare vs manned spacecraft in sci-fi

[Cykeisme]

Drones will take up much less room than fighter crews or mounted weapons. With fighter crews you need life support and living space for them plus the storage for the fighters, or at least you'll take the mass penalty if they're just docked outside.

Granted, I'm not an expert, but I assuming we're talking about spaceships (if we're talking about naval vessels then my earlier points are invalid too, sorry) then mass is a bigger issue than "room" (volume).

Likewise with mounted weapons you need to have a few more hands on board to maintain and use them, lest you strain your existing crew. With a dozen simple point-and-shoot drones a freighter that comes under attack can just release some of them and while the attacker is stuck dealing with what is little more than a gun and a targeting computer with maneuvering rockets the freighter can accelerate away and call for some help.

Here we're unfairly attributing mass and crewing costs to mounted weapons, when they could be equally automated.
Similarly, having intelligent missiles would be more expedient than drones here, for the same mass cost.. to put it simply, more bang for your buck. It's one of the issues that have been discussed at length with regards to space fighters (manned or not), compared to simply carrying more ordnance.
If we're comparing "ship armed with short-range drones" to "completely defenseless ship", it works. But when we're comparing it to "ship armed with guns and missiles", it doesn't stack up.


The initial point makes the most sense though, and I have to totally agree with it: they are very good at serving as a distraction for an extended period of time, allowing an outgunned vessel to run. The drones could also have sensor jamming equipment on them, further increasing the chances for the fleeing vessel to escape. One or more of the drones can even interpose themselves between the attacker and the escaping vessel, ensuring that even focused directional sensors can be blinded.

So returning to Stark's original point, if we narratively want the living characters to be in danger due to the short operational range of drones, it works best plot-wise primarily when the situation involves around a weaker vessel attempts to escape from a stronger one.
As a rule, offensive use of unmanned combat vehicles will tend to strip the dramatic tension (danger) out of a story.


Edit:
Ah, funny how I didn't think of this earlier (probably my lack of imagination at work ).. if the attacker also uses drones, then there will be proxy battles between defensive and offensive drones, which can still be dramatic, if the controlling ships are still at dangerously close distances, perhaps due to limited control signal range.
So we can have swarms of combat drones fighting each other, with both sides trying to keep the enemy drones away from their manned carrier ships while simultaneously trying to get some to slip past and hit the enemy carrier ship. So danger to the characters is maintained, even with drones in the story.
Seems like a simple concept, so this has probably been done in fiction already, maybe there are already stories where this happens?

[Imperial528]

Granted, I'm not an expert, but I assuming we're talking about spaceships (if we're talking about naval vessels then my earlier points are invalid too, sorry) then mass is a bigger issue than "room" (volume).

I've been talking about spaceships. Volume raises issues if you have to work within an existing spaceframe or your freighter needs to maintain certain dimensions. If you can just bolt it on the outside to a docking port/power hookup, it only adds mass. Though you would want to try and keep your mass center along your axis of thrust, for efficiency and all that.

Here we're unfairly attributing mass and crewing costs to mounted weapons, when they could be equally automated.
Similarly, having intelligent missiles would be more expedient than drones here, for the same mass cost.. to put it simply, more bang for your buck. It's one of the issues that have been discussed at length with regards to space fighters (manned or not), compared to simply carrying more ordnance.
If we're comparing "ship armed with short-range drones" to "completely defenseless ship", it works. But when we're comparing it to "ship armed with guns and missiles", it doesn't stack up.

I was assuming automated weapons, actually, or at the least the operation of them could be done by one of the maintenance crew. They would have a high mass cost (and financial, for that matter) however as you have to route power systems to them, integrate them into the computer systems, etc. and if they come with their own power supplies, computers, sensors, and such, you have basically welded a large combat drone to your ship. This is less of a concern in the freighter is designed with the weapons from the start, but your maintenance costs will still be higher. Not to mention that unless you carry around very big guns, you're also going to have to put up the cash to make your ship durable enough to actually fight off similarly armed space pirates or what have you. Carry around enough combat systems and you may also need to get some more crew to maintain them, or invest in maintenance robots.

Funny that you mention missiles, as a drone can be easily configured to be the same thing. Now obviously with the small drones you're going for the "death of a thousand cuts" attack since they'll basically be carrying just enough firepower to stall an attacker until the drones have been finished off. You could easily program them so that when they run out of ammo/get damaged enough that they ramp the engine to full and send hundreds of kilos of fuel and drone into the baddies' ship.

The initial point makes the most sense though, and I have to totally agree with it: they are very good at serving as a distraction for an extended period of time, allowing an outgunned vessel to run. The drones could also have sensor jamming equipment on them, further increasing the chances for the fleeing vessel to escape. One or more of the drones can even interpose themselves between the attacker and the escaping vessel, ensuring that even focused directional sensors can be blinded.

That's an angle I hadn't thought of. Though there are many various things you can do with a cheap, disposable flying chunk of metal. Why stop at jamming though when you can program the drones to go for sensors and engines first? Don't even have to kill 'em.

So returning to Stark's original point, if we narratively want the living characters to be in danger due to the short operational range of drones, it works best plot-wise primarily when the situation involves around a weaker vessel attempts to escape from a stronger one.
As a rule, offensive use of unmanned combat vehicles will tend to strip the dramatic tension (danger) out of a story.

You can easily build in drama and tension even with long-range drones. Imagine a trading outpost facing the threat of being raided during wartime, for example. Say that they don't have much (or any) military escort, so they're forced to rely on defensive drones. In the end it can all depend on how well they predicted the enemy's plan of attack and deployed their drones likewise.

[jollyreaper]

The arguments in favour of drone warfare have all been made here many times before, and they've been made all the more compelling in light of the real-life ascendance of drone warfare as the tactic of choice in today's military actions.

This begs the question: how do we rationalize the very heavy reliance upon manned spacecraft and away missions in science fiction? Is there some point where we must simply give up and say that the writers didn't see it coming?

As per http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... mnotes.php
Most people instinctively know Burnside's Zeroth Law of space combat: Science fiction fans relate more to human beings than to silicon chips. That is, while it might make more logical sense to have an interplanetary battle waged between groups of computer controlled spacecraft, it would be infinitely more boring than a battle between groups of human crewed spacecraft.

You can tell good stories in the command bunker in realistic future wars. As far as the bunker's concerned, it doesn't matter if the units moved about on the map are divisions of squishy humans or clanking drones. The decision-makers are still human and still relevant to the human audience. But a bunker story is not the same thing as one set in the field. If a New Hope were told realistically, we'd still have the bunker scenes with Leia and C3P0 and Dodonna but lose everything with pilots in fighters. It would just be guided missiles vs. automatic weapons, not even Storm Troopers manning the turrets. It could still be made into a good movie but it would be a different kind of movie. It's the difference between a gambler with his money and his life riding on a jockey and a horse versus the throw of dice or the spinning off a roulette wheel. It's the difference between action and passivity. Does the character actively do something to seal his fate or does he have an envelope to open and the only thing in his power is to control when he learns of what has happened?

What makes the Death Star fight in Star Wars different is even though the people in the bunker are pretty much out of any means of controlling their fate, Luke is in his fighter and so our guys are thus still in the fight.

As technology marches on, keeping humans in the fight will feel more and more contrived. Trying to write realistic SF becomes more daunting. But hell, there's a whole body of real world fiction about old warriors bemoaning the changing of the times, where their notions of chivalry and honor have become outmoded and obsolescent. A samurai in a time of peace, a knight in the age of the gun, the fighter pilot in the atomic age, etc.

At this point in time I think there's a pretty good argument still for manned warships, just as there is today. Manned starfighters seems pretty much relegated to rule-of-cool unrealism, much like power armor and swords-beat-guns-if-its-a-katana. But if in 50 years time our warships are all automated drones remotely controlled from the Pentagon and the closest humans get to the battle is the harbor where the ships are supported, it will feel pretty silly to argue for manned ships in scifi.

[jollyreaper]

Edit: I would also say its not quite true to say 'humans are always ore interesting than robots' as far as story goes, because this is once more a matter of 'how the author envisions the setting.' sci fi is chock full of interesting robots who have character or even are humanlike (from C3-PO and R2-D2 to R Daneel to Robbie the Robot, and there are countless others.) so it is quite possible to construct a story around 'likable' robots if the author wished to. It may not be precisely 'realistic' to do so, but you can have a story that doesnt involve humans that remains interesting and characterful.

Those characters are still fundamentally human. By saying "people" need to be in a story, it's a sentient being we can identify with. We project on and sympathize with animals in nature films, personifying them. C3P0 is "people" just as much as Dwarves, Vulcans, Elves, replicants, the rats of NIHM, Lassie, or the Rabbits of Watership Down.

Where it gets bloody damn hard to personify is when we're looking at Voyager or Curiosity. We can talk to HAL, we can imagine him having wants and needs, just like a person. It's hard to feel sympathy for Curiosity if it gets stuck in a ditch. We can sympathize with the struggles of a Kamikaze pilot falling short of his target more than we can with an anti-ship missile doing the same. Taken to a further extent, the Terminator of the first film is purely a machine. It has programming that it follows but is not sapient in the sense that we could come to know it. While more sophisticated than a homing missile, it is fundamentally the same. You cannot argue or reason with it, its motivation is clockwork. You'd have as much luck trying to talk a time bomb into not exploding.

The really, really difficult trick in creating the alien is portraying thinking, sensible entities that have goals and motives that are certainly real but we may be incapable of properly understanding.

[jollyreaper]

I prefer the idea of synthesis. Instead of asking Man or Machine, why not have Man and Machine?

Rather than just manned or unmanned Space Fighters, why not put the Human pilot in a large Corvette-sized vessel that deploys the unmanned drones to fight alongside him, like the Options of Gradius or the Bits/Funnels/DRAGOONS/etc... of Gundam on a larger scale?

A ground team can be equipped with a vehicle that deploys drones for combat (and has AI-controlled turrets), but if the situation demands advanced decision-making or person-to-person contact, the crew can get out and handle it.

The way that makes the most sense is that the political control of the force is retained by humans, pretty much as you say.

Deploy a fleet to some system to enforce a policy? There's a human admiral in charge of the fleet. Something going on at the second planet? Detach a force to handle it, force commanded by a human and his staff. Even if he's 20 light minutes away, there's still a human calling the shots, even if the composition of the force is like the equivalent of a command ship, a dozen battleships and a hundred escorts and a thousand fighters, there's a staff of humans calling the shots.

If you look at the way old school officers viewed commoners and the enlisted ranks, it's not that much different from humans calling the shots over drones. Only nobles are trusted to know what's what, filthy commoners are too stupid. Officer ranks are filled with nobles. Enlisted commoners are the brawn, officers are the brains and direct efforts accordingly.

[amigocabal]

The arguments in favour of drone warfare have all been made here many times before, and they've been made all the more compelling in light of the real-life ascendance of drone warfare as the tactic of choice in today's military actions.

This begs the question: how do we rationalize the very heavy reliance upon manned spacecraft and away missions in science fiction? Is there some point where we must simply give up and say that the writers didn't see it coming?

One reason for manned spacecraft, in say, interstellar science fiction is the need for personal crews to watch over the drones, and to be able to reset the drones' mission parameters as circumstances warrant. For example, in The Empire Strikes Back, the probe droids used to search for the Rebels were supervised from Vader's flagship, instead of directly from Coruscant. Someone near the scene can adapt more quickly than someone in a distant capital.

[Simon_Jester]

They may also be equipped to react in more complex ways.

Mobbing the rebels on Hoth with a zillion probe droids (or more heavily armed versions thereof) might work as long as the situation didn't get complex. But they faced the combination of fighters, defensive shields, bad terrain, and rebels poised to evacuate at any second. The robots' physical and programming 'toolkits' for dealing with the situation might not be up to handling all that. Just as there are political problems that you really can't solve with a Predator drone.

[lPeregrine]

Mobbing the rebels on Hoth with a zillion probe droids (or more heavily armed versions thereof) might work as long as the situation didn't get complex. But they faced the combination of fighters, defensive shields, bad terrain, and rebels poised to evacuate at any second. The robots' physical and programming 'toolkits' for dealing with the situation might not be up to handling all that. Just as there are political problems that you really can't solve with a Predator drone.

And, more importantly, they faced a need to take Luke (and, less importantly, his friends) alive. Swarming Hoth with wave after wave of automated gun platforms might have been a very efficient and no-risk way of killing everything on the planet, but do you really trust your expendable gun platforms to identify the handful of rebels you need to capture and avoid killing them?

Of course Star Wars might not be the best example given their ability to produce droids with human-level personality/intelligence/etc instead of just mindless weapons, but even there it might be the case that producing human-like droids costs as much as training more of your expendable stormtroopers.

[Dr Roberts]

If I were in the position to take Hoth I would have used the droids, the problem is they would never have captured Luke so again you would have mainly droids with a few Human Elites to guide.

[Sea Skimmer]

Hoth is a horrible example for anything given how bad the Imperial attack was. Who needs zillions of drones? The enemy are some lightly armed infantry with no overhead cover, and some static gun positions fed by exposed power cables. Mortar fire would have decimated them.

The rebels meanwhile didn't even notice they were under ground attack until the Imperial troops were within visual range of the main defenses, meaning no sign of a covering position (typical for a movie, but this is why the example sucks). The logical Imperial attack would have been to drive a couple hypersonic missile launchers under the shield edge, and fire on the already known location of the shield generator. Boom, generator explodes, zero Imperial losses so far, heavily escorted air assault drops down directly on top of the rebel base behind all its feebly dug in defenders, which seems to have been what happened anyway in the end given that Vader was one of the first guys in the base.

Rebel fighters might have been able to cope with some kind of missile attack like this, but not with no effective warning time. A mach 10 missile would cover the 30nm distance from a launch position comfortably over the horizon to the generator in about seventeen seconds... we could build such a missile in real life in the 1960s too, see Sprint.

Target identification is a big problem sure, but warfare more and more favors using drones as information collectors, and then stand off weapons, which can be human controlled, as the killers.

[jwl]

Well in star wars, the force is better than any targeting computer, and precog would be useful too. The same can be said of some other fictions where the characters have powers.

[Stark]

Hey I think I just found out where all those amazingly boring scifi battles come from!

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Hey I think I just found out where all those amazingly boring scifi battles come from!

i shouted out 'who killed the kennedys'

but after all

it was you and me

[Sea Skimmer]

Darth Vader jumping out of a supersonic shuttle right into slaughtering rebel guards around a doorway, then moving indoors to do the same, while the rebels basically blow it up in his face as they retreat, would have been a way more interesting battle then some slow moving dinosaurs being just as unstoppable. The rebels could have just run away from that open field fight and Luke could have kept his buddy gunner alive ect... and it would have made absolutely no difference to anything. They didn't even slow the Imperials down, and then run away in terror anyway. Great use of time in the movie. Course Stark's opinions of what are interesting have nothing at all to do with the topic at hand.

[Stark]

See what a difference it makes when you actually contribute instead of saying HAHA SS-N-20A BIS PRODUCT IMPROVED LOL? I'm always glad to see you improving.

However, the events surrounding the battle being more relevant than the conduct of the battle to ... everyone except milnerds is still 'relevant'. Sorry baby!

[jollyreaper]

Star Wars is rule of cool all the way. It's really impossible to think logically without wrecking everything. Battle droids are just one of the many plot holes. It's like the argument a few years back about why R2 doesn't speak. Answer: because he's meant to be a mute sidekick or clever animal friend in grand movie tradition. But geeks try to find an in-universe explanation like speech boxes are expensive. No, there's no way to rationalize it.

Now if we can accept that Star Wars isn't meant to make sense, we could still talk about what would make more sense. Don't put bridges on exposed towers for one thing, maybe don't blow up planets when you could just gas the population ad resettle instead, Endor Holocaust is inevitable, etc.

Within the setting as presented, just how badass is that planetary shield that it could withstand a bombardment by the fleet? Or is the concern that bringing down the shield would catastrophically glass everything under it as well?

I do have to wonder at how much they had oliphants in mind when filming Empire. Seems like they had to of. Like with the trench run, it's the Dam Busters. They had to approach the trench at 90 degrees at some point anway, why not do so from right above the target? Because it wouldn't look as cool.

[Stark]

And... geometry.

People who say something can't possibly make sense should probably choose better examples.

[Connor MacLeod]

I have this urge to slap anyone who tries to use 'rule of cool' to justify anything in universe. It would actually make more sense to say 'God did it' because you can at least ARGUE that as technically true if you construe the author as being, in fact, a deity of a religion rather than a guy making up stories.

Its espeically annoying for 40K. Yes its magical, and generlaly may not involve thought. But trying to trope up an explanation is just so kneejerk unthinking its hilarious. But then I guess nowadays tropes are the way we classify shit, or something.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The rule does have some relevance though, when thinking about actual space flight. Look at how most of the first generation of rocket pioneers and theorists got into the business and say that can't be interpreted as rule of cool; most of them wanted to do it, started out on the garden shed scale and damn' well improvised. As a motive, cool is not inconsiderable.

There's an important corollary of that too- "Do you know what makes your rockets go up. Funding. Funding makes your rockets go up. No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

Although maybe that should have been in Russian- arguably the entire Soviet space program was an unplanned deviation, started by engineers thinking it would be much cooler to build satellites and manned capsules than the ballistic missiles they were supposed to be working on.

Look for the arguments about the warhead size of the R-7, good old Soyuz, where first the rocket men tricked the nuclear physicists into thinking they could give them five and a half tons to play with, so they would report that they needed a rocket big enough to carry the warhead they had just designed, so the rocket men would get funding to produce that rocket;
which they didn't have fully designed yet, but coincidentally they had this design for a manned capsule that happened to weigh five and a half tons and they needed the money to make a rocket to send it up on... When your space program starts with "First, we run a con on Comrade Stalin" then you are going the hard road.

Hartford's account says this is how it was, though. Rule of cool, or at least a non- internetty, adult version of it, in real life. That, plus intelligence and determination, is what turned space dreamers into theorists, scientists, engineers, spacemen, the people who made as much of it as we really have happen.

Until it gets too impossible and you run out of money; and I could put this into my own words, but I'd only be quoting really anyway, and I think he nails it dead on-

The universe is probably full of the one planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space; each discovered, studied and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

Yes, that was Randall Munroe of XKCD- but is he not (probably) right?

Space is expensive. Returns are enormously far away. We have our problems down here. The economic benefits there are from space depend on people, at most, in ground stations. Drones are part of the sensible, rational economic decision, one that tends to close off the human future in space.

If you look closely, he's arguing- and I agree with him- that putting people in space at all is economically a bad, irrational decision, and strictly speaking, he's right. Only coolth- only the irrational factors- got us as far as we've gone. The science fiction with people in space is from an era that didn't understand the real costs, believed the irrational political conditions that drove spaceflight to begin with would continue, or believed that costs could be brought down.

Or believed in glory. That's the word I was looking for.

[jollyreaper]

I have this urge to slap anyone who tries to use 'rule of cool' to justify anything in universe. It would actually make more sense to say 'God did it' because you can at least ARGUE that as technically true if you construe the author as being, in fact, a deity of a religion rather than a guy making up stories.

Its espeically annoying for 40K. Yes its magical, and generlaly may not involve thought. But trying to trope up an explanation is just so kneejerk unthinking its hilarious. But then I guess nowadays tropes are the way we classify shit, or something.

Well, it's helpful to keep from crawling up our own butts when talking about a given setting. Like the Death Star. There's no way to make sense of it. The power scale is completely out or line with the rest of the universe, like Hannibal crossing the Alps with atom bombs. And if extermination of all life on the planet is all that's required, just chucking rocks should be sufficient.

I'm not a fan of it as a justification, personally. "It's just a story, it doesn't have to make sense." Ugh. I always like it when even if the things are all made up, some effort is put into making things make sense. But it can at least save us the time of putting more thought into it than the writers did. It's fine and fun to point out flaws but not enjoyable to get I to flame wars with fans trying to justify bad writing and oversights.

In a period piece, I always like looking at the background details to see how much they got right. It's the attention to detail that's impressive. Even if most people won't catch that the uniforms are wrong or something isn't period, it's nice to know when everyone took the extra effort to make things just so.

Am I making a distinction without a difference? I don't think so.

[jwl]

Personally, I like large power gaps, because it makes the power of the thing that much more awesome/ terrifying if it is so much more powerful than the rest of the universe. If every random X-wing in star wars had planet-destroying lasers, the death star would seem a lot less threatening.

[Crazedwraith]

I have this urge to slap anyone who tries to use 'rule of cool' to justify anything in universe. It would actually make more sense to say 'God did it' because you can at least ARGUE that as technically true if you construe the author as being, in fact, a deity of a religion rather than a guy making up stories.

'Rule of cool' doesn't justify anything in-universe, it's not meant to. It's just a short hand way of saying 'this universe doesn't make sense because the producers did cool stuff without thinking it through'

[jollyreaper]

Personally, I like large power gaps, because it makes the power of the thing that much more awesome/ terrifying if it is so much more powerful than the rest of the universe. If every random X-wing in star wars had planet-destroying lasers, the death star would seem a lot less threatening.

You get that on the scale of P51 vs a-bomb. How much greater is the disparity between an X-wing and a planet-busting super laser? I think a paramecium and blue whale would be on a closer scale.

But it's also interesting to note that the x-wing would have a bitching power source. It can easily make single stage to orbit and go FTL. We can't guess what the power requirement for FTL is but we know escape velocity. It's using a reaction engine therefore it's some kind of rocket. Even assuming it sucks up atmospheric gases for part of the ascent, it still needs to dump massive amounts of energy into whatever reaction mass remains to make orbit. The exhaust would be coming out near light speed. Therefore the power available to weapons must be fairly ridiculous and yet the lasers don't seem all that much more powerful than the equivalent in machine gun rounds.

I do agree with you that the Death Star does demand a viewer's attention and we have had historic examples of weapons that redefine the balance of power with their introduction but the Death Star goes way beyond that.

The crazy thing with super laser technology is that it already disrupts the balance of power as an anti-ship weapon. It looks like the turbo-laser is a warship's primary weapon against all targets. Ship to ship combat is a long slugfest as they grind each other down. A super-laser can one-shot a star destroyer. That is already an "I win" button. In conventional warfare, the Emperor has got them licked.

Historically, there haven't been many cases of a rebellion growing from guerrilla outfits into conventional forces. There have been cases of rebels being subsidized by outside states with equipment they could never produce for themselves. Only when the regime is collapsing do you see rebels getting heavy equipment which is usually by defections from the army.

So, what does it mean that the rebels now have a fleet? Even at that, the forces were still employed guerrilla-style much of the time. The scale of the universe makes that more practical. In the real world, heavy equipment and mass formations = targets and fighting a game the stronger power can win. And the establishment of a fixed base like Hoth meant the Empire could crush them. Having a fleet to serve as a mobile base sounds more sensible but has a host of problems. In the real world, ships are always tied to shore. Only so much maintenance can be performed at sea and even if there's continuous resupply, eventually the ship would need to return to port for serious yard time. So, do rebels have secret ports established? How are the locations kept secret from the imperials? How do they keep sources of supply obfuscated to escape reprisals? If their tech can allow for continued operation in space for years at a stretch, how do they do it?

Frankly, I don't think anyone who worked on Star Wars really cared about those kinds of details and many would consider them boring. But it certainly leaves the opportunity open for someone who wants to tell a similar story in that level of detail. And even if the writer doesn't exhaustively explain every bit, the gaps can be extrapolated. Read a WWII bomber story and you know they're hitting a ball bearing factory. Nobody explains why that's important to the war effort. Read a little about machinery and you realize why it's a great target. Geographic realities shape campaigns. Why is a flyspeck island in the Pacific important? Why do we need Guadalcanal? That shapes the campaign. Why did we bypass other islands? Didn't need them, the garrisons there couldn't hurt us. No need to waste blood and treasure there.

[amigocabal]

I have this urge to slap anyone who tries to use 'rule of cool' to justify anything in universe. It would actually make more sense to say 'God did it' because you can at least ARGUE that as technically true if you construe the author as being, in fact, a deity of a religion rather than a guy making up stories.

Its espeically annoying for 40K. Yes its magical, and generlaly may not involve thought. But trying to trope up an explanation is just so kneejerk unthinking its hilarious. But then I guess nowadays tropes are the way we classify shit, or something.

Well, it's helpful to keep from crawling up our own butts when talking about a given setting. Like the Death Star. There's no way to make sense of it. The power scale is completely out or line with the rest of the universe, like Hannibal crossing the Alps with atom bombs. And if extermination of all life on the planet is all that's required, just chucking rocks should be sufficient.

My biggest problem with the concept of the Death Star superlaser being a DET weapon is the issue of waste heat.

Even assuming a 99.9% efficiency, the waste heat would be 1 E 35 joules, more than enough to vaporize the Death Star. (A 2 m thermal exhaust port would be woefully insufficient to expel 1 e 35 joules of waste heat.) For the Death Star to still be in one piece after firing the superlaser would imply extreme efficiency.

(This is not a problem if the superlaser works by converting a portion of the target's mass into 1 E 38 joules of explosive energy.)

[Simon_Jester]

Any energy weapon with output of kilotons TNT-equivalency or higher has the same problem. Very few settings dealt with it- Doc Smith and the primary beam are the only one I can think of, where overloading a projector to get a high megaton-range bolt blew the first gun crew that tried it into vapor. Also the second through ninth, before the enemy caught on and came up with a countertactic...