Ship-to-ship combat is like that in the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. Hours or days of waiting and preparing, trying to get in the enemy’s head to guess what they’ll do, and coordinating the fire and last minute acceleration/maneuvers of your fleet, then the automatic programs carry out those orders and you see who died. It’s really well done.
There’s a sequence in a Larry Niven book where a ship sees some missiles inbound from across a solar system. In order to avoid them, they have to spend several hours at high-G thrust, nearly killing a bunch of the crew. It’s a long, slow chapter of high tension, it obeys the laws of physics, and it’s excellent.
I’m pretty sure it’s either The Mote in God’s Eye or The Gripping Hand.
Edit: Checked, and it’s most of the last couple of chapters of The Gripping Hand. I fudged some of the details from not having read it in a long time, but the basics are there; spaceships jockeying for strategic advantage across an entire solar system, balancing fuel and orbits, and crews doing their best to withstand painful acceleration.
I have 56 books of his (a few are duplicates in other editions), including those two. I read Mote ages ago, bit don’t remember it. Reordering my TBR pile!
I love the space battles in the early Expanse books. They are essentially
There’s a ship visible several thousand kilometers away…
Shit, they’ve armed weapons
Firing countermeasures
They will pass in 30 seconds at an appreciable fraction of C
BRAAAAAAAAP
battle over
Ship-to-ship combat is like that in the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. Hours or days of waiting and preparing, trying to get in the enemy’s head to guess what they’ll do, and coordinating the fire and last minute acceleration/maneuvers of your fleet, then the automatic programs carry out those orders and you see who died. It’s really well done.
There’s a sequence in a Larry Niven book where a ship sees some missiles inbound from across a solar system. In order to avoid them, they have to spend several hours at high-G thrust, nearly killing a bunch of the crew. It’s a long, slow chapter of high tension, it obeys the laws of physics, and it’s excellent.
I’m a fan and collector, but that doesn’t sound familiar from the portion of my collection that I’ve read through. Do you recall anything else?
I’m pretty sure it’s either The Mote in God’s Eye or The Gripping Hand.
Edit: Checked, and it’s most of the last couple of chapters of The Gripping Hand. I fudged some of the details from not having read it in a long time, but the basics are there; spaceships jockeying for strategic advantage across an entire solar system, balancing fuel and orbits, and crews doing their best to withstand painful acceleration.
I have 56 books of his (a few are duplicates in other editions), including those two. I read Mote ages ago, bit don’t remember it. Reordering my TBR pile!