Darth Raptor wrote:
That's the critical question, isn't it? If fighters are so useless, why are they so ubiquitous?
Fighters are far from useless, even if they can't take down capital ships alone the original mission of combat "pursuit" aircraft was reconaciance after all. Here a list of missions:
Forward Observation
Fighters can be used to relay targeting data to a parent vessel from a forward position, in a heavy ECM battlefield.
Reconnaissance
The original use of aircraft on warships was to provided reconnaciance beyond the range parent vessels sensors. Hyperdrive equipped fighters can quickly search vast areas of space, while the parent vessel coordinates the search. This mission has been taken over in part by hyperspace capable probe droid. However the droids are not reusable, while fighters are. Additionally it can be useful to have a sentient present to interpret the intelligence.
Harassment
Fighters force starships to maintain full shields along all vectors. Without the danger of enemy starfighters swarming around them armed with very high-yield warheads vessels can divert all their shield strength along the vector facing an enemy capital ship. By forcing vessels to maintain uniform shield coverage, starfighter make those vessels more vulnerable to capital ship fire. Canon evidence shows that fighters can't destroy capital ships, but they can irritate them. To pose a credible threat, they must be equipped with very powerful anti-ship weaponry, and engage in squadron or wing sized mass fires. The Battle of Endor proves this point. While rebel fighters were dog-fighting with TIEs over Mon Cal Cruisers. Several shots miss and impact on capital ships, with no effect.
Combat Support
A less powerful ship armed with more fighters can defeat a more powerful ship. If the capital ship can manage to collapse a section of the enemy's shields, they will most likly take some damage, but their fighters/bombers can even the odds by disabling the enemy’s systems and weapons emplacements in the collapsed area. So even without employing heavy anti-ship missile weapons, starfighters can still positively effect the outcome a capital ships duel.
Circumventing Enemy CIWS
In ANH, the rebel base tracked Imperial fighters launching, and warned their own fighters of this, despite the DS being on the far side of the gas-giant. FTL sensors can easily track capital ships and fighters. But when limited to the use of sub-light sensors or LS weapons targeting computers must 'project' the target's position, if the target is flying in a straight and line it is relatively simple. However fighters jink, and vary their acceleration all the time, so computers can only 'guess' where they might be, but will have little chance of actually hitting any. Even at distances as near as 10,000 km any track for a fighter will already be several dozen meters inaccurate because of the speed differentials. And that doesn't even take into account things like jamming and ECM, which all SW ships (even fighters) making extensive use of. In the face of severe ECM subluminal sensors aren't very accurate at targeting capital ships at distances beyond 12 light seconds, let alone tiny fighters. Still, SW fire control computers are nothing short of amazing. From distances of at least 20 km away and firing at a rate of roughly 10 shots per second the Federation starships in TPM was able to accurately bracket the Naboo Queen's private vessel on all sides without scoring a direct hit; indicating that the gunners identified the Queen's personal vessel and were shooting to disable rather than destroy it. Furthermore, when repair droids appeared on its surface, the ship was able to accurately target and destroy the droids, still in an attempt to disable the Queen's ship. They were able to repeatedly hit tiny 1-meter tall droids while merely buffeting the starship itself with flak, in spite of the enormous difference in size.
In conclusion is is clear that it is the random nature of fighter movement that makes them survivable in the face of CIWS and fire control computers that are capable of hit 1-meter targets at distances greater than 20 km, and that are so effective at point defense that capital ship mounted missiles can not be effectively employed in combat. Finally, the reason why capital ships can not easily lock on to enemy fighters in battle; is simple fighters have local jamming and are capable of random maneuvers, torpedoes do not have local jamming and are capable of only limited evasive maneuvers; in general they just home to the target.
Pin-Point Attacks
Fighters are intended to hammer point targets on capital ships and to exploit shield failures. In such a situation they can be deadly, and they can very quickly de-claw and blind a capital ship independent of its own fighter support. Official material claims that an ISD's rear end / engines / reactors are too heavily shielded or armored for viable attack. Thus, attacks are generally conducted against external devices such as comm. equipment, sensors, weapons points, etc, blinding and castrating the ship, until it can be destroyed. Starfighters can get in and make pinpoint strikes with physical impactor warheads once the shields go down, as we saw in ROTJ. A heavy ship's light guns aren't as powerful as the biggest fighter warheads, its shots don't generate the same kind of reaction forces as a physical impactor, and heavy guns are too ponderous to hit pinpoint targets. While a beam of energy can always be diverted, and in general energy shields can counter energy weapons any number of ways which do nott require lots of energy, i.e., reflecting the beam, or 'bending' the beam. Deflect solid matter however, takes a lot of energy, as does the absorption of the energy of a collision. Basically, you cannot get around Conservation of Energy. Therefore, the best defense against particle weapons (missiles) is a good point-defense system rather than some type of energy-siphoning deflector shield. For this reason Star Wars ships literally bristle with point-defense cannons designed to shoot down enemy missiles, rendering a ranged missile attack all but useless, unless a massive volley of missiles is unleashed. To get around this, protagonists make use of tiny highly maneuverable and difficult to track fighters designed to be able to get in close and launch their missiles from point-blank range. The missiles themselves, proton torpedoes, have a comparatively small warhead, somewhere between 1-10 gigatons, but with one very important enhancement. The warhead is designed to focus the entire detonation in a tight cone (between 1-2 degrees) towards the target, making it extremely powerful.
The hardest part of a fighter destroying a capital ship is overloading the vessels shields. Capital ship shielding is orders of magnitude higher than starfighter weapons yield. Clearly insufficient to overload the shields of larger capital ships. Virtually all instances of fighters killing capital ships they accomplish it: with friendly capital ships support, are merely finishing off un-shielded or heavily damaged vessels, or manage to get inside the vessels interior or under it shields.
In TPM again, an N-1 strafes a part of the unshielded TFB’s bridge tower while being chased by droid fighters, and blows off a significant portion of it. In this case the N-1 fighter did do some damage to the enemy vessel that was not simply superficial, and it was accomplished solely with its laser cannons, not proton torpedoes. However the fighter, would have all been destroyed long before it could have done similar damage to any critical systems. The resulting damage however, was far too small to have any huge effect on the battles outcome. If there had been more than 2-3 wings of fighters putting out similar damage they would have had a good chance of defeating the vessel. The ROTJ novelization describes several B-wings bombing an ISD and destroying it, since this occurs well into the battle we can safely assume that the ISD had suffered a shield failure already. Anakin destroyed the Trade Federation ship by flying in the hangar while the shields were down. Immune to fighter attack, only means immune from the outside. In the Bacta War several squadrons of fighters and dozens of armed freighters had to fire on the command ship Lusankya with more than 80 heavy capitals ship torpedoes at the same time to take down the vessels shields.
Why does the Alliance center its entire guerilla warfare strategy around them?
The Rebel Alliance has very few capital ships to begin with, they have a hard time even procuring fighters so it should come as know surprise that they rely on them so much. More importantly look at the missions that the Rebels tend to engage in. In the X-wing games and novels the Rebels always engage in hit and fade attack on weakly defended convoys and imperial bases of little importance. They are not really hurting the Empire at all, they're more of an annoyance and that's the best they can do in the begining. While fighter scale weapons are ineffective against true combat starships. Merchant ships have only weak particle shielding and no ray shields in most cases. They're easy marks, as are the insignificant vessels used to escort them.
From the way people talk around here, it seems like the only function of starfighters is to engage other fighters, which makes no sense. Why have them at all?
Fighters are indeed worthless in direct attacks against true warships if they are unsupported. But again thats not what fighters were originally intended for. They were used for recon first and only latter mounted weapons to deny oponents from getting the same recon advantage. The same principles apply in space, only more so due to the vast volume which must be covered.
