Yes, you can have starfighters RAR!

[Alkaloid]

You're kidding, right? This whole discussion started because you feared giving guns to AIs that could actually think, and now you wonder how to make them recognize which targets are red targets?

What, we segued into this after you suggested that we make AI's that find exploding targets as exhilarating and important as people find sex. My issue was that I though making an army of smart heavily armed slaves was a bad idea. Anyway, it's less an issue of recognise red targets than have it think about what constitutes a red target. If it can think, it can determine it's own targets, and if it's smart it will try and work around restrictions put in place to stop it doing that. That's why AI's would be better than this than people, they would not have the restrictions of a human body, but they would be able to react to a changing situation much better than a drone that can only follow instructions given before it took off. Taking away its ability to think and choose will make it more predictable but far less useful, to the point that human pilots woud conceivably be able to compete.

Ask yourself this: how do HUMANS who happen to like blowing things up determine which things they're allowed to blow up? It would work the exact same way. THX-1138 would be built to LOVE driving his space fighter and fighting the enemies of democracy. And he'd be TOLD who the enemies are and who he's allowed to shoot and when by the chain of command. If its creators were smart, he'd also have a sense of morals that would make him disobey illegal orders. Quite possibly he'd be way better at it than organics, who are subject to all sorts of chemical/instinct/peer pressure driven behavior that might override their sense of duty or morals.

Humans fuck up and shoot the wrong targets all the time. The two A-10 pilots who talked themselves into strafing what they had previously identified as a friendly armour column, or shoot civilians because they were in the way, or because they were ordered too. Those are cases of people making a decision without being coerced, to perform that action, and they should at least in theory be held accountable for it. If you make something that loves to do one specific thing you are by definition coercing it, and I'm not sure it can really be held accountable then.

Yeah, you can build it to love exploding things and have morals, and it would maybe make the moral choice. On the other hand, there are people that love sex and have morals that have affairs all the damn time, even though they think it's immoral because they just love sex that much, and I really don't think we can tell if an actual functioning AI will even accept a system of morality we just build into it without question.

And yeah, philosophers will have a problem with determining who to punish if THX-1138 was messed up by the factory ; But so what? It's not some sort of insurmountable, unsolvable problem:if the AIs imperatives were mishandled by the engineers, punish the engineers and try to fix the AI. If they were not and the AI decided to commit a crime entirely on its own, punish the AI.

It's not that easy though. We don't punish parents for crimes their children commit, or engineers if the breaks on a car fail unless they knew beforehand that the brakes were flawed and would fail, why should we punish the designers of an AI. Likewise, if you build something with certain characteristics can it really be responsible for the choices it makes?

These dynamics would be an interesting thing to explore in a sci-fi universe, actually...

Interesting hell, it's fascinating, and sadly seems to all too often be ignored for either 'AI's are lovely and will solve all our problems forever' or 'arrrgh the scary AI will kill us all.'

What do you do with discharged soldiers whose only skill is killing? Or injured washouts?

You let them go and live their lives. Of course since the military comissioned those AIs that didn't volunteer, they'd probably support them somehow. Again, not a game-breaking problem, a question of organization.

Yeah, but a discharged soldier or injured washout is still a limited resource, an adult educated to a certain standard. Many will find work simply because they are something that takes about 18 years to make, not a quick phonecall to a factory with a list of specifications for exactly the employee you want.

[jollyreaper]

Or if you really really want to be 'ard and realistic, have "fighters" actually be long-range one-man 30 000 ton missile platforms.

So the human is there for battle management/shoot no shoot decisions while his einstein-smart missiles are the payload.

Right. That's certainly one valid approach.

Any situation where you'd want a human in the loop could justify fighters, really. They'd just look different depending on the circumstances. Possibly the culture of their pilots would be way wifferent, too, depending on how they work exactly.

True. The scenario i wanted, though, was as close to classic starfighters as possible. For the most part even at the most generous stretching of credulity, any reasonable starfighter would likely be more akin to a PT boat than a single-seat jobbie. It's going to be more P-3 Orion than F-14 Tomcat. Long patrols, high need for comfort and livability. Though the interesting thing with the Russian SU-34 is that it's a conversion of a carrier aircraft to fit kind of midway between a fighter format and a maritime patrol plane. It has side by side seating and enough room to actually get up and stretch your legs, including a chem potty and galley and enough space to lie down for a nap. it's intended to replace a far larger patrol bomber.

In the scenario I'm outlining atmospheric combat would feature the same constraints we're familiar with except for the bit about ships being capable of traveling over land. I think I'd like to make altitude energy-intensive for the antigrav so you use many times more power to get up to 50k feet than to cruise along just off the ground. And this would be just as well since altitude means a whole lot of people can shoot at you. We decided that years back when we canceled the Valkyrie multi-mach, high-altitude bomber in preference for sub-sonic aircraft that could fly low and in the ground clutter.

In the void I think the best answer would be to make the very nature of the medium highly disruptive to the propagation of EM radiation so beyond a certain range you're just not going to see anything and the human eye has enough of an edge over the electronics in this environment that you simply have to get close and personal.

One other thought is that ambushes at rift points means that there's a lot of potential for fights to start out at ridiculously close ranges, very cinematic. You would prefer to scout a rift before going through to detect that sort of thing but you might not always get that chance. You go through blind and could blunder right into an enemy formation.

[jollyreaper]

I'm always leery about this. UCAV's work now because the people they are used against have almost no capacity to fight electronic warfare. You won't truly see the death of manned combat planes until you can build UAV's that flat out cannot be jammed, hacked or have the signal you are sending them interrupted or messed with in any way, or until you can build a platform that is entirely autonomous and isolated (no signal in or out) and can identify not only the target you want shot, but also any changes in the target and whether it should still be shot because it won't be able to check with you and you will have no ability to abort the strike.

I hear what you're saying. The argument has been going back and forth for years in anticipation of this very thing.

The way I see it going, we're likely to have manned combat aircraft still in the inventory another 50 years but the question is what use will they see? We've had heavy bombers since WWII. The B-52 is an old warhorse. When we did Gulf War 1 did we see the B1 fight? No, it was kept back. Did we see the B2 fight? No, it was kept back. The B1 got used in Gulf War 2 but didn't do all that well, lost one to mechanical failure. The B2's been used a few times but it's too bloody expensive to make any kind of sense. The Air Force is desperate to justify keeping it around.

The B1 and 2 were meant to be part of the nuclear triad and, quite frankly, were obsolete before they were even built. The Zoomies just have a hard-on for manned aircraft. I'm sure we'll keep flying them until their wings fall off but they aren't getting any serious use.

I'm sure the F-22 and F-35 will be the same way; they'll drop a few bombs but the majority of the combat work will be done by every other air asset in the inventory but them.

Now there's been talk about manned combat aircraft being rendered obsolete before, the specific thing I'm thinking about is the invention of decent SAM's. The Israelis lost so many aircraft in the Six-Day War to modern Soviet equipment that NATO planners were wondering if it would be suicide to continue with current battle doctrine. We later developed Wild Weasel tactics that gave the advantage back to the zoomies but technology is always a back and forth proposition.

I don't see the first scenario happening at all, and I don't see the second happening until a true artificial intelligence is built, and I'm in the camp that doesn't see the appeal of building yourself a smart robot slave and giving it lots of guns. Call me crazy.

Remains to be seen. There's a big confluence here between pragmatism, practicality and tradition. I've had a suspicion that the aircraft carrier has been made too vulnerable to operate by ASM's and has been so for some time but I doubt we'll scrap them until we've lost a couple to unexpected surprise attacks. If it never happens then we'll keep using the carriers for decades more. But just imagine the way it'd play out if we lost a CVN and a few escorts to a country like Iran in the opening days of another oil war. That means to protect the carriers we have to keep them far enough offshore that they can't engage targets or be engaged: they'd be neutered. Have one or two sink with thousands of dead sailors and you tell me how long we'll keep using them.

[jollyreaper]

Concerning the question of AI programming and motivation I had one idea for that. Assuming that we're building AI's modeled after the human brain, we could end up with temperamental, autistic genius-child AI's. If that scenario played out, I can imagine a profession for human psychologists, "computer whisperers" who plead and cajole and manipulate the AI's in order to get them to do their jobs. It could also feel like an agent working with a talented but difficult writer who never meets his deadlines.

If played for laughs it could be a hoot.

[Beowulf]

The B-1 wasn't used in Desert Storm (I'm using this name, because it's relatively difficult to call it Gulf War 1, when it's really something like the 4th in modern history), because they had no conventional tasking. They had no ability to drop non nuclear bombs until 1993, with the CMUP upgrade. As for mechanical issues, there's a joke that goes around for heavies:

A fighter pilot is trying to show off his aircraft, flying in rough formation with a bomber. He does rolls and other stunts. The heavy pilot goes: "Watch this." Nothing apparently happens.

After a couple minutes, the fighter pilot radios over: "I didn't see anything."

The other pilot responds: "I turned off two of my engines, and got up to use the bathroom."

--

The B-2 didn't enter service until after ODS. It'd have been significantly less expensive per plane if the full run of them had been built, allowing the B-52 to retire. An estimate at the end of production was about $300 million for each additional aircraft ordered. The F-22 will probably never drop a bomb in anger. That's not the point of the F-22. The F-22 is designed to own the sky, allowing freedom of action to our aircraft and troops. The F-35 is supposed to supplant every other fighter in our inventory. If we actually follow the plan, I don't doubt that the majority of munitions will be dropped from a F-35 in the future.

[jollyreaper]

Concerning the bit about strategic bombers, time will tell.

Anyway, did some more thinking on the potential for the setting itself.

I really liked Charlie Stross' Missile Gap. Earth appears to be peeled like a grape and laid down flat on a disc that is the diameter of a solar system. Beyond the confines of our own familiar continents stretch billions and billions of miles worth of new territory. It becomes implied that there are a number of parallel human civilizations placed on these continents by experimenters who remain unknown. Many dead civilizations as well as empty continents are found. Nuclear-powered colony ships are sent out to colonize.

It would be pretty wild to have the same thing play out. Expanding on the idea I'd mentioned earlier, there should be no proof of experimenters but lots of compelling evidence that the environment is not natural.

A scientifically-minded character could posit that the worlds seem like experiments and the voids are like barriers to be raised and lowered as with rats in a cage maze. Isolate populations for whatever reason and bring them into contact at a suitable time for purposes beyond calculation.

I figure that there will be commercial routes that are well-known and easy traveling but also unusual routes that take a long time and go interesting places. A month out from one rift gate could be another rift leading to a dead world and two days of travel across the cratered and irradiated landscape is another rift that leads to another void and through there another void and six months later you have found a back way in to an enemy's important colony world.

I figure the major rifts would be defended on both sides, in the void and on the ground, so hitting a fortified world is tough. The fights would be for empty worlds or ones with inferior natives.

And again the scientists marvel at the distribution of humans and human-friendly ecologies. Explorers could try combing the wreckage of the destroyed worlds to find samples of newer technology. But there's the uncomfortable conclusion that they rarely find examples of worlds much more advanced than their own because they're all ruins. Did they destroy themselves or did someone else?

An empire could stretch across dozens and dozens of habitable worlds. The situation of Rome at its height is dwarfed. A message by courier with horses to swap could reach from Rome to Britannia in what, weeks? Radio can transmit across planets but only a vessel could cross the rift and then use relay beacons to cross the rift where radio fizzes out in a short while. Maybe it would take a week to transmit a message across the empire. But to move a person from the capital world to the border? I'm imagining a nuclear-powered aircraft. We played around with the concept in the 50's. Imagine something like a nuke-powered Concorde staying in the air and in the void for three months to make it to the furthest reaches of the empire. It would have to have some size for comfort but would still be fairly cramped. Enough food for the trip, drinking water condensed out of the air, the nuke plant would be good for years. Mach 2 or 3 in atmo, some ridiculously high speed in the void, blowing half the remass to get up to speed and half to slow for transiting the other rift, likely the fasted thing you'll ever see in the void.

I think the religious implications of a system like this would be pretty mind-bending. I think the simplest approach would be to assume that there's intelligent design and thus a creator god, assume that he's got our best interests at heart and worship blindly. The more scientific would not be able to refute the evidence but be skeptical about the benign nature of those responsible. Naturally, that kind of heresy is not spoken aloud in polite company.

Aerospace fighters would have some interesting characteristics. They'd need air-breathing engines for atmo flight. Fine, we know how to build jets. But they'd also need an additional powerplant for providing enough juice to run the antigrav rings. If they can't just redirect the jet exhaust past a generator to power them, they might need an auxiliary turbojet just to run the generator. It would fire up any time antigrav engaged. Once in space, either set of engines is no longer operational so fuel cells would be required.

If we really wanted to make the aerospace fighter complicated, imagine if the aircraft was built like a layout four-engined BSG viper. In air mode the engines and gun pods are flush with the fuselage. When transitioning to space, the engines swing out on movable sponsons and you now have the engines in an X configuration like a Starfury. Guns also swing out and are gimbaled so that they can now shoot targets far off of boresight. This supposes there's enough of a maneuverability advantage to offset the mass penalty of the extra machinery to make the transformation possible.

Either way, a pure void fighter or a pure atmo fighter would surely have the edge over a hybrid. The versatility would potentially be worth the penalty.

[jollyreaper]

Some other thoughts I had on this particular setting.

The earlier speculation I had is that it might seem like a higher intelligence set things up as an experiment, shades of Missile Gap. If we run with it feeling more explicitly like an experiment, you could see different cultures from our own known history put into competition with each other and the ruined worlds found will seem like variants on many of those cultures, a few starting variables changed. It's like living within a genetic algorithm in development.

Consider how WWII Japan was the result of a primitive society rapidly upping the tech to parity with the west. You had the weird clash of modern tech and primitive thought. Japan could have had a 90% population crash due to disease like the American natives. Conversely, American natives could have not been so susceptible to European diseases and so presented a much stronger opposition to European colonial powers, rapidly assimilating the new technology and presenting a capable and implacable foe.

Imagine that playing out for an Aztec-flavored society. They develop modern war tech and start conquering. While they may not literally believe blood fuels the sun, the leaders might feel that the terror of providing sacrifices keeps the vassal nations cowed. And the nobility must have war to justify their existence.

So you have a conquering people waging war for religious and cultural reasons, mass human sacrifice as dominance displays. Ambassadors from vassal proles have to journey back to the capital city to see the annual tribute go to their deaths at the sun temple.

I think that would make for a pretty terrifying enemy.

And consider the terrifying theological implications for the leaders of the various societies who are listening to their scientists and understanding that they are basically existing within an experimental space. Who is running the game? What is their goal? Is there a win condition?

Consider the plight of a fleet from a culture conquered by the Aztec analogues. They might flee deep into the void in the desperate hope that they could find a route to another civilization similar enough to theirs to call brothers. Just how similar? And how would they feel with the implicit understanding that they are trapped in a game they did not consent to, don't know the rules of, and have no idea who runs the house?