Yes, you can have starfighters RAR!

[jollyreaper]

We all love the big, shooty WWII in space starfighters and starships. It doesn't really hold up under any kind of analysis and thinking about it too hard will make your head go splody Scanners-style. Even if you're able to suspend disbelief while watching Vipers and Raiders battling in deep space, your brain starts hurting when you see them flying through an atmosphere and struggling to get each other in range of projectile guns and you realize either opponent could be utterly smoked by a modern F-18 firing AAMRAM's from 40 miles out. (And the long-range version is supposed to be able to reach out to 100mi.) You've got self-ware freakin' robots and FTL and engines that can take a fighter from surface to orbit but guided missiles are busting your balls? Stop thinking, stop thinking...

So, how do we back into the kind of setting that allows for the kind of coolness we want without having to suspend our disbelief by the neck until dead? Here's my stab at it.

So, we suppose there exist rifts that can be breached by vessels using field generators. They are randomly distributed around planetary bodies but only the ones in the air are easy to access. You pop through them and are in an empty void. It's like space in that it's pretty empty and dark, no gravity, no air but there aren't stars or anything else like that, it's pretty empty. However, there are clumps of matter to be found that are rich in a great variety of mcguffinites. What's more, if you venture out far enough you might find another rift and find yourself on an entirely new world.

Now the difficult part with the rifts is that you have to be in the air to get to the good ones. Trying to go through on the ground is cumbersome, especially on the return since you could smack right into the dirt. You need wiggle room. So the first vessels to pass through a rift into a void are airplanes. But you can't just slap a field generator on a bog-standard plane and send it through. No, it has to also double as a proper spaceship; pressurized cabin, proper life support, thrusters, reaction control system, radiators, etc. It can fap about in the void and upon return must be ready to hit a wall of air and restart the air-breathing engines before whacking the ground.

So, once you're out in the void, you find mcguffinite. What does it let you do? Ah, lots of things. The big assumption here is an atomic power source and some kind of refined handwavium that, combined with ridiculous amounts of power, gives you antigravity.

Now you can build massive, hulking ships that can hang there in the air all impressive-like and also move through the void.

Nuclear reactors are just barely affordable for superpowers and only for special circumstances. They need to be quite a bit cheaper for our ships. Aside from that, the tech can feel pretty 20th century.

The void ships float across planets to reach new rifts. They compress air for use in the void just like a sub. They'll need reaction mass. Do they liquify oxygen and hydrogen to store onboard and use like our current rockets or do they take on water and run it across a bare reactor core to make a nuclear steamjet? Don't know which idea makes more sense. How do they move in atmosphere? Either the antigrav field can be made asymmetrical allowing the ship to move in a direction or else they'll need to use air-breathing jets. Perhaps the main engines can work as air-breathers in atmosphere and pure rockets in the void.

Once in the void the ship aligns on the beacon for the next rift, fires up the engines and gets up to cruising speed. Because the ships have limited delta-v, the top velocity won't be ridiculous. Nobody is in orbit, speeds are slow. There's no grace to them, nothing to inspire poetry and fancy. The ships look like ugly, blunt instruments and move ponderously. They would be completely useless in conventional space but are capable enough in the void.

Ships will need to kill velocity before making the next transition because they are slamming into atmosphere and some rifts are pretty close to sea level.

So, you have trade between civilizations across the void. You have mining activities in the void itself. Mining stations need defenses. Likewise, rift points will be defended by battlestations specially constructed for the task.

If we assume that sensors are futzy in the void, radar tracking could be problematic for long-range guided weapons like cruise missiles. The most reliable weapon might remain the big gun with the shells using proximity fuses. Guns would have an unlimited theoretical range but a shorter effective range. Fighter craft can be launched by larger ships to chase down smaller, faster targets and also screen the ship from enemy fighters.

The other factor in favor of guns is that they remain effective in atmosphere. Warships cannot afford to be optimized for one environment over another because they are often called to fight in both. Fighters, of course, can be specialized for atmosphere or space and those that try to fight well in both will suffer the penalty of the generalist.

The only other assumption required is that a bit of a tech plateau has been reached, a decelerando. This provides a good, long time for humans to spread through the territories of the void. What is the void? Failed universe, strange dimension, something else? Impossible to say. Each void seems different. As to the other planets, are they even in our same universe? The stars are all different but so many of them feature biospheres compatible with human life. How could this be? Mysteries within mysteries.

So, full of win or fail?

[Dass.Kapital]

+1 Vote. Win.

Much cheers to you and yours.

[jollyreaper]

Thanks!

A few more thoughts about ship design. Depending on how fast they move in atmosphere, streamlining could be effective but also consider how effective a tactic it is to come through a rift at high speed. An armored military ship might be able to slam across at multiple machs. If it isn't torn to pieces it could provide the same kind of fireworks as the Galactica's atmospheric jump. I'd still like to limit the atmospheric top speed to under 100 mph.

If such tactics are used, ships would require sturdy superstructures with anything delicate retractable. Of maybe it's simply not practical for the big warships, sort of like how the Italians built a submersible cruiser that never worked right. (looked like a sub with stacked big gun turrets like a cruiser.)

Fleet fighters would need antigravity so they can operate in atmosphere and land properly on the ships but terrestrial fighters could do away with that excess weight but require proper runways.

One other thought is it'll be interesting how you can go topside on these ships in atmosphere and there would be walkways and railings and the airlocks would be open on both sides but securing for the void would require making the ship airtight just like prepping a sub for a dive. You could still take a suit and go for a walk outside in the void but I would wager that would be rather unsettling.

As for navigation in the void there would be beacons but the backup would be an inertial navigation system, just like our subs use. Of course, they drift and lose accuracy so need navigation fixes every so often. If a ship is trying to find an unmarked rift, fighters might have to me sent out to scout the vicinity since the rift might not be very detectable from a distance.

[Mr Bean]

Fail because this is not a RAR, it's more of a here's my idea about starships isn't that neat. RAR's require the posters to come up with a method to solve a problem. You've not come up with one here except fighters in space are hard to justify. Which they are lets be clear but that's not in the proper RAR tradition.

[Slacker]

While it might not be a RAR it *is* an intriguing idea.

[jollyreaper]

Fail because this is not a RAR, it's more of a here's my idea about starships isn't that neat. RAR's require the posters to come up with a method to solve a problem. You've not come up with one here except fighters in space are hard to justify. Which they are lets be clear but that's not in the proper RAR tradition.

Gomennasi, mea culpa, etc. But I thought I'd explained that the problem is that it's hard to reconcile WWII in space with any kind of realistic spaceships. You can't really dogfight at orbital speeds.

The definition I found is highly complicated or hypothetical and stranger than usual. I guess all of that is in the eye of the beer holder.

[jollyreaper]

Even if we built high frontier space colonies on the oneill time scale, it still doesn't work out logically. Who are the polities? Is mars settled? Jupiter space settled? What are the economics? Why are they fighting? How can they fight? You could certainly try telling some stories there but the starfighter idea falls apart.

Also, AI wank is hard to avoid in that kind of future. We are already seeing the end of the manned fighter. While there will still me manned aircraft, the shooting will be done by ucavs.

I am thinking about sensors being futzy in void space so you really need humans running the fighter and aiming the weapons. You need to be close to have a chance of hitting and that means guns. Optical tracking for missiles could remain poor and so any engagement will eventually become a dogfight.

Star Wars wank says ISD's can accelerate at thousands of G's. Even if gravity generators keep the crew from turning to paste, you're not having WWII in space at that kind of velocity.

Keep ship performance low. Even if a vessel is doing 2000mph vs a rift, the relative movement of the fight around the vessel could still be slow. Closing could feel like the Luftwaffe engaging bombers with a head-on pass and then circling for another engagement. Large warships have limited delta-v. They might only have the budget to get up to speed for the next rift and slow down at the other side with a limited maneuvering reserve. Fighters can afford to blow their remass profligately because they can always tank up at their carriers.

I really can't defeat the arguments against fighters in space. They are correct. Same goes for the argument against combat mecha even though they remain awesome. So I'm just trying to shape a setting where we can have our cake and eat it to, where WWII in space isn't completely ridiculous.

With the whole void thing and low relative velocities we've pretty much removed all the snarly complications of orbital mechanics and the illogic of trying to reconcile an x-wing flying at escape velocity for an earth-like world (25k mph) and still dogfighting with laser blasters in visual range. Realistic space battles would be beyond cinematic visual range. Hell, modern naval combat would all be over the horizon shots with cruise missiles. You could have a major engagement and neither side would be close enough to see the smoke plumes from sinking ships. Depicting that in a movie would be missiles firing, blips on a scope, then missiles passing through defensive fire to hit a target. I think it would be a rare situation for the deck guns to ever get used.

You really only have two choices: either you say fuck it like BSG and Star Wars and do whatever you think is cool or you have to tailor a situation that balances cool and plausible.

Personally, I think trying to work within plausibility is cool. You have the hammering of the guns in atmospheric combat and the screaming of engines. Pass through the rift and it's all silent glitters and plumes. A damaged and smoking ship goes trough the rift and the fires are extinguished even as the crew in the breached compartments are killed by decompression. A damaged ship comes back to atmosphere and the keel can no longer support the weight against the antigravity generators. It begins to break up in flight.

If I were to compare the idea to game play mechanics, space would feel like the old xwing/tie fighter games and atmospheric combat like Crimson Skies.

[Darth Fanboy]

Fail because this is not a RAR, it's more of a here's my idea about starships isn't that neat. RAR's require the posters to come up with a method to solve a problem. You've not come up with one here except fighters in space are hard to justify. Which they are lets be clear but that's not in the proper RAR tradition.

To be fair, the fact that this isn't a true RAR makes it way better. Otherwise we have to assign stuff based on postcount in an attempt to start another board meme and nobody wants that.

[jollyreaper]

Could you describe the short ranges your space fighters would operate at? Who are the combatants, where do they reside? How do they reach each other? What are they fighting over?

[PeZook]

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.

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.

[Alkaloid]

Also, AI wank is hard to avoid in that kind of future. We are already seeing the end of the manned fighter. While there will still me manned aircraft, the shooting will be done by ucavs.

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 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.

[PeZook]

The thing about smart robots is that they can be made to enjoy being slaves.

It's creepy and quite possibly amoral, but if that's how you build it, that's how they'll behave.

Plus of course there's the option of...not making them slaves in the first place.

[Eternal_Freedom]

The thing about smart robots is that they can be made to enjoy being slaves.

It's creepy and quite possibly amoral, but if that's how you build it, that's how they'll behave.

Plus of course there's the option of...not making them slaves in the first place.

This puts me in mind of Red Dwarf's "Belief Chip" and Silicon Heaven - if you're a good submissive robot that follows orders you go to paradise, if you rebel/think for yourself you go to Hell.

It's a nasty idea, but I can't see why it wouldn't work.

[Alkaloid]

The thing about smart robots is that they can be made to enjoy being slaves.

It's creepy and quite possibly amoral, but if that's how you build it, that's how they'll behave.

Well, yeah, but if it just obeys a set of arbitrary rules about what it enjoys and why is it really intelligent? To do that you either have to have something that isn't intelligent at all and is really just a very comprehensive list of if statements or build something so stupid that you run the risk of it deciding to shoot down its wingmen so the enemy can't do it first. Something that is actually intelligent will look at arbitrary rules it's been given, try and work out why and if they make sense, and if they don't will try to figure out a way to work around them if it can't outright break them.

Plus of course there's the option of...not making them slaves in the first place.

What do you suggest, build 300 if you need 10 and ask for volunteers?

[PeZook]

Well, yeah, but if it just obeys a set of arbitrary rules about what it enjoys and why is it really intelligent?

Who says anything about rules?

Build it to enjoy shooting red targets, and that's what it will want to do. That's how evolution ensured animals breed: they simply love sex so goddamned much. And we're intelligent and can examine the sillines of this but very, very few humans can overcome the urge to have sex when the opportunity arises.

What do you suggest, build 300 if you need 10 and ask for volunteers?

Why not? It depends on the economics of the thing.

[Alkaloid]

Yeah, so now you have something that likes shooting things. Does it only like shooting red targets? It doesn't know, maybe it should shoot something else and find out. People and animals love sex, sure, but they constantly shag all sorts of things we would rather they didn't, children, lamp posts, tables, animals that aren't the same species. Intelligent things experiment, which is useful to them because it means they can take what they know and apply it to new situations but is very bad to have in something you need to maintain control over.

Why not? It depends on the economics of the thing.

Sure, you just have to find jobs for another 290 AI's that you didn't need done before. Or destroy them, but again I'm not sure that's the best plan because the other AI's, the ones you taught to kill things, will find out about it at some point and realise that yes, they are still slaves, they just didn't realise it before now.

[PeZook]

Yeah, so now you have something that likes shooting things. Does it only like shooting red targets? It doesn't know, maybe it should shoot something else and find out. People and animals love sex, sure, but they constantly shag all sorts of things we would rather they didn't, children, lamp posts, tables, animals that aren't the same species. Intelligent things experiment, which is useful to them because it means they can take what they know and apply it to new situations but is very bad to have in something you need to maintain control over.

By that standard it's impossible to teach a soldier restraint and target identification if he likes his job and would never want to do anything else. If anything, people who love their jobs do them BETTER because they spend a lot of time perfecting their craft.

The AI likes to shoot red targets. It loves to be given opportunities to shoot red targets. It doesn't mean it can't properly identify what a red target is supposed to be, or learn morality or anything else a meat-brain can do just fine.

And yes, it might not be perfect, depending on your level of understanding of the production process you are using: but if you demand PERFECTION from your killing machines, then we should instantly disband all militaries because they fuck up all the time, too.

Sure, you just have to find jobs for another 290 AI's that you didn't need done before. Or destroy them, but again I'm not sure that's the best plan because the other AI's, the ones you taught to kill things, will find out about it at some point and realise that yes, they are still slaves, they just didn't realise it before now.

Or you let them live in your society and work normal jobs. And if you can alter their desires during production, you'd get more like 290 volunteers out of 300 newborn AIs, rather than the other way around.

[Alkaloid]

It's not perfection I want, it's accountability. Human soldiers, at least in theory, are accountable for what they do. "But I was ordered to bomb the building at that location, so I did, it just happened to be a clearly marked hospital" isn't going to fly as an excuse. If you start assigning arbitrary rules to soldiers that they literally cannot break, you are taking away their accountability and it becomes increasingly difficult to justify punishing them when things go wrong. It's even worse if you can build them specifically to enjoy a task, like shooting red targets. "OK, someone fucked up and marked that hospital as red. The AI knows it shouldn't shoot hospitals, but it also loves to blow up red targets because that's how we made it. Did it blow up that hospital because it's love of blowing things up overcame its knowledge that hospitals are a no go? If it did is it its fault or is it ours for building it like that?" The act of making it want to do a specific thing means that you limit it's ability to not do that thing as, like you said, people still have sex even if they think it's silly, hell they have sex when they know it is morally wrong or counter to their interests all the damn time just because they like it.

Or you let them live in your society and work normal jobs. And if you can alter their desires during production, you'd get more like 290 volunteers out of 300 newborn AIs, rather than the other way around.

Yeah, I have no objection to letting them live in society, it's more what to do with them? There will be very few positions where an AI is needed because they can just be built on demand, and who would want an AI built to run fast and blow things up to run a citywide traffic grid when you can have one built that likes running traffic grids?

[Alkaloid]

Also, this has drifted a bit from the void/barge/fighter thing and should maybe be split?

[PeZook]

It's not perfection I want, it's accountability. Human soldiers, at least in theory, are accountable for what they do. "But I was ordered to bomb the building at that location, so I did, it just happened to be a clearly marked hospital" isn't going to fly as an excuse. If you start assigning arbitrary rules to soldiers that they literally cannot break, you are taking away their accountability and it becomes increasingly difficult to justify punishing them when things go wrong. It's even worse if you can build them specifically to enjoy a task, like shooting red targets. "OK, someone fucked up and marked that hospital as red. The AI knows it shouldn't shoot hospitals, but it also loves to blow up red targets because that's how we made it. Did it blow up that hospital because it's love of blowing things up overcame its knowledge that hospitals are a no go? If it did is it its fault or is it ours for building it like that?" The act of making it want to do a specific thing means that you limit it's ability to not do that thing as, like you said, people still have sex even if they think it's silly, hell they have sex when they know it is morally wrong or counter to their interests all the damn time just because they like it.

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?

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.

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.

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

Yeah, I have no objection to letting them live in society, it's more what to do with them? There will be very few positions where an AI is needed because they can just be built on demand, and who would want an AI built to run fast and blow things up to run a citywide traffic grid when you can have one built that likes running traffic grids?

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.

[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."

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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.