Good article on "Aircraft Carriers in Space"

[Deebles]

Although I'm sure the criticism of certain sci-fi won't go down well with all readers.

[Vendetta]

I only scanned the article, but I don't think it mentioned the fact that space fighters are basically silly because much of their internal volume is dedicated to the business of keeping a tinned monkey working, and if you take out the tinned monkey what you've basically got left is more like a missile bus rather than a recognisable "fighter".

But, of course, having tinned monkeys in our space fighters gives us heroes to root for, which is why we have them.

[Blayne]

It takes some effort to justify space fighters but they are justifiable; Star Wars for instance presumes an abundance of saturated jamming does it not? Would make long range fire more inaccurate so fighter craft become reasonable. And this would preclude AI or remote controlled drone warfare for the same reasons.

[Simon_Jester]

A lot depends on mass fraction of fuel. If a spacecraft needs to carry 90% of its weight in fuel to be effective as a space fighter, a missile will nearly always be better. If the fuel for a TIE fighter only makes up, say, 5% of the TIE's weight, then the extra delta-v cost really doesn't hurt you very much and making the fighter reusable is desirable.

The other key objection: "robots always do it better-" well, we think that's going to be true in the future. But it was very very far from certain that this would be true if we go back more than about 10-15 years into the past. We have a lot more faith in automation, as a society, than we did ten years ago. We may well assume this turns out to be right, and that the promise of AI doesn't turn into something like "the atom will make electricity too cheap to meter!"

But let's not be too hard on fiction which dispenses with that assumption; I'd like to hang onto the fond dream of a future with a place for me in it just a little longer, if you please. Wouldn't you?

[Stark]

Science fiction is fictional? My mind is blown. Battle star Galactica should clearly be judged on the accuracy or otherwise of its claims regarding SPESS COMBAT.

TBH that people even write stuff like this beyond thought experiments makes me wonder how many people honestly can't separate fantasy and reality.

[weemadando]

The interesting part was him talking about how sci fi, which is rooted in historical thinking, is seen as the future /aspirational goal by many, even those who should know better.

[Blayne]

I've always seen Science Fiction as serving an important speculative role in order to help challenge our presumptions and engage the reader in an exercise of critical thinking. So to an extent I agree with the notion that there's a lot to scifi that we as readers should be excited to look forward to in a "Oh man,[Y] is awesome I want to do that! *works to become an astronaut/scientist/engineer/physicist and invents [Y]*".

Heck, perfect example, Krugman became an economist after getting inspired by The Foundation by Isaac Asimov (Hari Seldon).

[Stark]

The interesting part was him talking about how sci fi, which is rooted in historical thinking, is seen as the future /aspirational goal by many, even those who should know better.

Is just sad that speculative fiction is largely the domain of smug nerd chic idiots, so it's sailing ships in space repeated forever with a saleable licence or Neal Stephenson.

And frankly I'd rather die in a fire.

[Blayne]

Bodacious Space Pirates got us some innovation on that front though :D

[Simon_Jester]

The interesting part was him talking about how sci fi, which is rooted in historical thinking, is seen as the future /aspirational goal by many, even those who should know better.

The "should know better" part here seems to be "the future will bear no resemblance at all to the past, it's all going to be completely alien and ineffable."

I don't think that's something everyone in the world should just start taking on faith right this minute. A lot of us happen to be very confident that technology is going to change all the rules until nothing looks like we imagined. But we've believed that before, and throwing away the sense of historical precedent doesn't make us smarter.

A lot of SF is conceived with some historical thinking; certainly much of the mass market material is. The speculative future comes out of it through the subtext as much as anything else: "Hey, we survive! The future does not end in nuclear war/ecological collapse/everyone living on mush after peak oil! Civilization keeps going on!"

Except for dystopian fiction, of course, which serves the complete opposite purpose.

[Sky Captain]

A space carrier is reasonable if FTL device is very expensive and hard to manufacture. Then you would want to minimize danger to your most expensive assets and probably end up with something that jumps near combat zone, dumps its load of more expandable combat ships, jumps to safe place and waits till the fighting is over. If battle is won the carrier returns to pick up remaining ships, if lost then it go back to base empty, but othervise undamaged ready to receive another load of combat craft.

[weemadando]

AT that point you're really just talking about the Dune fold ships or whatever they're called.

[streetad]

We really have to ask what we want from our works of fiction. A space battle involving a bunch of functional metal boxes launching ftl missiles from millions of miles away at where they think another bunch of metal boxes might be would be a very visually dull and unengaging way to present a conflict, with no room for individual skill or heroism.

Would you really prefer to watch that than Han swooping in at the last minute with his WW2-era ball-turrets to save Luke from the implacable Black Knight so he can use his magical wizard powers to blow up the Death Star?

[Guardsman Bass]

The other key objection: "robots always do it better-" well, we think that's going to be true in the future. But it was very very far from certain that this would be true if we go back more than about 10-15 years into the past. We have a lot more faith in automation, as a society, than we did ten years ago. We may well assume this turns out to be right, and that the promise of AI doesn't turn into something like "the atom will make electricity too cheap to meter!"

In a different setting, it could be due to ships pumping out a lot of radiation designed to disrupt the computer systems of enemy ships that can't afford the mass penalty involved in proper shielding. Computers on spacecraft today already have it hard as it is due to cosmic rays and other forms of radiation.

Of course, that doesn't work in Star Wars (where they have droids exposed to space on top of their fighters), but it's something. The obvious limitation is that the inverse square law would play hell with the effectiveness of it over a distance, but you don't need it to be strong enough to kill humans or even fry their electrical systems - just screw up their computers, forcing them to use simpler, hardier versions on unmanned ships (or use manned ships, with all the limitations that entails in terms of mass).

We really have to ask what we want from our works of fiction. A space battle involving a bunch of functional metal boxes launching ftl missiles from millions of miles away at where they think another bunch of metal boxes might be would be a very visually dull and unengaging way to present a conflict, with no room for individual skill or heroism.

I don't think it has to be dull, particularly if you don't include the FTL missiles. You just have to create tension a different way, kind of like how they do it in submarine movies. Or you can come up with reasons for ships to get much closer (like "light-second" range), which don't even have to be unrealistic.

[PainRack]

I can think of one perfectly good Aircraft Carrier in Space. As in real aircraft carriers, where spaceships launch fighters into a planet atmosphere to support ground operations.

I once had this idea where you have a mixture of armoured carriers operating alongside Fleet and Landing craft carriers for a story concept. Armoured carriers(WW1 hybrids, or TCS Midway) would operate alongside cruisers and the like to go into a defended planetary space and destroy groundside defences, opening up the space for Fleet Carriers to move in and secure system space. They would then cooperate with Landing craft carriers to actually support and invade the planet, using airstrikes to destroy troops and etc, where naval ordnance would inflict too much collateral damage.

As for why not robots, because they're too "useful" in other areas, such as the smart missiles carried by your destroyers and battleships to hunt out other starships.

[Commander 598]

Generally I believe it is considered a negative to bombard a jumble of random unidentified contacts and/or civilian installations. This applies to both orbital and planetary combat.

It's not actually hard to justify small craft.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

In Charles Stross's book "Singularity Sky," FTL drives are based around fairly massive artificial black holes. Though the drive cores make ships so equipped extraordinarily fast, the colossal mass makes them rather lumbering in real space. Apparently only fools try to equip every battleship with an FTL drive. Septagon, one of the more competent and economically developed space polities (once the die-hard libertarians were killed off in civil war and the survivors instilled the value of everyone working to maintain the habitats) favored mounting them on supercarriers which jumped to the outside of battle areas and unloaded masses of smaller specialized attack craft (some of which I believe were manned) using torch drives. The Festival used purely automated warships, which while two kilometers long, were basically small amounts of very smart hardware and dozens of tiny autonomous weapon systems mounted on a colossal exotic torch drive that no human could survive.

[Imperial528]

I think one issue with space carriers is that most peoples' idea of a carrier is the kind we see in modern navies. A big ship that carries lots of small planes.

In space, the advantage of a big ship is big, efficient engines that also have a high acceleration. Smaller ships usually have to choose between acceleration or fuel life. However, a big ship is also much less maneuverable. Enemy has a laser aimed at where you are a minute or two from now? Sucks to be you, because you're way too big to turn on a dime, and would probably tear yourself apart trying to rotate that fast anyway.

Smaller ships have less momentum, and also have the advantage of not being so big that they can only handle large forces in a few directions. The ideal solution, I think, is to think of the carrier as simply a giant engine, and you put your battleships on it to move them large distances. To further expand on that, if the battleships will only see use in combat, put their living facilities on the carrier and crew them only when they're needed. Now your battleship can dedicate more volume to weapons, engines and armor.

Even better, make them modular. Have a carrier that moves ships and crews, have another carrier which is dedicated to logistical support (fuel production and repair facilities or just massive cargo containers) have one that brings landing craft, all from the same design root.

[Feil]

Fighter ships allow for direct armed conflict between protagonists, which can be nice. If the fighter pilot isn't fighting another important character, however, all he's doing is struggling to solve a problem under adverse conditions, and you can manufacture problems and adverse conditions for protagonists to solve in any scenario. And you can still have space battles between individuals at visual ranges with lasers and rockets without space fighters. Karl Schroeder's novel /Permanence/ has a great fight between rocket propelled space-suited infantry, for instance.

[lPeregrine]

We really have to ask what we want from our works of fiction. A space battle involving a bunch of functional metal boxes launching ftl missiles from millions of miles away at where they think another bunch of metal boxes might be would be a very visually dull and unengaging way to present a conflict, with no room for individual skill or heroism.

Would you really prefer to watch that than Han swooping in at the last minute with his WW2-era ball-turrets to save Luke from the implacable Black Knight so he can use his magical wizard powers to blow up the Death Star?

That's a pretty unimaginative way of looking at it. Sure, you lose the chance to make a two hour demo reel for your chosen special effects company, but it's not like Star Wars style battles are the only way to include war in a story. Besides the submarine warfare analogy there's always the option of having the war in the background. For example, the plot concerns characters on a planet being fought over by the drone-launched missile swarms, or asks what it would be like to be on a space battleship where the enemy launched a fatal attack on your ship months ago but you still have to do your duty and control YOUR outgoing missiles until the very end. There's plenty of room for telling good stories in a world with "realistic" space combat if you use your imagination a bit.

And of course nobody is saying that we should do away with Star Wars style combat entirely.

[weemadando]

Go further outside the box. What happens to the thousands of relativistic projectiles that don't hit their targets? What happens when thousands of years later one hits a populated planet, or a ship in a completely different civilisation inappropriate completely different part of the galaxy? What if it's a known threat because one side did a scorched earth approach and fired them off in huge swarms at swarms?

There's lots of interesting ways to tell stories about a war or combat without resorting to duels.

[Irbis]

Smaller ships have less momentum, and also have the advantage of not being so big that they can only handle large forces in a few directions. The ideal solution, I think, is to think of the carrier as simply a giant engine, and you put your battleships on it to move them large distances. To further expand on that, if the battleships will only see use in combat, put their living facilities on the carrier and crew them only when they're needed. Now your battleship can dedicate more volume to weapons, engines and armor.

Once you have that, slap some fuel tanks on carrier giving ships enough to comfortably do mission, but not more. Then, some ammunition stores. Some spare parts. Then...

You pretty much have the "impossible", wet-navy Carrier, but in space. Ergo, writer of the article in OP is an idiot

Also, while you can have fuel tankers and ammo ships supporting your carrier, basic logic makes them smaller and support only, exactly like real world ships. Sometimes copying reality isn't being unimaginative, things in RL are used that way because they work. To break with carriers, we need to radically shift paradigms, like FTL being too cheap to meter, or ships facing some hard size design limit.

He is also stupid saying starships have no maximum speed and only acceleration counts. Sorry, even if we ignore C, there is speed at which ship collects too much bacground radiation for its shielding, which can be interesting factor in itself - but no, guy goes "I'm so smart I'll take one look at issue without thinking to spew truths!"

There are also some good points above - you not only have to thing where the ship you fire at will be in some time, you also need to manage acceleration - do I keep it at limit to become less visible at sensors and conserve fuel, or do I burn it in unpredictable dodging? How do I deal with relativity? Sadly, the "analyst" in OP fails to consider this, I'd even say he falls prey to thing he supposedly abhors - subconsciously copies his understanding of acceleration from airplanes where these issues exist to much smaller degree, without trying to really understand them.

I remember reading very good SF story where protagonist used gravity/relativity relationship in very creative way to make time flow for himself much faster (which enabled him to gut enemy battleship in starfighter as from his perspective point defence was too easy to dodge) but since that story had starfighters and carriers, OP writer guy would probably call it impossible trash

[Satori]

We really have to ask what we want from our works of fiction. A space battle involving a bunch of functional metal boxes launching ftl missiles from millions of miles away at where they think another bunch of metal boxes might be would be a very visually dull and unengaging way to present a conflict, with no room for individual skill or heroism.

Would you really prefer to watch that than Han swooping in at the last minute with his WW2-era ball-turrets to save Luke from the implacable Black Knight so he can use his magical wizard powers to blow up the Death Star?

Last I checked, both Honorverse and Lost Fleet were doing just fine in book sales. And it's not like Starship Operators was a comercial failure, either.

Go further outside the box. What happens to the thousands of relativistic projectiles that don't hit their targets? What happens when thousands of years later one hits a populated planet, or a ship in a completely different civilisation inappropriate completely different part of the galaxy? What if it's a known threat because one side did a scorched earth approach and fired them off in huge swarms at swarms?

Some sci-fi have adressed this issue. Crimson Dark has a ban on pure kinetic weapons because of it. (space warfare uses particle beams and rarely, missiles). Crimson Dark then goes on to commit every error in the article, but no one reads Crimson Dark for realistic science.

Mass Effect gives us this:

http://youtu.be/hLpgxry542M

Which is honestly more of a case of handwaving by lampshading than an actually addressing of the issue, but hey, at least they recognize that it's a problem.

[Simon_Jester]

Once you have that, slap some fuel tanks on carrier giving ships enough to comfortably do mission, but not more. Then, some ammunition stores. Some spare parts. Then...

You pretty much have the "impossible", wet-navy Carrier, but in space. Ergo, writer of the article in OP is an idiot

The problem isn't so much the carrier as it is the fighter. Classically conceived fighters don't look like they're going to survive much longer in air combat, let alone in a medium as different as space.

He is also stupid saying starships have no maximum speed and only acceleration counts. Sorry, even if we ignore C, there is speed at which ship collects too much bacground radiation for its shielding, which can be interesting factor in itself - but no, guy goes "I'm so smart I'll take one look at issue without thinking to spew truths!"

You only get that at speeds which require either very soft-SF accelerations, OR a runup time so long that you're traveling interstellar distances before getting up to speed. The latter case only makes sense without FTL.

So check your assumptions, that's all I'm saying.

How do I deal with relativity?

Relativity is the easiest thing in the world to handle if your computers are competent. Unless you can arbitrarily achieve .99c at will or whatever, it's not going to offer major tactical advantages EXCEPT for the obvious one: "My cannonball was moving very fast before I even fired it at you, so it will hit you extra double-plus fast."

[lPeregrine]

Once you have that, slap some fuel tanks on carrier giving ships enough to comfortably do mission, but not more. Then, some ammunition stores. Some spare parts. Then...

You pretty much have the "impossible", wet-navy Carrier, but in space. Ergo, writer of the article in OP is an idiot

Not really. A carrier is defined by launching SMALL ships, well below the size of an average capital ship. A "carrier" for battleships is more like a mobile repair yard and fuel station. It's a carrier in name only, and nothing like the scifi carriers the author is complaining about.

He is also stupid saying starships have no maximum speed and only acceleration counts. Sorry, even if we ignore C, there is speed at which ship collects too much bacground radiation for its shielding, which can be interesting factor in itself - but no, guy goes "I'm so smart I'll take one look at issue without thinking to spew truths!"

Err, no. In any kind of realistic scifi there is effectively no speed limit, the only limits are your maximum acceleration and fuel supply. Short of magic technology you're not going to get moving fast enough for that limit to apply, and with magic technology you might as well just say everyone has anti-radiation shielding that works up to 0.9999999999c.

OP writer guy would probably call it impossible trash

And for good reason.