starships

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2003-01-02 03:21pm

assuming stl travel as a rule, which would you prefer in your ships - missile bays (thousands of explosive smart bombs) or fighter bays (hundreds of mobile hunterseekers)?

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2003-01-02 03:27pm

Missiles. What's the bloody point of strapping your crew - one of the hardest-to-replace resources - into a smaller, less well-armored ship, which will likely carry missiles of its own?

We can build fairly decent self-propelled weapons right now for use against targets in space, if we wanted to.

jaeger115 · Post by **jaeger115** » 2003-01-02 03:29pm

Still, Lagmonster, fighters are more flexible. They can scout, attack, and return to base, unlike missiles.

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2003-01-02 03:40pm

jaeger115 wrote:Still, Lagmonster, fighters are more flexible. They can scout, attack, and return to base, unlike missiles.

One issue is human. A ship with a person in it is going to consume resources: air, water, fuel to move itself and the extra weight of the person AND the extra weight of the life support systems. A fighter gets to be more expensive to build and use, more dangerous to the pilot, and no harder to destroy than the mothership.

In space combat, why pull punches? You use nukes. If that is deemed too dangerous for you at the moment, you use conventional explosives warheads. For scouting, remote-piloted probes (which we use now for long-distance scouting of the solar system anyway).

Lord Pounder · Post by **Lord Pounder** » 2003-01-02 03:44pm

You really need a combination of both. Fighters to scout and find targets and HUGE fecking missiles to kill the new live and new civilisations you find.

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2003-01-02 03:51pm

Darth Pounder wrote:You really need a combination of both. Fighters to scout and find targets and HUGE fecking missiles to kill the new live and new civilisations you find.

Argh. You don't need people in scout ships. You really, really don't! You can strap a cheap camera to a rocket if you need to! It really makes more sense than wasting all the resources you'd need for a fighter, especially on some sort of deep-space exploration vessel moving at slower-than-light speeds!

Knife · Post by **Knife** » 2003-01-02 04:13pm

Enforcer Talen wrote:assuming stl travel as a rule, which would you prefer in your ships - missile bays (thousands of explosive smart bombs) or fighter bays (hundreds of mobile hunterseekers)?

Missiles would be preferable. As to the fighters, it would depend on if you can get a weapon small enough to employ with an fighter and with enough punch to harm an enemy capital ship. If this is possible then the option of fighters would be better.

As others have said, the ability of a small vessel to extend the sensor capabilities of the "mothership" is hand but it dosen't need to be the dedicated fighter that all expect it to be.

All would depend on the various tech levels of the combatents but again, the racks upon racks of missiles apeals to me more than fighters than may or may not be a threat to the enemy.

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2003-01-02 04:16pm

Maybe a couple of manned scouts, but by and large I'd go for tons of missiles.

Post by **Alyrium Denryle** » 2003-01-02 04:35pm

But with a missile attack ship your combat survavability is only about 50%. Fights will come down to who shoots first. I would go with fighters, I can can use them to increase my detection capability. and engage the enemy. My ship would of course be armed with point defense weaponry, but my fighters would be the primary combatants.

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