Star Fighters: Who the hell needs Em?

[Knobbyboy88]

Seriously, has anyone else ever really though about it. Why would there be any need for star fighters?

A). To start off with, there is the obvious problem involved with star fighters. There is really just no resistant material (water, air, etc) in space that would create the same kinds of friction terrestrial vessels experience on Earth. Accordingly, there woud really be nothing to hamper a vessel's maximum acceleration. Theoretically, this would mean that the maximum speed of a spacecraft would be ultimately determined by the sheer size and power output of its engines. Fighters would have puny engines compared to capital ships and would thus be rather slow in comparison to larger vessels. They might be a little quicker to accelerate and quite a bit more manueverable due to their smaller mass in comparison to heavier spacecraft, but I think that any overall gain in these areas would be pretty much negated by the other issues at hand.


B). Secondly, there is the fact that a Star Fighter's smaller size would limit the size of its reactor or powerplant. This would in turn limit its available energy reserves in relation to a Capital Ship's and thus minimize the size, efficiency, and energy output of any of its available weapons systems. Given the Capital Ship's larger hull, powerplant, and available energy reserves, it should theoretically be able to field weapons with enough size, power, and range (given their higher energy levels) to render any perspective tactical advantage offered by a fighter irrelevant. Fighters would simply take too long to reach their target in comparison to a Capital Ship's heavy weapons (and maybe even the Capital Ship itself) to be effective and probably wouldn't pack enough firepower to be of much strategic significance when they finally got there either.

To be quite honest, the only real advantage I can see to using a Star Fighter over a Capital Ship would be its relatively low cost in relation to a larger vessel, and the fact that the fighter might be slightly harder to shoot down than the Capital Ship due to its small size and greater manuerability. However, I don't see either of these really playing all that key of a role, as in order to equal the combat power of a Capital Ship you might very well have to build thousands of such fighters. Additionally, fighters have a rather inconvenient knack for dying in droves, which might make them significantly more expensive and less useful than any Capital Ship in terms of overall survivability.

The only way I'd ever imagine Star Fighters to realisticaly function would be in a role similar to that of late 19th century torpedo and gun boats. They could use their superior manueverability to shield the far larger and less manueverable capital ships, while their essentially expendable nature would ensure that their inevitable losses didn't interfere with a battlegroup's ability to effectively deal with an enemy fleet.

Is this whole thing just a huge Sci Fi brain bug?

[Vendetta]

Fairly sure we've had this before. A lot. But:

I think it depends on the disparity between offensive and defensive systems.

In an offensive biased system, where weapon systems have a significant chance of causing severe damage (like a setting with no unobtanium hulls vs. nukes), then a close release guided munition delivered by a high mobility platform like a fighter might be better than long range weapons more easily intercepted.

In a defensive biased system, where defensive systems can take a lot of hits before caving in, fighters are not a useful delivery mechanism, because they can't carry enough munitions.

Manned space fighters are always a boondoggle though, cool as they are in fiction, because space you're spending on a pilot and his life support you could be spending on reaction mass and weapons. Remote presence and automatic systems are more useful, so anything you could realistically call a "Fighter" would probably be more like a remote piloted missile with submunitons.

[Eris]

As for whether people have thought of it, here's the obligatory Atomic Rockets link.

Now, I'm of the mind that you might be able to think up some reasons for fighter-like craft, but in all cases they'd be more like torpedo boats that real fightercraft. The problems come in scaling up putting more strain on the superstructure and engines due to size-weight ratios and finite heat tolerances before engines start melting, and so forth.

As a general rule I think the consensus is (mostly) that fighters are the realm of soft SF.

[Sea Skimmer]

Seriously, has anyone else ever really though about it. Why would there be any need for star fighters?

Only in about a billion threads before this. Suffice to say ‘star fighters’ certainly can have a useful role to play, but they are likely to be built and equipped on the scale of today’s heavy bombers, maritime patrol planes or missile corvettes, rather then what we think of as a fighter normally.

A). To start off with, there is the obvious problem involved with star fighters. There is really just no resistant material (water, air, etc) in space that would create the same kinds of friction terrestrial vessels experience on Earth. Accordingly, there woud really be nothing to hamper a vessel's maximum acceleration. Theoretically, this would mean that the maximum speed of a spacecraft would be ultimately determined by the sheer size and power output of its engines.

Maximum velocity would be governed by starting velocity, fuel capacity, and the velocity of the engine exhaust. Time dilatation effects would also become a factor, as would the risk of hitting space debris.

B). Secondly, there is the fact that a Star Fighter's smaller size would limit the size of its reactor or powerplant. This would in turn limit its available energy reserves in relation to a Capital Ship's and thus minimize the size, efficiency, and energy output of any of its available weapons systems.

They’ll also cost a fraction of what the capital ship does, so a 1 to 1 comparison is pointless, and missile weapons make gross engine power output irrelevant. The low mass and potential to quickly accelerate to very high velocity would make star fighters ideal for service as a reusable first stage for long range missiles.

In any case, small size doesn’t mean low power, but it will mean either low power or low endurance. In case you aren’t aware, most modern naval warships are powered by the same jet engines the are used in transport planes and jetliners. A 10,000 ton Ticonderoga cruise for example is primarily powered by four LM-2500 gas turbines each making about 25MW shaft power. LM-2500 is a turboshaft version of the TF39 turbofan, four of them also happen to be used to power the C-5 Galaxy, a mere 420 ton object.

Given the Capital Ship's larger hull, powerplant, and available energy reserves, it should theoretically be able to field weapons with enough size, power, and range (given their higher energy levels) to render any perspective tactical advantage offered by a fighter irrelevant.

That would be dependently entirely on what kind of weapons you have. For many weapons, like a laser, having a larger firing platform would make no difference at all (though it would affect sensor range) and for firing missiles only having to accelerate a smaller launch platform to the desired launch velocity would be an advantage. I don’t know about you, but I sure as shit don’t want to have to make a huge main engine burn on my colossus-2 class battlecruiser directly that he enmy before launching weapons. That’s kind of asking to get nailed.

Fighters would simply take too long to reach their target in comparison to a Capital Ship's heavy weapons (and maybe even the Capital Ship itself) to be effective and probably wouldn't pack enough firepower to be of much strategic significance when they finally got there either.

A fighter is a WAY smaller target. That means a dispersed group of fighters using laser datalinks to act as a giant radar antenna will detect the capital ship at vastly greater range then the capital ship will be able to detect any one of them in turn. Naval warfare today is all about emissions control and avoiding being detected by enemy emissions; this would become all the more important in the vastness of space. Having the largest possible platform is not an advantage in this respect. More systems on a ship means more emissions in one spot to detected, and since your bigger you’re going to be inertly easier to find with any form of sensor.

To a point the capital ship gains advantages in its own sensor range, since it is after all bigger, but no one ship could match the resolution gained from linked the sensors on multiple platforms together. I suspect some kind of towed array of infrared and X-ray telescopes, plus radar receivers would be the main sensor in anything like realistic space warfare.

To be quite honest, the only real advantage I can see to using a Star Fighter over a Capital Ship would be its relatively low cost in relation to a larger vessel, and the fact that the fighter might be slightly harder to shoot down than the Capital Ship due to its small size and greater manuerability. However, I don't see either of these really playing all that key of a role, as in order to equal the combat power of a Capital Ship you might very well have to build thousands of such fighters.

That presumes you have the technology to build a capital ship that isn’t just going to be fried by a nuclear bomb going off within 20km, and if you want to build say ships on the scale of star destroyers, buying thousands of fighters for the same cost will easily be possible. Less risk of losing them all to a loose reactor cooling pump gasket too.

Additionally, fighters have a rather inconvenient knack for dying in droves, which might make them significantly more expensive and less useful than any Capital Ship in terms of overall survivability.

Real life suggests that small spacecraft should be entirely capable of making big ships die in droves too. Once more it goes back to the issue of how much ridiculously sci-wank tech do you have, and just what are your weapons and sensors and defenses in the first place.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Seriously, has anyone else ever really though about it. Why would there be any need for star fighters?

Only in about a billion threads before this. Suffice to say ‘star fighters’ certainly can have a useful role to play, but they are likely to be built and equipped on the scale of today’s heavy bombers, maritime patrol planes or missile corvettes, rather then what we think of as a fighter normally.

Probably more toward the very heavy end of that range. At least if we're talking a crewed vessel. If we stick a person onto a spaceship, we stick on a bunch of heavy life-support equipment and radiation shielding to keep the person alive. This greatly increases the cost and mass of the vessel, so then we add in ECM and other defenses to increase the chances the vessel comes back in serviceable condition. This makes it less expendable.

They’ll also cost a fraction of what the capital ship does, so a 1 to 1 comparison is pointless, and missile weapons make gross engine power output irrelevant. The low mass and potential to quickly accelerate to very high velocity would make star fighters ideal for service as a reusable first stage for long range missiles.

If you wanted a reusable first stage for missiles, you'd build an unmanned missile bus, not a space fighter. Why you'd make it reusable at all would be a real good question, however, since this reusable missile bus would require something like 4x the delta-v that a completely expendable bus does. (Delta-v to get to the launch point + delta-v to stop and turn around + delta-v to head back to the mothership + delta-v to stop so the mothership can recover it.)

Given the Capital Ship's larger hull, powerplant, and available energy reserves, it should theoretically be able to field weapons with enough size, power, and range (given their higher energy levels) to render any perspective tactical advantage offered by a fighter irrelevant.

That would be dependently entirely on what kind of weapons you have. For many weapons, like a laser, having a larger firing platform would make no difference at all (though it would affect sensor range)

Actually, the larger firing platform will have more sink capacity for all the waste heat a laser will generate. The larger firing platform will also be able to mount a bigger powerplant to feed energy to the laser, a bigger, beefier lasing mechanism to generate higher-energy, shorter wavelength photons, and support a larger mirror to better focus the beam.

A fighter is a WAY smaller target. That means a dispersed group of fighters using laser datalinks to act as a giant radar antenna will detect the capital ship at vastly greater range then the capital ship will be able to detect any one of them in turn.

The capital ship could deploy a dispersed group of sensor drones with laser datalinks back to the capital ship in order to provide targeting data to the missiles loaded into its giant rail-gun launchers, or to the swarm of missile buses accelerating out ahead of the capital ship.

Naval warfare today is all about emissions control and avoiding being detected by enemy emissions; this would become all the more important in the vastness of space. Having the largest possible platform is not an advantage in this respect. More systems on a ship means more emissions in one spot to detected, and since your bigger you’re going to be inertly easier to find with any form of sensor.

A space fighter offers zero advantage to a capital ship in this regard. Both are at least a couple hundred degrees hotter than the background of space if they were doing nothing more than just sitting there keeping their crews from freezing to death. A drone, on the other hand, could run much cooler, assuming appropriately designed electronics.

[Peptuck]

A). To start off with, there is the obvious problem involved with star fighters. There is really just no resistant material (water, air, etc) in space that would create the same kinds of friction terrestrial vessels experience on Earth. Accordingly, there woud really be nothing to hamper a vessel's maximum acceleration. Theoretically, this would mean that the maximum speed of a spacecraft would be ultimately determined by the sheer size and power output of its engines. Fighters would have puny engines compared to capital ships and would thus be rather slow in comparison to larger vessels. They might be a little quicker to accelerate and quite a bit more manueverable due to their smaller mass in comparison to heavier spacecraft, but I think that any overall gain in these areas would be pretty much negated by the other issues at hand.

Someone has forgotten the concept of "inertia." A smaller vessel is going to require a lot less energy to accelerate because, being a smaller vessel, it doesn't need to devote large amounts of mass and volume to important things like, say, crew considerations. Much more of the mass on a fighter can be devoted to engines relative to its overall mass than can be devoted to, say, a full-sized warship, because the fighter is a small, lightweight ship intended purely for combat, and doesn't need to support a crew for an extended period of time, nor carry extensive and exhaustive amounts of supplies and ammunition for prolonged operation.

The larger your ship gets, and the more roles and duties it has to handle, the more ancillary mass that is going to be added on to accomodate those capabilities. Smaller ships with more specialized or short-term duties, like fighter craft, would have far less mass and thus far less inertia to overcome, making them significantly faster and more maneuverable.

B). Secondly, there is the fact that a Star Fighter's smaller size would limit the size of its reactor or powerplant. This would in turn limit its available energy reserves in relation to a Capital Ship's and thus minimize the size, efficiency, and energy output of any of its available weapons systems.

Incorrect. As I just stated above, the fighter has a specific mission and its mass is going to be limited compared to what a capital ship is going to require. Further, if the fighter is designed in the first place to be fast and agile, it will have proportionally larger engines than capital ships. The combination of focused, specific mission requirements and no need to support the pilot for weeks or months at a time limits the amount of fuel and mass the fighter needs, and adding a proportionally larger engine will give it proportionally larger amounts of energy compared to what a capital ship would utilize.

Given the Capital Ship's larger hull, powerplant, and available energy reserves, it should theoretically be able to field weapons with enough size, power, and range (given their higher energy levels) to render any perspective tactical advantage offered by a fighter irrelevant.

Why would this be the case? If I were to pull up something from, say, the real world, I would compare the weapons loadout of a naval cruiser to that of a fighter, and could give you a wide variety of weapons carrie dby either craft that fills in distinct tactical roles in a naval or navy-to-surface engagement.

It depends on the technology of the setting and whether the fighters carry different armaments from the ships. If they carry the exact same weapons systems, its certainly possible the capital ship could put out more raw destructive power than the fighters, but if they carry different weapons systems (say, the fighter carries torpedoes while the warship uses cruise missiles and direct-fire cannons) the fighter can play a distinct role complementing the capital ship.

For example, I can point to Star Wars and the Empire's TIE fighters, which have similiar weapons to turbolasers, but far weaker. One use of these fighters in Allston's X-Wing books was that a capital ship would engage an enemy vessel on one side, forcing the ship to concentrate its shields against that side. Meanwhile, the fighters would attack on the opposite, unshielded side, where even their light weapons could deal significant damage. The enemy commander would be forced to choose between keeping his shields "honest" and devoting power away from the flank being attacked by the capital ship, or keeping his shields directed against the barrage and letting the figthers rip and tear his ship's unprotected side. This is excatly the kind of use a fighter's superior speed and maneuverability would give it in a tactical engagement, even if it has similiar but weaker weapons compared with capital ships.

Fighters would simply take too long to reach their target in comparison to a Capital Ship's heavy weapons (and maybe even the Capital Ship itself) to be effective

This depends entirely on the technology of the setting. For example, if I were to compare the speed at which a missile fired from a ship would reach a target with the speed of a missile fired from a fighter, and add to that the difference made up by the fighter's proportionally larger engine....

and probably wouldn't pack enough firepower to be of much strategic significance when they finally got there either.

That depends entirely on the technology of the setting.

For example, in Mass Effect, fighters are in integral part of fleet combat, as they utilize disruptor torpedoes fired at close range that can bypass the kinetic barriers of enemy vessels due to their relatively slow speed. These torpedoes can obliterate enemy ships, but can't be fired from capital ships because the point defense systems of the ship in question would pick them up and destroy them. Fighters are able to outmaneuver the point defense systems of enemy ships and deploy their torpedoes close in.

To be quite honest, the only real advantage I can see to using a Star Fighter over a Capital Ship would be its relatively low cost in relation to a larger vessel, and the fact that the fighter might be slightly harder to shoot down than the Capital Ship due to its small size and greater manuerability.

Slightly? Compare a mouse to a hippo; that's roughly around the proportional size of a fighter to a capital ship in most generic sci-fi, if not bigger. It would be a lot easier to hit a hippo than a mouse if you were firing at them, so your use of "slightly" in this context is misleading and inaccurate when you take into account that capital ships can be hundreds or thousands of times larger than fighters.

However, I don't see either of these really playing all that key of a role, as in order to equal the combat power of a Capital Ship you might very well have to build thousands of such fighters.

In terms of raw firepower, based on the moronic assumption that fighters will always be carrying the exact same weapons as capital ships, and they're going to have an exact engine:mass ratio as a warship, maybe.

But fighters are not going to always be carrying the exact same weapons as a warship - any more than a helicopter is going to carry the same weapons as a tank, or a modern jet fighter carries the same weapons as a cruiser or frigate - and they are not going to have an exactly equivilant engine power:mass ratio as a warship, because the warship is going to have large amounts of space and mass given over to supplies and crew considerations for prolonged operations.

Additionally, fighters have a rather inconvenient knack for dying in droves, which might make them significantly more expensive and less useful than any Capital Ship in terms of overall survivability.

This is another baseless assumption, because this is again dependent on the technology of the setting.

I bring up Mass Effect again: the disruptor torpedoes used by most fighters are powerful enough that only a handful are required to destroy frigates or cruisers. You can therefore choose to expend a few fighters to take out an entire enemy warship that costs tens or hundreds or maybe thousands of times those fighters' value, or you can risk an entire warship of your own engaging a ship of equivilant tonnage, risking tens or hundreds or thousands of times the value of the fighters you could send otherwise. Both will get the job done, but one will cost you a lot more if you lose it.



tl;dr: the relevance of fighters depends on the technology of the setting they're used in.

[Peptuck]

The capital ship could deploy a dispersed group of sensor drones with laser datalinks back to the capital ship in order to provide targeting data to the missiles loaded into its giant rail-gun launchers, or to the swarm of missile buses accelerating out ahead of the capital ship.

Why even bother with drones? Depending on your technology, you could combine missiles and sensors, letting you deploy a network of drone sensors that could also attack targets immediately without needing to be fired. Its what they did in Schlock Mercenary with the Very Dangerous Array.

[phongn]

Why even bother with drones? Depending on your technology, you could combine missiles and sensors, letting you deploy a network of drone sensors that could also attack targets immediately without needing to be fired. Its what they did in Schlock Mercenary with the Very Dangerous Array.

High-quality sensors are expensive.

[Vendetta]

Also, your missile packages spouting all sorts of sensor noise is going to help the enemy's intercept systems.

[Sea Skimmer]

Probably more toward the very heavy end of that range. At least if we're talking a crewed vessel.

Well I don’t necessarily expect it to be crewed, I’d expect a mixture of manned and unmanned systems, but for long range autonomous strike only crewed systems are going to be satisfactory and that’s the main role I see for fighters.

If we stick a person onto a spaceship, we stick on a bunch of heavy life-support equipment and radiation shielding to keep the person alive. This greatly increases the cost and mass of the vessel, so then we add in ECM and other defenses to increase the chances the vessel comes back in serviceable condition. This makes it less expendable.

Or you could just have a neutron liner and other protection integrated into the ships very hull structure, a little trick warship designers have being using for about 85 years, while also wrapping the spacesuited crewmen in the ship own fuel supply for additional protection. This would not be any terrible mass penalty, and you need radiation shielding for electronics anyway.

If you wanted a reusable first stage for missiles, you'd build an unmanned missile bus, not a space fighter. Why you'd make it reusable at all would be a real good question, however, since this reusable missile bus would require something like 4x the delta-v that a completely expendable bus does. (Delta-v to get to the launch point + delta-v to stop and turn around + delta-v to head back to the mothership + delta-v to stop so the mothership can recover it.)

I think you underestimate how much of a range advantage I expect this first stage to give, remember while the fighter has limited fuel it can coast along to gain distance without burning anything except oxygen for the crew. Owing to the very long ranges involved you need a decent targeting system on the booster, and that’s going to be expensive, too expensive to be expendable. Never mind the issues of programming an anti shipping computer system that’s fully autonomous.

Actually, the larger firing platform will have more sink capacity for all the waste heat a laser will generate.

A fighter can use its own fuel for a heatsink, which should be plenty enough for any remotely realistic laser weapon. I can’t see a laser being useful for more then inflicted a soft kill anyway.

The larger firing platform will also be able to mount a bigger powerplant to feed energy to the laser, a bigger, beefier lasing mechanism to generate higher-energy, shorter wavelength photons, and support a larger mirror to better focus the beam.

Assuming we can build a big enough mirror for the difference to matter, sure. Course it would also always be possible to mate a relatively speaking compact spacefighter to an oversized podded weapon, its not like you have to worry about aerodynamic drag.

The capital ship could deploy a dispersed group of sensor drones with laser datalinks back to the capital ship in order to provide targeting data to the missiles loaded into its giant rail-gun launchers, or to the swarm of missile buses accelerating out ahead of the capital ship.

So now you need extremely sophisticated long range drones, and extremely large missiles on the same ship, this is unlikely to provide any advantage over a bunch of duel role manned craft which have a few simple old humans to make basic but vital decisions. Also, the whole point of my system was the mother ship remains absolutely silent and hidden. For your system to work it has to communicate with drones out ahead, which means sending transmissions right at the enemy. Those webs of laser light that in my idea would be perpendicular to the enemy axis of advance would now be parallel to it. Then when it fires weapons, the course of those weapons directly backtracks to its own location. In other words, your alternative totally misses my entire design premise.

A space fighter offers zero advantage to a capital ship in this regard. Both are at least a couple hundred degrees hotter than the background of space if they were doing nothing more than just sitting there keeping their crews from freezing to death.

You’re trying to claim that size has no affect on detectability, that’s just plain nonsense. I guess you think range doesn’t change anything either?

A drone, on the other hand, could run much cooler, assuming appropriately designed electronics.

With the right design a fightercraft could use its own fuel as a heat sink, and deliberately have all its radiators facing aft. Yeah, you can design a lot of solutions to heat, and its going to be a hell of a lot easier to employ them, and all your other systems and weapons if you have a couple people making the big calls, rather then relying completely on billions of lines of computer code.

[Junghalli]

Is this whole thing just a huge Sci Fi brain bug?

Basically, yes. It's the result of overly simplistic analogizing between space combat and wet navy combat.

The subject is totally done to death already.

[Knobbyboy88]

A). To start off with, there is the obvious problem involved with star fighters. There is really just no resistant material (water, air, etc) in space that would create the same kinds of friction terrestrial vessels experience on Earth. Accordingly, there woud really be nothing to hamper a vessel's maximum acceleration. Theoretically, this would mean that the maximum speed of a spacecraft would be ultimately determined by the sheer size and power output of its engines. Fighters would have puny engines compared to capital ships and would thus be rather slow in comparison to larger vessels. They might be a little quicker to accelerate and quite a bit more manueverable due to their smaller mass in comparison to heavier spacecraft, but I think that any overall gain in these areas would be pretty much negated by the other issues at hand.

Someone has forgotten the concept of "inertia." A smaller vessel is going to require a lot less energy to accelerate because, being a smaller vessel, it doesn't need to devote large amounts of mass and volume to important things like, say, crew considerations. Much more of the mass on a fighter can be devoted to engines relative to its overall mass than can be devoted to, say, a full-sized warship, because the fighter is a small, lightweight ship intended purely for combat, and doesn't need to support a crew for an extended period of time, nor carry extensive and exhaustive amounts of supplies and ammunition for prolonged operation.

The larger your ship gets, and the more roles and duties it has to handle, the more ancillary mass that is going to be added on to accomodate those capabilities. Smaller ships with more specialized or short-term duties, like fighter craft, would have far less mass and thus far less inertia to overcome, making them significantly faster and more maneuverable.

No, I actually did account for inertia. It factors into my reasoning on manueverability and acceleration. However, I think that the sheer size of the engines and the excess energy available made available to them on a Capital Ship (due to the vessel's larger reactors) would largely negate this factor. Besides, a Capital Ship would be better able to deal with excess heat and radiation due to its size. This would allow the Capital Ship to burn its engines at higher energy levels and for longer periods than a significantly smaller fighter would be capable of doing. Ultimately, I guess it would depend on the efficiency of the propulsion systems available to each ship. Even apart from this, however; there lies the fact that speed increases exponentially in space. A capital ship would have a greater potential for total maximum veolicty in flight while a fighter MIGHT be better suited for short bursts of acceleration.

B). Secondly, there is the fact that a Star Fighter's smaller size would limit the size of its reactor or powerplant. This would in turn limit its available energy reserves in relation to a Capital Ship's and thus minimize the size, efficiency, and energy output of any of its available weapons systems.

Incorrect. As I just stated above, the fighter has a specific mission and its mass is going to be limited compared to what a capital ship is going to require. Further, if the fighter is designed in the first place to be fast and agile, it will have proportionally larger engines than capital ships. The combination of focused, specific mission requirements and no need to support the pilot for weeks or months at a time limits the amount of fuel and mass the fighter needs, and adding a proportionally larger engine will give it proportionally larger amounts of energy compared to what a capital ship would utilize.

However, a significantly larger proportion of a fighter's total mass would have to be put towards such systems as life support, power generation, and ammunition storage than would be necessary on a capital ship. A capital ship would have room to spare for such systems due to its size, a fighter wouldn't. In any case, and unless you design your fighters like light destroyers rather than snub craft, you're either going to end up with either an extremely heavily armed fighter that is rather slow in proportion to its carrier, or an increadibly fast and agile fighter with no real offensive armament to speak of. A large capital ship would have the potential to fill both roles in a balanced fashion, and concievably do it quite a bit more efficiently than either extreme of fighter would be able to achieve.

Given the Capital Ship's larger hull, powerplant, and available energy reserves, it should theoretically be able to field weapons with enough size, power, and range (given their higher energy levels) to render any perspective tactical advantage offered by a fighter irrelevant.

Why would this be the case? If I were to pull up something from, say, the real world, I would compare the weapons loadout of a naval cruiser to that of a fighter, and could give you a wide variety of weapons carrie dby either craft that fills in distinct tactical roles in a naval or navy-to-surface engagement.

It depends on the technology of the setting and whether the fighters carry different armaments from the ships. If they carry the exact same weapons systems, its certainly possible the capital ship could put out more raw destructive power than the fighters, but if they carry different weapons systems (say, the fighter carries torpedoes while the warship uses cruise missiles and direct-fire cannons) the fighter can play a distinct role complementing the capital ship.

For example, I can point to Star Wars and the Empire's TIE fighters, which have similiar weapons to turbolasers, but far weaker. One use of these fighters in Allston's X-Wing books was that a capital ship would engage an enemy vessel on one side, forcing the ship to concentrate its shields against that side. Meanwhile, the fighters would attack on the opposite, unshielded side, where even their light weapons could deal significant damage. The enemy commander would be forced to choose between keeping his shields "honest" and devoting power away from the flank being attacked by the capital ship, or keeping his shields directed against the barrage and letting the figthers rip and tear his ship's unprotected side. This is excatly the kind of use a fighter's superior speed and maneuverability would give it in a tactical engagement, even if it has similiar but weaker weapons compared with capital ships.

That's just the thing. We're not talking about ocean going navies here. We're talking about the mechanics of space flight. Modern fighters are faster than their carriers because they fly through the air while their surface platforms much drag their bulk through the significantly more resistant water below. This wouldn't be the case for a spacebourn fighter and its carrier. They both use the exact same mode of propulsion and travel through the same medium (space). That is why I compared a theoretical space fighter with a torpedo boat. A torpedo boat travels the same medium as the heavy cruisers and battleships it supports, but it does so with a significantly smaller engine, power plant, and weapons payload. The only real advantages it has are in terms of manueverability and acceleration.

However, I will cede the point that star fighters could be used in close range engagements to harrass enemy vessels and as a sort of tactical distraction to allow the main ships in the fleet to do their job easier. This was one of the major functions of torpedo boats as well.

Fighters would simply take too long to reach their target in comparison to a Capital Ship's heavy weapons (and maybe even the Capital Ship itself) to be effective

This depends entirely on the technology of the setting. For example, if I were to compare the speed at which a missile fired from a ship would reach a target with the speed of a missile fired from a fighter, and add to that the difference made up by the fighter's proportionally larger engine....

That is entirely dependent of whether propulsion technology has reached a point to allow engines efficient enough to make such proportional speed possible. Even then, however; it would have to be a tech which worked more efficiently in a proportionally smaller form than in a brutally massive form. Besides, a capital ship could technically carry larger missiles with far larger engines and payloads than anything a fighter could carry. As far as missiles are concerned, the same question of proportionality applies to their propulsion as it does to the propulsionary levels of fighters and capital ships.

and probably wouldn't pack enough firepower to be of much strategic significance when they finally got there either.

That depends entirely on the technology of the setting.

For example, in Mass Effect, fighters are in integral part of fleet combat, as they utilize disruptor torpedoes fired at close range that can bypass the kinetic barriers of enemy vessels due to their relatively slow speed. These torpedoes can obliterate enemy ships, but can't be fired from capital ships because the point defense systems of the ship in question would pick them up and destroy them. Fighters are able to outmaneuver the point defense systems of enemy ships and deploy their torpedoes close in.

Fighters in Mass effect are a rather small part of fleet engagements. The most important ships are the massive dreadnaughts which can use their mass drivers to engage enemy vessels tens of thousands of kilometers away. It's funny that you should mention that, however; because Mass Effect is what got me thinking about this to begin with.

To be quite honest, the only real advantage I can see to using a Star Fighter over a Capital Ship would be its relatively low cost in relation to a larger vessel, and the fact that the fighter might be slightly harder to shoot down than the Capital Ship due to its small size and greater manuerability.

Slightly? Compare a mouse to a hippo; that's roughly around the proportional size of a fighter to a capital ship in most generic sci-fi, if not bigger. It would be a lot easier to hit a hippo than a mouse if you were firing at them, so your use of "slightly" in this context is misleading and inaccurate when you take into account that capital ships can be hundreds or thousands of times larger than fighters.

However, a Hippo is a hell of a lot harder to kill than a mouse. If a swarm of mice were to attack a Hippo, the Hippo could easily kill hundreds, if not thousands of the mice before succumbing... if it were to succumb at all.

However, I don't see either of these really playing all that key of a role, as in order to equal the combat power of a Capital Ship you might very well have to build thousands of such fighters.

In terms of raw firepower, based on the moronic assumption that fighters will always be carrying the exact same weapons as capital ships, and they're going to have an exact engine:mass ratio as a warship, maybe.

But fighters are not going to always be carrying the exact same weapons as a warship - any more than a helicopter is going to carry the same weapons as a tank, or a modern jet fighter carries the same weapons as a cruiser or frigate - and they are not going to have an exactly equivilant engine power:mass ratio as a warship, because the warship is going to have large amounts of space and mass given over to supplies and crew considerations for prolonged operations.

Once again, we're not talking about terrestrial navies. All of the factors which make modern jet fighters such a success (i.e. they fly) go out the window here.

Additionally, fighters have a rather inconvenient knack for dying in droves, which might make them significantly more expensive and less useful than any Capital Ship in terms of overall survivability.

This is another baseless assumption, because this is again dependent on the technology of the setting.

I bring up Mass Effect again: the disruptor torpedoes used by most fighters are powerful enough that only a handful are required to destroy frigates or cruisers. You can therefore choose to expend a few fighters to take out an entire enemy warship that costs tens or hundreds or maybe thousands of times those fighters' value, or you can risk an entire warship of your own engaging a ship of equivilant tonnage, risking tens or hundreds or thousands of times the value of the fighters you could send otherwise. Both will get the job done, but one will cost you a lot more if you lose it.

That wasn't the impression I got from Mass Effect at all. From what I understand, the Fighters are mainly used as a distraction. They are seldom used alone. During a major fleet engagement, where the big ships are having it out with their massively powerful rail guns, the fighters would basically be called in when the battle had reached extreme close range in order to try and sneak around the point defenses of the larger ships and sneak in an opportunistic shot or two with their disruptor torpedoes.

[Warsie]

There's also reconnaisance. Why send such a large projection of force as a cap shit when you can send a fighter instead.

[Darth Ruinus]

There's also reconnaisance. Why send such a large projection of force as a cap shit when you can send a fighter instead.

Sounds like it would be cheaper to just send a droid dedicated entirely to reconnaisance. No extra cost with weapons that may not do anything to cap ships.

On second thought, a cap ship would probably have better sensors anyway.

[Hawkwings]

The thing about the hippo and the mice... If each mouse had a stick of dynamite as payload, how long do you think the hippo would last? Even if the hippo had a machine gun, it would still succumb to the bomber-mice rather quickly.

Also, I must point out that a small ship would be better at heat management than a large ship, assuming proportional energy production.

Starfighters will find a role in universes where the offensive power is much greater than the defensive power, to the extent that a small group of starfighters can take out a capital ship with their payloads. If the starfighters in Mass Effect can take severely damage or destroy a capital ship, then defending against them would make sense, even if you weaken your defenses against enemy capships to do so. Since this is the case, it's not hard to see that starfighters do have an effective role in that universe.

[Braedley]

A). To start off with, there is the obvious problem involved with star fighters. There is really just no resistant material (water, air, etc) in space that would create the same kinds of friction terrestrial vessels experience on Earth. Accordingly, there woud really be nothing to hamper a vessel's maximum acceleration. Theoretically, this would mean that the maximum speed of a spacecraft would be ultimately determined by the sheer size and power output of its engines. Fighters would have puny engines compared to capital ships and would thus be rather slow in comparison to larger vessels. They might be a little quicker to accelerate and quite a bit more manueverable due to their smaller mass in comparison to heavier spacecraft, but I think that any overall gain in these areas would be pretty much negated by the other issues at hand.

Someone has forgotten the concept of "inertia." A smaller vessel is going to require a lot less energy to accelerate because, being a smaller vessel, it doesn't need to devote large amounts of mass and volume to important things like, say, crew considerations. Much more of the mass on a fighter can be devoted to engines relative to its overall mass than can be devoted to, say, a full-sized warship, because the fighter is a small, lightweight ship intended purely for combat, and doesn't need to support a crew for an extended period of time, nor carry extensive and exhaustive amounts of supplies and ammunition for prolonged operation.

The larger your ship gets, and the more roles and duties it has to handle, the more ancillary mass that is going to be added on to accomodate those capabilities. Smaller ships with more specialized or short-term duties, like fighter craft, would have far less mass and thus far less inertia to overcome, making them significantly faster and more maneuverable.

No, I actually did account for inertia. It factors into my reasoning on manueverability and acceleration. However, I think that the sheer size of the engines and the excess energy available made available to them on a Capital Ship (due to the vessel's larger reactors) would largely negate this factor. Besides, a Capital Ship would be better able to deal with excess heat and radiation due to its size. This would allow the Capital Ship to burn its engines at higher energy levels and for longer periods than a significantly smaller fighter would be capable of doing. Ultimately, I guess it would depend on the efficiency of the propulsion systems available to each ship. Even apart from this, however; there lies the fact that speed increases exponentially in space. A capital ship would have a greater potential for total maximum veolicty in flight while a fighter MIGHT be better suited for short bursts of acceleration.

Do you know what Newton's Second Law is? Have you studied any thermodynamics? (I haven't studied thermo, so I can't really comment on it, but I'm sure you're wrong on those statements.) And no, speed doesn't increase exponentially in space. At best, it's quadratic at "low" velocities. This ignores relativity effects, which bumps it down to sub linear at high sub-c velocities. Although cap ships can be moving faster in a fight, they're also not turning a hell of a lot. That is what kills your speed.

B). Secondly, there is the fact that a Star Fighter's smaller size would limit the size of its reactor or powerplant. This would in turn limit its available energy reserves in relation to a Capital Ship's and thus minimize the size, efficiency, and energy output of any of its available weapons systems.

Incorrect. As I just stated above, the fighter has a specific mission and its mass is going to be limited compared to what a capital ship is going to require. Further, if the fighter is designed in the first place to be fast and agile, it will have proportionally larger engines than capital ships. The combination of focused, specific mission requirements and no need to support the pilot for weeks or months at a time limits the amount of fuel and mass the fighter needs, and adding a proportionally larger engine will give it proportionally larger amounts of energy compared to what a capital ship would utilize.

However, a significantly larger proportion of a fighter's total mass would have to be put towards such systems as life support, power generation, and ammunition storage than would be necessary on a capital ship. A capital ship would have room to spare for such systems due to its size, a fighter wouldn't. In any case, and unless you design your fighters like light destroyers rather than snub craft, you're either going to end up with either an extremely heavily armed fighter that is rather slow in proportion to its carrier, or an increadibly fast and agile fighter with no real offensive armament to speak of. A large capital ship would have the potential to fill both roles in a balanced fashion, and concievably do it quite a bit more efficiently than either extreme of fighter would be able to achieve.

Well, yes and no. The size of life-support system is somewhat proportional to the volume that needs to be supported. Compare the size needed by a person to stay alive in a fighter for maybe 10 hours at a time versus what they need to stay alive on a cap ship for a month at a time. It's about 1.5m^3 compared to 15m^3. And this only includes the space needed to eat sleep and work. 7'x8'x10' is not a lot of space to do all that. Hell, just my bedroom of my apartment is over twice that size. The current crew of the ISS has more space than that.

As for the rest of the this section, it all falls from the smaller life-support system. By having a proportionally smaller life-support system, more space can be attributed to weapons and engines. So much so that compared to a cap ship, a fighter of course has a higher portion of mass given to engines and weapons.

[Sarevok]

In universes with fast, accurate and reliable FTL capability star fighters MIGHT have a place if the proper handwavium tactics and uobtanium tech are used in construction of said fighter.

But a STL universe ? No way. Who the hell is going to sit in a F-16 cockpit for months it takes to cross typical interplanetary ranges ?

[Adrian Laguna]

The way I see it, fighters work in real life because they travel in a medium that land and sea combatants don't. They also have the ability to go beyond the horizon to strike targets hiding behind it. In space, everyone is in the same medium, and there is no horizon. So space fighters are basically small space battleships, or space battleships are oversized space fighters. Thus, the earthbound analogy for a space fighter is not the air fighter, it's the patrol boat (gun or torpedo).

[bz249]

There's also reconnaisance. Why send such a large projection of force as a cap shit when you can send a fighter instead.

Sounds like it would be cheaper to just send a droid dedicated entirely to reconnaisance. No extra cost with weapons that may not do anything to cap ships.

On second thought, a cap ship would probably have better sensors anyway.

To shoot down the other guys recon craft? I think the force with worse, but active sensor net have the advantage over another which have a very sophisticated array of space debris...

[McC]

What are these 'recon craft' you're all talking about?

There is no stealth in space.

If the spacecraft are torchships, their thrust power is several terawatts. This means the exhaust is so intense that it could be detected from Alpha Centauri. By a passive sensor.

The Space Shuttle's much weaker main engines could be detected past the orbit of Pluto. The Space Shuttle's manoeuvering thrusters could be seen as far as the asteroid belt. And even a puny ship using ion drive to thrust at a measly 1/1000 of a g could be spotted at one astronomical unit.

This is with current off-the-shelf technology. Presumably future technology would be better.

The life support for your crew emits enough heat to be detected at an exceedingly long range. The 285 Kelvin habitat module will stand out like a search-light against the three Kelvin background of outer space.

Isn't much call for manned recon drones when you can see everyone in the system and make a good guess as to what kind of ship it is based on its radiation profile.

And to forestall your next question, decoys do not work particularly well either. More specifically, a decoy capable of fooling the enemy would wind up costing almost as much as a full ship.

Just to make sure that we are both on the same page here, I am talking about time frames of weeks to months. Such as found when a task force weeks or months away from their target, attempting to fool the [enemy] observers into thinking that your are a force of twenty warships, when you are actually a force of one warship and nineteen decoys.

Seriously, people need to read Atomic Rocket before...well, anything.

[Knobbyboy88]

Do you know what Newton's Second Law is? Have you studied any thermodynamics? (I haven't studied thermo, so I can't really comment on it, but I'm sure you're wrong on those statements.) And no, speed doesn't increase exponentially in space. At best, it's quadratic at "low" velocities. This ignores relativity effects, which bumps it down to sub linear at high sub-c velocities. Although cap ships can be moving faster in a fight, they're also not turning a hell of a lot. That is what kills your speed.

I wasn't referring to relativistic speeds, but low speed sublight propulsion. Ion engines work for exactly the reason I mentioned above. There is really nothing in interstellar space to offer up the kinds of resistance and corresponding friction that would be necessary to impede a ship's forward progress through 3D space, so its possible for the ship to accelerate continuously and even reach hyper velocity when accelerating under low thrust. A larger ship would have larger engines and more available power to supply to them, so it could conceivably achieve greater maximum speeds than a fighter would be capable of reaching. The fighter, on the other hand, could accelerate faster due to its smaller mass.

As far a capital ship's needs to change direction goes, long range turreted weapons, guided missiles, and an adequate defense screen would more definitely minimize the necessity of manuever for a large ship during combat operations.

However, I do agree that the effectiveness of a theoretical star fighter is ultimately determined by the balance of offensive and defensive tech available.

As for the rest of the this section, it all falls from the smaller life-support system. By having a proportionally smaller life-support system, more space can be attributed to weapons and engines. So much so that compared to a cap ship, a fighter of course has a higher portion of mass given to engines and weapons.

This may very well be the case. However, it would need to be a massively powerful engine (ridiculously powerful in proportion to the fighter's overall size) to be able to match the brute force and energy consumption allowed by a capital ship's significantly larger engines and powerplants. This would ultimately depend on the proprtional power of the propulsion technology available.

[Knobbyboy88]

The thing about the hippo and the mice... If each mouse had a stick of dynamite as payload, how long do you think the hippo would last? Even if the hippo had a machine gun, it would still succumb to the bomber-mice rather quickly.

Also, I must point out that a small ship would be better at heat management than a large ship, assuming proportional energy production.

If the fighter wanted to be able to reach speeds on anywhere near same the level as a capital ship, it would have to devote an obscene amount of energy and space to its engines. This would throw any alleged heat efficiency out the window.

[Hawkwings]

Speed? There's only acceleration and fuel capacity in space. It would not need a ridiculously powerful engine proportional to the fighter's size, it would just need the exact same engine power proportional to the capital ship's size.

[Coyote]

The "Starfighter" thing comes up so often we should gather all the salient points together and make a sticky/FAQ of it.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Just to add my own two-penn'orth-

First of all, Star Wars has a special circumstance worth bearing in mind, the private availability of starfighters and of similarly scaled weapon systems. Think of them as an individual vehicle in a hostile (potentially hostile, anyway) galaxy, and also as the most effective personal firepower and defence available to one individual.

From the top down, they may be highly questionable; from the bottom up, as an extension of the individual's ability to protect himself and make a difference, they rationalise better. Of course, even there there are light freighters to account for.

Oh, and no disagreement on the fundamental issue, they make less sense than an equivalent missile fit, and any small craft will probably be multicrew torpedo boat/strategic bomber equivalents. In an unfinished bit of softish-SF, I called them 'pigboats'- a nickname derived from WWI submarines, and considering the stench inside one after a three month deployment entirely appropriate.
Would robot gun drones, deployed very close to the parent vessel to add crossfire to the built in point defence fit, make any sense, though?

The largest things I came across that fit the bill in this circumstance aren't really fighters, it's Traveller's tender/rider system.

In that setting's technology, the jump drive core is the most expensive component of a ship, easily responsible for half the total cost of a civil trader or liner, and it requires fuel- liquid hydrogen to a volume somewhere from ten to sixty percent of the ship. A jump capable warship is at a severe disadvantage to a ship which has been able to spend that moey and volume on direct offence, defence and mobility.

The solution is to back the conventional, mobile fleet with tenders and riders, only barely above civil standard large ships that carried well armed dedicated small warships from star to star, released them to fight and stood well off.
I think the standard was a five million cubic metre tender that carried seven three hundred thousand cubic metre riders. That may be pushing the limit of the definition.