Good article on "Aircraft Carriers in Space"

[NecronLord]

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?

While not entirely realistic, you can certainly do beyond visual range space combat and make it interesting. It has been done.

[Blayne]

Also the anime/light novel series Starship Operators and to a lesser extend Moretsu Space Pirates also take the hard scifi approach to space combat, so a lot of metal boxes shooting metal boxes at BVR range.

fake edit: Hey Satori suggested it! *props*

Also PainRack has the right idea as to how they're most likely to be used realistically speaking, as a platform for invading/raiding planets/space colonies.

I don't see a FTL engine being so expensive as to only justify a CV equipped with it but leaving BB's and below without it. Capital ships with it can justify fighters not having it, but we're back the problem as to how to justify fighter/bomber craft without breaking people's immersion.

I wonder if it might actually be interesting idea to go "Heck it!" and just embrace the "Robots can do everything better" paradigm and have a series where Absurdly Humanlike Robots that Anime likes to have do the flying because they can handle the gee forces and are immune to jamming. Writers would like it, very easy to play up the drama and angst of robots wanting to be human/accepted by humans.

[Sky Captain]

I don't see a FTL engine being so expensive as to only justify a CV equipped with it but leaving BB's and below without it. Capital ships with it can justify fighters not having it, but we're back the problem as to how to justify fighter/bomber craft without breaking people's immersion.

Well, if FTL drive is bulky, fragile and has to be exposed to space to function it makes perfect sense to have carriers for battleships and everything below. After all if FTL drive can fail from minor combat damage it makes no sense to have it on ships that are going to be hit by enemy fire. Also it is beneficial if combat ships can devote as much of their mass and volume to weapons, armour and engines leaving stuff that is not essential for combat to other specialised ships.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

I like the idea of FTL being limited to a few major capital ships for several reasons. First, it helps highlight the vastness of space if FTL is a difficult thing to do. If every dirt farmer can hop a half day trip across the galaxy when getting water is a difficult task, it really cheapens the sense of scale the universe should inspire in a story. Reliance on carriers also offers interesting dramatic possibilities. If a third party maintains some sort of monopoly on FTL, it creates a political situation like Dune, where militaries of planetary or system governments have to jockey against each other within certain rules, because they can't risk cutting their ties to the guild. Or if every invasion fleet is dependent on a handful of FTL supercarriers, then interesting tactics result. The carriers become a choke point, and very valuable. They may even jump out of system once they have deployed the fleets, either to return at a scheduled rendezvous, or leaving behind some sort of FTL capable probe or communications relay to monitor the battle (depending on the nature of sensors and FTL communication in the setting). This leaves a battle fleet marooned in a hostile system unless they can make it to the scheduled rendezvous. Or worse, if something intercepts the carriers, then the fleet must fight for survival in the occupied system without any certainty of rescue. That could lead to some interesting stories.

[Blayne]

That Carrier though! Think about it in terms of scale, a Missouri class BB in 1943 config was 45,000 tonnes. If we were to make it "Space Battleship Missouri" and doubled the mass and rounded up, we get 100,000 tonnes for our single BB (I double it to approximate taking two battleships and attaching them together upside down and merging them, so they have all around firing arcs).

I would imagine to make a space CV worth it we would need one able to bring with it an entire battlefleet and escorts; which I'll hypothesis as four BB's, six CL's, and eight DD's and maybe some 350 fighter-bombers, landing craft, electronic warfare ships and so on.

6000 tonnes for the USS Atlanta, 2000 for IJN Yuugumo class DD. Based on my earlier formula that's 12,000 and 4000 tonnes each; to 400,000+72,000+32,000 to 504,000 tonnes assuming I can do math. For this to be practical we're presuming a minimum of something along the lines of 900,000 tonnes to carry ships, maintain them during long jumps and so on.

Clearly we've played too much Homeworld :D

I think to make it sufficiently impressive we bump it up to 1.5 million tonnes just to make sure we have enough room for supplies, major ground forces (like ten to twenty divisions?) spare parts and what not. Maybe I should go try and draw some pictures.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Exactly! Please do! I should also mention that this plays into my love of colossal engineering structures and infrastructural projects. It also highlights the scale of what's being done, which constantly seems missed or underplayed in a lot of fiction.

[Batman]

1.5 million tonnes is actually pretty timid compared to a lot of soft Sci-Fi (and the moment you have FTL it's somewhat soft by definition). Size a CVN (which isn't armed worth shit other than its air wing and isn't really armoured, either) up to ISD dimensions (which is and is) and look at the mass figures you get. Yes, not exactly 100% applicable given the sea and space aren't exactly comparable environments but still worth noting.

A combination I could see working for capital-ship carriers is a) FTL simply not working on anything below a certain mass threshold (which is going to be pretty much arbitrary) while your STL isn't up to moving something that heavy at any accelerations worth mentioning (which is still going to be pretty much arbitrary but unlike FTL is at least something we have a pretty good understanding of the workings of, at least where real-world physics reaction drives are concerned).

[Alerik the Fortunate]

If your supercarriers aren't going to be doing a lot of realspace maneuvering, they could be relatively light and flimsy. They might be hugely bulky, perhaps carrying small manufacturing facilities and large repair bays in addition to supplies and a command/communication center, but it could be largely an unarmored frame built around whatever the requirements of your FTL system are. It might have just basic maneuvering thrusters, and maybe minor point defenses in case of encountering debris, but be relatively unarmed, slow, and unarmored. It might not even weigh all that much even if it were kilometers across.

[Batman]

Which particular part of 'FTL simply not working on anything below a certain mass threshold' didn't you understand?
You mass less than (random assumption) 30 million tons, no FTL. It's that simple. Yes, it it is an arbitrary limitation on FTL. It's also clearly labeled as such in the post.

[ray245]

It is also possible that the main purpose of small craft is to simply act as good scouting units to locate the exact position of the enemy's ships and locate its weak spot.

The guns and weapons on those small craft are simply meant for self-protection against other fighters/interceptors. It would make sense if A) Sensors are not some sort of magical detect everything device and B) the large carriers and battleships believes that there is a benefit to gain by staying far away from the enemy.

[Commander 598]

If a third party maintains some sort of monopoly on FTL, it creates a political situation like Dune, where militaries of planetary or system governments have to jockey against each other within certain rules, because they can't risk cutting their ties to the guild.

Didn't Dune have like ZERO space combat? I'm not sure what "Lets copy Dune!" is doing in a thread that's clearly about how to write in real world analogue space navies and presumably involves lots of ships and fightercraft of varying sizes shooting at each other.

Also, lol:

f your supercarriers aren't going to be doing a lot of realspace maneuvering, they could be relatively light and flimsy.

"Lets make the the thing that our big space fleet of perhaps millions of souls is completely and totally reliant on completely defenseless! What could possibly go wrong?"

[Alerik the Fortunate]

I did say relatively. Going with something like Batman's proposal, it could be advantageous to make the thing as massive and massively armed as possible too, though. I was just pointing out a possibility if mass is a serious issue in the setting.

[Sky Captain]

f your supercarriers aren't going to be doing a lot of realspace maneuvering, they could be relatively light and flimsy.

"Lets make the the thing that our big space fleet of perhaps millions of souls is completely and totally reliant on completely defenseless! What could possibly go wrong?"

Carriers would have their fleet of warships to defend them. If your carriers are in position where enemy can attack them then something has fucked up on multiple levels. Just like in a real world carriers don't have any serious weapons or armour. It would take only a fishing trawler fitted with torpedo launcher to send one to the bottom. Hovewer carriers have their air wing and escorts that are supposed to stop any attacker before it can launch a missile or torpedo against carrier.

[Commander 598]

f your supercarriers aren't going to be doing a lot of realspace maneuvering, they could be relatively light and flimsy.

"Lets make the the thing that our big space fleet of perhaps millions of souls is completely and totally reliant on completely defenseless! What could possibly go wrong?"

Carriers would have their fleet of warships to defend them. If your carriers are in position where enemy can attack them then something has fucked up on multiple levels. Just like in a real world carriers don't have any serious weapons or armour. It would take only a fishing trawler fitted with torpedo launcher to send one to the bottom. Hovewer carriers have their air wing and escorts that are supposed to stop any attacker before it can launch a missile or torpedo against carrier.

But with a real carrier your entire fleet isn't stranded astronomical distances from anything without it, it also isn't the only source of fuel, munitions, and maintenance facilities for astronomical distances. These situations aren't remotely comparable.

If this is your plan of fleet management you'd better be rolling around in a massive hollowed out asteroid covered in more and bigger guns than you even knew you had.

[Simon_Jester]

If ships you need for logistics support are 'light and flimsy,' they'd probably be built with a lot of redundancy, modular design, and (hopefully) you'd send many of them per fleet. This could still wind up being more cost-effective than individual heavily armored behemoths.

In real life, ships that carry ammunition and fuel for naval ships were often nothing but a fast, specialized cargo transport.

[Elfdart]

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.

The one you described really sounds like something people will pay to see at the box office.

[Sea Skimmer]

If ships you need for logistics support are 'light and flimsy,' they'd probably be built with a lot of redundancy, modular design, and (hopefully) you'd send many of them per fleet. This could still wind up being more cost-effective than individual heavily armored behemoths.

In real life, ships that carry ammunition and fuel for naval ships were often nothing but a fast, specialized cargo transport.

Or in wartime, they might well be a slow hastily converted scrapheaps. It might be nothing but a bunch of shipping containers with an engine on the rear, I think a Star Wars EU freighter like that exists, certainly its found in other written sci fi. Redundancy in a cargo ship may not make much sense compared to sending out more ships depending on how expensive the drive system is. They might even be intended for nothing but one way missions, or will only the drive and crew section returning and the cargo end actually attaching to the warship to be drained of fuel and supplies over time, then cast away, or picked up by the next cargo ship. In effect making it a giant shipping container.

The problem with aircraft carriers in space and any discussion of them is, well, what counts as a fighter or bomber or what have you? Little tiny one man fighters have some obvious problems and may or may not work depending on the setting technology, but everyone would agree we can call an X-Wing a fighter. But what about a 3,000 ton ship with multiple weapons mounts which just happens to only have a crew of two or three people who have bunks in a little cockpit compartment and sleep waiting for the computers to tell them an enemy is found. Is this a fighter or a missile corvette? Or more of a space submarine? What if this craft is refueled and even has its crew replaced by tankers sent out by the 'carrier'? Modern jet fighters can be an actual forty times the mass of a typical WW1 fighter, another forty times increase would get us to 1,600 tons, so its a very valid thing to think about. Likewise flying endurance went from around an hour to as much as a dozen hours (with refueling), scale that up another dozen times and we are approaching a week long mission. If we have cryosleep tech or even just really good chemical sleeping /wakeup pills the options could expand even more.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Good point. It's obvious that space "fighters" aren't going to be exact analogues to contemporary fighter planes; mixing elements from other existing vessel types such as submarines or manned bombers would give increased realism while drawing from existing sources for experience.

[Blayne]

I would arbitrarily draw the line at relative sizes; if our fighter candidate is 1,600 tonnes but our smallest destroyer or frigate is 30,000 tonnes than it doesn't matter that much for our efforts to envision a wet navy in space.


I think keeping ships relatively small compared to other SciFi settings has merit in that they would probably be faster and cheaper to manufacture, they might not need to reach the colossal sizes in contemporary scifi regardless, and that smaller sizes may confer certain logistical and defensive advantages depending on the technology.

I think with something as important as the CV in our hypothetical here we wouldn't be jumping it into a war zone except as a hail marry/desperation move if its sufficiently armed and armored to make a difference. Ideally I would think we would jump it, presuming an "Sol" like system somewhere around Neptune or whichever planet has a lot of moons we can hide it near and then have a campaign to "push" towards the enemy homeworld or base of operations in that system.

Traveling using something with a high thrust high impulse engines, so actual campaigning takes days, weeks to months maybe even a year or so to "fight" over the system in a Pacific War sort of style. With one maybe both sides constantly jumping in more ships and material, maybe even mobile factories and miners/refineries.

[McKitten]

The problem with aircraft carriers in space and any discussion of them is, well, what counts as a fighter or bomber or what have you? Little tiny one man fighters have some obvious problems and may or may not work depending on the setting technology, but everyone would agree we can call an X-Wing a fighter. But what about a 3,000 ton ship with multiple weapons mounts which just happens to only have a crew of two or three people who have bunks in a little cockpit compartment and sleep waiting for the computers to tell them an enemy is found. Is this a fighter or a missile corvette? Or more of a space submarine? What if this craft is refueled and even has its crew replaced by tankers sent out by the 'carrier'? Modern jet fighters can be an actual forty times the mass of a typical WW1 fighter, another forty times increase would get us to 1,600 tons, so its a very valid thing to think about. Likewise flying endurance went from around an hour to as much as a dozen hours (with refueling), scale that up another dozen times and we are approaching a week long mission. If we have cryosleep tech or even just really good chemical sleeping /wakeup pills the options could expand even more.

Nah, doesn't work out. The individual sizes don't matter, the problem is that due to the conditions in space, several smaller ships are always worse than one big one, especially if those smaller ships are supposed to be launched from the big one.
There is just no useful role for them. Missile carriers are especially useless, since they will reduce your effective missile range. Scouts lose out against bigger sensors (and no, you can't hide behind moons or asteroids), and no gun will do more damage than an equally large warhead. All that holds even before factoring in the problem of increased inefficiency and carrying humans around.
The guy in the article has it right when he points out that carriers only work because the carrier and the fighters operate in fundamentally different mediums (water&air respectively).

Hi guys btw.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem with aircraft carriers in space and any discussion of them is, well, what counts as a fighter or bomber or what have you? Little tiny one man fighters have some obvious problems and may or may not work depending on the setting technology, but everyone would agree we can call an X-Wing a fighter. But what about a 3,000 ton ship with multiple weapons mounts which just happens to only have a crew of two or three people who have bunks in a little cockpit compartment and sleep waiting for the computers to tell them an enemy is found. Is this a fighter or a missile corvette? Or more of a space submarine? What if this craft is refueled and even has its crew replaced by tankers sent out by the 'carrier'? Modern jet fighters can be an actual forty times the mass of a typical WW1 fighter, another forty times increase would get us to 1,600 tons, so its a very valid thing to think about. Likewise flying endurance went from around an hour to as much as a dozen hours (with refueling), scale that up another dozen times and we are approaching a week long mission. If we have cryosleep tech or even just really good chemical sleeping /wakeup pills the options could expand even more.

Yeah. If we're determined to use naval vocabulary, we can end up with a lot of things other than 'fighters.' For a game I once wound up with 'carriers,' but recycling terminology from naval warfare while applying some vague sense of logic left me calling the small craft 'cutters' and the motherships 'tenders.' Modeling them as an AGP for a bunch of PT-boat equivalents mde a lot more sense.

Then again, it's kind of arbitrary. A "frigate" doesn't really mean what it did 300 years ago either, when you think about it- a modern frigate just can't do independent cruising and power projection the way an Age of Sail frigate could.

[Sea Skimmer]

The only truly rational thing to do would be go back to the rates system. In the age of sail the functions, configuration and methods of combat of all major warships were basically the same, the difference was purely one of scale. The same thing is basically true of modern multipurpose missile ships, and would almost certainly be true of ships in space since all space is more or less the same. You don't even have differences brought on by shallow water. So whatever is the biggest and baddest ship around is a 1st rate, adjust the ratings downward as need be.

The other option would be generic mission oriented names, which the USN actually started to do in the 1950s and 60s before giving it up with the infamous 1975 'cruiser reclassification', when we had ocean escorts, fast task force escorts and a few others, and the only new ship called a cruiser was nuclear powered and thus actually could steam the world as was the classic cruiser role.

Littoral Combat Ship is actually a reversion to that concept of classification, but one unlikely to stick since DDG-1000 is a destroyer instead of a Coastal Attack Escort. In any event this idea works better for modern naval warfare then space warfare. Rates would be best, with combat subdivisions limited to maybe combatant and carrier, while auxiliaries and transports would retain the mission oriented names like repair ship, oilier ect.. they’ve always had. But this would deprive us of fun like calling something a Heavy Armored Dreadnought Battle Missile Line Ship. Or as an example I have used before when 'modern' battleships come up, clearly we need to bend over backwards so we an classify something armed with nuclear weapons as a trireme!

[Elfdart]

All the bulging neck veins and clenched teeth over whether a spaceship is a destroyer or a dreadnaught or yacht or fluyt or dinghy always struck me as silly. The system of rates certainly seems more useful and less hackneyed, but so would small-medium-large.

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.

I can't think of a space battle or minor skirmish in Star Wars that doesn't mention jamming and/or interference. When Han is trying to bump off a single TIE fighter in ANH, the first thing he says to Chewie is "Jam its transmissions".

[Eternal_Freedom]

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.

I can't think of a space battle or minor skirmish in Star Wars that doesn't mention jamming and/or interference. When Han is trying to bump off a single TIE fighter in ANH, the first thing he says to Chewie is "Jam its transmissions".

Indeed, in X Wing SOlo Command we see full-spectrum jamming being used against droid fighters to spectacular effect, athough since those were slaved to living wingmen it is likely that autonomous droid fighters woudl be less affected.

[Blayne]

Exactly! Please do! I should also mention that this plays into my love of colossal engineering structures and infrastructural projects. It also highlights the scale of what's being done, which constantly seems missed or underplayed in a lot of fiction.

Here you go dude! UNS "Stalingrad"

I could maybe go to my drafting table and make something more formal/cleaner but I'm not an engineering or architecture student... :(

I'm thinking if our "superdreadnaught" there is 350,000 tonnes then something that can carry what looks like is 60 to 70 means 24,500,000 tonnes; if 350,000 seems too small and prefer more EVE or Starwars tonnage just multiply by as many zeros across the board until it looks like.

Basically the ships dock like those fish on the bigger fish pointing straight at the carrier and then dock in reinforced "drydocks" that resemble ICBM missile tubes, I'm thinking best way is that they are "reeled" in so that they can do a hard burn and escape like a rocket ship under combat conditions.

Those dry docks can do scraping, repairs, maintenance, and even from scratch construction of ships. Refineries, fabricators, material sorting and storage can all be done from within the ship. There's little "bands" that go around the circumference of the carrier which are habitats. The ship spins so it generates artificial gravity along the edges, all heavy factory work is done in the "middle" to easy transportation and fabrication/assembly.

The carrier itself is one massive coilgun so it in of itself is a formidable weapons platform, I'm not bothering to put down numbers as SciFi Writers Have No Sense of Scale and I likely couldn't come up with a reasonable number.

Essentially what this means is that if a carrier is of this size, and can carry that many ships; a lot depends on the limitations of the FTL technology. Can we jump with pinpoint accuracy? Can we only jump to the "edge" of the gravity well of a star system and then slow boat it inwards? How long are the recharge times on spooling the jump drive (long presumably?)?

So we have our carrier and it carries capital ships, and basically is a mobile Pearl Harbor, I imagine its best use is to have it be "deployable" and latch onto a moon or asteroid so it can dismantle it for ores to crank out warships with? One thing for sure, it isn't going to be stealthy...

I'm thinking by having that big Amarr looking "dish" at the front we could potentially have mega upsized ships comparable in size with the carrier itself that can latch on for jumps, like "Aliens" sized ore haulers from the third (fourth?) movie I think it was?