Standard Sci-Fi Fleet

[Corvus 501]

@Eternal_Freedom, Simon_Jester, Patroklos: In universe fighters would be viable. They would be a mix of AI assisted, human (or other species) piloted drones, and internaly piloted heavy fighters, gunships, and torpedoboats. Gunships and torpedoboats are basically the same type of spacecraft, though they are built with different components and missions in mind. Gunships are essently mini corvetts, designed to brige the gap between fighters and ships. If fighters are battlecrusers, and torpedoboats are monitors, than gunships are drednoughts.

[Patroklos]

That are the specifics of AI assist? The biggest reason to use AI is to avoid the physical limitations of the human body (G-forces, life support, etc.) which is lost if you still have a human present. Is it more like there is an AI RIO/other flavor of backseater?

[Simon_Jester]

First question: do you have something that

Basically you'd need a technomagic solution to the problem of applying acceleration to a human body. As long as the engines just accelerate the ship at twenty gravities, the job of accelerating you, personally, is covered by the back of your chair. If you're a two hundred pound person, having the back of your chair push you hard enough to do that requires that a force of roughly four thousand pounds be applied to your body- which means you'll handle it about as well as you'd handle having a two ton truck lying on you.

What is desired is some kind of field of force that acts uniformly on every part of the body, pushing every part with whatever force is necessary. If that force is truly uniform, then no part of your body accelerates faster than any other part, so you don't feel any crushing or tearing forces that might cause you harm.

Of course, in and of itself this leaves you in free fall no matter how fast you accelerate- but that's a manageable problem.

Without this, realistic limits for a human crew are in the range of three to five gravities (brutally punishing but survivable if you never get out of your chair), with accelerations of five to ten gravities being sustainable maybe for a minute or two, and accelerations over ten gravities being totally unsurvivable for anything more than a very short burst (say, a sudden frantic dash to get out of the way of an incoming Missile of Doom).

[bilateralrope]

Of course, in and of itself this leaves you in free fall no matter how fast you accelerate- but that's a manageable problem.

If you've got inertial dampening tech, why not just use the same tech pointing in a different direction for artificial gravity ?

[Simon_Jester]

There might be engineering constraints depending on the shape of your ship. For example, suppose that the inertial 'damper' works by having a big tractor beam built into the nose of your ship that pulls everything toward it. Or a big pressor beam built into the stern that pushes everything toward it.

[Obviously this would not work to propel the ship any more than you can lift yourself into the air by your own shoelaces, but it would work as an inertial damper]

It may be that in order to make a similar tractor/pressor that would act as artificial gravity, you would have a gigantic 'second hull' sticking out of your ship at right angles. Or that you'd have to apply a much higher degree of fine-tuning to the machinery to get only partial neutralization of acceleration forces, rather than getting total neutralization.

The basic point is that at a minimum you need a system that compensates for acceleration caused by the engines. Whether it provides extra acceleration so that you can have the subjective experience of 'artificial gravity' is largely unimportant; the crew can be trained to operate in zero-g much more easily than they can be trained/engineered/protected to operate in high-g conditions.

[bilateralrope]

The basic point is that at a minimum you need a system that compensates for acceleration caused by the engines. Whether it provides extra acceleration so that you can have the subjective experience of 'artificial gravity' is largely unimportant; the crew can be trained to operate in zero-g much more easily than they can be trained/engineered/protected to operate in high-g conditions.

This is true. Especially on smaller parasite craft.

[Zeropoint]

Just build your fighter in the more physically realistic "up is forward" configuration, then program the inertial damper to be offset from the thrust by one gravity. Thrust forward at 20 gee, and it cancels 19 to leave you at one in the cockpit. Thrust forward at one gee, and it cancels zero to leave you at one. Thrust forward at less than one gee . . . well, the either the system will have to have a small (zero to one gee) reverse capacity, or you'll have to settle for having no cockpit gravity when you're coasting.

The rule of drama obviously indicates that we need characters in our fights, but there's no obvious reason to bother putting humans in your fast movers unless they'll be operating completely out of communication with their mother ship.