[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

"Your determination to avoid making any concrete statement about the premise you're arguing from is quite impressive."

As the premise is space combat which has not taken place yet, making concrete statements is difficult. And any statement about a possible future war is necessarily speculative. Could you perhaps tell me what details you wish given rather then asking for a nebulous premise.

You're constantly talking about some kind of scenario that calls for the AI to make wide-ranging but unspecified assessments of supposedly civilian but suspect vessels, engage in both command decisions over a multi-element force and intelligence analysis, and generally perform what seem to be wider duties than are normally placed on a single human.

Considering that the specific activity previously in question was piloting a fighter, what the model you're proposing that puts any of the above, let alone all of them, on the metaphorical shoulders of our poor computer is a rather vital point to me.

Originally Posted by jason taylor

"No, it has some rather distinct implications about fitness to engage other fighters in combat."

Which implication is irrelevant for planes which spend most of the time in ground attack and is in any case ahistorical and would be like demanding that the Grenadier Guards be the only regiment in the British Army that uses grenades.

Um, fighters are both presently and historically designed with air-to-air capability as a priority - including the ones for which ground attack is also a significant priority.

You might argue that that's a misplaced focus, but to deny it's there is simply wrong.

I don't know what you're going for with the last sentence.

Originally Posted by jason taylor

"If you want to define every bomber, ground attack aircraft, AWACS, military transport, gunship and so forth in the world as an 'oddity' you have perhaps gone a great deal too far."

Dedicated bombers and ground attack aircraft are seldom built, transports are not intended for combat, AWACS is a command aircraft, and gunships are not planes. So yes the word fighter becomes obsolete when nearly all warplanes are fighters in designation and fighter-bombers in function.

Gunships.

Anyway, yes, once you handwave lots of very important military aircraft away, nothing but fighters of various sorts (basically all multirole to some extent) remains.