[Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?

[WaterAndWindSpirit]

In my universe, space fighters are used for the following reasons:

Fuel is everywhere. Reactionless drives that run on pure mana (sorry, Exotic Energy) are used, and space is a Low Mana zone. Also, they don't create heat, and detecting exotic energy at long range is almost impossible.

Every computer that has no soul can be hacked in literally seconds if you have a tech mage (sorry, Exotic Energy Specialist that have followed the Combat Hacker MOS) that can link his soul to it, though the exact time depends on the skill level of your soldier and the complexity of the software.

FTL depends on psionics, and psionics can detect each other. What you want is drop near your target (ideally behind a big hiding spot like a planetoid), and send fighters and bombers that use nullpsi tech and turn it off right before the attack.

Weapons outpace defense except for psi shields, and those run out eventually. A battle between vehicle is basically a contest of whom can run out of psi shields last, and evasive actions are a pretty big part of that.

Missiles are psi-guided. Meaning they are literally guided through a psychic link from operator to missile, and only by defeating the operator in a contest of will can you take over his missile. Psi strength diminishes with distance though.

[acrosome]

"Space fighters" are another one of those things that only exist due to Rule of Cool and the aforementioned Zeroth Law. Not unlike stealth in space.

But an independent missile bus makes a lot more sense than a fighter.

Also, I'll pimp a little here: there is a really neat computer game out called Children of a Dead Earth that covers space combat. It makes heavy use of missiles, missile buses, and drones, but no fighters. This was not by design- it evolved from the principles programmed into the game, which are pretty rigorous (in most ways). As the model has improved the game has diverged significantly from what the devs were expecting. The devs sort of seemed to expect "broadsides" of some sort, but players have left those designs all behind, instead making spindle-shaped ships with heavy nose armor and radiators protected by the bulging "waist" that are dominating other designs. (So... they sort of look like Golden Age atomic rockets...) You can also design your own weapons, armor, missiles, reactors, rockets, etc., though the player designs tend to operate unrealistically close to materials limits and have a shocking disregard for crew safety. The boards are as interesting to read as this one- some real experts tend to pop up.

Still, an outstanding game for anyone with pretensions of scifi snobbery. If that's you, it's on Steam- check it out.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by acrosome

It makes heavy use of missiles, missile buses, and drones, but no fighters.

What's the difference between drones and fighters?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

To clarify: if you place the topic of what the spoiler is about on the outside, you already spoil the series; if you put it on the inside, the viewer has no way to find out whether the spoiler in the closed box is going to spoil any series the viewer is following.

You put the title of the media on the outside.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

What's the difference between drones and fighters?

A pilot in the vehicle, and all of the plumbing that implies.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by acrosome

A pilot in the vehicle.

Ah, well, that seems unlikely for any spacecraft of any size.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Ah, well, that seems unlikely for any spacecraft of any size.

Blame George Lucas.

But more cogently, the game uses no technology that hasn't been at least demonstrated. (When last I checked in there was a debate on the forums about whether or not we had enough data on particle beams in vacuum to model them, and I personally would kill to use a CASABA HOWITZER.) So, among other limits there is no strong AI. And when a cruise takes months or years it's handy to have monkeys on board to deal with glitches, do routine maintenance, deal with damage control, etc. Not to mention that needing minutes, hours, or days for an attack order to reach the ship is a severe limitation in some situations.

And, of course, Zeroth Law... :)

But, yes, your point is made. Every ship could be an unmanned drone and missile bus.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by acrosome

But, yes, your point is made. Every ship could be an unmanned drone and missile bus.

I think my point is that an autonomous small spacecraft designed to return to a supporting carrier is a fighter, regardless.

[warellis]

One way you can possibly have space fighters in a realistic space setting is having mind-upload piloted fighters.

In a novel called Hegemony, pilots are uploaded into piloted space fighters that are launched using the primary laser array of the launching ship to accelerate to 82 G's:

A daemon could go irrevocably mad if it spent too much time inhabiting an avatar that was too different from a human body. A daemon was a human mind. But not a human brain.

There were no biological brains aboard the vast assault-ship. The Conquering Sun carried a crew of more than a five hundred minds, each of them housed in neural networks and transferable between avatars: bodies that could be biological clones with neural nets in place of meat brains, or biosim androids that were almost indistinguishable from humans, or armored combat avatars that had a humanoid shape only to aid in the taking and holding of places that were built for humans.

Or interceptors: sleek, armed parasite missiles that were hurled across space to fight and defend and kill. The huge ship itself could be an avatar as well, or rather several. Each of its core systems could hold a daemon, and that mind would become that part of the ship. But no human-born mind could live inside an inhuman avatar for too long. A few hundred hours without a break could lead to serious psychological stress.

By a thousand hours, severe psychological harm was almost a certainty. A few more hundred hours on top of that and the harm would all too likely be irreparable, leaving the daemon with severe, dysfunctional psychosis, or, more likely, just irretrievably catatonic. And no daemon could be in two avatars at once. Because a daemon was more than just data. A mind was a quantum data singularity. That discovery had eluded scientists working on artificial sentience and human mind emulation for generations.

A sentient mind operated on a quantum level. A human brain was a naturally evolved biochemical quantum computer, and the mind it held was a complex quantum-state singularity. It could only be in one place at one time. A mind could be uploaded from meat-brain to neural net, once; it destroyed the meat to do it. That was the irrevocable change that one accepted to join the Fleet and become one of the noble aristokratai. But once that change was made, a mind still could not be copied.

A copy of the quantum singularity transferred it to a new location, but at the instant the new "copy" was made, the "old" copy collapsed into indeterminacy. A rough map could be made of the non-quantum-state structures of a mind, coarse memories and general traits of personality, but the actual living mind, the daemon, could not be duplicated.

A neural network could hold the mind's quantum state, and a hyper-bandwidth connection could transmit it, but at any moment, the mind, the daemon, was in one place only, and the best copy or backup was no more than a memory photo-album, almost unreadable to any other daemon.

The interceptor was riding the laser of one of the Conquering Sun's Primary Laser Arrays, PLAs, catching the enormous output of the huge laser array in its variable geometry parabolic reflectors and focusing it to turn carbon reaction mass into high energy plasma thrust. Zandy adjusted the magnetic nozzle of her drive and her thrust vector changed accordingly, slewing the interceptor in a corkscrew as she signaled the vector change back to her mother-ship. She could direct thrust in almost any direction, so long as it was powered by the PLA of her mother ship. But she needed that laser; there was no way get sustained high thrust from an onboard power source in something as small as an interceptor.

There was also no way to focus killing laser energy from the assault-ship out as far as an interceptor could be propelled, using its reflectors to focus the distant laser of its mother-ship. That meant that interceptors, propelled by laser power from their mother-ships, were the weapons of choice for deep space battle. For a moment she was off the beam, switching seamlessly to a burst of micro-fission pellets for thrust, before the mother-ship tracked her maneuver and tasked another PLA to propel her. The engine switched back to laser power. She was out of the glare of the enemy blinding laser now, and she triggered another spread of sensor drones to launch. This time she had a decent few seconds of new data before the enemy blinding lasers found her. The bow-shields were bleeding vaporized polymer fast, and she upped the injection rate of fresh polymer into the shields to maximum.

The shields were deployable panels of smart-metal and composite mesh that held a fluid barrier of ablative polymer between her and the enemy lasers. Her onboard polymer reserves should hold out for the brief remaining duration of the attack run. More importantly, the new sensor data suddenly gave her a targeting fix on two enemy interceptors screaming out to meet her. Her closing vector towards the enemy ship was up to almost 680 kilometers per second now, and the enemy interceptors were doing about 370 kps reciprocal.

The closure rate was over a thousand kilometers per second, a third of a percent of light speed. There might be a second wave of enemy interceptors beyond this one, she thought, but it would be too late. Interceptors launched this late wouldn't be able to engage her before she was in range of their mother-ship, especially since the enemy boost lasers would be getting dangerously hot; her own mother-ship was venting geysers of coolant trying to manage the big lasers' waste heat.

But she had a target now and the decision to take the shot was almost subconscious. She selected half of her anti-interceptor warheads and tasked them, launching them out into the laser-saturated space around her. The small projectiles' fission motors flared for a violent second, deploying the warheads to minimum stand-off range. Lasing rods aligned at the now unseen targets' probable positions and the multi-kiloton yield warheads detonated in flashes of nuclear fire, sending out coherent blasts of X-ray energy. An instant after the warheads were launched she was executing another random vector variation and dropping salvos of micro-decoys, seeking to evade a possible counter-attack from the enemy interceptors. Her own blinding lasers were tracking across the most likely volumes of space where the enemy interceptors might have deployed sensor drones; their main sensors would be blinded by tertiary laser arrays from her mother-ship, just like the enemy ship was blinding her.

[warellis]

The interceptor was a narrow spike of metal and ceramic, black as space and, where the hull was not interrupted by external hardware, smooth as glass. Zandy ran her hand along the hull of Interceptor CS-1-4. The ten meter long craft was nestled in its support cradle, one of six that were about to be loaded into the forward-starboard launch tubes. The interceptor was festooned with clusters of long "harpoons," nuclear detonation x-ray laser warheads fitted along the interceptor's sides. There were a dozen anti-interceptor warheads and six bigger anti-ship warheads; these were the business end of the tiny fighter-missile. Each warhead was a six-meter-long needle of metal. The anti-interceptor warheads were barely 10 centimeters in diameter, and the anti-ship warheads were only twice as wide. The x-ray lasing rods took up most of that length, with the actual warhead and short-duration fission pulse-drive crammed into the last meter of the weapon. Zandy smiled grimly.

This time would be for real; no simulations now. Those warheads were live; multi-kiloton nukes for the anti-interceptor weapons and megaton-yield nukes for the anti-ship warheads. She stepped forward to look at the retracted panels of the bow-shields, ran a hand along the sensors masts that would extend to look past the shield, then stepped aft to inspect the reflector array that, once opened to its full twelve meter span, would help focus laser energy onto the interceptor's drive. The drive section was retracted for now; in space it would extend from the rear of the interceptor, almost doubling the craft's length, placing the reaction mass nozzle right at the focus point of the reflectors. When the laser energy from one of the Conquering Sun's PLAs focused on it, the drive would be able to accelerate the interceptor at almost ninety gees. Zandy looked over the glossy half spheres of the interceptor's laser arrays.

The little lasers lacked the power to burn though heavy armor, but they would be able to blind an enemy interceptor's sensors. Aside for the bow-shields, the little lasers and the radical evasions made possible by the interceptor's huge acceleration were her only defense. She ran a hand along the cluster of recessed launch tubes for her sensor drones. Those would be her eyes when the main sensors of the interceptor were blinded by the glare of enemy lasers.

Everything looked perfect. It was odd, she thought, to be touching one of her bodies with the hand of the other... Now there was a thought only a daemon could have, Zandy mused. She could see the distorted reflection of her biosim face in the smooth metal of the interceptor, and for a moment it was as if the interceptor wore the same face. She wondered briefly which one was actually "her." But there was no time for that sort of thing now. She focused her mind and turned away from the interceptor.

It was time to head to the avatar storage compartment, where her current body would be safely stored while she inhabited the interceptor. There was just enough time left to walk to her assigned storage compartment before the Conquering Sun dispensed with the charade that she was a freight super-liner and went to a full three gees acceleration; a few minutes after that, the enemy would be in range and the assault-ship would open fire, with Zandy, in her interceptor body, as one of the projectiles.

The avatar storage room was a familiar sight; rows and rows of storage capsules for biosims and the occasional bioavatar. In an emergency, she could have transferred into her interceptor from her quarters, or from a dozen other places in the ship, but if the Conquering Sun accelerated hard, that would risk damage to her biosim avatar, left behind while she was in the interceptor. Zandy jostled past other crewmembers as they climbed into the capsules. Jessa was already in the command neural net, flying the ship. Her biosim avatar was already stored in one of the ship's other avatar storage rooms.

Zandy climbed into a storage capsule, plugged a data line into the back of her neck, and strapped herself in. The link to her interceptor lit up inside her mind and she transferred herself: A moment of disorientation... And she was in the interceptor; she was the interceptor. A systems check ran almost subconsciously as she tested her body: reflectors, maneuver systems, small laser arrays, sensors; all came up green, stretched and limber, ready to fly. She was used enough to the interceptor that she didn't feel a psychological need to take a deep breath. A query came into her mind and she answered it, "CS-1-4 ready to go."

Interceptors could be launched with AI control. But, whether, as some researchers argued, AIs were actually sentient, or whether, as conventional wisdom held, they were just a very clever imitation of sentience, it was clear that, no matter how sophisticated, AIs utterly lacked any sort of intuition or instinct. It might have been different if pilots were forced to interact with their weapons by voice and manual commands, but even biological minds could be interfaced directly with their defenses and weapons; there was no speed advantage for AI controlled weapons.

And in a contest between a thinking mind and even the most elaborate autonomous programming, an AI, incapable of improvised or creative responses, almost always lost. So that left putting a human mind into the interceptor. Not hard to do; a neural network large enough to hold a daemon was small enough to fit into a human skull. A six thousand kilogram interceptor had plenty of room. A biological human pilot could have been crammed in, at the cost of significant payload space, but no biological pilot could have survived the accelerations that interceptors attained under laser-boost.

There was another advantage to having a daemon pilot an interceptor: All too often, an interceptor mission was a suicide mission. The tiny ships really were more like missiles than space-fighters. A daemon stood a good chance of escaping from her manned missile by means of a data-link, transferring back to the launching ship in the instants before an interceptor was destroyed. Daemon pilots allowed interceptors to fight like heedless kamikazes, but without the certain loss of skilled pilots and without the need to indoctrinate skilled pilots to become suicidal. Which was not to say that piloting an interceptor was safe.

Even without combat, the huge accelerations and energies involved made the tiny parasite ships very dangerous. Simply to operate, they had to ride a high energy laser beam that, if mismanaged, could vaporize the tiny ships. An interceptor mission was usually over in less than twenty minutes; an interceptor pilot's statistical average life-span in actual combat time, even allowing for data-link escape for the piloting daemon, was less than an hour. A pilot who survived three combat missions was a hardened veteran.

And each battle could see a pilot launched more than once: An assault-ship carried several hundred interceptors in its magazines; a pilot could expect to be yanked from a dying interceptor into a fresh one and launched again if the battle was an extended engagement. In some cases, a pilot might go through three interceptors in one fight.

In addition here is an image of said piloted missiles being propelled by their launching ships' primary laser arrays (PLA) (for that is what they are essentially, just with uploads instead of flesh & blood):
https://i.imgur.com/BHOHko9.jpg