08-30-2007, 07:09 AM | #1 |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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[Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
Greetings, all!
It came as an interesting fact that most popular space settings include both fightercraft and larger craft, esp. in combat. This seems kinda strange because in planetary navies, we don't have lots of cutters rushing around cruisers and firing some machineguns. So I decided that it would be interesting to raise the question of how the presence and ratio of fighters defined, and what factors affect it? Thanks in advance! |
08-30-2007, 07:15 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
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Re: [Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
The biggest excuse is usually your FTL drive. If it's huge, bulky, expensive and tends to make the ship carryng it vulnerable, you won't send oversized FTL ships into combat where they can blow up. Instead, you'll have sleeker, better armed and armored ships that can detach from the FTL ship and engage the enemy at a distance.
Reactionless drives help, otherwise its hard to justify all that Delta V on a fighter when you could just build a smart missile (that doesn't require Delta V to get back to the main ship) |
08-30-2007, 07:24 AM | #3 |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: [Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
Actually, presence of fighters and simultaneous absence of fighter-scale megamissiles is strange but everpresent.
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08-30-2007, 07:24 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: [Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
The other main thing that makes fighters even possible is weapons carried by small vehicles that can seriously damage large vehicles.
When you have such a pattern, attacks will be carried out by the smallest vehicles capable of doing so. If there is no equivalent of heavy bombs, missiles or torpedoes (expecially nuclear) then fighters don't make much sense. If all the aircraft could do was strafe with machineguns, no one would bother. Fred Brackin |
08-30-2007, 07:30 AM | #5 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
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Re: [Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
Huh, I thought the answer was "Because it's cooler."
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08-30-2007, 07:34 AM | #6 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
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Re: [Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
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08-30-2007, 07:35 AM | #7 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: [Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
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08-30-2007, 07:36 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Jul 2007
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Re: [Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
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08-30-2007, 08:08 AM | #9 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
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(Hint: Many years ago a friend and I used to place a game of space battle on hex grid graph paper, with quasi-Newtonian mechanics. The usual outcome was that one side lost all its ships, and the other side had surviving ships that were out of reaction mass and drifting off the board.) Bill Stoddard |
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08-30-2007, 08:13 AM | #10 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Psionic Ward
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Re: [Space] Fighter-to-ship ratio: what is it and why?
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It was about a world where computers had essentially taken over in the sense that computers were building computers and humans had forgotten even simple things like arithmetic. |
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