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

[vicky_molokh]

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!

[Mailanka]

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)

[vicky_molokh]

Actually, presence of fighters and simultaneous absence of fighter-scale megamissiles is strange but everpresent.

[Fred Brackin]

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

[mikeejimbo]

Huh, I thought the answer was "Because it's cooler."

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by mikeejimbo

Huh, I thought the answer was "Because it's cooler."

The Zeroeth Law: Nobody wants to read a sci-story about the angst ridden antics of a missile's computer guidance system.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by mikeejimbo

Huh, I thought the answer was "Because it's cooler."

That's not enough when everybody seeks a rationale, or starts bulding fighter-missiles anyway.

[mikeejimbo]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The Zeroeth Law: Nobody wants to read a sci-story about the angst ridden antics of a missile's computer guidance system.

I probably would, if only because it makes a lot more sense from a realistic viewpoint.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by mikeejimbo

I probably would, if only because it makes a lot more sense from a realistic viewpoint.

The fact is that it doesn't make much sense from a technological viewpoint. It's a direct transcription from World War II aircraft carriers, pure and simple. The spirit is much the same as David Weber's contriving a technological background to allow Napoleonic era naval combat in space: Give the reader/viewer a simple, familiar model of space tactics that they already feel they understand. If you want a more sophisticated approach, take the actual capabilities of the technology you assume and derive their tactical implications—but then you'll need to come up with a simple graphical image of how a battle proceeds.

(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

[Extrarius]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The Zeroeth Law: Nobody wants to read a sci-story about the angst ridden antics of a missile's computer guidance system.

Asimov had an interesting story about something almost like that =-)
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.