Hangar Bay, Cargo Hold & Steerage Cargo

[wellspring]

Originally Posted by Refplace

What about combining several first in rack ships with fleet tenders for maintenance and such between battles? and if you use missiles rather then beams (which makes rack ships significantly less useful) you could have the tenders rearm too.
And another thought a rack ship could have a small hanger for normal operations that would be slower but could get he job done between most battles.

Depending on the setting, this might make a lot of sense. If you have high attrition among your pilots, then you'll be launching way more fighters than you recover. So why not just have launch ships be more skeletal, designed to haul fighters and pilots, which dedicated recovery/support ships. If a fight is such a walkover that more fighters survive, then it's likely that most won't need a ton of support and can return to their launch ships anyway.

The one in Babylon 5 is the only ship like this that I've seen on TV. Its design makes a lot of sense. The fighters are mounted outside the hull, on a boom that presumably includes a tunnel for the crewman to get to the fighter. Its designed to do several things: 1) create jumppoints, 2) house and support the fighter pilots, and 3) support/repair/maintain the fighters themselves.

For support functions, if you look closely, the design does have a small conventional hangar-- by eye it appears big enough for one or two Delta V fighters to fit.

So the tactical picture is this: you jump in, release your fighters, have the carrier retreat. Later, the fighters return. The carrier opens a jump point, and once everyone's safely in hyperspace the fighters dock. The pilots disembark, and later they park the fighters in the small hangar one at a time for repairs/rearming.

Much of this works because of the assumptions of the B5 universe. The pirate carrier was intended for piracy: brief battles against lightly-armed foes. Without a defensive role, they were free to keep the carrier light and spare in its construction, and didn't need rapid turnaround on fighter re-armament. Hyperspace was a place where you couldn't engage in combat, so the fact that docking with an external clamp is slower and more finicky isn't a big deal.

In the BSG universe, you saw the trade-offs of different design philosophies. Cylon raiders had jump drives, but were less maneuverable in a dogfight. So the Colonials' better fighters required a carrier armed and armored sufficiently to stick around for the battle. OK, so far so good, but why did basestars ever show up for battles at all? Those raiders could clearly make multiple jumps on short notice and with great range and precision. So why not park your basestar elsewhere, launch your fighters and have them jump directly into battle, and then have them retreat the same way. Even if you wanted to recover damaged raiders, you could always jump the basestar into the area after the battle was over-- and Cylon immortality means you'd never care that much anyway. Then again, space fighters don't make much hard sci fi sense anyway, so why not enjoy yourself?

I think rack carriers are a perfectly defensible design, depending on the tactical picture.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by wellspring

space fighters don't make much hard sci fi sense anyway, so why not enjoy yourself?

That really depends. It's a badly overplayed card.

Fighter as missile bus...they usually acknowledge that but treat it as not counting. Being a missile bus is a major part of the modern jet fighter's role. They haven't been replaced in that role by disposable drones, so far, though the not-terribly-disposable UCAVs are coming for them.

'Fighter' as the logical end-point of an eggshells with sledgehammers missile and PD setup also makes perfect sense. If adequate armor is unfeasible, slicing your ship into lots of littler independent ships is the obvious way to improve survivability. Dice it fine enough and I'd call it a fighter...

Space dogfighters, of course, don't make a lot of sense unless your setting is massively altered from reality in ways that prevent them being annihilated by beam weapons from far too far away to properly 'dogfight'.

And obviously regardless of any of the above, if your electronics are smart and capable enough there's no reason to put canned monkeys on any of your ships.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Fighter as missile bus...they usually acknowledge that but treat it as not counting. Being a missile bus is a major part of the modern jet fighter's role. They haven't been replaced in that role by disposable drones, so far, though the not-terribly-disposable UCAVs are coming for them.

Maybe, but in space you don't have to worry about a horizon, so there is less reason to put a pilot or even an expensive sensor package on the missile-bus. And a pure missile-bus will have far superior performance over a fighter/missile-bus, since any non-disposable craft will need to stop and come back.

[Humabout]

The missile bus role is certainly reasonable, but I"m also considering aerospace fighter/bombers intended to devastate a planet's atmospheric defenses or strike surface targets with minimal warning. I was also considering this as a way to deliver troops quickly to the ground, but I'm sure there are holes in the idea.

Certainly a small hanger to service ships outside of combat would work.

[wellspring]

Originally Posted by Humabout

The missile bus role is certainly reasonable, but I"m also considering aerospace fighter/bombers intended to devastate a planet's atmospheric defenses or strike surface targets with minimal warning. I was also considering this as a way to deliver troops quickly to the ground, but I'm sure there are holes in the idea.

Certainly a small hanger to service ships outside of combat would work.

Those are good points, though they are separate roles entirely from space fighters (except in superscience settings). In the case of atmospheric fighters, the logic is less immediately robust... but with even very modest advances about computer control, you're back to UCAVs. Ulzgoroth's makes that point himself: our atmospheric fighters are at the limit of what their pilots can withstand in terms of performance-- nearly everyone agrees that sixth generation fighters will be unmanned.

So really, the only reasons to have manned fighters at all are A) tech level limitations and B) dramatic license.

On the point about dropships, though, I'm in total agreement. A piloted dropship may or may not make sense-- but if your shuttle is going to be habitable anyway, then why not?

Either way, a rack carrier makes perfect sense, though it might not be tactically optimal for every setting, depending on assumptions.

[Humabout]

Well, oddly enough, I'd think that the rack carrier design would be particularly optimized for unmanned fighters of any kind, since it maximizes the number of ships you can launch at once and the fighters' unmanned nature means you don't really need to worry about logistical things like how or when to get the pilots to their ships. A small hangar the ships can cycle through for reloading/refueling would more than suffice, For the initial assault, this getup seems pretty solid; although, I'd not want to get stuck servicing drones in enemy space. Then again, that's why you just jump to neutral or friendly space to do that.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Humabout

Well, oddly enough, I'd think that the rack carrier design would be particularly optimized for unmanned fighters of any kind, since it maximizes the number of ships you can launch at once and the fighters' unmanned nature means you don't really need to worry about logistical things like how or when to get the pilots to their ships. A small hangar the ships can cycle through for reloading/refueling would more than suffice, For the initial assault, this getup seems pretty solid; although, I'd not want to get stuck servicing drones in enemy space. Then again, that's why you just jump to neutral or friendly space to do that.

OTOH, you're increasing effective maintenance cost. No crew/full automation . . .

[Humabout]

True enough. I suppose this would be an approach for rather wealthy spacefaring societies. Or just societies that put an inordinate value on the lives of their citizens.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Humabout

True enough. I suppose this would be an approach for rather wealthy spacefaring societies. Or just societies that put an inordinate value on the lives of their citizens.

Also with a limited interest in major expeditionary operations, perhaps. If your doctrine focuses on falling back to safe space after every sortie, there's a number of things you can't do.

Also might not be ideal for major defensive operations, for a similar reason. You don't want your fighters withdrawing entirely from the operation after each patrol.

Depends a lot on how the setting's FTL is used. If ships pop around, jumping in and out of close contact with the enemy, that's a plus for racks, because exposing all the extra elements of a full carrier to that sort of action may not be worthwhile. Might be better to have rear-area logistics ships that do most of that work. On the other hand, if you've got system-wide sublight combat operations, you can't check out of local space whenever you want a breather.