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.