[Spaceships] Under what tech assumptions Space Fighters make sense?

[pnewman]

You might consider what tech assumptions apply to the pilots themselves.

If you give the setting cheap fast cloning and braintapes then you could set up an environment where all the pilots get a back up of their brains before the mission. If any pilots don't make it back you just activate their clones and all you lost is the actual mission time. This sort of technology will ensure that high attrition rates among pilots don't lead to a lack of qualified pilots, or the expense and difficulty of recruiting more. If your society allows for multiple copies of the same person to live at the same time than you can just make thousands of copies of your top gun pilot and have them fight a one man war.

[Ulzgoroth]

Actually, I find that the point-defense vs. missile opposition doesn't necessarily break the way you might prefer even with sub-tertiaries, so long as the attacker can use conventional 16cms with proximity fusing. But that gets somewhat ungameable in a swarm of dice-rolls anyway.

[JAW]

Originally Posted by Langy

Why? How do reactionless thrusters or high delta-v fuels make space fighters more useful?

Hmm - duno about the reactionles thrusters but if there's fuel intensive but light for it's power engine available a carrier+fighter combination makes more sense as the bigger carrier can carry more fuel for the fighters to get higher delta-v:s. If the reactionless drives on the other hand are heavy for their power you can use them to get unlimited range (OK range is unlimited in space anyway but you get the idea) for the big ship - at lov delta-v:s.

Of course a heavy FTL drive that's useless in combat makes carrier/fighter combination good too. Fighters that don't carry FTL engines of their own then become much more efficient combat crafts that ships with their own FTL usually are.

[Ulzgoroth]

A setting which allowed reaction drives plus something equivalent to the rotary reactionless drive could be interesting. I suspect it would overall disadvantage (fast) fighters compared to a non-superscience setting, because slow capital ships suddenly have a lot of extra space, whereas fighters would still need painfully expensive EPP fuel. Unless they get fusion torches.

Hmm. If you make it full-power rotary reactionless, you've got one-rotor slow-haulers, 5-rotor ships capable of tactical maneuvering, and high-performace fusion torch craft with potential for multi-G short-term thrust. Though for any craft with a reactor it'd be tempting to put on at least a single reactionless as backup...


In the non-superscience regime, fighters have the useful property that they leave behind the necessary high-impulse engine, saving mass that has to be pushed around with costly high-thrust drives. In addition to the similarly necessary long-term life support and general supplies that are likely to clutter up any large vessel.

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by JAW

Of course a heavy FTL drive that's useless in combat makes carrier/fighter combination good too. Fighters that don't carry FTL engines of their own then become much more efficient combat crafts that ships with their own FTL usually are.

But that doesn´t have to mean fighters. It may also mean battletenders and battleriders as in Traveller.

[vicky_molokh]

Firstly, I looked over SS4, which I think does (if arbitrarily) make fighters more viable.

Most important is Hugging the Enemy and Relative Target Size, preferably combined. The good news for the fighter pilots is that now they can deny the enemy big chunks of firepower. The bad is that settings with this rule in play give incentive to have more Tertiary batteries, and those will be prime attackers against bombers, not enemy interceptors. What's special about this rule is that it allows craft of merely 3 SMs difference to run circles around bigger ones, once they're close up.

Landing on enemy spacecraft is mostly only relevant for boarding shuttles/marine corvettes/etc.

Cockpit Multitasking is essential for jamming/shooting missiles in a dogfight, but I have no idea how to explain not installing convenient cockpits on larger craft.

--------------------------------

Now, some rather minor and simple calculations:

At TL9, an SM+5 fighter will have 20 dHP, and 5 dDR (with minimalistic armor, un-streamlined).

I consider a pair of Spinal Mounts essential for attacking large craft, so here are the numbers for them:
Spinal EM gun: 120mm/S/6dx3(2)/sAcc-5; i.e. an average of 63 dDamage worth of penetration (armor divisor and hardened armor should even out).
Spinal missile/bomb: 240mm/L/6dx6(2)/sAcc+3; i.e. 126 dDamage worth of penetration with a conventional warhead.

This should be sufficient to penetrate:
w/Spinal EM gun:
1 layer of Hardened Advanced Metallic Laminate of SM+11 craft, or (barely) 2 layers of HAML of SM+10 craft. Increase that to 1 layer of HAML of an SM+13 craft, or 1½ layers of HAML of an SM+12 if aiming for the chinks in armor (nasty -10).

w/Conventional Spinal Missile/Bomb:
1 HAML of SM+13, 2 HAML layers of SM+11. With chink-aiming, increase that to 1 HAML of SM+15, or 2 HAML of SM+13.

Since under SS4 rules, a fighter will almost always try to flank a 'heavy' ship, it will almost always attack the least armored part of it, and many ships will only afford 1-2 layers on the weakest part. Thus, a wing of SM+5 'bombers' crewed by hot pilots can potentially threaten ships up to 10 SMs larger (8 SMs for the more realistic assessment), and a wing of 'lancers' with the same crew will threaten ships up to 6-8 SMs larger.

Note that the aforementioned SM+13 craft (the largest craft that can be meaningfully threatened by a swarm of fighter/bombers) can carry a whopping 33 fighters per hangar bay, launching them all in 5-10 minutes (depending on hangar optimization). Makes one wonder what's better -3 hangars, or a spinal missile launcher doing 480 dDamage on average.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

The fighter doesn't require a life-support system either. You are going to be wearing a space-suit, after all.

A space-suit is a life support system. You need AKVs if you want snarks.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

A space-suit is a life support system. You need AKVs if you want snarks.

A space suit doesn't consume Habitat Slots. OTOH, for a ship with the only crewed space being the Control Room, this doesn't seem to be a big deal either way. I always considered the X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter argument for/against ship-mounted life support to a holywar of little real consequence. (But I would wear a sealed vacc-suit in an XW, and not the silly glasses-only helment of rebels.)

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

A space suit doesn't consume Habitat Slots. OTOH, for a ship with the only crewed space being the Control Room, this doesn't seem to be a big deal either way.

A space suit for an otherwise normal human consumes finite resources and generates lots of waste heat. A snark needs to be able to idle for years, cold, quiet, and undetected.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

A space suit for an otherwise normal human consumes finite resources and generates lots of waste heat. A snark needs to be able to idle for years, cold, quiet, and undetected.

Oh. I thought we were still talking about space fighters in the classical sense. What you call a snark is probably closer to a 'space mine version of the AKV'.