A niche for space fighters

[Eris]

The computing and flight plan is done at launch and on the fly, but many battles have the ships at 20 light seconds distant meaning up to 40 second lag time.
Situations can change enough in that time to warrent having a fighter much closer (far enough away that it's manuvering allows it to avoid being plinked out of the sky right off the bat) for processing power and command level decision making.

I'm still sceptical it'd be much of a help. What sort of command level decisions would need to be made after the missile has been launched that hasn't already been so? I can't imagine any decision in this kind of fight besides a command decision could be done better by a human than by a computer, especially the sorts of computers that could be made by a society that engages its enemies at twenty light seconds.

The only sorts of things I can come up with are things like re-assigning targets, but that could be handled easily enough by making a list back on the missile ship and giving a few AI protocols to make sure that all the ordinance is coordinated mid-flight. Besides, if your missiles are fast enough to reasonably engage the enemy at these sorts of ranges, I can imagine they're moving too fast for humans to react, precluding any sort of decision making at all. The situations move too fast, for either the people at the missile ship or on the pickets.

[Eris]

Ghetto edit: Thinking about the potential for some sort of combat drones instead of fighters, I don't think they'll be practical for direct engagement for more or less the reasons that Destructinator (I'm also in his camp about hard SF combat being potentially interesting), but I do think that the concept can be salvaged, just in a different way. Scouts.

Now, mostly this runs into the same problems as an interceptor or similar would run into, since anything it can do the home ship can do better, unless you effectively turn it into another line ship anyway. But. The one thing I can think of that might make one useful is that if you make a bunch of cheap, disposable scout probes they can provide you with triangulation data. This is something that the home ship can't do itself, since there's assumably only one of it; itmight even be useful to fleets, assuming those fleets are clustered enough together to not be able to get a large enough arc between their sensor arrays. A couple scout probes could add in a depth of information that might make them useful to carry around. It doesn't get around light lag, but it gives you a better look at things like location--the sorts of calcuations where multiple perspectives are really handy.

[Stofsk]

But realistic space combat is horribly boring and in the end still unrealistic because no one knows the future.

I have to disagree with both things here. Realistic space combat can be quite exciting without silly gimmicks if you focus on the characters and their reaction to the situation.

You can say the same about magic-tech as well. Crappy writing featuring 'realistic' space combat is still crappy writing; good writing featuring 'magic-tech' is still good writing. I think people tend to forget this in their holy quest to attain some kind of perfect realism that is just not possible with speculative fiction; like Sarevok said, we don't know what real space warfare will be like, and it's likely going to be different to what we think it will be. Probably would be more automated if anything.

[SirNitram]

But realistic space combat is horribly boring and in the end still unrealistic because no one knows the future.

I have to disagree with both things here. Realistic space combat can be quite exciting without silly gimmicks if you focus on the characters and their reaction to the situation.

You can say the same about magic-tech as well. Crappy writing featuring 'realistic' space combat is still crappy writing; good writing featuring 'magic-tech' is still good writing. I think people tend to forget this in their holy quest to attain some kind of perfect realism that is just not possible with speculative fiction; like Sarevok said, we don't know what real space warfare will be like, and it's likely going to be different to what we think it will be. Probably would be more automated if anything.

The quest for realism leads to Orion's Arm, which is a cesspit of brainbugs, stupidity, and cliche's. Walk not that path, young padawans.

[AMX]

You can get away with it if the story is good enough. Star Wars certainly did (interestingly, in the films, fighters actually play a very limited military role, except in special circumstances). But you seem more interested in doing it realistically, so let's look at your other options.

Honestly, I'm more shooting for consistency than realism.

Playing with physics doesn't actually get you anywhere, since whatever wonky things you to do to make fighters work will also make unmanned missiles much more effective.

Indeed; the only exception I could find would be if a human pilot had something to offer that simply can't be replaced with technology (like Jedi precog, or something).
But that's not just wonky, that's uncomfortably wonky.

This is where you start running into problems with the definition of words. Real-life fighters don't do police patrol and interdiction work.

Actually, they do (though it appears the term "police" is not used in English; luftpolizeiliche Aufgaben in German.)

What you've just described is basically a Coast Guard cutter in space.

Actually, I was thinking of "peacetime air patrol" (which is basically police work)

Why not just call it a cutter?

Because it's smaller than a cutter.

And a one-man police vessel won't be very effective, since it limits your options when dealing with suspicious traffic to "shoot them down" or "let them go". Cutters have crews that can board and inspect suspicious ships. They can also do safety inspections and conduct rescues, both operations which, again, would be impossible for a one-man craft. And since they're larger, you can arm them more heavily.

You have a point there - I missed the "inspections" aspect simply because aircraft can't dock anyway; I suppose one could leave the fighter unmanned while inspecting, but that'd be stupid.

Realistically, if there's going to be space commerce, it's going to be bulk transport, meaning big ships which are already so massive that the mass of a few weapons to swat down "fighters" will be more or less a rounding error. They'll also be so big that a fighter might not be able to carry weapons heavy enough to disable it without being so heavy the target is completely destroyed.

That's arguable - commerce might just as well focus on small, extremely rare, extremely expensive commodities, rather than bulk freight.
...
Of course, these would warrant a significant investment to protect them, so that doesn't change the situation all that much.

Then there are the problems of carrying enough fuel and propellant to be good for anything away from a larger base. Remember that a manned fighter will never--never--be able to outrange a missile launched from the same mothership or base, so if you're limited to operating close to a base, you might as well have the base armed with missiles and boarding shuttles and to hell with the fighters. If they come within fighter range of the base, they're already deep inside its weapons range, so the base itself could observe its actions and order it to "heave to and prepare to be boarded" without risking a pilot and a spacecraft.

Lightspeed lag could take care of the range aspect; just because your missiles can reach from Mercury to Uranus doesn't mean whatever ship looked suspicious is still there when they arrive.

Why not just crash the jet ski into the enemy? Whatever weapons you could mount on such a light craft wouldn't pack the same punch as the craft's own kinetic energy.

'Cause then it's gone.
Of course you are right that they would be more effectively used as missiles, but that requires a certain supply which may not be in place.

While I think you're barking up the wrong tree trying to shoehorn space fighters into a story, there's plenty of story potential in a backwater making do with what it has. Consider it this way: the vast majority of stories that have ever been written have been set on modern Earth or earlier, and modern Earth would be a barbarous backwater by the standards of even most hard sci-fi.

But very few of them start out mentioning how utterly insignificant it is (and thus the entire story taking place on it).

Don't get hung up on the idea that all anyone wants to read about are grand empires at their very height. People want to read a good story in an interesting setting. You can make a backwater interesting and the imperial capital boring.

But if I already have a "grand empire at its height" in the story, which turns out to merely be a plot device to explain why things are the way they are in the insignificant backwater, won't the readers feel kinda cheated?

To take one example, the entire Star Wars OT was set, with the exception of the five minute scene in which Alderaan was destroyed, in the galactic backwater. Much of the PT took place on Coruscant. Which trilogy do you think most Star Wars fans prefer?

The problem with that analogy is that, while the OT took place in the backwater, it was also clear that the events were very important for the entire empire; my scenario can only work if everything that happens is insignificant in the big picture.

[Major Maxillary]

step 1: make missile and torpedo systems capable of damaging space ships, then spam them like crazy.
Step 2: make point defense to intercept Itano cirus.
Step 3: increase volume of Itano Circus.
Step 4: resort to smaller ships to intercept Itano Circus.
Step 5: Make small shipr to intercept small ships trying to intercept Itano Circus.
Step 6: ???
Step 7: Deep-space furballs!

[petesampras]

But realistic space combat is horribly boring and in the end still unrealistic because no one knows the future.

I have to disagree with both things here. Realistic space combat can be quite exciting without silly gimmicks if you focus on the characters and their reaction to the situation.

By the time we are at a stage of development where space combat could occur, it is likely that computers will be the 'characters' making all the decisions in a battle.

Look at the advances made in just 60 years in the fields of computing and A.I. The advantages of ships/fighters controlled by advanced A.I. are numerous - superior reaction times, no need for life supports, greater G-forces tolerable, greater precision, no fear or panic....

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

It has been said time and again that space fighters simply make no sense.
This obviously creates a dilemma for any author who might (for whatever reason) want to use them in his story: fighters, or logic?


<snip>

3) Find some other use, away from the battlefield, for which fighter-like ships appear suitable.
While this might seem futile at first, I believe I have actually been able to identify two (or one and a half).

a) Police vehicles
Consider:
-They will usually operate more or less close to a base, so their limited endurance is irrelevant

In this instance, there's no reason why you should have one-man space fighters. What you'd have are small warships. Space-going patrol-boats, rather than fighters. That way, you'd have room to carry a team of inspectors or boarders, and a large enough powerplant to support weapons strong enough to get into the vitals of large spacecraft like freighters and transports, and enough surface area to mount the radiators needed to shed the waste heat generated by those weapons.

-They are not supposed to take on proper warships, so neither their relative fragility nor their rather light armament is a problem

A starship, even a huge lumbering merchantman will need a thick hull. Certainly not one as well-armored as that of a proper warship, but it might just be thick enough to stop fighter-based weaponry long enough for an unsavory sort to deploy his own attack craft. In which case, you're better off threatening to shoot nukes at them.

-They are cheaper than aforementioned proper warships

Not necessarily. The number of one-manned fighters you might require, plus the cost maintenance and upkeep for small high-performance craft might equal the cost of purchashing a few patrol-boats or cutters instead.

-They can not realistically be replaced with missiles

Wrong. Replace the warhead and guidance package of a missile with a laser and a less terminal-minded guidance package, and you have a high-performance drone. It will certainly have the performance needed to harrass a starship, and while they might not have the power reserves needed to seriously hurt a starship, you're not going to lose much sleep if you lose them. And besides, if someone's being a naughty boy, a laser drone will drive home the point that you object to their naughtiness . . . and if you object enough, the next missile to come at them will have a nuke on it, instead of a laser gun.

b) Improvisations
This is the "one half" mentioned above, for reasons that should become obvious shortly.
A fighter-like, but unarmed, craft would, in my opinion, make a pretty snazzy upper-class toy; kinda like a private yacht, but probably more analogous to a jet ski.
When such a "space jet ski" is the only spacegoing craft you can get your hands on, and you're really, really desperate for some kind - any kind - of armed spaceship, it's not entirely unlikely that you might end up sticking guns on it, and hoping that no warship shows up before you've finished whatever you were doing, and left.

Sticking guns on a spaceship isn't an easy proposition. For one thing, a spaceship's main motor and maneuvering thrusters would be designed to work within a certain range of masses and a certain range of mass-distributions. And a commercial spaceship probably isn't going to have a lot of surplus capacity in its powerplant, since a spaceship isn't going to be very cheap to build to begin with. Upgrade the powerplant to support weapons, and you'll need to upgrade the ship's waste-heat disposal mechanisms, and such.

And, of course, there's the problem of where you're going to get the weapons. A smart government entity isn't going to be all that enthusiastic about letting military hardware into the hands of civilians. Sure, you could crudely convert some sort of industrial mining laser or mass-driver into a weapon, but the expertise required to perform such a drastic conversion would realistically be beyond the scope of the 30th century shadetree mechanic. Though one could posit some sort of black-market comprised of old, outdated surplus arms from shadier planetary governments. But that doesn't change the technical challenges involved in militarizing a civilian spaceship.

At this point, it made "klick" in my head (although it took longer than I care to admit): in a sufficiently big and otherwise-occupied empire some "useless backwater systems" could easily be left without "proper" military protection, having to rely on their local police forces instead - who are equiped with fighters, because the budget doesn't allow anything better.

Again, it would probably be more cost-effective to spend that money on a few space-going patrol-boats and some missile drones, rather than space-fighters. And if you have enough space infrastructure to make it worth the cost of attacking you, you'll probably be relying more on fixed defenses anyway.

Similarly, the rebels/pirates/whatever are using fighters because that's the best they could get their grubby little fingers on.

A pirate is much more likely to use some sort of craft that can also conduct boarding operations, since if you're a pirate, you'd probably prefer to seize entire hulls and dispose of both them and their cargoes in your favorite manner (rather than simply seizing the cargo, and spending your own fuel to haul it into port.) Space fighters would be of limited utility to pirates or privateers . . . since if you're going to threaten someone, you'd might as well do it with a ship that can actually put a crew aboard your new prize.

And sure, one might say a pirate would want to use space-fighters, in case they accidentally attack a Q-ship instead of a fat merchantman; but the pirate mothership is going to have to hang around inside the limited range of its fighters and stay in communication with them. If things turn ugly, then it's unlikely any starship a privateer or pirate could afford would be able to outrun a proper warship, regardless of the starting distance between them.

[AMX]

The space-fighter-as-police-vehicle was the approach that Cowboy Bebop took.

Interesting...

In the 'verse I write in, fighters are used more as communication hubs to direct smart munitions from a point where speed of light lag will not affect them as much as it would if all communications were handled by the capital ship.
They are called fighters just because they two manned small craft. <snip>

Nice idea, although I'm wondering how much command input they'd actually need at this point.
I actually considered something similar in conjunction with "Solution 2" - specifically, one variant that prevented anything bigger than a fighter from moving FTL (resulting in swarms of missiles and combat drones, with a few manned command vehicles mixed in).

step 1: make missile and torpedo systems capable of damaging space ships, then spam them like crazy.
Step 2: make point defense to intercept Itano cirus.
Step 3: increase volume of Itano Circus.
Step 4: resort to smaller ships to intercept Itano Circus.
Step 5: Make small shipr to intercept small ships trying to intercept Itano Circus.
Step 6: ???
Step 7: Deep-space furballs!

Problem: One logical step in "shrinking the ships" is removing the pilot.

[Teleros]

recon can be done by telescopes, drones, or, if you absolutely positively must have a human in the loop, an unarmed scout, since the weapons will waste mass without realistically improving its chances in combat.

IIRC, the first aircraft used in WW1 were basically unarmed scouts, but weapons were added to let you shoot down the other side's scouts. Could not a similar thing be done here? The same idea could be also be used for recon drones too.
As for having a human aboard the "scout fighter", well what about the vulnerability of the drones to electronic warfare? One of the ideas I use is where starships and ground forces continue to use living people instead of the fully-automated machines they could use because the electronic warfare of the day is obscenely good. The human in the fighter / starship / tank is basically a backup for when the computer / sensors get subverted by enemy EW. Of course the human crews aren't anywhere near as good at, say, piloting the fighter as the computer is, but they can at least get it back home etc if all else fails. This is also a reason why missile weapons are used so little relative to beam weapons.

For police work, it really depends on the capabilities of the freighters. Fighters could be used to box in suspect freighters until the inspectors et al can arrive - whilst drones could do the same with a fighter you would get the good old hunches computers don't tend to have (would the guy sitting at the drone control station get the same hunch being so far away and running how many drones?). And if really necessary you would be able to get a human aboard a freighter, unlike with drones.

For a fleet engagement I can see fighters being useful as stand-in EW drones (or hunting them down) should our fleet be low on the real thing (maybe from the previous engagement), but able to do tiddly-squat against a properly armoured warship (finishing off crippled ones might let them shoot occasionally though) - ie they'd be very peripheral to big guns.

For planetary assault, the ability to escort your dropships and create near-immediate aerial superiority will be handy, although depending on the tech involved your capital ships might be able to do much of this. If you're facing an enemy that can shield its key defences from your fleet (think Battle of Hoth), then there might be another use for them here too if you can get under the shield: I seem to recall reading that it was only the Hoth shield's interference with TIE fighter drives that stopped them being used against the Rebel Alliance - if we didn't have that interference, well...

[AMX]

In this instance, there's no reason why you should have one-man space fighters.

Except cost; every crewmember you add has a noticeable footprint.

What you'd have are small warships. Space-going patrol-boats, rather than fighters. That way, you'd have room to carry a team of inspectors or boarders,...

Point on that one.

... and a large enough powerplant to support weapons strong enough to get into the vitals of large spacecraft like freighters and transports,...

I was kinda assuming that those would fit into a fighter.

... and enough surface area to mount the radiators needed to shed the waste heat generated by those weapons.

Er... in relative terms, a smaller ship has more surface area...

A starship, even a huge lumbering merchantman will need a thick hull. Certainly not one as well-armored as that of a proper warship, but it might just be thick enough to stop fighter-based weaponry long enough for an unsavory sort to deploy his own attack craft. In which case, you're better off threatening to shoot nukes at them.

Might being the operative word.
As noted above, I think a fighter could mount sufficient armament (well, less "think" than "define thusly while piecing together the 'verses physics"... although that gets a bit into #2 territory again, I guess).

Not necessarily. The number of one-manned fighters you might require, plus the cost maintenance and upkeep for small high-performance craft might equal the cost of purchashing a few patrol-boats or cutters instead.

Tricky... the per-unit cost would definitely be lower, but you've got a point that there may be higher numbers required, due to their lower endurance if nothing else.
Which option would probably vary depending on the setting (I'm starting to worry about the number of tweak this requires - #2 could easily end up having less effect on the in-universe physics than this...)

Wrong. Replace the warhead and guidance package of a missile with a laser and a less terminal-minded guidance package, and you have a high-performance drone. It will certainly have the performance needed to harrass a starship, and while they might not have the power reserves needed to seriously hurt a starship, you're not going to lose much sleep if you lose them. And besides, if someone's being a naughty boy, a laser drone will drive home the point that you object to their naughtiness . . . and if you object enough, the next missile to come at them will have a nuke on it, instead of a laser gun.

Bad idea.
Such a drone would likely have only limited decision-making capability, so what's it gonna do if a ship is not openly "naughty", but merely looking a bit fishy?
And if you do have to resort to missiles, why should the "naughty" ship stick around and wait for them (it's not like a smuggler will hang around at point-blank range, would he?) - or were you planning to pre-deploy your missiles, thus having a lot of nuclear weapons drifting in space with nobody around to babysit them?

Sticking guns on a spaceship isn't an easy proposition. For one thing, a spaceship's main motor and maneuvering thrusters would be designed to work within a certain range of masses and a certain range of mass-distributions. And a commercial spaceship probably isn't going to have a lot of surplus capacity in its powerplant, since a spaceship isn't going to be very cheap to build to begin with. Upgrade the powerplant to support weapons, and you'll need to upgrade the ship's waste-heat disposal mechanisms, and such.

Those problems should be solvable, unless possibly if the thing has to deal with atmospheres or planetary take-offs; the "power" one should be especially easy - excess performance is what upper-class toys are all about.
(Converting a passenger ferry or something would be more problematic in this regard.)

And, of course, there's the problem of where you're going to get the weapons. A smart government entity isn't going to be all that enthusiastic about letting military hardware into the hands of civilians. Sure, you could crudely convert some sort of industrial mining laser or mass-driver into a weapon, but the expertise required to perform such a drastic conversion would realistically be beyond the scope of the 30th century shadetree mechanic.

Funny, I was thinking the opposite: That suitable weaponry would be far less complicated than an entire spaceship.

Though one could posit some sort of black-market comprised of old, outdated surplus arms from shadier planetary governments. But that doesn't change the technical challenges involved in militarizing a civilian spaceship.

Worse, it might offer an easier alternative: buying a demilitarised spaceship plus the parts that were removed from it, and putting them back together.

Again, it would probably be more cost-effective to spend that money on a few space-going patrol-boats and some missile drones, rather than space-fighters.

Maybe, maybe not; I think we'd need to go pretty far into the details to decide that issue.

And if you have enough space infrastructure to make it worth the cost of attacking you, you'll probably be relying more on fixed defenses anyway.

Er - elaboration, please?
You just lost me.

A pirate is much more likely to use some sort of craft that can also conduct boarding operations, since if you're a pirate, you'd probably prefer to seize entire hulls and dispose of both them and their cargoes in your favorite manner (rather than simply seizing the cargo, and spending your own fuel to haul it into port.) Space fighters would be of limited utility to pirates or privateers . . . since if you're going to threaten someone, you'd might as well do it with a ship that can actually put a crew aboard your new prize.

And sure, one might say a pirate would want to use space-fighters, in case they accidentally attack a Q-ship instead of a fat merchantman; but the pirate mothership is going to have to hang around inside the limited range of its fighters and stay in communication with them. If things turn ugly, then it's unlikely any starship a privateer or pirate could afford would be able to outrun a proper warship, regardless of the starting distance between them.

So we strike pirates from the list.
Easy one.

[Gunhead]

I've used the following idea in my SF settings. Detection over great distances is hard because sensor cannot accurately determine what is actually out there. To really find out what the sensors have picked up, a recon vessel is dispatched to take a closer look.
Now of course if the sensors actually picked up an enemy ship(s), they're bound to have their own ships out to intercept any intruders.

I agree with the idea that the smallest craft used should be big enough to be able operate independently. Shuttles are good for hauling stuff and people around, but there's no need to arm them.

-Gunhead

[petesampras]

As for having a human aboard the "scout fighter", well what about the vulnerability of the drones to electronic warfare? One of the ideas I use is where starships and ground forces continue to use living people instead of the fully-automated machines they could use because the electronic warfare of the day is obscenely good. The human in the fighter / starship / tank is basically a backup for when the computer / sensors get subverted by enemy EW. Of course the human crews aren't anywhere near as good at, say, piloting the fighter as the computer is, but they can at least get it back home etc if all else fails. This is also a reason why missile weapons are used so little relative to beam weapons.

I don't see why an advanced military A.I. need be vulnerable to getting hacked or subverted. Ultimately hacking needs a very open system or holes/bugs in the security - it isn't some magic power to take over computers.

Obviously, if you have some Culture style ability to manipulate matter at the atomic level from great distances, you will be able to hack even the most advanced A.I. However, you will also be able to hack human brains.

The best excuse to have human pilots in advanced sci-fi is some religious opposement to advanced A.I.

[RedImperator]

recon can be done by telescopes, drones, or, if you absolutely positively must have a human in the loop, an unarmed scout, since the weapons will waste mass without realistically improving its chances in combat.

IIRC, the first aircraft used in WW1 were basically unarmed scouts, but weapons were added to let you shoot down the other side's scouts. Could not a similar thing be done here? The same idea could be also be used for recon drones too.

Not an analogous situation. The Western Front was a few thousand square kilometers; recon drones will be operating in areas measurable in cubic AUs (cubic light years if we want to pretend FTL is possible). The probability of two enemy drones or scouts running into each other by accident is several dozen digits to the right of the decimal point.

As for having a human aboard the "scout fighter", well what about the vulnerability of the drones to electronic warfare? One of the ideas I use is where starships and ground forces continue to use living people instead of the fully-automated machines they could use because the electronic warfare of the day is obscenely good. The human in the fighter / starship / tank is basically a backup for when the computer / sensors get subverted by enemy EW. Of course the human crews aren't anywhere near as good at, say, piloting the fighter as the computer is, but they can at least get it back home etc if all else fails. This is also a reason why missile weapons are used so little relative to beam weapons.

What electronic warfare? Hacking? You defeat hacking by turning off your receiver, or if you absolutely positively must be able to receive instructions, using good encryption. The code makers have been pulling ahead of the code breakers for decades. Unless your drones are running an unpatched version of Windows 98, "subverting" them should be a nonstarter (unless you're just going to pull authorial fiat to make the story you want to tell possible). Any other kind of EW--jamming and the like--will be just as effective on humans as on the machines, since a human will need the same instruments to navigate as the machine does.

For police work, it really depends on the capabilities of the freighters. Fighters could be used to box in suspect freighters until the inspectors et al can arrive - whilst drones could do the same with a fighter you would get the good old hunches computers don't tend to have (would the guy sitting at the drone control station get the same hunch being so far away and running how many drones?).

No, they couldn't, because fighters will have shitty range compared to everything else available. The only advantage they might have over a larger ship is a higher thrust to weight ratio, and drones will have an even better one. As for "hunches", don't be silly. A drone operator will have access to the exact same data a fighter pilot will, without the distraction of having to fly his ship. Forget lightspeed lag; fighters won't have the range to make lightspeed lag an issue. And why, exactly, if you're positing one pilot per fighter, is the default assumption there's more than one drone per operator?

And if really necessary you would be able to get a human aboard a freighter, unlike with drones.

So what's the pilot going to do? Abandon his multi-billion dollar spacecraft and only ride home to conduct an inspection of a possibly hostile spacecraft alone?

For a fleet engagement I can see fighters being useful as stand-in EW drones (or hunting them down) should our fleet be low on the real thing (maybe from the previous engagement),

More silliness, since the mass you wasted on fighters and their pilots could have been spent on more drones instead.

but able to do tiddly-squat against a properly armoured warship (finishing off crippled ones might let them shoot occasionally though) - ie they'd be very peripheral to big guns.

So would guys in spacesuits throwing darts. What you're really down to here is spending the mass and money to build fighters, the money to train pilots, the food, water and air to keep pilots alive during the 95% of the time where they'll be hanging around the ready room playing grabass and watching Top Gun, leaving behind all the other stuff you could have taken with you if you hadn't taken the fighters and their pilots, so that you'll have a slow, inefficient, third-rate weapon which might occasionally, maybe, if you're lucky, be able to finish off a ship that you could have killed with one more coilgun shell or nuclear missile anyway.

For planetary assault, the ability to escort your dropships and create near-immediate aerial superiority will be handy, although depending on the tech involved your capital ships might be able to do much of this.

For the second time in this thread, I'll refer someone to the thread where the idea of an aerospace fighter was shit upon from a great height. If planetary assault is possible (not a given) and you do have fighters that are dropped from space into the atmosphere, what you will use are air fighters which can survive reentry, not fighters that can do both jobs.

If you're facing an enemy that can shield its key defences from your fleet (think Battle of Hoth), then there might be another use for them here too if you can get under the shield: I seem to recall reading that it was only the Hoth shield's interference with TIE fighter drives that stopped them being used against the Rebel Alliance - if we didn't have that interference, well...

And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.

[Teleros]

Not an analogous situation. The Western Front was a few thousand square kilometers; recon drones will be operating in areas measurable in cubic AUs (cubic light years if we want to pretend FTL is possible). The probability of two enemy drones or scouts running into each other by accident is several dozen digits to the right of the decimal point.

By accident of course, but there will always be regions in which you can expect to find enemy scouts of some variety which improves the probability of "bumping into one" a lot.

The code makers have been pulling ahead of the code breakers for decades.

True, although dividing the decryption task between the ships would cut down on the time, and there may well be other intel that helps here. I agree with you on this, I'm just trying to think up situations in which a navy type (in this case a rather paranoid one) would want a human around.

As for "hunches", don't be silly. A drone operator will have access to the exact same data a fighter pilot will, without the distraction of having to fly his ship.
<Snip>
And why, exactly, if you're positing one pilot per fighter, is the default assumption there's more than one drone per operator?

The point I'm making is that being there and receiving the same information at home base are different things - hence why a simulation of a fighter cockpit is never as good as the real thing - actually being there can give you an edge. Now it won't matter much in a space battle as your reactions are too slow, but for police work? Maybe.

So what's the pilot going to do? Abandon his multi-billion dollar spacecraft and only ride home to conduct an inspection of a possibly hostile spacecraft alone?

Hence why I said "if really necessary". And I doubt it'd be too difficult to stick a beacon on said fighter to pick up later (assuming he couldn't bring it aboard via a shuttle bay etc).

More silliness, since the mass you wasted on fighters and their pilots could have been spent on more drones instead.

Yes well I think we're both agreed that fighters in a capital ship battle = big no-no, but hey if you've got 'em (for some other reason presumably) you may as well use them instead of keeping them in their carrier all battle.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

In this instance, there's no reason why you should have one-man space fighters.

Except cost; every crewmember you add has a noticeable footprint.

Except with the one-man space fighter, you're essentially constructing a complete life-support system for one person. Tack on the costs of building up a sturdy enough spacecraft to actually be useful in fighting, and the space-fighter starts to look like less and less of a bargain. Especially since it has such limited utility insofar as it's a weapons drone with a superfluous life-support capability.

What you'd have are small warships. Space-going patrol-boats, rather than fighters. That way, you'd have room to carry a team of inspectors or boarders,...

Point on that one.

... and a large enough powerplant to support weapons strong enough to get into the vitals of large spacecraft like freighters and transports,...

I was kinda assuming that those would fit into a fighter.

Depends on your definition of 'fighter' and how much energy you need to burn through a target's hull. Or wreck everything that has to be mounted outside the hull. Sure, a small laser gun that could be mounted on a fighter might be able to slag a freighter's radiators and radar, but you could mount this laser onto an unmanned drone and save the cost of life-support, as well as the training and upkeep of a fighter pilot.

... and enough surface area to mount the radiators needed to shed the waste heat generated by those weapons.

Er... in relative terms, a smaller ship has more surface area...

And a smaller volume with which to fit in reactors, reaction mass, weapons, etc, etc, etc. And you have to give over a certain amount of that surface area for thrusters, radio antennas, radar and LIDAR ports, as well as docking/grappling facilities, attachment points for external weaponry, etc.

Not necessarily. The number of one-manned fighters you might require, plus the cost maintenance and upkeep for small high-performance craft might equal the cost of purchashing a few patrol-boats or cutters instead.

Tricky... the per-unit cost would definitely be lower, but you've got a point that there may be higher numbers required, due to their lower endurance if nothing else.

Yes, there's that too. And since these would be fast-reaction forces, they're going to need high-performance engines to get on-scene and off-scene quickly enough. A high-performance engine is placed under greater stress than a low-performance one. Greater stress means more frequent maintenance cycles, increasing the cost of maintenance.

Wrong. Replace the warhead and guidance package of a missile with a laser and a less terminal-minded guidance package, and you have a high-performance drone. It will certainly have the performance needed to harrass a starship, and while they might not have the power reserves needed to seriously hurt a starship, you're not going to lose much sleep if you lose them. And besides, if someone's being a naughty boy, a laser drone will drive home the point that you object to their naughtiness . . . and if you object enough, the next missile to come at them will have a nuke on it, instead of a laser gun.

Bad idea.
Such a drone would likely have only limited decision-making capability, so what's it gonna do if a ship is not openly "naughty", but merely looking a bit fishy?

If you need a human in the loop, you place your cutter midway between the base and the target. Ideally your drones can then talk to your cutter or patrol-boat, allowing you to keep your human in the loop without exposing her to the risk she'd be exposed to while sitting inside weapons range. If you want to be less provocative, instead of a laser-armed drone, you send an unarmed recon probe, which reports back to the patrol-boat. You could have a flight of laser-armed drones near the boat, which can be lit off should the data returned by the recon drone turn up anything extremely suspicious.

And if you do have to resort to missiles, why should the "naughty" ship stick around and wait for them (it's not like a smuggler will hang around at point-blank range, would he?) - or were you planning to pre-deploy your missiles, thus having a lot of nuclear weapons drifting in space with nobody around to babysit them?

A smuggler isn't going to be able to outrun state-of-the-art military missiles. He's probably going to be unable to outrun a missile, period, since the missile can pull much greater accelerations than any crewed vessel. And if he somehow could, then he's going to be able to outrun your fighters and their fragile organic payloads. And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with pre-deploying missiles aboard armed satellites. It's not as if they're going to spontaneously go crazy and decide to shoot you. And you can make a satellite quiet enough to slip through at least a first-glance by a privateer or other unsavory person.

Sticking guns on a spaceship isn't an easy proposition. For one thing, a spaceship's main motor and maneuvering thrusters would be designed to work within a certain range of masses and a certain range of mass-distributions. And a commercial spaceship probably isn't going to have a lot of surplus capacity in its powerplant, since a spaceship isn't going to be very cheap to build to begin with. Upgrade the powerplant to support weapons, and you'll need to upgrade the ship's waste-heat disposal mechanisms, and such.

Those problems should be solvable, unless possibly if the thing has to deal with atmospheres or planetary take-offs; the "power" one should be especially easy - excess performance is what upper-class toys are all about.

You might equip a high-performance space-yacht with high-output engines, provided the owner can afford the cost of fuel. However, you're not going to equip this high-performance yacht with a military-grade power generator, life-support system, or sensor suite. And if one was rich enough to somehow swing all that, or the cost of converting a high-performance civvie hotrod into a combat spaceship, then they're probably rich and well-connected enough to buy a proper patrol-boat or gunboat, even if it's military surplus. That would probably be the way to go, anyway, purchase some small surprlus military hull marked for disposal, and base your conversion on that.

And, of course, there's the problem of where you're going to get the weapons. A smart government entity isn't going to be all that enthusiastic about letting military hardware into the hands of civilians. Sure, you could crudely convert some sort of industrial mining laser or mass-driver into a weapon, but the expertise required to perform such a drastic conversion would realistically be beyond the scope of the 30th century shadetree mechanic.

Funny, I was thinking the opposite: That suitable weaponry would be far less complicated than an entire spaceship.

Not quite. A military-grade laser would probably be a pretty sophisticated beast, requiring lots of power, cooling, and tight mounting tolerances. It would also require a fairly specialized system for tracking targets and steering the beam . . . which requires high-tolerance steering motors to keep it pointed accurately, since at space-combat distances, minor errors in tracking and pointing will lead to huge swings in where the business end of the beam ends up. You could get around this by throwing more power at the problem, but then you'd need a tougher laser assembly . . . and a bigger powerplant. Accelerating a kinetic slug to useful velocities also requires sophisticated equipment and the power to spare. And it faces similar problems in tracking. Neither of these are as simple as, say, a machine gun.

Though one could posit some sort of black-market comprised of old, outdated surplus arms from shadier planetary governments. But that doesn't change the technical challenges involved in militarizing a civilian spaceship.

Worse, it might offer an easier alternative: buying a demilitarised spaceship plus the parts that were removed from it, and putting them back together.

That's likely the path an unsavory sort would go. This path tends to rule out space-fighters, due to the design trade-offs already discussed.

Again, it would probably be more cost-effective to spend that money on a few space-going patrol-boats and some missile drones, rather than space-fighters.

Maybe, maybe not; I think we'd need to go pretty far into the details to decide that issue.

Not really. The only way space-fighters are even remotely concievable is if you're using magical sci-fantasy wanktech. And if you've got magical sci-fantasy wanktech at your disposal, you'd come out ahead by constructing a wanked-out drone . . . unless you had some sort of freak circumstance that halted advances in computing technology somewhere in the 20th century . . . in which case, one must wonder how your civilization got to sci-fantasy wank scales on such meager computing horsepower. That, or have a civilization where there's a fanatical desire to send people off to get killed in pointless, useless ways. Such civilizations, however, couldn't support the sort of sophisticated intellectual environment needed to foster social and scientific process.

And if you have enough space infrastructure to make it worth the cost of attacking you, you'll probably be relying more on fixed defenses anyway.

Er - elaboration, please?
You just lost me.

It's simple. Say you're the planetary governor of a backwater colony at Zeta Reticuli A. You have just enough space-infrastructure (asteroid mines, maybe an antimatter production facility or a He-3 mine in the system's gas giants,) that trading companies within the Solar Empire consider your backwater just profitable enough to send merchant ships to (since you produce enough fuel and materials for your own purposes, plus enough to sell to passing merchantmen.)

Your space-defense needs, then, will be driven by the following priorities:

A) Protect your space-infrastructure and in-system traffic.
B) Protect and police what little merchant traffic does pass through your system.

For B, you'd rather have cutters or patrol-boats, since you might want the need to conduct boarding and search operations, and it doesn't make much sense to buy two classes of short-duration ships to do this operation (a shuttle and a fighter.)

For a small-time backwater, the principle threats to your system security will be raiders, and their primary goals will be to skim off your surplus production, or jump merchantmen using your system as a port-of-call. If they're raiding your merchant traffic, then they'll be hanging out on the outskirts of your system, well out of the range of your low-endurance space-fighters, just in case a squadron from the local imperial sector-defense fleet turns up, or the merchantmen turn out to be escorted by destroyers or other tin-cans.

On the other hand, if they're coming in to raid your storehouses, then chances are, they'll be coming in something big enough to swat a so-called space-fighter anyway. In which case, your best bet would be to use fixed emplacements . . . those nukes floating around in space, aboard armed satellites . . . since you're interested in discouraging them from getting too close to your equipment, and getting experienced men and women killed by sending them out in fragile space-fighters wouldn't be the best way to do it.

A pirate is much more likely to use some sort of craft that can also conduct boarding operations, since if you're a pirate, you'd probably prefer to seize entire hulls and dispose of both them and their cargoes in your favorite manner (rather than simply seizing the cargo, and spending your own fuel to haul it into port.) Space fighters would be of limited utility to pirates or privateers . . . since if you're going to threaten someone, you'd might as well do it with a ship that can actually put a crew aboard your new prize.

And sure, one might say a pirate would want to use space-fighters, in case they accidentally attack a Q-ship instead of a fat merchantman; but the pirate mothership is going to have to hang around inside the limited range of its fighters and stay in communication with them. If things turn ugly, then it's unlikely any starship a privateer or pirate could afford would be able to outrun a proper warship, regardless of the starting distance between them.

So we strike pirates from the list.
Easy one.

A member of a space-terrorist group, or a privateer is really little more than a pirate with a political agenda. As a result, he has many of the same decisions to make. Even if he's just interested in smashing hapless merchantmen, instead of capturing them, a missile will do the job much more cheaply, and at lower risk to the insurgents than a space-fighter would. Especially since you'd still have to pick the fighters up again.

[RedImperator]

Not an analogous situation. The Western Front was a few thousand square kilometers; recon drones will be operating in areas measurable in cubic AUs (cubic light years if we want to pretend FTL is possible). The probability of two enemy drones or scouts running into each other by accident is several dozen digits to the right of the decimal point.

By accident of course, but there will always be regions in which you can expect to find enemy scouts of some variety which improves the probability of "bumping into one" a lot.

No, it doesn't. Not enough to make a difference. It's not free to attach weapons to a scout. Weapons have mass. You have to pay for that mass in delta-V, other equipment, or money. There's no point doing that for the chance to shoot down an enemy scout once every billion sorties or whatever ridiculous number it turns out to be.

True, although dividing the decryption task between the ships would cut down on the time, and there may well be other intel that helps here. I agree with you on this, I'm just trying to think up situations in which a navy type (in this case a rather paranoid one) would want a human around.

Humans are far less reliable than a machine with reasonable security. How many MiGs were hacked into by the CIA and remote flown to America? Zero. How many were flown to America by Soviet defectors? Not zero. A paranoid Navy would try to keep humans out of the loop as much as possible. Humans fuck up, humans get funny ideas about whose side is the right one, humans get greedy. Machines don't.

The point I'm making is that being there and receiving the same information at home base are different things - hence why a simulation of a fighter cockpit is never as good as the real thing - actually being there can give you an edge. Now it won't matter much in a space battle as your reactions are too slow, but for police work? Maybe.

And what information, exactly, will a fighter pilot in a cockpit (who is distracted by the task of flying his spaceship) possibly be able to gather that a machine couldn't relay back home? And even if there is some slight edge a human on the scene has, two questions:

1) Why not put him in a cutter, since you need one anyway?

and

2) How could this edge possibly justify the expense of an otherwise useless space fighter?

So what's the pilot going to do? Abandon his multi-billion dollar spacecraft and only ride home to conduct an inspection of a possibly hostile spacecraft alone?

Hence why I said "if really necessary". And I doubt it'd be too difficult to stick a beacon on said fighter to pick up later (assuming he couldn't bring it aboard via a shuttle bay etc).

This is starting to get dumb. Why would any sensible person prefer this half-assed method to sending a cutter or other type of larger ship with a crew that's actually trained for boarding operations and isn't needed to operate the spaceship?

More silliness, since the mass you wasted on fighters and their pilots could have been spent on more drones instead.

Yes well I think we're both agreed that fighters in a capital ship battle = big no-no, but hey if you've got 'em (for some other reason presumably) you may as well use them instead of keeping them in their carrier all battle.

First, there's no reason to have them, or a carrier. Second, there are two damn good reasons not to throw them into battle "just because": the cost of the spacecraft and the lives of the pilots. Real navies don't throw auxiliary craft away in battle just because, so why would a space navy do it?

[frogcurry]

I've always thought that the best reason for fighters would be to use an Andromeda style solution; to guide a ship in faster than light travel, it needs a sentient and -crucially- organic mind that can use the force/sense the weave/wear the magic underpants and chant the holy words...

In such a scenario you wouldn't be making manned fighters, but you'd be kicking yourself in the teeth not to use manned recon and bomber birds. Warfare would be conducted from carriers for big battles and smaller cruisers with some multirole scout/bomber support for smaller battles.

Large ships could hence be ambushed by enemies using manned craft to track them down without ever exposing their large assets, and then surprise attack. By the time your sensors pick up the attacking bombers their high velocity missles would be spamming your defenses with warheads. You would use automated ship defenses and you'd probably have automated missle drones for support in a sphere around the ship to intercept attackers. Presumably some bombers would be pathfinders loaded with automated anti-drone weapon systems, with the job of making holes in such defenses for the main attack ships to launc their missles through.

The key form of warfare would be a game of hunt-the-carrier as your scouts try to find them before their scouts find you, then overcome the defenses. I imagine it would be very like WW2 carrier battles without the benefit of radar. Possibly some capital ships would be destroyers or battleships and engage directly once they knew the enemies location, but this would involve putting these ships directly in harms way with the resulting risks and costs.

Although it won't have many dogfights, a sci-fi scenario based on this could have a fair degree of tension and mental struggle in it. I.e. a small cruiser hunts a damaged enemy carrier unable to jump after a major engagement. The carrier hides in a solar system, and begins seeking to turn the tables on opponent by tricking its captain into revealing their location

[frogcurry]

Minor amendment to the above I failed to make clear: I assume also that FTL travel can be done easily inside star systems or between then, and that ships travel in a manner that can't be detected. Hence there's no way to just detect the location of a ship that is using an FTL drive.

[petesampras]

I've always thought that the best reason for fighters would be to use an Andromeda style solution; to guide a ship in faster than light travel, it needs a sentient and -crucially- organic mind that can use the force/sense the weave/wear the magic underpants and chant the holy words...

The OP is clearly looking for realistic reasons why fighters could make sense. This does not qualify.

[frogcurry]

The OP is clearly looking for realistic reasons why fighters could make sense. This does not qualify.

When making such a statement, please actually give a reason, and not just an opinion.

[Stark]

Because a) FTL is unrealistic and b) FTL that requires organic magic is even worse?

[petesampras]

The OP is clearly looking for realistic reasons why fighters could make sense. This does not qualify.

When making such a statement, please actually give a reason, and not just an opinion.

You cannot be serious. You need me to state a reason why the human brain having magical powers that attune it to FTL travel that a machine could never have does not count as realistic?

[petesampras]

A FTL system is really the only way you can try to justify space fighters (although, something like nBSG's Raptor is probably more like what would come of it). Maybe you jump in to scout then jump back out without risking the main ship falling into a trap. Even then, I would argue a robot probe is a better choice, since if it is a trap, it is a one way trip.

But as Stark said, FTL is unrealistic anyway. But that does give you the advantage as the writer in that you can just make it all up - you have a little more freedom, as long as you are self-consitant with it.

Not sure I fully agree with this. FTL is unrealistic, for sure. However, it is so fundamental to sci-fi story telling that we generally include it in sci-fi stories out of necessity. That does not mean that you can now invent any balony you want in your story and that you won't make it any more unrealistic. Having the human brain attuned to this 'property' of physics, but a machine could never be is essentially magic. You are putting magic in your story. You now need some kind of soul or spiritual energies associated with the mind.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

A FTL system is really the only way you can try to justify space fighters (although, something like nBSG's Raptor is probably more like what would come of it). Maybe you jump in to scout then jump back out without risking the main ship falling into a trap. Even then, I would argue a robot probe is a better choice, since if it is a trap, it is a one way trip.

But as Stark said, FTL is unrealistic anyway. But that does give you the advantage as the writer in that you can just make it all up - you have a little more freedom, as long as you are self-consitant with it.

Yes. Even if you had FTL and could stuff it onto something the size of a one-man fighter, you'll still be better off making an autonomous recon drone out of it. Especially since a recon vessel has exactly one mission . . . get in, have a look around, get out again. A mission so simple a computer with all the mental horsepower of a modern PDA could get it done.

If you really wanted a small FTL-equipped vehicle to reach out and touch someone from really, really far away, you'd be better off building a robotic missile-bus or an FTL-equipped missile.