A niche for space fighters

[Stark]

Oh well. It was worth trying. Guess the future of space warface is big ships and no fighters.

NO SHIT.

However, if you're writing that funny 'fiction' stuff, you can set it up however you want. There's nothing - NOTHING - stopping you writing scifi with fighters in it: just drop the delusions of realism. Let's face it: mass-market scifi doesn't care about realism, why should you? Write the story you want to write, don't bend and break it to fit in things you think are awesome. How many times has this been said already?

[Coalition]

Oh well. It was worth trying. Guess the future of space warface is big ships and no fighters.

The only area where there might be space 'fighters' is when the same size nuke is capable of killing both. At that point, you want more 'fighters' to make sure the enemy doesn't kill your massive single warship with a single hit. Essentially the ships used will be small and numerous, to make the enemy have to expend lots of warheads to take them out. There will also be larger vessels, capable of mounting better defensive systems.

So the larger ones will be harder to kill due to defenses, and the smaller ones will be harder to kill due to redundancy.

So if your enemy uses nukes capable of killing ships up to 500 kilotons, then your capital ships will start at 500,001 tons, and your escorts will be very small (keeping the nukes away from the capital ship, or sacrificing themselves, without costing too much). As nuclear weapons change in capacity, ship masses will fluctuate accordingly (you build lots of small ships to make the enemy waste their shipkillers, they build lots of minimukes, you build ships capable of surviving, their nukes get bigger, etc).

The other option is where you have a small economy, and lots of places to protect. You need lots of ships to protect lots of places, so you need the smaller ships. You can still build the larger ships for critical locations, or for surprise reinforcements.

Assuming you are also going with realistic heat dissipation, then smaller ships have an advantage there, due to larger surface area relative to volume.

My post is also ignoring structural requirements, where larger ships have to devote more of their mass to structural bracing, and eventually the military effectiveness of the larger ship is lower than the smaller ship.

But if you do not expect the weapons platform to come back (quite likely when fighters engage larger ships) then an expendable platform is better. If the ship is capable of stopping a 30 ton missile, then a 30 ton fighter will likely be just as dead. A 'fighter' in that situation would be armed with weapons and defenses capable of surviving the battleship's PD fire (and would likely be in the 300-3000 ton range anyway, making it a 'bomber' or a 'gunship'). If the 30-ton fighter is armored well enough to survive the fire, then its own acceleration and/or offensive capability will be lower than the missile, making the fighter a lower threat.

[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!

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

Logic don't enter into the equation.

[JGregory32]

First question is how good is your electronic warfae ability? Can you for instence spoof or jam the control links remote drones require? If so you juts might need a fighter.
Second question, how small can you make a nuclear warhead? Make it small enough and it can fit on a fighter chassy as a missle.
Next, how many missle tubes can your big ships mount? Some would say that missles fired from the cruiser/battleship/destroyer can easily take out fighters, fair enough but every missle you fire at the fighter is one less that your firing at their carrier, the bombers their providing cover for, or home base. Don't forget that the other guys are shooting at you to so you might want to launch counter missles soon.
Energy mounts would actually be useless against a manuverable platform like a fighter, simply becasue the precision required for hitting a fast moving, object that would be constantly changing vector, acceleration, and orientation are beyond most mechanical limits. Don't forget that battles are chaotic things with many many events happening simultainsly.
Fighters would probably work best as a anti-bomber or bomber-escort role. This would free up the cap ships point defense and missle tubes to deal with the enemy cap ship and the incoming missles.

[Stark]

Medic!

Did you even read the thread? You obviously failed maths, since you think a manueveuring fighter (containing a human, thus limiting it's agility) makes hitting it with direct fire 'beyond mechanical limits'. At what range, exactly? LOL!

[JGregory32]

Actually the mechanichal system is quite symple, lets assume a distance of one light second, roughly 299 792 kilometers. practially spitting distance in space. Now assume your trying to hit a target twenty meters in diamater. (note figure used for demonstrative purposes only) I'll even be generous and give the energy weapon a diamater of one meter. If both the target and the platform the energy weapon is on are moving on the same vector and at the same velocity then hitting it a simple matter if you can assume that the mechanics behind the aiming of the energy weapon(servo-motors, robotics, electrical moters, what have you.) can aim the weapon with enough precision. Now assume the two vehicles are no longer on the same vector, or velocity. The weapon now has to track the object with data that is one second old.
Now I'll admit that math is not my strong suit but it seems to me that any deviation originating from the mechanical ability of the weapon mount would throw off the beam by a signiffigant amount.
As for limiting the agility of the fighter due to the fraility of the human being how large a limit do you really think that would be? A constant accelration of say 1.5G plus the occasional 5 or 6 G's as you undertake radical *RANDOM* course changes should be enough to avoid beam weaponary.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

First question is how good is your electronic warfae ability? Can you for instence spoof or jam the control links remote drones require?

First, demonstrate that drones will require definitively require control links. With sufficiently sophisticated computer control, a drone may only need the same sporadic top-level direction a human would. Furthermore to spoof a control link requires that the controller do something stupid, like make it unencrypted.

Second question, how small can you make a nuclear warhead? Make it small enough and it can fit on a fighter chassy as a missle.

Very small. And you can cut out the life-support a fighter would require and replace it with a computer control. Did you just wade into the thread without reading first?

Next, how many missle tubes can your big ships mount? Some would say that missles fired from the cruiser/battleship/destroyer can easily take out fighters, fair enough but every missle you fire at the fighter is one less that your firing at their carrier

No reason to stupidly sacrifice human pilots for this, then. Again, you've not demonstrated why a fighter makes more sense than a drone. And if, for the space requirements of one fighter one can get more than one missile, then you could simply solve the problem via an overwhelming number of missiles.

Energy mounts would actually be useless against a manuverable platform like a fighter, simply becasue the precision required for hitting a fast moving, object that would be constantly changing vector, acceleration, and orientation are beyond most mechanical limits.

Wrong. Again, it looks like you've just jumped into the thread without even a cursory read, like a goddamned retard. And, for your information, a human's control inputs require some sort of mechanical means to make the vehicle maneuver. And the vehicle can easily be designed to withstand tens or hundreds of gravities of acceleration, whereas a human is good for less than ten. Again, you lose.

Don't forget that battles are chaotic things with many many events happening simultainsly.

This might mean something to the admiral directing the battle, but it doesn't mean jack or shit to the grunts in the thick of it. And in a space battle, most of it is computing ballistics tables, and computers are really good at that.

Fighters would probably work best as a anti-bomber or bomber-escort role.

For reasons exhaustively discussed in this thread and every other godsdamned space-fighter thread that has ever come up on this board, a space-fighter wouldn't work at all. And you'd figure that a missile-bus might have some space devoted to a few laser turrets, in order to knock down interceptor missile fire (reducing the need for escorts.)

This would free up the cap ships point defense and missle tubes to deal with the enemy cap ship and the incoming missles.

You could get the same job done using automated drones, without the unmitigated slaughter of crews, and without the gross inefficiencies manned space-fighters would bring.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Actually the mechanichal system is quite symple, lets assume a distance of one light second, roughly 299 792 kilometers. practially spitting distance in space. Now assume your trying to hit a target twenty meters in diamater. (note figure used for demonstrative purposes only) I'll even be generous and give the energy weapon a diamater of one meter. If both the target and the platform the energy weapon is on are moving on the same vector and at the same velocity then hitting it a simple matter if you can assume that the mechanics behind the aiming of the energy weapon(servo-motors, robotics, electrical moters, what have you.) can aim the weapon with enough precision. Now assume the two vehicles are no longer on the same vector, or velocity. The weapon now has to track the object with data that is one second old.
Now I'll admit that math is not my strong suit but it seems to me that any deviation originating from the mechanical ability of the weapon mount would throw off the beam by a signiffigant amount.
As for limiting the agility of the fighter due to the fraility of the human being how large a limit do you really think that would be? A constant accelration of say 1.5G plus the occasional 5 or 6 G's as you undertake radical *RANDOM* course changes should be enough to avoid beam weaponary.

Except a human has a reaction speed measured in tenths of a second. Computer control has a reaction speed measured in microseconds. Not to mention the computer is better at computing your trajectory than you are. A computer can be programmed to adjust for light-speed lag. The human may not remember to do this.

And to a missile capable of, say, five gravities of constant acceleration with turns measured in tens of gravities . . . the manned space fighter's life-expectancy suddenly gets a lot shorter.

[JGregory32]

First there's no need to be insulting. second I have been reading the thread but I do not agree with some of the conclusion being reached, nor am I going to ignore the built in assumptions that some of the argument require.
One such argument includes the "perfect" technology assumption. Over and over again the agrument is made that with powerful enough computers humans can be replaced at almost all leaves. Computers would still be made and programed by humans so some hardware and software would be better than other unless you assume a microsoft utopia where everyone uses the exact same programs running on the exact same hardware.
About the argument that space battles would consist of computing ballistic tables. If everyone is computing tables, then how long before someone finds some way to cheat? Build a missle with a boster programed to kick in close to the target and computer suddenly needs to recompute everything, send those numbers to the point defense, and then the point defense then needs to retarget. End result would be more missles making it past point defense as the computer begins to choke on recalculating ballistic arcs of many missles using this technique at different speeds and distances.
Automated drones are just that automated. What happens when someone sends in something like a MIRV? i.e. a large missle that splits into manny smaller warheads, would a automated drove have the processing power to retarget, recalulate, and fire at what is suddenly many many different targets?
What about detonating a few nukes short to blind the drones, effectivly knocking out a layer of defense?
Turing everything over to machines and having less bloodshed in war sounds nice in theory. Unfortunetly things rarely work out that way. What happens when someone comes up with a way to turn your technology into an achillies heel?
Case in point might be Q-ships. They look like merchant ships so your automated systems would ignore them up till they started firing, even then they might still calssify the ship as a civilian and refuse to fire.

[Stark]

You are seriously asking that a spacefaring civilization might not have drones that can handle a target becoming many targets?

It boggles the mind. We're talking about science fiction here, did you notice? Your suggestion of Q-ships (that you could even hide the abnormal reactors or masses from sensors, and that a military ship would let a neutral get so close for... some reason) which succeed because the computers refuse to fire is so 70s scifi-chic it's not funny.

So, some tips. Try using the english language: things like paragraphs. Also, read the fucking rules, you shitfaced little traytard, because you obviously haven't. If you've got some input, try quoting people and responding instead of firing off laughable polemics like you are currently. Just bear in mind that this board is not full of ignorant teenagers, and people are not simply going to accept what you say.

And it bears repeating: read the fucking rules, you shitfaced little traytard. If you don't, your stay here will be short.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

One such argument includes the "perfect" technology assumption. Over and over again the agrument is made that with powerful enough computers humans can be replaced at almost all leaves.

A computer does not have to be "perfect," it just has to do its job better than a person, or the computer it's going up against, can do it.

Computers would still be made and programed by humans so some hardware and software would be better than other unless you assume a microsoft utopia where everyone uses the exact same programs running on the exact same hardware.
About the argument that space battles would consist of computing ballistic tables. If everyone is computing tables, then how long before someone finds some way to cheat?

You can't cheat physics. If you're travelling along one vector and you apply a force to change that vector, you're not going to get some magical radically new course that defies the conservation of momentum.

Build a missle with a boster programed to kick in close to the target and computer suddenly needs to recompute everything, send those numbers to the point defense, and then the point defense then needs to retarget.

Like the same won't happen to your human fighter pilots. The human's not going to realize something's amiss for a significant fraction of a second. A computer will realize that the missile's acceleration has changed, and can generate new a new range of intercept numbers, and have the commands sent to the gimbals moving the point-defense turret well before a human can finish thinking "OMG WTF!!!11"

End result would be more missles making it past point defense as the computer begins to choke on recalculating ballistic arcs of many missles using this technique at different speeds and distances.

This isn't the goddamned 1950s. We have computers now that can execute many billions of calculations in a singe second. You're probably babbling mindlessly on one right now. You can squeeze large numbers of computers into a given space, and each computer can have multiple processor cores or be optimized for a high degree of parallel-processing. This isn't 25th century science, it's 21st.

Automated drones are just that automated. What happens when someone sends in something like a MIRV? i.e. a large missle that splits into manny smaller warheads, would a automated drove have the processing power to retarget, recalulate, and fire at what is suddenly many many different targets?

Demonstrate that a human with slow human reflexes would cope much better than a computer which can perform billions or trillions of calculations in a second. Demonstrate that an emotionless computer will be inferior to a human fighter pilot who might be shitting his shorts at the large numbers of new contacts on his plot.

What about detonating a few nukes short to blind the drones, effectivly knocking out a layer of defense?

The sensors being stuffed into the nose of the drone will be the same ones mounted onto a space-fighter, feeding information to the human pilot. Both will be equally blinded. In short, there is no advantage to a human pilot.

Turing everything over to machines and having less bloodshed in war sounds nice in theory. Unfortunetly things rarely work out that way. What happens when someone comes up with a way to turn your technology into an achillies heel?

And what if your pilots get funny ideas about whose side is the right one to fight for? What if the enemy manages to get someone in your fighter corps to conduct espionage and the enemy spies hold your pilots' families hostage? What if your enemy comes up with some sort of psychological terror tactic that wipes out your pilots' espirit de corps?

Again, there's no realistic way to have manned fighters in space. They have to haul around extra mass in the form of life-support and radiation shielding for a human crew, meaning less performance, and less space to fit in systems that might improve the spacecraft's combat performance. People will still die in job lots when a space battlecruiser takes one missile too many, but those people will be doing something useful for the war effort, rather than fighter pilots, who would be an enormous waste of space.

Case in point might be Q-ships. They look like merchant ships so your automated systems would ignore them up till they started firing, even then they might still calssify the ship as a civilian and refuse to fire.

Any programmer who can't program in the simple control statement of:

Code: Select all

if(Target[i].Status() == IsAttackingUs)
{
     Target[i].IFF = enemy;
}

Probably deserves what's coming to them.

[RedImperator]

First question is how good is your electronic warfae ability? Can you for instence spoof or jam the control links remote drones require? If so you juts might need a fighter.

Ask the Royal Navy about jamming an Exocet's "control links", which is about the level of sophistication a missile's brain would need. The idea that a missile or drone would need to be remotely controlled in a space battle is simply retarded. Everyone can see everyone else from the word "Go"--the level of human interaction will be, at most, a weapons operator assigning targets to the missiles before launch.

Why people continue to assume a future society advanced enough to have wars in space at all would not be capable of building missiles as sophisticated as what we and the Soviets were deploying in the 1980s is completely beyond me.

Second question, how small can you make a nuclear warhead? Make it small enough and it can fit on a fighter chassy as a missle.

No, the question is, "Why would you?" A fighter carrying nuclear missiles in space is a two-stage missile. We don't put people in the first stages of Minuteman or Topol missiles, so why the hell would you do it in a space war?

Next, how many missle tubes can your big ships mount? Some would say that missles fired from the cruiser/battleship/destroyer can easily take out fighters, fair enough but every missle you fire at the fighter is one less that your firing at their carrier, the bombers their providing cover for, or home base. Don't forget that the other guys are shooting at you to so you might want to launch counter missles soon.

Because fighters (and pilots, and all their specialized maintenance facilities) cost nothing in mass or money and therefore do not represent an opportunity cost which could otherwise have been spent on more missiles, right?

Also: bombers? You haven't been paying attention at all, have you?

Energy mounts would actually be useless against a manuverable platform like a fighter, simply becasue the precision required for hitting a fast moving, object that would be constantly changing vector, acceleration, and orientation are beyond most mechanical limits.

I'm a generous guy, so I'll temporarily grant you this point for the sake of argument (besides, Destructionator pretty much beat your ass in on this and you never bothered to respond). Now, explain to the class why a human pilot subject to human physical limitations, using human reflexes, and doing math at human speeds in a fighter is somehow going to make a better missile-killer than a drone.

Don't forget that battles are chaotic things with many many events happening simultainsly.

Bluntly, so the fuck what? This is an argument for an admiral and his staff, not meatbrains flying the first stage of your missiles.

Fighters would probably work best as a anti-bomber or bomber-escort role.

No bombers for the same reason there will be no fighters. Try again.

This would free up the cap ships point defense and missle tubes to deal with the enemy cap ship and the incoming missles.

Point defense designed to kill missiles will effortlessly swat fighters and bombers out of the sky. If the fighters and bombers are launching missiles from outside capital ship point defense range, then all they were doing was acting as the first stage of the missiles, and you could have done the same thing cheaper and better with unmanned first stages.

Actually the mechanichal ...<snipped for brevity, since you say very little with a lot of words and honestly, life is too short>
As for limiting the agility of the fighter due to the fraility of the human being how large a limit do you really think that would be? A constant accelration of say 1.5G plus the occasional 5 or 6 G's as you undertake radical *RANDOM* course changes should be enough to avoid beam weaponary.

I love how you nitpick this or that disadvantage and ignore all the other glaringly obvious reasons why a meatbrain is a bad idea. So what if a human can maneuver well enough to avoid energy weapons (a point, by the way, already demolished by Destructionator)? A drone can still maneuver better, has four times the delta-V at minimum assuming it's disposable, will be far more precise and accurate when engaging enemy missiles, costs less, has less mass (or can use the mass freed up by removing the pilot and his life support for other things), sits quietly in storage when it's not being used, didn't need to be trained, won't require a pension, won't get scared, won't get bored, won't get sick, won't go out flying with a hangover, won't become a conscientious objector, won't defect, and nobody cares if it gets blown up. This isn't a situation where you make tradeoffs here and there and in the balance, missiles come up ahead, but there are points to be made for the other side. There isn't a single argument for human pilots except "OMG KEWL MIDWAY IN SPACE LOL!" and Luddite terror at the thought of humans being replaced by machines in battle (as if that hasn't been happening since someone figured out how to tie a flint hand ax to the end of a stick).

First there's no need to be insulting.

Quit whining. Between the way you've obviously ignored all the points other people have gone through the trouble to make and your ridiculous unsupported polemics, you've become irritating.

second I have been reading the thread

No, you plainly haven't, because almost everything you've said has been argued and demolished earlier in the thread, and everything else is so stupid even other meatbrain fanwhores didn't try to bring it up.

The alternative is that you have read the thread, and you're just too dumb to understand it. I am willing to keep an open mind about this possibility.

but I do not agree with some of the conclusion being reached, nor am I going to ignore the built in assumptions that some of the argument require.

Too bad.

One such argument includes the "perfect" technology assumption. Over and over again the agrument is made that with powerful enough computers humans can be replaced at almost all leaves. Computers would still be made and programed by humans so some hardware and software would be better than other unless you assume a microsoft utopia where everyone uses the exact same programs running on the exact same hardware.

Yes, perfect technology. Like the kind used in a French anti-ship missile designed in the late 70s. And of course, the slight (or even significant) differences in capabilities between different ships and missiles is much more important than the overwhelming superiority of all computers over meatbrains in space combat, right?

About the argument that space battles would consist of computing ballistic tables. If everyone is computing tables, then how long before someone finds some way to cheat? Build a missle with a boster programed to kick in close to the target and computer suddenly needs to recompute everything, send those numbers to the point defense, and then the point defense then needs to retarget. End result would be more missles making it past point defense as the computer begins to choke on recalculating ballistic arcs of many missles using this technique at different speeds and distances.

And you think that human brains will respond better to this?

...

BWA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Boy, that may well be the stupidest thing I've ever heard on this board. Seriously, the stupidest fucking thing I've ever personally read on SDN.

Automated drones are just that automated. What happens when someone sends in something like a MIRV? i.e. a large missle that splits into manny smaller warheads, would a automated drove have the processing power to retarget, recalulate, and fire at what is suddenly many many different targets?

There's no other appropriate response here. Yes, you're totally right, drones suck, let's send in pilots with pocket calculators and scratch paper to work out the calculations, since they're obviously better equipped to deal with multiple targets than computers are. Maybe while we're at it, we could have the engineers who design the ships use slide rules. And instead of radios, we'll have the fighters carry an AU's worth of telegraph cable with them on a big spool to communicate with the mother ship.

A really big spool.

What about detonating a few nukes short to blind the drones, effectivly knocking out a layer of defense?

Fortunately, the magic psychic powers the pilots will use to detect incoming missiles are unaffected by nuclear detonations. Unlike their eyes.

Turing everything over to machines and having less bloodshed in war sounds nice in theory. Unfortunetly things rarely work out that way. What happens when someone comes up with a way to turn your technology into an achillies heel?

You mean an Achilles heel like less maneuverability, delta-V, ordinance, accuracy, and overall effectiveness for greater cost, volume, and actual human lives lost in battle?

Case in point might be Q-ships. They look like merchant ships so your automated systems would ignore them up till they started firing, even then they might still calssify the ship as a civilian and refuse to fire.

Right, because an advanced spacefaring society will never be able to program drones to shoot back at something shooting at them, even though the monsters in Doom I could do this in 1993 on 486 bitty boxes.

This whole manned fighters versus drones debate is beginning to remind me of the mechs vs. tanks debate early in the board history. You have one side with every conceivable advantage, and the other side with nothing but a rabble of desperate idiots making progressively dumber arguments trying to keep up.

[petesampras]

Right, because an advanced spacefaring society will never be able to program drones to shoot back at something shooting at them, even though the monsters in Doom I could do this in 1993 on 486 bitty boxes.

Advanced spacefaring societies tend to be very bad programmers. Haven't you seen Independance Day?

Seriously, though, this has to be one of the worst arguments I've ever seen. On a par with making the A.I. explode by giving it a logical dilema, such as saying "I'm a liar"....

[SWPIGWANG]

You are thinking this from the wrong direction in the context of the question. You are thinking that humans should get out of the way of the battle and let the computers do the job because it is nearly as efficient but involve no loss of life.

Actually, it is more efficient if we are talking about fighters, considerably more.

However, we have never defined what exactly is a "fighter."

If you are talking about a ~30ton winged vehicle, yes absolutely. However such a vehicle would be an completely ineffective space combatant due to terrible power projection issues from inability to fit reasonable amounts of fuel or long range weapons.

As to the battleship crew, it is my stand that there will be people on it, but not a terribly huge number of them. I have a number of reasons for this stand, the biggest one being the requirement of consumables, but again, battleships are a whole different discussion than fighters.

A battleship is not defined by the weight or capacity of the vehicle. It is defined by the ROLE.

There is no fundamental reason why we can't write a story of 10,000ton "fighters" in a universe where a battleship is the size of a ESSD or a deathstar.

Why would a 10,000ton vehicle be a "fighter" in this universe? Well, it is used in a manner similar to modern fighters, with relatively limited range compared to major warships that can cross mutiple AU with ease. It is relatively poorly armored and expandable, and survive tactically on its greater acceleration relative to larger opponents. It is also one of the smallest independent combat vehicles in the environment.

Scaling issues of drive systems. If the optimal drive system is far too large to be used just to accelerate one missile, the missile bus would be used.

I see what your theory is, but I'm not sure how it fits the facts. It seems to me that missile drives will basically be a fuel tank and chemical rocket, which would be simple enough to be very small, and you would want to avoid extra mass if possible to make the most of that fuel.

The question whether a missile bus would be used depends drastically on the relative effective scales of drive system and terminal attack warheads. While a chemcial rocket, the drive system can be scaled down to extremely small size without loss of too much efficiency, there is indeed not too much reason to use a missile bus.

However, if you want to have some seriously high performance missiles, chemical drives simply won't cut it, as it probably wouldn't even catch a fusion touch ship outside very narrow launch windows. If you are putting an entire fusion reactor and complicated electromagnetic drive system on a high delta-V missile, than it would benefit from a missile bus design.

A quick thought of it leads me to believe it would offer no advantage - the mass saved by a shared fuel tank is lost by the framework it uses to carry multiple missiles.

With proper design, there is little additional mass from supporting framework for sub-missiles. The bus stage would probably not have high acceleration but have high endurance to catch targets and build up speed to penetrate defenses. With lower accelerations and the ability to bind the sub-missiles in almost any manner for minimal structure weight cost, the costs simply do not match up the advantages of having a more efficient drive system and the efficiencies of larger fuel tanks and so on.

The moral issue could very well add a dimension to the story.

Indeed, it could. But the ethical problem is overshadowed by the lack of necessity: there is simply no need for intelligence on a missile or recon drone or whatever anyway.

Actually, there is perfect reason for intelligence on a missile or recon drone: It improves performance of such equippment.

Example 1:
Here you have send a long range scout drone. Now a dumb drone pretty much have to open up a huge communication channel and send thousands of terabytes or beyond of information back to the home system, spending massive amount of energy that makes the signal vulnerable to interception and make the drone vulnerable to detection.

Now a intelligent drone collects information and processes it within its computational system and finely analyzes the weakness of the opponent and sends back a concise targeting list and the amount of weapons required as opposed to a mess of sensor data. The vastly lower data transfer rates reduces the emissions from the drone and make it far more survivable.

Example 2:
A stupid trajectory-intercept missile would probably just chase the target without much planning after being launched. An intelligent hunter seeker missile can have quite a few different options build into it. For example, one can build a missile without a definitive target on launch and work on a self targeting route, where the missile have ot use its own sensors to identify valuable enemy targets of oppunity and analyze the relative value or each and the possibility of success for each attack. A smart missile may, after intercepting planetory radio transmissions, determine the location of the enemy leader after some detective work, and destroy the yart the enemy leader is on. An intelligent missile may also use more complex tactics to defeat specific enemy targets. For example, an intelligent missile swarm may, by previous historical data and extropation of enemy tactics, determine the likely patrol path of the enemy battleship and set up mutiple ambush positions using the backside of planetoids, astroid belts and solar emissions to mask the approach in a long range flanking attempt.

Whatever you do, you need intelligence either in the missile or in the missile launcher/command center. If computers are cheap and missiles/drones have massive range, than there is good reason for building high intelligence into the missiles themselves to improve response time.

For an extreme example, a STL interstellar attack missile from light years away could not count on the intelligence and the sensor capacity of the home system. It would have to determine what enemy target to elimate and how to defeat various enemy defense systems. It at least need the intelligence to perform military tactics and intelligence collection and analysis.

=============
Of course, being "intelligent" does not imply sentient. But than again, "sentience" is not required for anything anyways, as there is no reason why a "non-reflective machine" can't win performance tests in most issues. That is a completely different issue however.

[Coyote]

The thing people bring up about the "human brain" being smarter/faster/preferable to a computer isn't addressing the real issue-- smart is not the operative word, it is judgement where brain has the advantage over chip.

But as mentioned, computers that continue to develop on the same advance curve that modern computers have will be able to reason out and use limited judgement sufficient for most combat scnearios where drones would be deployed anyway. That said, if you feel you need a human decision maker in the loop, then have a human controller on a ship or station that controls a sort of "lead drone".

Like a lot of modern video games, player-characters have "pets" that passively follow them around and don't do much until the player initiates action. Then the drone kicks in with the simple instructions: "anything I attack, you come in and attack as well". Same for anything that attacks the formation of drones.

With this, the closest you can get to a fighter is what Sikon pointed out on page 1: have a large craft, with a pilot and a gunner-- or, in this case, a "drone director". The "fighter" goes to a standoff location and launches drones. While the "drone gunner" launches several drones in a formation, all of them following his "lead drone", the pilot watches for problems and takes evasives as needed.

While a lot of the discussion here focuses on the physical unrealities of fighters in space, then look at other factors briefly touched on such as a ban or distrust on AI-- could there be political reasons to maintain fighters, even if of only modest use (if at all)?

If Super Galactic Empire is allied with Mediocre Spacegoing Republic, then the SGE may want to base a military force in MSR's backyard. But the citizens of MSR don't want to feel like they are being treated like some lowly vassal state; so instead of parking a battleship with 50 heavy guns, the SGE sends 50 fighters with 1 heavy gun each to do the same job but appear less intrusive.

Since science makes sense, and there is nothing in science that supports fighters, then you have to go for decisions that don't make sense but get made anyway. That leaves political, social (ie, traditions), or religious reasons. Social and Religious reasons for fighters in space have been covered and discarded by mentioning "Knights in Space" earlier, so that leaves political. Politics will guide people to make dumb ideas for reasons that may be intangible; in the case I stated, to "show a flag" without stepping on toes.

[Stofsk]

With this, the closest you can get to a fighter is what Sikon pointed out on page 1: have a large craft, with a pilot and a gunner-- or, in this case, a "drone director".

Nah, 'gunner' is sexier. Calling somebody a drone director makes it sound like they're one of the guys you recruit in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

The thing people bring up about the "human brain" being smarter/faster/preferable to a computer isn't addressing the real issue-- smart is not the operative word, it is judgement where brain has the advantage over chip.

But as mentioned, computers that continue to develop on the same advance curve that modern computers have will be able to reason out and use limited judgement sufficient for most combat scnearios where drones would be deployed anyway. That said, if you feel you need a human decision maker in the loop, then have a human controller on a ship or station that controls a sort of "lead drone".

You're probably going to have the drone deployment and attack profile loaded before you ever launch them. In any semi-hard sci-fi, most space battles will be conflicts that both sides have chosen to engage in, since in a volume of space as large as a solar system, the only way you're going to get close enough to an enemy force to fght them is if you go looking for it. Since one can't really hide in space, both sides will have a pretty good idea of the other guy's basic force composition. You're pretty much going to know what you want to kill, and in what order. Sure, if you're the fleet admiral, you might want to designate specific drones to recieve updated orders, so you don't have to waste time, and tip your enemy off by blasting all your drones with com-lasers . . . but these orders will be changes to attack priorities, orders to shift from attack to defense, or recall instructions. Otherwise, you'd let the drones' AI work out what they're supposed to be doing.

With this, the closest you can get to a fighter is what Sikon pointed out on page 1: have a large craft, with a pilot and a gunner-- or, in this case, a "drone director". The "fighter" goes to a standoff location and launches drones. While the "drone gunner" launches several drones in a formation, all of them following his "lead drone", the pilot watches for problems and takes evasives as needed.

These manned drone-coordination/carrier ships would be the very first thing the enemy will try to kill. And if your enemy's opening broadside comes in the form of a Honorverse-esque missile spam, the pokey coordinator ships will be so much wreckage. Better to embed these control links aboard something large and nasty, like a battlecruiser, that can take some hurt before being taken out of the fight.

While a lot of the discussion here focuses on the physical unrealities of fighters in space, then look at other factors briefly touched on such as a ban or distrust on AI-- could there be political reasons to maintain fighters, even if of only modest use (if at all)?

There comes a point where political expediency has to give way to cold hard physics. This point comes well before you get to the point of "space fighter." The closest you'd get is a small general-purpose warship. It'd be a patrol-boat/gunboat/corvette, and unless your capital-ship yard capacity lags way behind where it ought to be, these guys will generally have no place in a proper wall or line of battle. They would be useful in policing, patrol, and mop-up duties, but they'll be too fragile to do anything but empty their racks of anti-ship missiles at the enemy formation, and then get the hell out of Dodge.

If Super Galactic Empire is allied with Mediocre Spacegoing Republic, then the SGE may want to base a military force in MSR's backyard. But the citizens of MSR don't want to feel like they are being treated like some lowly vassal state; so instead of parking a battleship with 50 heavy guns, the SGE sends 50 fighters with 1 heavy gun each to do the same job but appear less intrusive.

Well, yes. The Empire might choose to detach squadrons of patrol-baots to these provincial backwater systems. They'll have the teeth, endurance, and Marine-hauling capacity needed to police civilian traffic, cow the locals (if we're talking about a vessel just big enough to mount anti capital-ship missiles, then it can probably mount a railgun big enough to reach out and smack targets from low orbit, and have the defenses needed to swat ICBM-style weapons struggling to get into space) and discourage privateer or pirate activity. These will, however, not be fighters by any stretch of the imagination. The only similarity they might bear to a fighter is that they'd need a larger proper starship to haul them from system to system.

[Nyrath]

Nah, 'gunner' is sexier. Calling somebody a drone director makes it sound like they're one of the guys you recruit in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

Maybe you'd prefer "Ravening-Death-Machine Master".

[Coyote]

...manned drone-coordination/carrier ships would be the very first thing the enemy will try to kill. And if your enemy's opening broadside comes in the form of a Honorverse-esque missile spam, the pokey coordinator ships will be so much wreckage. Better to embed these control links aboard something large and nasty, like a battlecruiser, that can take some hurt before being taken out of the fight.

For certain-- but the OP said "justify a fighter" so I'm trying to come as close as possible before crossing the bullshit line (although fighters in space is pretty deep in bullshit territory to begin with).

A small drone carrier-coordinator "fighter" would park on the outside of enemy far range and then send in the drones to do the actual close in work. The pilot keeps the drone carrier ship backing up in case the enemy starts moving towards them before the drones can deal with it. And the use of a "fighter" carrying drones is to cut costs of a big battleship, or, deploy said fighter to those places wehere the battleship is (for whatever reason) not politically preferable.

This is stretching things a lot, but not as stretchy as F-15s in space. As you mentioned:

There comes a point where political expediency has to give way to cold hard physics.

[FOG3]

I think I have one to add.

A "fighter" that's basically like a F-1 racecar for competitions ala Yamamoto Yohko. Given said ships were actually much bigger then a Boeing 747. Used for fun mock battles allowing either side to measure up the others relative tech in a way they can also raise tourist dollars with.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

...manned drone-coordination/carrier ships would be the very first thing the enemy will try to kill. And if your enemy's opening broadside comes in the form of a Honorverse-esque missile spam, the pokey coordinator ships will be so much wreckage. Better to embed these control links aboard something large and nasty, like a battlecruiser, that can take some hurt before being taken out of the fight.

For certain-- but the OP said "justify a fighter" so I'm trying to come as close as possible before crossing the bullshit line (although fighters in space is pretty deep in bullshit territory to begin with).

A small drone carrier-coordinator "fighter" would park on the outside of enemy far range and then send in the drones to do the actual close in work. The pilot keeps the drone carrier ship backing up in case the enemy starts moving towards them before the drones can deal with it. And the use of a "fighter" carrying drones is to cut costs of a big battleship, or, deploy said fighter to those places wehere the battleship is (for whatever reason) not politically preferable.

If you're at the stage where you're throwing attack drones at somebody, then I'd think the chances are pretty good that all concerns of political correctness have gone out the nearest airlock. Besides, for a drone to carry enough fuel and powerplant to be useful, it's likely going to be fairly large (after all, it's going to need to accelerate to target, have enough fuel left over for maneuvers on-target, and maybe enough to come back at the end; and it'll need to carry a big enough hammer to justify the cost of building it, instead of spending the money on more missiles.) It'll probably larger than a long-ranged missile, but smaller than the space-going PT boat. The carrier vessel, in this case, is going to be a modest-sized capital ship all by itself, a sort of guided-missile cruiser.

[Coyote]

... for a drone to carry enough fuel and powerplant to be useful, it's likely going to be fairly large...The carrier vessel, in this case, is going to be a modest-sized capital ship all by itself, a sort of guided-missile cruiser.

Yeah! Pretty odd-- a "fighter" the size of a modern Ticonderoga cruiser, or thereabouts. With two people in it-- not what we think of when we hear the word "fighter" but that would be the end result. In truth, the drones would be the "fighters", really-- the two-man carrier would just be the delivery system.

A lot of this depends on what exactly is supposed to constitute a fighter-- as mentioned so far, the size and weight of fighters in real life history has grown at an alarming rate, from boxkites over 500 lbs to hundred-ton monsters,. Assuming the rate of growth continues (since we're assuming the rate of AI capability will also continue) we'll end up with fighters as big as modern navy ships.

If a person is willing to say "a fighter is a combat vessel that carries less than three people", then that cruiser-sized drone bus fits the bill. But if maneuverability and dogfights are supposed to be implied, then I have to give up 'cause I'm with the majority here stating that the closest we'll ever see will be torpedo corvettes with maybe a half-dozen crew minimum (exactly what I have in my own story universe already).

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

... for a drone to carry enough fuel and powerplant to be useful, it's likely going to be fairly large...The carrier vessel, in this case, is going to be a modest-sized capital ship all by itself, a sort of guided-missile cruiser.

Yeah! Pretty odd-- a "fighter" the size of a modern Ticonderoga cruiser, or thereabouts. With two people in it-- not what we think of when we hear the word "fighter" but that would be the end result. In truth, the drones would be the "fighters", really-- the two-man carrier would just be the delivery system.

At this point, one would probably stick a full crew aboard the drone-carrying cruiser and make it a proper capital-ship, rather than the galaxy's largest fighter-bomber.

[RedImperator]

You are thinking this from the wrong direction in the context of the question. You are thinking that humans should get out of the way of the battle and let the computers do the job because it is nearly as efficient but involve no loss of life.

Actually, it is more efficient if we are talking about fighters, considerably more.

However, we have never defined what exactly is a "fighter."

If you are talking about a ~30ton winged vehicle, yes absolutely. However such a vehicle would be an completely ineffective space combatant due to terrible power projection issues from inability to fit reasonable amounts of fuel or long range weapons.

As to the battleship crew, it is my stand that there will be people on it, but not a terribly huge number of them. I have a number of reasons for this stand, the biggest one being the requirement of consumables, but again, battleships are a whole different discussion than fighters.

A battleship is not defined by the weight or capacity of the vehicle. It is defined by the ROLE.

There is no fundamental reason why we can't write a story of 10,000ton "fighters" in a universe where a battleship is the size of a ESSD or a deathstar.

Why would a 10,000ton vehicle be a "fighter" in this universe? Well, it is used in a manner similar to modern fighters, with relatively limited range compared to major warships that can cross mutiple AU with ease. It is relatively poorly armored and expandable, and survive tactically on its greater acceleration relative to larger opponents. It is also one of the smallest independent combat vehicles in the environment.

It doesn't matter if you make the "fighter" the size of a planet (never mind the virtual impossibility of one or two people operating a vessel that size without automation so sophisticated it makes pilots even more redundant). If it's expendable and the only thing it's doing is being a first stage, then putting humans on board is a serious disadvantage. While it's cute how you bloated a fighter up to frigate size to make the mass of the pilots and life support trivial, you cannot get around the fact that ship designed to return home will have one quarter the delta-V of an identical ship sent on a suicide mission.

[Ariphaos]

It doesn't matter if you make the "fighter" the size of a planet (never mind the virtual impossibility of one or two people operating a vessel that size without automation so sophisticated it makes pilots even more redundant).

In my own setting this factor mostly involves having a responsible sapient being (actually usually three) in charge of any weapons platform that can do a number on a planet. It's a political and 'etiquette' issue, of course. But eventually these things are big enough (~25 kilotons) and the life support small enough (in some cases, just raw electrical support for a braincase separated from the body) that dedicating a single ton does not significantly impact performance.

Long story short: unlike marine navies, speed is not a significant factor in space warship design, unless you are getting into obscene sizes.

I disagree.

A military will want to design its ships so that their position will be uncertain given their engagement range.

For example, if a ship is expected to engage its targets at a range of about a light-minute, and is capable of random acceleration of .3 m/s in any direction, they will try to design its attack profile (the face of the ship the defender sees) to be smaller than 540 meters (preferably much smaller, at least in one direction).

In order to counter that, an enemy will want to get smaller, more maneuverable ships closer. At a single light-second, 30 m/s acceleration is needed to do the same for a vehicle 15 meters in 'face'. This is going to be pushing physical limits for any craft with a decent delta V, if it hasn't well quashed them already. Of course, planetary defenses will have a significant advantage in this arena.

In theory you could have something like a dogfight scenario at 300 meters if accelerations are about 10% of c... If dogfights are the most interesting part of your setting (or in the top 50) at that level of magitech, you need to think more about the implications of that sort of output.

But strategically and tactically, speed will always be important. Nothing wants to eat a direct hit.