AMX wrote:GrandMasterTerwynn wrote: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.