JGregory32 wrote: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.