I hope nobody will be disappointed if I just pick out a few things to respond to.
(If you are, just complain.)
Because of that pesky little thing called "internal consistency".Stark wrote:So why the hell is it even an issue?frogcurry wrote:In answer to Starks last comment, I don't think the person who started the topic is concerned about going for that level of depth of realism. Not when they are considering empires and pirates in space in the first post...
This sort of thing irritates me, because plenty of people want to CLAIM 'hard' scifi, or 'harder than x' scifi, because they think it makes them 'better'. If you've got standard scifi shit, why bother trying to ruin your story by pretending to be all realistic? Write the story you want to write, for fucks sake.
Just because you ditch realism doesn't mean you can get away with stuff that is completely illogical.
Honestly?Gunhead wrote:I'm beginning to wonder how much is the creator of the OP is willing to bend the rules of reality to have his fighters in space.
Not particularly much; the entire question is somewhat academic. If I can't find a logical explanation, they get snippzorred out in an instant.
I have to disagree here, especially about the last part.I loathe the idea of fighters in space. It's completely unrealistic, but more importantly it has the cool factor of a dead snail.
If I were to write a story that features "fighter-usefullizing" elements anyway (not sure what that could be, though - FTL telepathy? outright magic?), you could bet they'd have a limited chance to appear (even if outright magic might make fighters useful, that'd still not be an excuse to plot them into medieval fantasy "coz' they'r cool").
Yep, that's what it looks like.frogcurry wrote:The gist of what has been said so far seems to be that there is no way to create a situation where manned spacefighers are needed that doesn't seem to attract some serious ire or is in denial of common sense thinking.
One could, of course, invent some trait inherent to humans (or at least pilots) that gives them a massive advantage (to offset their massive disadvantages), but that'd likely attract a lot of serious ire...
Logic is the whole point of this thread.Major Maxillary wrote:Logic don't enter into the equation.
Unless the actual output is not proportional to the observed performance.Xeriar wrote: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.
*dodges thrown vegetables*
Let me explain:
When you posit "magitech" anyway, you could simply repurpose Alcubierre's work: moving the patch of space containing the ship, rather than the ship itself.
Since you never actually accelerate the ship, you don't have to deal with g-limits, and the energy requirements are anybody's guess (IIRC, the Alcubierre metric features equal amounts of positive and negative energy, which adds up to zero).
You would, however, need a second set of engines to provide impulse for take-offs, landings, etc.
Of course, this still doesn't justify fighters - I doubt a human pilot could handle those relative speeds.
And I have no idea what other implications that tech would have.