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Batman wrote:Offhand,the only SciFi franchise to have offensive carriers as we know them would be 'Wing Commander'.

The Earthforce Omega and Warlock-class destroyers(the latter which we saw in just a single episode of Crusade), the Excalibur, the Minbari cruisers, and the Narn G'Quon-class heavy cruisers from B5 and Crusade also carried fighters.

40K's Imperial, Chaos, and I think Eldar factions also had offensive carriers, the Holy Fleet, in particular fielding the Emperor and Oberon classes, while Astartes battle barges and strike cruisers used their Thunderhawk gunships as both fighters and troop carriers.

(though 40K space fighters tended to be much larger than other universes' space fighters, with the exception of Trek)

The Star Fleet Universe also featured offensive carriers(culiminating in most races building space-control and super space-control ships), with the Hydrans ultilizing fighter craft on every combat starship design they fielded.

Also, even though they aren't starships, Firefly's Alliance cruisers served as carriers as well, with the first episode "Serenity" showing them deploying gunships.

B5 ships at least though tend to fall into the same multirolearea as battlestars. Carrying fighters but also being plenty capable of ship to ship action.

Why is that? In general.

I know many people look at shows like Trek, nBSG - Star Wars included, and say that's not how a real military would do something.

Is it purely Rule of Cool for TV shows and films to have things like Battlestars, Enterprises and Star Destroyers, or do they make sense in context?

Trek: Phasers aren't perfect, I'll be the first to admit. But they do seem pretty shit hot at taking out fighters. I don't need to post the clips from Conundrum and Sacrifice of Angels, we've seen them 20 times over. Nor Voyager and the Vaad'war. Or Preemptive Strike.

In Trek, at least Federation (and I'm guessing Romulan) ships have multiple target acquisition capability of small fighters moving in ~fairly~ fast speeds, at least relatively. Shooting a 2km/sec (or whatever) target at 5000km is easy for phasers. But they can do that when the target is going by so fast no normal turret could keep track and do 180 degrees in under a second whilst *remaining on target*.

So in Trek, fighters are rarely used. It'd be suicide to send 1,000 fighters up against 30 odd Galaxies (Rebels vs Endor fleet).


nBSG: They had two approaches to this. Battlestars, which have heavy weapons and a fair size compliment of fighters, and Basestars which are missile based and are "true" carriers. Why do they use fighters at all? Well it's a low tech environment - bullets and railguns etc. Not that the KE doesn't pack a punch - but I mean low tech like it's grounded in reality. So these are obviously Mach speed weapons - hypersonic most likely but nothing like a phaser or laser. You can dodge with good piloting. Fighters can carry weapons which can cripple a capital ship and can get in range to use them and get away. This requires fighters to stop them and flak, which is what we see.

Battlestars however - well we don't know how they were designed to work as a group. Galactica remember is an anomaly - it's not meant to be without escorts. Remember in The Plan (if you saw it) there was a wing of craft, different battlestars and then escorts, frigates and fighters. They just got shut down and we never saw them in action.

So I suspect they have gunboats and what-not and nBSG is actually pretty realistic. A Battlestar is essentially a battleship or dreadnought with a fighter compliment. It's not actually meant to be a carrier - normally with proper support their fighters would be minor in a major engagement. IMO anyway.


Star Wars: Again, fighters have the ability to damage capital ships when in large groups - and the turbolasers are too slow to track (ANH - they said so) - so fighters are used to combat fighters whilst the cap ships duke it out. A Star Destoryer is imo similar to a Battlestar, but a bit more self-reliant.


So the answer to the question carriers in Sci-Fi - well in some shows (Trek) fighters aren't really any use, day to day. We've never seen fighter craft in Trek manage to pull anything off against a cap ship except once: Preemptive strike when about 20 were swarming a Galor. And Enterprise beat them off with one photon torpdo detonated as a warning. No other time have they been a threat, even in numbers. SoA had them used as a plan, but Dukat saw it - he ordered the Cardassian ships to move on purpose, not because they were being damaged significantly.

Every Starship from Enterprise to Enterprise-E has been able to fire on multiple targets (maybe A didn't demonstrate it in the films) at once and can one-shot fighters from a Comparable Empire (Federation, Kazon, Cardassian, Maquis, Vaad'war, Suliban).

In other shows, the fighters are a threat. Whether that's due to bad design of the capital ships or very good designs on the fighters is dependent on the setting.


Are there any shows where you've (anyone) looked at it and gone "needs more carriers" ?

SG1 might be an interesting debate - their fighters *can* do damage. Sometimes. But against cap ships not so much. But they can against mid sized ships like Alkesh.

Prometheus Unbound wrote:Why is that? In general.

I know many people look at shows like Trek, nBSG - Star Wars included, and say that's not how a real military would do something.

Is it purely Rule of Cool for TV shows and films to have things like Battlestars, Enterprises and Star Destroyers, or do they make sense in context?

Atomic Rockets goes into more detail as to the whys and wherefores, but, yes, space fighters are a thing in many SF franchises, because Last War Syndrome, contemporary naval operations taken into space, and, because they're cool.

As well as impractical.

Most of the purposes that naval aviation serves only apply in a terrestrial enviroment. In space, there are no lumbering battleships versus nimble fighters, and there is no horizion. The sole limiting factor in spacecraft combat would be delta-v, which a larger ship, by virtue of a larger fuel capacity, would have more of than a smaller ship.

Also, a larger ship can mount more powerful weapons, not to mention point-defense weapons, whereas a smaller ship would be more limited in its armament choices.

nBSG: They had two approaches to this. Battlestars, which have heavy weapons and a fair size compliment of fighters, and Basestars which are missile based and are "true" carriers. Why do they use fighters at all? Well it's a low tech environment - bullets and railguns etc. Not that the KE doesn't pack a punch - but I mean low tech like it's grounded in reality. So these are obviously Mach speed weapons - hypersonic most likely but nothing like a phaser or laser. You can dodge with good piloting. Fighters can carry weapons which can cripple a capital ship and can get in range to use them and get away. This requires fighters to stop them and flak, which is what we see.

Battlestars however - well we don't know how they were designed to work as a group. Galactica remember is an anomaly - it's not meant to be without escorts. Remember in The Plan (if you saw it) there was a wing of craft, different battlestars and then escorts, frigates and fighters. They just got shut down and we never saw them in action.

So I suspect they have gunboats and what-not and nBSG is actually pretty realistic. A Battlestar is essentially a battleship or dreadnought with a fighter compliment. It's not actually meant to be a carrier - normally with proper support their fighters would be minor in a major engagement. IMO anyway.

The actual velocity of the ballistic rounds is irrelevant in space, as they have infinite range, the combatants fight at relatively close quarters(as far as space is concerned), well within the effective range of each other's weapons(effective meaning they fire and hit within a reasonable amount of time), and ballistic combat would be a battle of maneuver, as the target ship evades, and the firing ship anticipates and counters the target's evasives, while jockeying for optimum firing position.

And, again, the battlestar would still have a greater delta-v than any of the fighters we've seen in nBSG.

So, even there, fighters, or even multi-role SWAC vessels like the Raptor, wouldn't be that practical. On the main, Vipers seem to serve as extensions of a battlestar's firepower, a role which could more easily be assumed by UCAVs(which nBSG's Cylon Raiders are, essentially), which, of course, would defeat the purpose of pitting the Humans against the machines they created.

And, besides, no fan cares about the life and times of a combat drone.

Star Wars: Again, fighters have the ability to damage capital ships when in large groups - and the turbolasers are too slow to track (ANH - they said so) - so fighters are used to combat fighters whilst the cap ships duke it out. A Star Destoryer is imo similar to a Battlestar, but a bit more self-reliant.

In the Legends EU, capships were also equipped with anti-starfighter lasers in addition to the captial-scale turbolasers. And, in many cases, even in canon, fighters are only able to damage capships, after other capital warships have knocked down their shields, as was demonstrated in ROTJ(and ROTS to some extent, as the Invisible Hand was being pounded by Republic Venators the entire battle).

There was, of course, Hera's run on the Arquitens in Rebels, but the composite laser on her B-Wing was a one-off weapon which appeared on none of the other B-Wings, for whatever reason.

B5 and 40K, same thing, their fighters(and bombers)serve as extensions of firepower, and both universes' capships have extensive point defenses.

The Imperials I can understand not using drones in the place of attack craft, due to how tech is viewed and used by the Imperium, but not the other 40K factions, especially not the Tau, who already make extensive use of drone technology.

The B5 universe is even more incomprehensible. Sure, fighters are practical defensive weapons for a 2.5-megaton space station that can't maneuver, but the capships of nearly every race are relatively agile in and of themselves(especially those with gravitic drives), have extensive point defenses, and massive firepower that their fighters can't match unless they attack collectively.

Again, they would be better served by UCAVs in the place of manned fighters, but, as mentioned before, no SF fan wants to see the life and times of a drone.

Fans of the Cultureverse like myself would strongly disagree about whether one can be invested in the experiences of a combat drone. Posting from my phone. I'll have more about carriers vs. multi-role ships when I get home.

Even in cultureverse, drones are usually sidekicks. The squishy humans are the focus.

Speaking of books. Honorverse is one verse that does have pure carriers with nothing but defensive weapons. They don't carry fighters though but small non-ftl warships called LACs. The technobabble drives means they are faster than big ships and more stealthy.

The Protoss in Starcraft have carriers that use unmanned drone fighters instead of manned craft which the Protoss do have though, while it's implied that those protoss carriers have weapons besides their fighters ironically those aren't used in ship to ship combat but rather planetary bombardment. Also it's implied that Terran Battlecruisers carry figthers though their primary weaponary is meant for ship to ship combat.

Are the fighters for carriers in STO supposed to be automated, or are they supposed to be dozens of pilots dogfighting each other while their motherships Duke it out?

FaxModem1 wrote:Are the fighters for carriers in STO supposed to be automated, or are they supposed to be dozens of pilots dogfighting each other while their motherships Duke it out?

depends on the fighter I think, the shuttles and Peragrine fighters are suppose to be manned I think but who knows about the more exotic stuff and the romulan drones as unmanned I think.

Lord Revan wrote:

FaxModem1 wrote:Are the fighters for carriers in STO supposed to be automated, or are they supposed to be dozens of pilots dogfighting each other while their motherships Duke it out?

depends on the fighter I think, the shuttles and Peragrine fighters are suppose to be manned I think but who knows about the more exotic stuff and the romulan drones as unmanned I think.

It always struck me as odd that you could crank out fresh fighters to replace losses as many times as you like, since the pilots have to come from somewhere

Assuming they're based on the ones seen in ENT, the Rom drones are piloted remotely in the same way that UAVs are, in ENT they could be controlled from as far away as Romulus.

Crazedwraith wrote:Even in cultureverse, drones are usually sidekicks. The squishy humans are the focus.

Speaking of books. Honorverse is one verse that does have pure carriers with nothing but defensive weapons. They don't carry fighters though but small non-ftl warships called LACs. The technobabble drives means they are faster than big ships and more stealthy.

The LACs also mass in the tens of kilotons, IIRC, so they can carry a substanial arsenal, so they're more like the non-jump capable battleriders from the Traveller universe.

There's also a couple of posthuman settings(including the default setting for the Squadron Strike tabletop game)featuring fighters piloted by the operator's uploaded consciousness.

I might also add, for anyone's who's familiar with it, that Piers Anthony's Bio Of a Space Tyrant series features space carriers which use remotely-piloted UCAVs exclusively, and this, before the Global War on Terror made them a thing.

Lord Revan wrote:The Protoss in Starcraft have carriers that use unmanned drone fighters instead of manned craft which the Protoss do have though, while it's implied that those protoss carriers have weapons besides their fighters ironically those aren't used in ship to ship combat but rather planetary bombardment. Also it's implied that Terran Battlecruisers carry figthers though their primary weaponary is meant for ship to ship combat.

Andromeda, features both combat drones and slipstream-capable fighters which can carry at least one nova bomb(first seen in the S1 episode "To Loose the Fateful Lightning"), again, the latter making sense for an orbital that can't get out of the way of incoming fire. Initally, the Andromeda Ascendant appears just to have combat drones, until(I think) the third-season episode "Slipfighter:The Dogs of War," but, it would still make sense for Andromeda to carry both, given that slipfighters can be used to deploy nova weapons, as I'd imagine the High Guard wanted an organic making the final decision on deploying a weapon that can destroy a star system, and not leave that decision to an AI which would employ cold, hard logic in the decision.

The Nietszchian Prides also have slipfighters, which they seem to use as force multipliers for their combatant starships.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:The Protoss in Starcraft have carriers that use unmanned drone fighters instead of manned craft which the Protoss do have though, while it's implied that those protoss carriers have weapons besides their fighters ironically those aren't used in ship to ship combat but rather planetary bombardment. Also it's implied that Terran Battlecruisers carry figthers though their primary weaponary is meant for ship to ship combat.

Andromeda, features both combat drones and slipstream-capable fighters which can carry at least one nova bomb(first seen in the S1 episode "To Loose the Fateful Lightning"), again, the latter making sense for an orbital that can't get out of the way of incoming fire. Initally, the Andromeda Ascendant appears just to have combat drones, until(I think) the third-season episode "Slipfighter:The Dogs of War," but, it would still make sense for Andromeda to carry both, given that slipfighters can be used to deploy nova weapons, as I'd imagine the High Guard wanted an organic making the final decision on deploying a weapon that can destroy a star system, and not leave that decision to an AI which would employ cold, hard logic in the decision.

The Nietszchian Prides also have slipfighters, which they seem to use as force multipliers for their combatant starships.

It's not outright stated if the smaller Protoss ships have independent jump capabilities but seeing as Protoss teleport in their field bases from Aiur, Shakuras or the Spear of Adun rather building them like the other 2 races it's likely every manned ship does have independent jump capability though the drones don't seem to be jump capable, that said the Protoss were using their equilevant of the costal guard in SC and for the most part in SC2 so the capabilities of their ships could have been intentionally nerfed in-universe that is.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote:The LACs also mass in the tens of kilotons, IIRC, so they can carry a substanial arsenal, so they're more like the non-jump capable battleriders from the Traveller universe.

<nod> Going by what I remember of the back-of-the-book plans and diagrams, the LACs are more or less just very small warships comparable to a frigate, with the hyper capability swapped for extended endurance. Once the Shrikes were developed, though, it would be a bit more plausible to call them something like a fighter.

I'd consider them fighter/torpedo boat hybrids. They seem to use fighter tactics but to me they lack several distinctive fighter characteristics-namely, being significantly faster than regular warships (they're not, their speed (technically acceleration) advantage is 30% or less over the capital ships leave alone smaller FTL ships, and they're NOT significantly smaller than those ships (not to the degree I'd except fighters to be).

Batman wrote:I'd consider them fighter/torpedo boat hybrids. They seem to use fighter tactics but to me they lack several distinctive fighter characteristics-namely, being significantly faster than regular warships (they're not, their speed (technically acceleration) advantage is 30% or less over the capital ships leave alone smaller FTL ships, and they're NOT significantly smaller than those ships (not to the degree I'd except fighters to be).

The nearest naval analogue would be FACs; as I mentioned upthread, WH40K attack craft are similar in size to Honorverse LACs(and the warp-capable PFs of some of the Star Fleet Universe races), with Traveller battleriders being somewhat larger.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote:40K's Imperial, Chaos, and I think Eldar factions also had offensive carriers, the Holy Fleet, in particular fielding the Emperor and Oberon classes, while Astartes battle barges and strike cruisers used their Thunderhawk gunships as both fighters and troop carriers.

Marine ships are emphatically not fighter carriers; lore-wise they tend to only carry a couple of thunderhawks; it's a game-balance thing that lets them deploy wing after wing.

(though 40K space fighters tended to be much larger than other universes' space fighters, with the exception of Trek)

That depends on the force. Imperial fighters are quite chunky, Dark Eldar use ravens and razorwings in space battles. Tau use Barracudas as their space fighters and Eldar Craftworlders use Nightwings. Only the bigger naval powers such as the Imperials, Eldar Corsairs and Chaos have the big mutli-crew fighters. Others tend to use their one-man snubfighters.

You are possibly overestimating the size Imperial Fury Interceptors too, the other smallcraft are big but really top out at airliner-sizes.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote:B5 and 40K, same thing, their fighters(and bombers)serve as extensions of firepower, and both universes' capships have extensive point defenses.

The Imperials I can understand not using drones in the place of attack craft, due to how tech is viewed and used by the Imperium, but not the other 40K factions, especially not the Tau, who already make extensive use of drone technology.

The necrons do that. Their fighter-analogue for space combat was to just fire waves of expendable drones at the target. The tau's drone fighters are experimental/limited deployment.

You're right, the bluies are experimenting with drone fighters.

And, I'll concede the point on attack craft sizes. While Furies are certainly larger, than, say, Marauders and Thunderbolts, at 60-70m in length(no mass given), they're the same length as a Boeing 777 series commerical aircraft(or a little over two C-130s long), as you've mentioned. Still larger than most universes' fighters, but not at LAC/battlerider proportions.

(it's been a really long time since I played BFG, sticking mainly to reading the better of the Black Library's works. I'm almost tempted to get the vid game)

And, I could've sworn Ork Fighta-Bommers were bigger and clunkier than that, as befitting Orky Teknologee. As I've said, it's been a long time since I last played the tabletop game.

UNSC Longsword fighters from Halo are similarly 747-sized, though IIRC they don't have any pure carrier analogs.

BattleTech does have pure carrier DropShips, which given their size and mass in some respects could count as warships in their own right. Given their lack of FTL though these are mostly used as system defense ships, using their fighters to patrol space and such, or attached to fleets providing escorts. Proper WarShips might carry fighters but their primary duty is throwing lots of lasers and explosive ordnance at a target until it goes boom.

Seeing as this has morphed into a discussion of carriers in scifi (rather then Star Trek in particular), I'd suggest that this thread would moved to the general Scifi forum and the title changed to match the changed subject matter.

everyone ok with that?

Makes sense to me, Revan.

I think the Spirit Of Fire would come close to being a carrier analog, Balrog, while Infinity was meant to be a one-ship battlegroup.

Hell for a goodly portion of the thread this wasn't about carriers period, leave alone Trek ones.

Batman wrote:Hell for a goodly portion of the thread this wasn't about carriers period, leave alone Trek ones.

As entertaining as the brewing flame-fest was, I knew I had to do something to bring it (somewhat) back on topic

Balrog wrote:UNSC Longsword fighters from Halo are similarly 747-sized, though IIRC they don't have any pure carrier analogs.

While not seen in the games, the books do refer to UNSC "supercarriers" like the Trafalgar and (I think) Musashi, both lost at Reach. The Covenant also field ships referred to as "carriers" but these retain a hell of a lot of anti-ship firepower.

And, there were carried fighters in (the)two(worst) non-canon Star Trek video games, ST:Invasion!, featuring the carrier USS Typhon, and fighters which bore a vague resemblance to BSG Colonial Vipers, and the kill-it-with-fire bad Star Trek: Shattered Universe which had the Excelsior and the ISS Enterprise deploying fighter shuttles for retreads of episodes from the five-year mission, except in the Mirror Universe.

I don't remember if the Starfleet Command games featured any carriers. The first two SFC titles were essentially Star Fleet Battles set in the Star Trek universe, but I don't remember any carriers in it.