"Why not starfighters, but starships?" Topic

I've noticed that many people here seem to dislike the idea of starfighters, but love the idea of starships, what I'd like to know is why? I can't see a real reason why starships are no likely/plausible than star fighters. It costs an awful lot to get anything into orbit, so surely starfighters make much more sense than a stardestroyer, figrate, etc. Or am I just missing the point (because starfighters are just clearly far cooler!)

Its like telling that airplanes are cooler than battleships..
Insane, man insane :>

I like both …Luke ewas able to detroy the death star with a fighter .

I agree. Seems spacefaring militaries would love the idea of a cheap attack vehicle that carries few personel and can deliver a high explosive nuclear/laser/particle weapon capable of crippling or destroying a much bigger ship.

But none of these things exist, so this is just another "uh-huh!, uh-uhh!" contest really. :)

The usual arguement is defined by the limitations of drive technology as we currently predict – namely, that you are going to have to carry a swag of fuel to squirt out the back of your spaceship/fighter. The more you want to dodge, sideslip and dogfight, the more fuel you have to carry.

You can see where this is leading – eventually you have a 'spacefighter' that looks like the Hindenburg, but with the gas cells full of fuel! It makes more 'real world' sense to assume that the better design is a trade off between acceleration (fuel) and combat potential (offensive systems carried) which, after you crunch the numbers in a very egg-headed manner, leads to spacecraft with masses that suggest 'ship' rather than 'fighter'.

Having said that – consider how much more mass (say) a MiG-25 has compared to a Sopwith Camel. Both are defined as fighters, but the MiG outweighs a WW1 heavy bomber.

Different technologies applied to different mission envelopes, but with similar philosophies – shoot down the other guy's means of doing you harm.

Perhaps space fighters will still have only one or two crew members, but mass in over 500 tonnes? Or more?

The other arguement revolves around reaction time – fighters and strike craft have always relied on their speed to 'get the drop' on their target – there one second, gone the next.
The usual 'real world' thinking is that that will be impossible in space – there's no distortion of atmosphere to obscure an incoming fighter, and its pilot will probably have to perform a straight-line intercept to reach the target, making the fighter easy to track. Its when the ECM/ECCM, drones, chaff, etc start flying that things get interesting.

Mind you – until we get up there and start shooting – I'll keep building my collection of F-Toys 1/144 X Wings and TIE fighters… ;)

Rick Robinson's Rocketpunk Manifesto: link

Winchell Chung: link

Both are incomparable sites. Nyrath (winchell) convinced me.

Also, if you look in the mirror and say his name three times, Ken Burnside will probably explain in detail too.

;)

Anyone who's interested in space combat should read this site:

projectrho.com/rocket

The arguments for and against realistic starfighters are there. Cinematic starfighters are fine, since they (like mecha) run on cool factor rather than physics. OTOH, you can have perfectly enjoyable starship combat settings with no fighters at all – see EE Smith's Lensmen for one example, or original series Star Trek.

Also, if you look in the mirror and say his name three times, Ken Burnside will probably explain in detail too.

I'm surprised he hasn't chimed in already, along with a lengthy explanation of how SITS and Squadron Strike are really quite simple to learn. :)

Fighters could have just as much to do in future space warfare as the big ships. They might be consigned to just intercepting incoming rounds so that the rounds will not have any more than a kinetic impact (which I know how devastating just kinetic impacts can be, but I also know how some materials tech will make such impacts nothing but a nuisance – Been to NASA Ames several times to see some of the small satellite work being done there and what they do to protect these things from debris strikes). So, fighters performing this role might have to worry about enemy fighters who are trying to stop them from performing that role, and so on.

I don't buy many of the assumptions I have read on this board about space combat (And, I am related to 2 Aerospace Engineers, one of whom helped design our current space station – both worked at NASA. And, I have done my own work in the Aerospace Industry – although on micro UAVs – although one may become one of the first micro CAV. Plus, I've spent a decent amount of time seeing what the most powerful laser on earth can do to stuff, and if it's performance against stuff like concrete is so lackluster, etc., etc…). I expect space warfare to be similar to some terrestrial warfare, saving that distances/ranges and detection will be carried out differently…. But, I expect there to be just as much room for a space-fighter role as there is currently. It's just that this role will likely be different than it is for a terrestrial aeronautic fighter.

If we're going with the analogy (as flawed as it is) of Starships = naval vessels, I suppose you wouldn't want a fighter per se, but some kind of fast attack/patrol/recon vehicle that would maintain a perimeter around larger vessels, perhaps with stealth technology ('submarine' equivalents? Fast frigates? Destroyers? PT boats?), as well as some kind of ram/spar torpedo boarding craft (think Coast Guard Cutter), similar to as described in the Rocketpunk Manifesto.

Having said that, wouldn't a fighter-type make sense as a 'mixed role' vessel; something that could take off and land from a planet and fight atmospherically but also patrol for and intercept, engage and/or board spacefaring vessels in low or geosynchronous orbit? Again, thinking along the lines of a coast guard cutter…

The thing that bugs me about fighters is not the tech, which can be explained away with handwaving – this is a game, after all – but the attrition rate. For drones or robot fighters of some sort, I'm fine with it, but in most games I've played the attrition rate for fighters is so astronomically high that I find the concept of manned units hard to buy into. As with the tech, you can handwave it away, especially when making up alien races, but I just don't like it.

Doug

The problem is and has always been what you can get the laws of physics to do, and physics are against anything as small as the popular conception of the fighter doing anything like what you see in popular media. Whatever a fighter can do can be done better by a drone which doesn't have to deal with a human's dependance on life support and low resistance to G forces. And I think people underestimate just how costly it is to launch anything into space from the ground. Again, the cheapest and most effective ways would pulp a human pilot.

It's better to muddle out a theory based on the real science and probable mission types than just trying to make your conceptual hardware fit into traditional shapes and roles. Maybe you think X-Wings or Colonial Vipers are 'teh sex', but what if you come up with something better and more interesting by reasoning things out? Pragmatism and working within limitations has produced all the real life hardware, military and civilian, that you might drool over after all.

Oddly enough GW came pretty close to your gunboat model with Battlefleet Gothic's fighters which are described as being the size of 747's. :)

The 500 tonne fighters I mentioned might be along the lines of gunboats. All this was explored in an earlier TMP thread, by the way… What was it?

Aha!
TMP link

Let's take a look at the primary mission fighters have:

1) Fighters exist to project firepower over the horizon, deep into enemy territory – or to keep the other side from doing the same.

2) They also offer a loiter presence in case the enemy isn't conveniently where you think he is and you need to get him later.

3_ In modern air combat regimes, fighters have accelerations and sustained speeds of 30-50x that of their carriers. Even in WWII, they offered a 10-12x increase in speed over their carriers.

Now, let's look at how those assumptions carry on in space:

1) Space has no horizon. Anything a fighter can reach, a warship can reach.

2) Space is an amazingly friendly sensor environment. Anything that's generating enough thrust to be a threat is naked eye visible from weeks away with plausible reaction drives. (Even when it shuts its drive down, you'll still have an excellent shot on its vector path.) This means that it's unlikely that the enemy won't be conveniently where you think he is. Loiter capability isn't as necessary.

3) While fighters might have higher thrust than ships, it likely won't be by more than a factor of 2 – and if your primary drive is nuclear, there may be a minimum size to make the drive safe. A fighter's total delta v will be set by fuel fractions, and most plausible reaction drives – or even handwavy fusion torches – won't give you enough additional thrust to matter. Anything that's high thrust has horrible ISp, and anything with decent ISp usually has thrust measured in milligees (or as a friend of mine describes it, 'thrust measured in gnat farts')

It's not that I don't think 'deployed weapons that chase someone down' will exist. I think they're going to resemble cruise missiles, not fighters.

A fighter needs fuel to get out to where its going.
A fighter needs fuel to do its 'combat maneuvers'.
A fighter needs fuel to get back onto a recovery vector.

Fuel mass goes up logarithmically with the amount you have to carry, because every ounce of fuel that you use to get back to the carrier with is part of the mass you're shoving out to the combat zone with, and shoving around on your combat maneuvers with, which means you need more fuel to get out there, and more fuel to maneuver with to preserve your bingo limit.

This means that a cruise missile, conservatively, has to carry about 1/4 the fuel (since it's only going one way) as a fighter does. It may be as much as 1/10th the fuel.

On top of this, cruise missiles don't need all that expensive life support system stuff, which makes them even MORE advantaged over fighters.

So – in a physically plausible universe, space fighters run smack into problems with physics.

Doesn't mean they aren't very cool – and cool is worth a lot in designing a game.

FYI – current time to do an automated full sky survey down to magnitude 24 stars with a modern telescope is now under 5 hours. It's dropped by a factor of 4 in the last year and a half, due to improvements in CMOS sensors and computing speed to run the noise filters, as well as the computing speed needed to correct for atmospheric distortion. (While there's no atmospheric distortion in space, similar techniques will be needed to cancel out hull vibrations.)

A drive capable of shoving a 5,000 ton ship at 1 G is about 2.5 terawatts (+/- about 0.5 terawatts depending on your tech assumptions for waste heat in the drive plume versus thrust generated). In round numbers, that's a magnitude -1 star at 3 AU – halfway to Jupiter. Even on 'milligee thrust' mode, it's a magnitude 8 star, it's still well within the capabilities of being detected by that sky sweep in one pass, and at milligee thrust levels, it's going to take about 6 weeks to cover those 3 AU.

And, so long as we're making assertions from "Who we know…"

I don't buy many of the assumptions I have read on this board about space combat (And, I am related to 2 Aerospace Engineers, one of whom helped design our current space station – both worked at NASA. And, I have done my own work in the Aerospace Industry – although on micro UAVs – although one may become one of the first micro CAV. Plus, I've spent a decent amount of time seeing what the most powerful laser on earth can do to stuff, and if it's performance against stuff like concrete is so lackluster, etc., etc…). I expect space warfare to be similar to some terrestrial warfare, saving that distances/ranges and detection will be carried out differently…. But, I expect there to be just as much room for a space-fighter role as there is currently. It's just that this role will likely be different than it is for a terrestrial aeronautic fighter.

I am related to two aerospace engineers. One worked on Apollo.

I have given guest lectures at the Naval War College on this subject.

I have regular access to people at Ames and Goddard.

There is a lot we don't know. There's a lot we do know.

There'a also a lot that you've pulled up that really shows that you've 'glommed onto a cool concept', but not actually done the math.

For example, your Wigner effect discussion ignores the time component in the equations for neutron induced brittleness. It ranges from hours of exposure to months, depending on the energy bonds of the material involved and the MeV of the neutron flux. (Also, paraffin is an amazingly good neutron absorber per unit of mass applied.)

The most powerful laser on earth right now is a laser that puts out a single pulse of incredibly short duration. Right now, we have a very narrow panoply of weaponizable lasers.

A weaponizable laser will have a pulse cycle to let the plasma created by the vaporized material dissipate. It is possible that we may end up with a fundamental problem that keeps weaponizable lasers from existing; thermodynamics and throughput are two limits that, while they don't seem intractable right now, could have stumbling blocks down the road.

Likewise, current weaponizable laser technology is about 0.001% energy efficient. A laser is an industrial blast furnace that happens to produce a beam of coherent light at its current development.

It's also possible we could end up with ridiculously efficient weaponizable free electron lasers with wavelengths in the far UV bands capable of melting armor at three light seconds. Or something in between.

Whenever I see posts from someone who's an engineer (Nuke, Aerospace, etc) on this subject, I listen to what they have to say. Usually because they have some fundamental assumptions integral to their field that they treat as God's Own Truth that do not apply.

For example – a Navy nuke engineer accepts, as God's Own Truth, that there will always be ocean that he can dump heat into by direct hull transferrance. He has never contemplated a reactor that can't do this, and his assumptions for how efficient a reactor of a given mass will be in space are usually off by a factor of three or four because he's used to dumping heat into the ocean by conduction, not radiating it into a vacuum, which is MUCH less efficient.

Whenever I see an aerospace engineer talking about missiles, unless he's actually working on exoatmo kill vehicles, I can be reasonably certain that he'll overestimate the ISp of missiles of a given mass and payload fraction by a factor of 2 to 7, because he assumes that the engine runs in a 20% oxygen atmosphere, rather than lugging its oxidizer along.

Whenever I see someone from the air combat field talking about detection parameters in space combat, I know that he's coming from assumptions that read like this: 'detection is mostly done with active sensors, because passive sensors get washed out in the noise', 'detection is directional, and the direction will either be forward facing, or ground facing', 'detection is all about angular resolution of the target', 'detection has a horizon' and 'detection and identification has to be done in time frames of minutes to seconds'

When I talk to people in the astrometric survey fields, their detection assumptions are very different. 'detection is almost entirely passive' (passive sensors are 4x longer ranged than active), 'detection is directional, and narrow field, so you do full sky sweeps of several hours', 'detection is all about spectrographic analysis of the target', 'detection has a diffraction limit, but no horizon' and 'detection time frames are measured in weeks, not hours or minutes'.

There's a lot we know; there's more we don't. I suspect your Aerospace Engineering background is hampering you in this discussion at least as much as it's helping.

Let me frame the detection parameter in terms that might pertain to what you've worked on professionally. You mentioned micro-UAVs as something you've worked on.

You are used to trying to identify a target on the ground. The ground has lots of objects of different shapes. The ground has a distinctive color, and the target, if it's smart, wants to blend into that color. The target will try to use trees, buildings, rocks and terrain to get inside the detection algorithms you're using.

In space, you're trying to detect a nuclear or chemical explosion. The explosion is happening overhead. The explosion is on the realm of hundreds of tons of TNT to kilotons of TNT. The explosion will have a distinctive spectrographic signature.

From a meta-strategy point of view isn't space combat highly unlikely at all. even if you do get FTL travel and colonise whole new systems, the cost of space travel is still going to be huge, just to get the raw material into orbit unless we can create a huge linear motor fixed to an orbiting asteroid/station. Even if we somehow make this affordable the distances, manuoverability, the potenial for 'slagging' each others planets, the difficulty in getting any significant armour on a starship, etc is likely to mean that large scale warfare is something of the past, and with it so are battelships, etc. What is more like are small scale raids aimed at damaging each others trading potenial, etc. It seems to me that warfare in such an environment is going to look much more like SAS/commando raids than anything else.

Dijit80, that's one possible model. It's also not a bad one – and you can make some interesting SF out of it.

The big argument for 'space warfare' in the traditional SF model is that once you've got the space based industry up there to protect, building ships is fairly straightforward.

The counter arguments are that the ships probably won't be manned by flesh and blood humans, and at orbital transit speeds, anything that hits is pretty much a mission kill. Both of these lean towards 'expendable' and 'highly attritional' as optimum strategies.

Slagging planets is pretty difficult if you're using reaction drives. Setting up the planetary slag shot is something that takes decades.

Obliterating cities can be done with anything that's capable of reaching orbit.

I've argued that from a physics sense, 'space fighters' make less sense than 'cruise missiles'. However, just because they make 'less sense' doesn't mean they don't belong in a game. :)

I can tweak parameters for assorted technologies and make all kinds of space combat scenarios. Regrettably, the vast majority of them boil down to pure attrition and non-existent tactical or grand tactical maneuver, which makes a horrible basis for a miniatures game. :)

If we limit ourselves to what's likely in the pipeline through 2030 or so…

Space combat is all about fragging satellites that provide valuable services on the ground. Get rid of the US's GPS constellation and you put a SERIOUS crimp in the capabilities of our ground forces.

Nearly everything in orbit is protected not by physical durability, but by the energy costs needed to put something in an exo-atmo kill envelope. Shooting down a satellite is about 98% of the cost of putting a new one up, and current strategic doctrine is that the US has 65% of the world's launch capabilities, which means that we can 'win' by launching spare satellites faster than they can shoot them down.

This all changes if there's the ability to launch things from the Moon. That shallower gravity well is huge.

The other major feature that needs consideration is the Van Allen Belts; ionizing radiation is bad for meat crews and nearly as bad for electronic crew. Any reasonably high ISp drive will have to do the 'spiral kick' orbit path, which puts you in the VA belts for weeks on end.

The problems of doing anything in Near Earth Orbit are challenging to a military planner. Most people never notice that the Shuttle spends ~30-36 hours before docking to the ISS. The Progress lunchpail rockets do about the same. This is because changing orbits takes a lot of very small little nudges at very precisely measured times and durations.

Actually I'd like to play a Sci-Fi fighter game. I love "check your six" and doing something like that with fighteres would be cool. I'd love to do the acrobatic 180 in place like a viper pilot. Remember George Lucas loved the Battle of Britian movies and wanted his fighter sequences to look like that.

I'm in no way a stickler for "realism" in spaceship gaming. But I do like things to be consistent within a game's context.

Here on Earth fighters and ships are very different because they operate in different mediums, air and water. They function in completely different ways.

But all spacecraft operate in the same medium: space. "Space Fighters" are nothing more than tiny spaceships. But most (not all) games and SF stories treat them as if they operate like aerial fighters relative to watercraft instead of tiny spacecraft relative to larger spacecraft.

The result is that tiny spacecraft carry weapons capable of "sinking" large spacecraft just like tiny jet fighters can "sink" huge carriers using Exocet missiles. You end up fighting wet-navy battles involving aircraft but using spacecraft miniatures.

That being said, in our home grown rules my two young sons insist on including space fighters. So we do. :-)

I just can't see fighters acting like aerial fighters so many sci-fi make them look to be, can't deny the cool factor. But with so many complexities of space travel a space fighter would operate more like a small ship of it's own, so much that a one man crew might not be able to handle the operations of it completely.

I keep going back to the rules for Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks, where the fighters are small ships and carry anti-ship assault rockets. But they are limited in their operations when an assault scout is nearly just as fast and maneuverable, can take more damage and has more weapons on it. Not to mention in SF:KH I tend to use the laser batteries primarily as an anti-fighter role, so fighters didn't live very long what with high-tech targeting systems.

And in the end I've gone with the idea of replacing piloted fighters with drones. Which would be still cheaper and smaller making it possible to carry more of them and just overwhelm an enemy.

The side that is still using fighters is going to hate the side swarming them with drones.

… detection parameters in space combat, I know that he's coming from assumptions that read like this: 'detection is mostly done with active sensors, because passive sensors get washed out in the noise', 'detection is directional, and the direction will either be forward facing, or ground facing', 'detection is all about angular resolution of the target', 'detection has a horizon' and 'detection and identification has to be done in time frames of minutes to seconds'

Quoted for truth.

The only military people who think in terms of passive detection are submariners, and even we are used to passive detection of other subs at Jutland to Trafalgar ranges. This gives a detect-and-maneuver-to-engage loop of about 10 minutes. So there's a lot of thought put into the idea of being ready to shoot *before* you detect the target, and a very quick shoot-and-scoot to get outside the engagement envelope of the return torpedo.

That's very different from a 6-week detection time that we're 'seeing' with reasonably-extrapolated drives.

In other words: Keep fighters in, just treat them realistically. Let "natural selection" weed them out. :)

I'm suprised no one's mentioned the Honor Harrington series, which has LAC's(light attack craft), but not fighters, per se, and covers most of the potential arguements against space combat/travel with a plausible, though rather advanced, tech base, which is decribed ,IN DETAIL, in the first couple of books. LAC's are about the size of a modern 747 jet w/o wings, and are the rough equivalent of WW2 PT boats. They are also considered almost as expendable as missles or other ammunition by fleet admirals, due to the fact that, like fighters, any hit by a ship's armament will usualy cripple or kill them! As such, the LAC crews often consider it a punishment detail(or a death sentence)to be assigned to LAC duty. In almost any setting, teleoperated or robot(ai-controlled) fighters/small combat craft are a better, more economical/realistic thing to be found than manned fighters…

I like the idea of unmanned smart weapons and interceptor craft. Effectively glirfied missiles, they carry defensive weaponry and countermeasures fo their own which they use to improve their chances of getting to the enemy and impacting delivering their main payload.

Are we discussing interstellar, interplanetary, or intraorbital space combat?

Space combat fought across an area the size of an entire stellar system is going to be very different to one fought across a single planetary system. Interstellar combat will first need to answer the question "How are we crossing interstellar distances?" The answer to that one will have a profound impact on the shape of combat.

RE interstellar combat the "warp-points" of Starfire led to battles fought around these discreet locations in space. Star Trek "warp drive" allowed FTL battles where ever two ships happened to meet. Star Wars "hyperdive" led to fleet battles in normal space, but potentially anywhere.

So, what sort of ground rules do we have for "space combat"? And I haven't even touched upon tech levels…

Better still, "emu," what if *they* *are* the *payload?*

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

"…Let there be light!"

One thought that IMHO *could* potentially justify *why* manned space "fighters" would be in use would be that of human psychology. For example, while launching swarms of cruise missiles at an opponent has a certain perverse satisfaction to it, cruise missiles cannot die for their chosen deity/ideology/be decorated for valour and all that cool stuff.

Our species has done more than its fair share of things in waging war that in hindsight (or even the occasional *foresight!*) were pretty darn stupid, but for one reason or another, they were done nonetheless.

And again, we *are* discussing *sci-fi,* so IMHO it's all about *having fun,* so if you want your space fighters, why the Hell not?!

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

THS has robotic small craft called "Autonomous Kill Vehicles" (AKVs). They are designed as kinetic impactors, but also mount weapons. In actions short of war, they act as fighters: flanking enemy ships, attacking enemy AKVs, conducting scouting/surveying, or commerce raiding. In a full-out battle, they destroy manned enemy capital ships by ramming them.

You get numbers, the potential for flanking, and an expendable asset that can scout (e.g. examine wreckage without endangering the ship). The only issue: why bother having a person aboard if you have AI tech? Answer: if there IS no AI, then you have a manned gunboat, plus teleoperated cruise missiles. But if there is AI, then you gain a LOT by dropping the lifesystem from the design-- mass, survivability and a potential kamikaze mission.

BlackWidowPilot: "Our species has done more than its fair share of things in waging war that in hindsight (or even the occasional *foresight!*) were pretty darn stupid, but for one reason or another, they were done nonetheless."

You mean like charging cavalry against machine guns? That lesson was learned pretty quick don't you think? :)

As to fun, ya sure. However, why can't realism have it's own time in the sun without arbitrarily being labeled boring/stupid/uncool? Do you only play WWII with walking tanks, werewolves, and zombies and lose everything that makes the era distinctive just for a couple of so called "cool" things?

Play sci-fi naval if you want fighters, you won't notice the difference. :)

That's interesting.

Many people here seem ready to file off 'starfighters' with other sci-fi coolness like mecha. A few weeks ago I saw a show on the military channel (from the Dogfights series) that revolved around what their experts believe that aerial combat will be like up to the middle of this century.

One scenario they painted revolved around scram/ram jet fighters that could breach the Earth's atmosphere and attack 'craft' in orbit. The ships used lasers to engage each other. To me, ti felt like watching a 'modern' Battle of Hampton Roads circa 1862. These 'fighters' were multi-manned craft that could 'fly' in space.

Spacefighters anyone?

Maybe it's more real then one would think?

Here are links to the show:

YouTube link

This wraps it up:
YouTube link

It also depends on what you define as a 'fighter' – is it something the same size as a modern aircraft, or is it based on number of crew, or some other factor. For example, with sufficient automation a 500-ton craft could be manned by one or two people, and maybe that's a 'fighter' in your setting.

-Will

Manned fighter technology is reaching the end of the line here on Earth – why should we revert to it in space, especially considering the much more significant challenges space combat presents in terms of life support and pulping the pilot with radical changes in speed and direction?

Even assuming some kind of magic "inertial compensator" technology (which is a BIG assumption that most sci-fi makes), seems unlikely the fighter would be able to power that AND drive system. There are drive types that would get around that, but again, huge power considerations.

What about remote-piloted fighters? Well, unless you have some kind of FTL communication, remote piloting of a combat fighter is not going to be practical due to communication delay.

So what we wind up with as the most likely scenario is autonomous cruise missiles. Nothing else offers the same engagement envelope and lethality to mass ratio.

Beams and kinetic kill weapons are nice, but are strictly short ranged due to time-to-target considerations. Given the speeds involved in space travel, the tiniest error in target path prediction can lead to a miss by thousands of kilometers. Thus, direct-fire weapons are only of use when time to target is so minimal as to allow zero opportunity for the target to maneuver in the time between when the weapon is fired and when it strikes the target.

This would be an argument FOR space fighters, but again, autonomous cruise missiles are far more efficient and capable.

Thus I predict larger ships with sophisticated point-defense and ECM technology firing cruise missiles at each other before closing the range to use particle and kinetic weapons.

As far as "getting mass into orbit" considerations go. . . any feasible space navy is going to have to be mined and constructed in orbital facilities. Climbing up out of a gravity well is just too hard to do.

Of course, any of these problems could be solved by sufficient application of "magic" technology. . . but there are slightly fewer hurdles for larger ships than there are for fighters.

Even so everything from fighters to battleships belongs in starship gaming! In fact, the starship rules we are releasing here soon did not include fighter/carrier rules at first, since I'm a battleship guy. . . but this was met with an uprising from my playtesters. Too many people love space fighters not to put them in a game.

"You mean like charging cavalry against machine guns? That lesson was learned pretty quick don't you think? :)"

Cavalry, yes, infantry with fixed bayonets, not so much…

"As to fun, ya sure. However, why can't realism have it's own time in the sun without arbitrarily being labeled boring/stupid/uncool? Do you only play WWII with walking tanks, werewolves, and zombies and lose everything that makes the era distinctive just for a couple of so called "cool" things?"

No, silly, I play WW2 with Early War French forces when I am left to my own devices… like there's much of a difference between Senegalaise Tirallieurs supported by a CACC of Char B1bis and some R-35s or H-38/39s from a neighboring BCC to werewolves, walking tanks, and a company of La Legion d'Unmort…

"Play sci-fi naval if you want fighters, you won't notice the difference. :)"

Hmmm.. well, some did equate my concepts for a sci-fi ship combat system of spacegoing dreadnoughts armed with mass driver cannon lobbing nukes at each other as being akin to WW1 naval combat in space, so you may be on to something… Mwahahahahahahaaa!!!

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

Leland, that is exactly what I meant. I recall the Albedo comic series used weapons of this sort. One of thei ACVs (Autonomous Combat Vehicles) was bigger than one of their trans-orbital lifting shuttles or heavy transport craft. Also, in that setting a single ACV hitting a ship was crippling to even the largest vessel. The idea in that setting was to do your damnedest to make sure it didn't happen.

Tgunner: "Maybe it's more real then one would think?"

Was the show based on actual military projections? Or was it based on experts (flying cars by the 1960's) or defense contractors (invisibility fabric by 2010!) making pitches? Considering how long it takes the military to change vehicle makes, much less the fact that there's no current need, I think it's highly unlikely that you're going to see such a scenario by the middle of the century if it happens at all.

There might be one attack on the orbital network, if we ever have a war against someone with the resources. Afterward the satellites will probably be armed.

I agree with TheDreadnought, even in atmosphere fighters are looking to be on the way out with the development of laser weapons and overall better tech. They are always visible and very fragile after all. And naming destroyer sized space ships fighters just so you can say they exist is stretching the concept a little far.

I wonder if this apparent need of gamers to shoehorn spacefighters into everything is a failure of the popular imagination and an over-reliance on movies and tv shows (bastions of sense and taste both :) ) for inspiration. I like BSG and Starwars and all, but I don't think they and others like them should be the be all and end all for gamers "toolkits".

@BlackWidowPilot: You should read David Drake's Surface Action if you haven't. The big battle at the end is pretty similar to what you describe, just without the nukes.

I agree with TheDreadnought, even in atmosphere fighters are looking to be on the way out with the development of laser weapons and overall better tech. They are always visible and very fragile after all. And naming destroyer sized space ships fighters just so you can say they exist is stretching the concept a little far.

Disagree. We will probably see a new class of weapon somewhere between helicopter and fighter. Say like a Star Wars snowspeeder. Heavy armour, wings, turreted laser weapon. Little need for overall manoevrability as armour and firepower become more important.

I have wondered why so few ground support air assets seem to appear in Mecha games, but that's an issue for another thread.

If space ships are relatively small and unmanuverable, think about 2001/2010 Space Odysey eg, then space fighters make great sense. Small, manuverable, and carry enough of a weapons payload and fuel to be a threat to the "ships". An armed "pod" would be an effective space fighter in that universe. The big issue is time to target. Even interplanetary distances are pretty big, and you want to be moving slowly enough when you arrive that you can actually do something before you fly by.

"Realistic" near to mid- future space combat may be one of those subjects that makes for less than riveting gaming. Sort of like trench warfare or modern naval. I like both of those subjects, but it is harder to make a fun, interesting, and not too detailed game of them than it is for say horse and musket battles.

Still I think space fighters are possible, even plausible, given the right set of background assumptions. Star Wars and BSG have them on the background assumption that cool factor is the highest priority. This is not an illegitimate assumption for popular entertainment.

@emu2020
I remember Albedo, read the comic too. Always thought about getting into the RPG, but I think the term 'Furries" has a bad astigmatism about it. But the concept of how the starships worked was very hard sci-fi.

Check this blog on the ideas from Albedo.
link

Why would fighters be more manuvarable then larger starships in space? Smaller engines, less space and mass to support directional thrusters should make them less manuverable then starships. I can see fighters palying a role in planetery defense networks. But not in system and interstellar battles.

Mind you the way military tech is going here war will become more automated. To the point that "real" war will be prohibitevly expensive for most states (it is already for the majority). I know Bloch made that prediction in 1905 and was proven wrong, but diffrent tech, and less information available to him.

Wars will eitehr be fought between states with primitive tech, or will be intra-state wars (indeed from 67 cases of extreme military disputes from 1990 to 2007, only 8 were interstate wars. All of the rest were civil wars, or military operations against non-state actors like the PKK, or Al Queda).

I don't expect interstellar wars of choice to make sense. Even with FTL tech due to time distortion. Only if tech exists that nullifies the Time Distorition effects would intersteallar war look like anything we know of right now. Of course having that tech, what other things would it entail?

Joe Haldeman's 'Peace and War' explores some of the issues of interstellar war very well, with time dialation (troops who due to it have only served a year, but on earth are over 700 years old) and space warfare, which isn't discussed in depth, but has ships which are combined landers/missile launching platforms, warfare involves hiding behind planets, before launching lots of nuke drones and hoping they hit first.

I thought the honorverse LACs were something like 36,000 tons and a couple hundred meters long? Of course, when the big ships are a half-dozen km long, a 200m 'fighter' is about in proportion.

I have wondered why so few ground support air assets seem to appear in Mecha games, but that's an issue for another thread.

Because in half the mecha backgrounds the mecha are transformable and act as their own air support, and in the other half the mecha are flight-capable (or nearly so) without transforming and act as their own attack VTOLs.

Besides, if you have fighter pilots, then you're distracting from the big tin samurai pilots as the main characters.

Still I think space fighters are possible, even plausible, given the right set of background assumptions.

Those assumptions would have to include functional reaction-massless drives, otherwise the fighters just can't carry enough fuel to make them more effective than 'cruise missiles'.

Star Wars and BSG have them on the background assumption that cool factor is the highest priority. This is not an illegitimate assumption for popular entertainment.

While true, some of us want more science in our science fiction.

I like the idea of people gaming whatever they want, because that's the point of wargaming by non-military types -- it's for entertainment.

Many of us like to game space combat as a reflection of modern combat. In that world, space ships with fighters are a cognate to aircraft carriers with fighters.

Nothing wrong with that.

What I find amusing is when people who game with mechs complain about space fighters, and when people who game with space fighters complain about mechs! People in glass houses ….

And actually let's just take that one step further. Many of the people who poo poo the idea of space fighters (or mechs for that matter) make their own series of giant assumptions about what future warfare will be like, many of them grounded in an assumption that the models will be some extension of combat as conducted today (or an extrapolation of current tech), when it's just as likely that future combat will be totally unrecognizable. So we all cherish our preconceptions.

Now, if it's just a conversation about actual future combat, of course it makes sense to have these discussions, but this is a site for wargamers so it's tied into the gaming people do.

Reminds me a bit of a "why do you game with zombies all the time" thread with a tsk tsk tone that was here not too long ago. Isn't the proper answer "why do you care?" Ours is a hobby that involves imagining worlds in conflict, whether they are zombie infested streets or Marye's Heights, Prokhorovka or the depths of space in the future. Relax and enjoy what you like and let others do the same.

Well said.

Hey, I'm not totally ruling out star fighters, I'm just putting s different view of them. The same for mechs, although I don't go with the giant mechs any more. Well there is that Jovian Chronicles game, but I go with Heavy Gear more where the mechs don't fly.

Because in my idea of a space combat there will be those that stay with the standard old methods of space combat. And those that will try the newer methods. I don't expect any fighters flying down a trench of a battle station, maybe pelting it from a distance with missiles instead. One is bound to go right down that exhaust port.

Actually I'd like to play a Sci-Fi fighter game. I love "check your six" and doing something like that with fighteres would be cool. I'd love to do the acrobatic 180 in place like a viper pilot. Remember George Lucas loved the Battle of Britian movies and wanted his fighter sequences to look like that.

You may want to check out Bag the Hun – there's a "Bag the Jedi" conversion article available for it. I just bought BTH2 and the compendium of articles for BTH, and have not even had a chance to read through them yet … so YMMV, but it may interest you.

Doug

Hey, it depends on whether I'm running a Rule of Cool game (fighters and/usually or mecha) or a harder scifi game! I'm currently playing in a Saga Edition Star Wars game, so it's rule of cool. The scifi game before that was hard-science Alternity, so no fighters.

And if you check most of my posts about mecha, I think that the only possible location those 18+meter tall Gundam clones will work is in space. In atmosphere, anything that big is painted with red and white concentric circles. *My* mecha are not more than 4.5m tall (yes, even PatLabors are too big)!

I think the problem with "rule of cool" style gaming is that it tends to overshadow any other style of gaming just because it takes less work and thought. It's kind of the same problem many miniatures games have going up against giants like GW and Privateer Press. If everyone wants to play gonzo anything goes scifi you really don't have a choice but to follow along if you want to game. Or like: TMP link where a talented sculptor is basically saying it's harder for him to find work doing realistic proportions because everyone is used to chunky style figures.

"Rule of Cool" is also limited just because the popular imagination (and a lot of people's personal imagination) is very limited and scientifically illiterate. Not to mention everyone thinks you have to have "balanced" set-piece battles with tons of figures on the table. That in itself really puts a crimp in many styles and theories of spaceship combat.

If it seems like we're being elitist it's because we're trying not to drown in everyone else's gaming hang-ups. :)

Dave Crowell: ""Realistic" near to mid- future space combat may be one of those subjects that makes for less than riveting gaming."

Blow out the scale to include an entire star system, and the turns to days or weeks. Lets you play giant-ass fleet battles people seem to like.

Lampyridae: "Little need for overall manoevrability as armour and firepower become more important."

So, like… a tank? :) Seriously though, something like this: link Hoping up from behind a low hill like a porpoise firing turrets in a broadside? That would be horrifying.

porfirio rubirosa: "Nothing wrong with that."

Nobody is saying it's wrong. Just that it's wrong to call it realistic. :)

"when it's just as likely that future combat will be totally unrecognizable. So we all cherish our preconceptions."

Um, actually, that IS the science side's argument. Oddly enough, it seems like the anything goes sci-fi people that are clinging most tenaciously to sci-fi as an extension of modern combat, and have a harder time accepting new ideas.

Still I think space fighters are possible, even plausible, given the right set of background assumptions.

The best reason is to look for physical laws that already exist. Thermodynamics puts severe constraints on the maximum size of a starship. A fighter can run hotter for less mass penalty. Similarly it can also radiate heat from laser hits better. There are also size and mass constraints for reentry vehicles, for example.

Conversely, more armour is of course better, as is radiation shielding.

Then you could be imaginative. Fighters could flex and move, a little like mecha, to avoid attacks. Although there is net zero movement, the craft could move its entire structure out of the path of a beam.