Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

save delta-v

depending on how hard your scifi is you could get the initial acceleration from the launcher, and need to carry less fuel on the fighters.

I mean, if the setting is hard enough that you're worried about delta-v you've already thrown areospace-style space fighters out the window a long time ago. I guess if you're far enough into light sci-fi that you have those kinds of fighters launching them falls under rule of cool.

I would suspend them from a huge scaffolding outside the exterior hull, with transport tubes that allow the pilots to access their fighters. They could then self-launch like missiles.

edited 19th Jan '18 4:58:51 PM by DeMarquis

Not really, fighters have the advantage of being more disposable then a battleships guns.

If combat is lethal enough there still very usefull because they provide assurance that even if the carrier is killed, that its fangs are still in play.

If you expect the ship to be lost in any kind of hit, its best to assure that a retaliation can still be carried out.

The problem with fighters in hard SF isn’t that they aren’t useful, it’s that they aren’t practical. Don’t forget that spacecraft need to carry their reaction mass with them. To compare this to aircraft. It would be like having to carry all the jet fuel you need and also all the air that passes through your engine during flight.

If you make the fighters small enough to be piloted by a single person and expendable, they don’t have the legs to meaningfully contribute to a battle. If you make them big enough to meaningfully contribute, they’re no longer expendable.

There’s also the issue of combat maneuvers in space having much higher G forces than on earth, potentially endangering human pilots.

At its base definition, a fighter is a craft that’s traded endurance and capacity for combat potential. Even today we already see these definitions blurring, in a hard SF setting they’d probably be blurred even further. What we know now as a fighter probably won’t exist.

The problem is the definition of expendable is malleable.

If a ship is lost in about 1 shot, which would you rather risk, a battleships that costs 10 billion, or a fighter that costs 500 million.

Your not going to INTEND to loose that fighter, but it is a matter of gauging the losses, honestly I would not even put a person in them if your dealing with scifi tech, an AI commanded by a directional laser is hack proof unless they work themselfs in-between your ship and your drones.

and as for fuel concerns, you can most likely mount a more efficient ram scoop on a large ship then a small one, or use whatever kind of engines that don't scale down, like nuclear engines.

Fighters are only not practical if you work with an overly narrow view of the possible techs involved.

edited 19th Jan '18 5:41:38 PM by Imca

What about launching them in cycles?

Like you can still have electromagnetic launching, just do it in waves every three-six seconds. If the launch bay is several "floors" with each floor containing a column of fighters waiting to launch, you can go by column, in order, every cycle, instead of risking to launch them all at once, even with fancy calculations to prevent collision.

Realistically, space fighters (small manned craft that depend on suprior speed and manuverability for their effectiveness) make no sense at all. Small patrol craft make sense, as do missiles and drones, but fighters just introduce an unnecessary weapon platform that doesnt contribute anything.

That shouldnt stop us from discussing them, of course. Not all sci fi has to be realistic.

Speaking of which if you folks want to read somewhat squishy decent sci-fi on space fighters Ian Douglas does the Star Carrier series.

Of course, you could always redefine the space fighter. I mean the X-wing makes as much sense as an ironclad canoe but there's no reason you can't have a ship that's short on crew and expendables and have it carted around in another ship.

Belisarius: I agree, I'd say ships that are called "fighters" will just be larger. Even if the ship has a small crew and is decently sized, if it trades endurance for being better in a fight than a similarly sized ship it could be called a fighter. Ships like that would probably be useful for local security tasks around planets and stations as well. The Navy occaisonally refers to their LCS as a "sea fighter", I imagine space fighters would be similar.

Imca: More powerful engines in space just mean more acceleration, not necessarily more speed. If we're talking hyper efficient engines that have extremely minimal fuel requirements, that's well into soft SF. At that point space fighters become plausible, and I agree that they will likely be unmanned, though I'd argue they would have more in common with cruise missiles than recoverable fighters.

It's a little trickier in hard SF. A space fighter would need to accelerate to its target, cancel out that acceleration, accelerate back home, and then cancel that out to land. It would also need extra fuel for any maneuvering. That ends up requiring a massive delta V budget, which in turn requires a large amount of fuel. That fuel increases the overall weight of the fighter, which in turn requires even more fuel. It's possible you could end up with a fighter slower than the ships it's meant to engage, or one that isn't able to carry enough weapons to actually do anything. Since it can't carry armor either, even the lightest weapons would be effective against it, and in space the lightest weapons are able to comfortably engage at pretty massive ranges.

There's also the question of purpose. Naval aviation on earth provides a critical capability because planes operate in a different medium than ships. A ship can't see beyond the curve of the horizon, but a plane can. The planes a carrier group carries are as much its eyes as they are its weapons. Space fighters operate in the same medium as the ships they launch from though, so there's not really any new capability being added. There's no horizon in space for a fighter to look over, and larger ships carrying larger sensors would necessarily have the advantage there.

Basically, there's not really anything you absolutely need a fighter for, and the difficulties in constructing a vehicle like that render the whole thing somewhat impractical anyways.

The most efficient possible power source converts 100% of rest mass to energy. If you propose the existence of such a power source, you can calculate how much reaction mass (fuel) you'd need for any given size of ship to get it to and from a target. The most efficient power source we know of is antimatter, and you need mere grams of it to get you around local space pretty quickly, which allows smaller craft to be practical.

Thus, it's entirely plausible that future spaceships could be "fighter-sized", assuming that we figure out a lot of science stuff along the way. There are other drawbacks, of course.

edited 20th Jan '18 12:03:58 PM by Fighteer

Antimatter could do it, though the advantage still goes to larger ships. I'd also imagine mastery over antimatter to that degree would require a fairly massive degree of technological advancement. Space just isn't friendly to fighter craft, there's very little they can do that a larger ship couldn't do better. Fighter craft in general may well be on the way out, even here on Earth. The comparison to fighters also sort of comes from pop sci-fi emulating WW 2 tropes in space, when since it's the same medium realistically a comparison to smaller naval craft would be more accurate.

First off on fighters. The Razorback is a pretty small ship for Fusion drives.

Secondly, I'm working on a soft Sci-fi Setting and trying to find a place for mechs among the use of various alien and human races. Not in outright combat, that's filled by tanks and such. But could they fill some sort of niche out in space?

'Mechs are basically Rule of Cool projected into a sci-fi setting. There's little reason to expect that a niche for them would exist in space combat. They could certainly have utility in other areas, however. I'm sure a rationale could be found for having them function in land combat, since they'd have hypothetical advantages in mobility over tracked or wheeled vehicles. There's also the idea of a scaled-up version of the kind of exoskeleton one might use in zero-G maintenance and construction, that can be equipped with weaponry and deployed in close combat.

A Transforming Mecha that can act as a space fighter and a ground combat vehicle is way too complex for any notional gain in utility. You'd be devoting a lot of the limited mass, power, and engineering space you have for such a craft to things that are completely useless in space combat and another portion to things that are completely useless in land combat, and it would have to have the capability to transition between those functions, adding even more complexity.

edited 20th Jan '18 1:58:27 PM by Fighteer

I was thinking no smaller than a armor trooper and no bigger than a wanzer for size.

No transforming of course. Perhaps in law enforcement on stations.

So, basically, Power Armor? That's completely reasonable.

Well like Power armor I suppose, if Power armor had a cockpit. Most mechs for the setting are used for gladiatorial matches but some are repurposed for actual combat.

I figure for 0g maneuvering they could be more advanced suits meant for boarding and such, no fighters, just mechs after the ship is close enough to make it through the barrier and board.

The most reasonable hand wave I can think of for space mecha is someone using them for contruction projects, then weaponizing them because nothing else was available at short notice.

That could work for a level 2 hardness setting.

Why couldn't you take it all the way up to 4.5 (One Small Fib)?

edited 20th Jan '18 6:24:44 PM by DeMarquis

Neither do missile boats on the open sea. They're faster (by far) and more maneuverable than any surface ship but they are one of the more dangerous foes to worry about even in the era of guided weapons and computerized fire control systems. Mainly because like space fighters, they can quickly get in, fire off their ship-killing payloads and get out with relatively limited cost and risk. And like torpedo boats a century plus ago, if you lose one it's not that big a loss in the grand scheme of war, unlike if say said destroyed fighter managed to kill a battleship or carrier. A destroyed capital ship like that is a far greater loss to a side than an obliterated space fighter even if it was your best Ace Pilot.

edited 20th Jan '18 6:29:05 PM by MajorTom

I think combat mecha sit around 3 or 4, noncombat mecha could conceivably get up to 5.5 if they're handled correctly.

Major Tom: In space, what's the advantage to sending a fighter armed with missiles when you could just send missiles? If you're talking about corvette-sized missile boats though, that's more along the lines of what I think a space "fighter" would end up looking like. They wouldn't win in a shooting match with a destroyer but they're light and fast and pack a big punch for their size.

edited 20th Jan '18 6:47:13 PM by archonspeaks

Because my setting is filled with aliens and psychics. I asked about Psy corps before. Hence type 2. That's the softest I go.

The fastest ships in the US fleet that I am aware of, other than hydrofoils or air cushion vehicles, are Littoral Combat Ships, which I would describe as being more or less corvette sized.