What's the mission?
And at what tech level?
Dreams of Revenge
This sounds suspiciously like equipment discussion, take it to the Equipment thread please.
Locking you up on radar since '09
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
How about you hold your horses there. This can easily fall into tactics and strategy especially considering you tactics and strategy are often partly dictated by what you have.
Who watches the watchmen?
Dreams of Revenge
Fair enough. The reason I'm perhaps being a bit "trigger happy" is to prevent blurring of the threads' purposes (and thereby create redundancy).
Carry on, nothing to see here!
Locking you up on radar since '09
I think Major Tom's question is still on topic.
^ Indeed if in a bit of a loose way. The mission determines the size. (And/or number of ships.)
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Very much so. What job you need a ship to do plays into tactics in strategy.
To answer the question broadly. The size of the ship depends on what you want to do with it. A drone meant to carry surveillance equipment will be built differently from a ship expected to do system wide patrol and interdiction missions. Picket vessels, drone carriers, missile spam ships, PD ships, ECM specialization ships etc will all have differing sizes and layouts depending on the equipment they need and how far they have to haul it. Levels of automation can affect ship size and layout as well. Automation can also affect performance. You might find you have to use a Picket Ship with more squishy crew differently then one that is more heavily automated.
Who watches the watchmen?
^ And to narrow it mildly, the type of mission puts limits on practical size.
For example interstellar force projection missions and long duration combat campaigns are ill-suited to smaller craft without significant logistical capabilities in auxiliary. Inversely, orbital defense and ASAT pickets don't need to be the size of a battleship. They can even be short ranged starfighters barely much if any bigger than modern fighter jets.
You wouldn't send a submarine to attack and occupy a harbor so why send a Starfighter or missile ship or other lightweight combatant to try and attack an entire planet? You would need countless smaller ships, ships that may not be capable of achieving their objectives compared to bigger and badder stuff. A destroyer wouldn't have the same force projection capabilities as a space battleship.
rollin' on dubs
And if I live to be a million, I'll never get the hate on the Space Fighter.
All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48
You mean other than they dont make any sense?
Yeah, unless you write in some serious Minovsky Physics note they are pure Rule of Cool.
rollin' on dubs
The sports car sized Space Fighter doesn't work, a larger craft like on Star Trek Deep Space Nine is perfect.
All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48
And doesn't really work either, for a wide variety of boring reasons.
This is why I figure consistency is more important than realism for storytelling purposes.
It kind of works with liquid G suits but it's a very soft line of reasoning.
Also, due to a lack of gravity, a need for fuel and air, and general advancement of technology you could end up with space fighters the size of a napoleonic warship.
This does raise the question of how we define a Space Fighter
Space Fighters are doable and buildable today with no new technology required. Your planet-killing, star-hopping, space battleships are not.
Which do you think is "harder"? A Gemini capsule with some missiles and machine guns bolted onto it? Or a Star Destroyer? The former is smaller than an F-16 and yet is exactly what a Space Fighter is. A small nimble short ranged armed craft
edited 7th Aug '15 3:20:39 PM by MajorTom
Regarding sailing ship-sized fighters, why not? Airplanes of all types have been getting bigger over the last century. For example.
To get things in proper scale, the Mustang is in the foreground, the Raptor is the background. Size inflation has also happened to numerous other types of vehicles, as advances in materials and powerplant technology have meant bigger craft that can outperform their smaller predecessors in every way.
rollin' on dubs
I posted this before, a Space Fighter would be the size of a 727 or 737.
All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48
by that point I'd say it was debatable whether you could realistically class the thing as a 'fighter'.
See, it's not that fighters make no sense, but putting people on them makes no sense, after all, people you must recover, whereas drones could be thrown away where necessary without significant detriment.
edited 8th Aug '15 2:18:00 AM by MattII
Same reason why UAV's make terrible fighters on Earth. The datalink lag. Unless you have the technology to make a craft 100% autonomous and capable of respecting the ROE to the same or better degree as a human pilot the unmanned craft is going to have some serious response time issues among other things.
Triply so if you intend for that craft to have any sort of operating range beyond a few hundred kilometers from its command source be it an airfield, space station, space carrier or what have you. If the craft is operating say about 300,000 km from the command source, it has a minimum 2 second transmission lag between receiving commands and the acknowledgement that it has done so and is waiting for next instruction. (Not factoring in processing time.) In air to air combat, delays of 1 second or more are easily turned fatal for the slowbie craft. One second can be the difference between getting in position for a kill shot and being stuck in position for a kill shot from the enemy.
In that situation, the speed of human thought and fingers is faster than the speed of light.
Reminds me of an idea I had for a robot rebellion plot where the robot soldiers became conscientious objectors.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Tom: Easy to answer. Autonomous systems. We already have space probes that largely operate sans human interference. No you don't need people to do that job. Manned space fighters are not only unlikely but not even remotely necessary. You are hamstringing possible capability, performance, range, and total payload options in favor of even single squishy meat bag. The Combat Wasps listed on this page are a far more realistic outcome then squishy meat bag ships.
AFP: I would totally read that. Comedic Satire or otherwise.
edited 8th Aug '15 8:06:52 AM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
The issue of drones keeps coming up and keeps running into the same issues.
The pro-drone side says it's cheaper and faster. A machine can be massed produced and operates on an entirely different level as a human brain.
The anti-drone side simply doesn't trust drones. If you remote control it you run into signal issues. Signals can be jammed. Signals have lag. Encryption takes time and a lack of encryption means the drones can be hijacked. There's also an ever present danger of a decapitation strike that leaves all the drones impotent.
A.I.s have entirely different set of issues. Can you trust their judgement? Can they handle the rampant chaos of war? Will they be able to problem solve or will absolutely childish plays tear them apart? We still don't know how the human brain works, how are we supposed to make something better? If we do make an AI that's better than a human by what rights do we command it to fight and die for us? Would an AI even want to do that and could we force it to do so? If an AI was smarter than us surely it could overcome any restraint we put on it. Yes, we might be able to add wants and needs but intelligence constantly grows and changes. An AI could move away from it's beginnings and develop it's own wants and needs.
No, let's not go to strong AI land. 'tis filled with dragons.
Not to mention that actually creating a true AI is just opening a pandora's box of ethical concerns. If you create an intelligent life, can you force it to do anything? If it will not do anything for you, can you shut it down, or would that be tantamount to murder?
I'd say it's how much of the ship can be automated against how many eggs you want to put in one basket.