Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

When I think of a C-5, I envision a large transport used to shuttle personnel between ships and bases. Combat landings would probably need specialized craft like you mention: dropships or drop pods. Combat boarding (ship-to-ship) would similarly use specialized craft.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 24th 2018 at 11:56:28 AM

So in that sense, even taking out the obvious breaking of physics, carriers in fiction with super large crew complements (i.e Imperial Star Destroyers having almost 50k troops and personnel) isn't really all that advantageous when you can spread them out?

The questions you're asking are a bit broad to be easily answered.

The most obvious technical problem would be the logistics of obtaining and sustaining all those people. There's certainly no point in building ships requiring that many crew members to operate: it's We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future taken to its most illogical extreme. Most of a Star Destroyer's complement isn't crew but troops: people to do stuff once the ship gets where it's going, and to that end you would bring as many as you need for whatever it is that you're trying to do, and design your ships around that requirement.

The comparison to modern carriers is a bit inept. A carrier's job is to transport, maintain, and launch aircraft. It's not to transport ground troops. You bring troops on troop transports and the carrier acts as the center of operations: the hub around which the battle group's combat capability is centered. A carrier by itself is a powerful combat unit but has no ability to conduct invasions.

Star Destroyers function more as The Battlestar, merging all of these functions into a single giant ship. It carries a fighter wing, assault craft, troops, and is capable of engaging in sustained direct combat. It's an all-in-one approach rather than a specialized approach, and one to which we don't have a direct modern equivalent. You design the ship to berth as many people as you need to accomplish those functions. If you're concerned about the technical realism of building such a ship in your Space Opera, you've rather missed the point.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 24th 2018 at 2:31:54 PM

Only thing a space carrier based on its terrestrial equivalent needs is fighters and dropships, and the crew needed to maintain them. Everything else is either irrelevant (ASW) or completely pointless given that its space (AWACS)

The combo aircraft carrier/troop carrier design most sci-fi characters have is a design with dubious utility. There’s really no reason for a carrier to do both.

As for the original question, Carrier Onboard Delivery isn’t done by large aircraft. Here on Earth, it’s done by Greyhounds and Ospreys. Most of the essential supplies the ship just brings with it, COD is only really used for things like mail, critical pieces of cargo, or visitors.

In space, there's virtually no limitation to how big you can make something. You aren't concerned with water displacement or the square-cube law or other things that define the parameters of terrestrial shipbuilding. There are other considerations of course (heat management being a big one), but most of them get hand-waved in space opera and soft sci-fi.

A "carrier" in space doesn't need a "launch deck" where fighters can "accelerate to takeoff speed". The notion is ludicrous. There's nothing keeping your resupply ships from being as large as you need them to be, your fighters don't need a "boost" to launch (other than in the sense that it saves them fuel), and landing is as simple as matching velocities with the carrier.

(Seriously, I blame the Wing Commander series for the meme that carrier operations in space are just like on Earth.)

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 24th 2018 at 3:12:40 PM

So then This would be pointless? It's a fighter coming back to its carrier.

Oh, lord. So very pointless. I even love how the fighter shuts off its engines to decelerate, rather than applying reverse thrust. Isaac Newton would be spinning in his grave.

I assume the deck of the carrier is using some sort of artificial gravity, of course, despite that being silly. Aircraft spend an enormous amount of energy fighting against gravity: one of the most powerful advantages of space is that you can work without that problem, and they're trying to put it back because it looks cool?

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 24th 2018 at 3:38:19 PM

The game gets a lot right, but a lot so very wrong.

One thing Star Wars, sort of gets right with there being no launch sequence. TI Es and X-Wings simply come and go as they please. The only thing that concerns me is safety hazards (it's one of the things that bothered me about Last Jedi among other things), fighters inside the First Order ships were zipping around as if the concern for potential pilot error wouldn't be catastrophic. If I were to ever include a handwave of why a ship launches fighters instead of letting the pilot go out on their own from a launch bay/depressurized flight deck, that'd be number 1.

I think the carrier = troop transport trope probably comes from the fact that carriers often ARE used as transports for evacuation.

But then they overlook that that is an emergency situation and there just being leveraged because they have large amounts of internal volume... being floating airplane warehouses and all... and that any time you weren't just trying to get every thing that floats to help there is much better options.

There is a difference between emergency utility, and functional uses... an M60 makes a good club, but that doesn't mean that future machine guns should pull double duty as one.

Edited by Imca on Sep 24th 2018 at 12:59:13 PM

The COD carrier landing there uses a small drone that latches onto the fighter as it approaches and does the braking for the fighter, you can see it lift up part way through that clip. I watched some lets plays of the game to see what it was about and they use the drone to act as reverse thrust for the for fighter and brake its approach. They do use artificial gravity in the game as well on the big ships.

I wouldn't think too hard about it.

The C-5 is a piece of the logistical chain delivering people, vehicles, and supplies to more remote or removed locations. They operate from base to base but their ranges can be augmented by mid-air refueling. Basically, you have a craft that operates from key logistical points to other logistical points.

If you want to look at a craft that carries compliments of crew just for launching raids and such look at the Amphibious Assault Ships aka the "Gator Navy". They carry a large complement of Marines, plus landing craft, plus helicopters and/or VTOL fighters. They are sort of the soft evolution of the Escort Carrier only they can launch their own landing force but still provide light aircover.

Big carriers like the Super Carriers are specialist ships built just house, launch, maintain, and supply an airwing. They project a lot of air power force. The AAS craft of various flavours are sort of lightweight carriers geared towards lighter craft compliments mostly with helicopters and some VTOL craft. The craft are there to directly support their troop compliments. For the landings, the ship includes utility landing craft as well as the craft for landing vehicles and the troops. They won't eat hits like a destroyer or cruiser so they need some protection as well.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Sep 24th 2018 at 3:28:08 AM

The fighter wouldn't be firing its engines on approach. You want to slow down, not speed up, and aerodynamic stalling is... not a thing. Not at all, not even a little. And landing gear? Give me a break. It'd bounce right back up into space. There. Is. No. Gravity. My face cannot be smacking my palm hard enough.

Edit: Well, you said they use artificial gravity, but it seems like a lot of effort to justify treating a spaceship like an aircraft carrier and playing all the same tropes. I suppose you can only go so far out of players' comfort zones before they start crying to their mommies.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 24th 2018 at 7:43:03 AM

Like I said don' think about it too hard. The COD games run rather high on the rule of cool principal. It falls pretty solidly on the soft side of sci-fi with a few bits and pieces of realism thrown in for light flavoring.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Sep 24th 2018 at 6:51:22 AM

And to be fair, it's not like even something the Expanse is immune to getting things wrong.

I don't expect perfect physics realism from sci-fi works. I know better than that. But if someone asks the question, "Is this realistic?" then I have to answer honestly. In fact, I am sometimes impressed when works that I didn't expect to bang the realism drum unexpectedly provide answers to their own Fridge Logic.

For all that Lost in Space (2018) is way down on the softer end of the scale, it surprised me by pulling out some very real science, and on the flip side by justifying its defiance of science in some cases. And yes, I will bang on about that show because it needs to be talked about a lot more than it is.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 24th 2018 at 8:17:32 AM

I tend to keep realism at a set distance with my works, and tend to go for more believable, which is why I'm gonna stop asking for "what is more realistic" and start asking "What do you all think is more believable for people who live with these rules" and such.

Soft Sci-Fi with a hard edge is always preferable to me than Hard Sci-Fi with a soft edge. Completely hard doesn't interest me in the slightest. Borderline awful, tbh

The issue with a lot of hard scifi is that if we were to go purely hard science, then there would be little reason for any human characters whatsoever. Which is a bitch of a thing to do especially since you can't make quirky robot characters questioning their existence in the void as True AI is impossible thanks to real science.

In short, you gotta know when to stop with the Sci and start with the Fi.

Characters drive plot, and things must happen to them, hence why ships have manned crews in sci-fi. Even in series where the characters are quirky robots they are operating tools like humans.

I agree something middling between hard and soft is preferable with room for it to slide a bit in either direction. We Are Legion (We Are Bob) falls into that category for me it leans more towards soft though.

I want works to be consistent about how they apply sci-fi tropes. Beyond that, yeah, it's a matter of personal preference. I also get very annoyed by works that recycle tropes IN SPACE! because they think the audience is too dumb to understand the differences. Such as the aforementioned COD example.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 25th 2018 at 9:54:43 AM

Huh? Where did you get that from? This isn't the quantum thing again, is it?

Honestly Infinite Warfare is pretty good about it, for one thing you can actually use the fact that ships don't have guns mounted under them to your advantage in space combat.

Edited by EchoingSilence on Sep 25th 2018 at 9:09:34 AM

Don't you mean Infinite Warfare? And that's only because the designers of those ships seem to have had some sort of fetish for precisely mimicking naval combat. Bear in mind that I've never played the game, only heard about it. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they have "depth charges" to drop on "submarines" flying "below" them in 3-D space.

I'm not aware of any research stating that "true AI" (whatever that means) is impossible at the physics level.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 25th 2018 at 10:07:51 AM

You should play the game Fighteer, it’s a lot more grounded than you’re giving it credit for. Retribution (the name of the carrier) design on the inside is literally NASA mixed with the Navy and it feels tangible. Only thing that’s wrong with the Ret is that the bridge has windows like Star Wars. Other than that, it’s nothing we couldn’t build. No super fancy monitors, touchscreen panels, etc.

For one thing, I'll be damned if I contribute any of my own money to feed the brainless, macho dick-waving of modern spunkgargleweewee games. (Caveat: At least COD:IW takes place in space so it can dodge overt accusations of racism.)

For another, I find it insulting to my intelligence to have any work attempt to rationalize such blatant defiance of logic, physics be damned.

But who knows — I might get bored one day and give it a try.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 25th 2018 at 10:14:03 AM