Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

And I'm sure someone will use it to cook their lunch in the field. Or to violently fail to cook their lunch.

I’ve always loved microwaves as a weapons. Would be a really good trap weapon in a Stern chase into a gas giant or something similar.

I would what the drawbacks be aside from Range, power maybe ?

Or try to warm up their jackets in winter. Or warm it up too much.

Say, for instance, that you have a universe where space fighters are viable, but a race you encounter, has your Standard Sci-Fi Fleet but they never developed fighters preferring an outdated doctrine, perhaps, being new on to the galactic scene or there was no need.

Would said ships logically, not have CIWS? Well, maybe yes for shooting down the occasional missile but no "effective" anti-fighter starship weaponry?

This is a first contact scenario, and I'm sort of imagining it where for the first few skirmishes, human fighters basically are able to be up close and personal with starships with little fear of being "shot down".

Maybe, but it seems unlikely that the idea of close defense would not occur to them at all. Even if they never developed space fighters, they'd surely have missiles.

Possibly they defeat missiles with jamming and ecm rather then Cwis ? Always an option.

An option that is not a guarantee and the more options you have outside that the more the odds of a ship surviving an encounter goes up. The point of adding close in defense is to give another layer to defeating threats. It only takes one shot getting through to possibly ruin your day so stacking the odds as much as possible in your favor.

It could be that fighters are just a little too tough to destroy with the point defenses they have. Yes, the PD will hurt them but you need way more hits to kill the target.

Wouldn’t this depend on doctrine? Especially if they favor slugs over missiles

Are we really going to have another squabble about the viability of fighter-like craft in space war? There are so many variables involved that it seems pointless to go over them again. If you really want fighters to be effective, just wave whatever hands you need to make them work. It's not like Macross (to pick a random example) makes any pretense of caring about scientific realism.

Edited to add: In the specific scenario being discussed, what you can do is give the fighterless side weapons designed for extreme long-range engagement. They can aim very precisely, but cannot change their aim rapidly. These weapons would be very powerful, so if a fighter takes a hit, it's toast, but the fighters could use their maneuverability to avoid this fate and close inside the minimum effective range of counter-fire.

The main problem is that you'd expect a faction that designs its capital ships around the idea of long-range combat to give them plenty of defenses, like armor and/or shielding, that would make fighter-based weaponry inflict Scratch Damage, if that. You then have to figure out how to actually hurt the things once you get close to them. Perhaps they have weak points that are only exposed up-close.

Another option is that the capital ships are lightly armored and highly mobile, but then fighters are going to have a hard time chasing them down, since they couldn't carry enough fuel to keep up.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 17th 2019 at 3:17:22 PM

You don't necessarily need to outlast an enemy in order to catch them. You only need to out accelerate them long enough to make a flyby.

Just do what Star Wars does: Give the big ships shields that can shrug off powerful capital ship weapons, but not prevent solid objects from penetrating. Thus, the niche of starfighters: Small, agile attackers that can get inside the shields to deploy pinpoint attacks, provided they make it past the defensive batteries. Maybe the counter to that is that the fighters can't carry weapons effective enough to do sufficient damage to kill the big ships.

Wing Commander did it from a different angle: The shields were quite impermeable, but you could phase through them if you could work out their frequency or something. So bombers and capital ships would launch torpedoes designed to do just that. The catch being that it took a bit of time to figure out the shield frequency, and so you end up flying straight and level into the teeth of the enemy defenses while laying in your attack.

Why couldn't you do the shield analysis while not doing that? Look, a distraction!

Wing Commander is a fun game series, but those bombers would be blasted into atoms by capital ship weaponry while lining up their shots. The only way they can make that work In-Universe is to give them party poppers and spitballs for point defense.

Edit: I remember playing the second game in the series, where bombers were introduced. The final mission has you in a bomber going up against two destroyers armed with anti-matter guns to kill other capital ships. They take off maybe half your shields on a direct hit.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 18th 2019 at 7:38:38 AM

Hey now, party poppers are a time-honored sci-fi Anti-Air weapon!

This just brings up the question of why those capital ships aren't firing solid objects. Unless the shields actually block everything except fighters for some reason..? Maybe the fighters have some kind of anti-shield tech (Perhaps their own shields work like that..?) that's too expensive to install on a single-use projectile? Then again, given how many fighters they tend to loose with each battle anyway I'm not sure how much sense that would make.

In regards to the space fighters/ capital ships, you could get around it by saying that the shield projectors can’t compinsate for the rapidly changing and close in maneuvering close to their hull so they can’t always catch the fighters munitions, but who can intercept the big capital ship fire. Still scratch damage but somewhat logical ?

Assuming the shields are not covering the entire ship the whole time and have to be angled/maneuvered against incoming fire? That's at least somewhat plausible, but conveys the unavoidable implication that these people have never encountered small, close-range craft (or consider them not to be a threat, like the Empire).

Or maybe shields (on the fighters) cancel the effect of shields (on the ships)?

Some sort of destructive interference? That's a pretty cool idea, although the relative power levels would make it unlikely.

Even a small reduction in power might be enough to avoid outright destruction.

Yes.

Remember that fighters would have an advantage no amount of pooh-poohing eliminates: Numbers.

Like missile boats and planes vs battleships and aircraft carriers in maritime war, a Space Fighter can be built in far greater numbers for the same cost and mass as any Star Destroyer or Dreadnought or Assault Carrier.

Edited by MajorTom on Jul 19th 2019 at 5:58:01 AM

And you can buy a lot more 9mm hollow-points than you can 120mm HE shells. Doesn't mean you can kill a tank by shooting it with them.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 19th 2019 at 9:01:58 AM

Numbers alone isn’t enough to overcome the inherent limitations of the concept. All you’d be doing is seeing how deep the enemy’s ammo reserves ran.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jul 19th 2019 at 6:01:32 AM

The diffrence is that hallowpoint wont go through the armor, no one is arguing to arm your fighters with machineguns for attacking capital ships.

There is quite a bit of merit to the idea of numbers with the shere lethality of space combat.... distribute your force around so that the loss of one ship is much less of a crippling blow.

You can easily outdo fighter numbers with missiles, bullets, and other munitions and far more cheaply we have covered this ad nauseam. Also, numbers alone is a lousy metric.