Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

In space you can not just get out and take a dump. Sci-fi writers/artists tend to forget this when making the internals of their ships.

I use fighters as a rapid reaction force, using the lack of expendables and small size (square cubed) to pack on massive acceleration (a whooping 5 G!). They've got a similar mindset to 18th century cavalrymen.

"Whether you divide the weight, fuel and thrust into two or more units of different sizes, or combine it all into one large mass (which is what you are doing when you dock one ship to another) is irrelevent to the equation."

Even IF this were the case, unless they were doing some type of exercise/training, it's still pointless for any smaller craft to be outside of its home ship.

It'd be akin to a Landscaper having his apprentice driving his lawnmower alongside the road with him while he's driving the truck.

Except that is the case, no if. Unlike the example you gave, where fuel usage is doubled, in space fuel usage is identical whether the ships are docked or seperate.

The ships being able to dock actually makes things worse, since the mechanisms required for docking would take up space and weight.

If anything it’s more pointless for the ships to be docked together.

Edited by archonspeaks on Dec 27th 2018 at 8:39:33 AM

Well TECHNICALLY you can, you might just have to deal with some at minimum very chilly cheeks.

Among other things...

Tactical: I think the best answer came from AFP. Somewhat similar roles to float planes. That is ISR and light strike or interdiction missions. The serious firepower came from carriers deploying CAP from their compliments to protect the fleet or launch strikes against distant targets without having to put the fleet close enough to be in danger of defenses around the area.

De Marquis: I am putting these behind label note markups as a courtesy and to make it easier to navigate.

^{Why hangars?}  First, a carrier is a support craft. Saying just have a support craft do it is redundant. You are not going to win that one because that is what they are, and why they exist. The important part of the carrier is the fact it can protect the craft from elements and makes it a lot easier to work on them by putting them into an internal hangar area. A pressurized hangar is not a single point of failure any more than a pressurized crew space is. That is to say, they aren't. That and it would be trivially easy to create them with compartmentalization in mind, and that you could pressurize/de-pressurize at will. Even operating in an enclosed but de-pressurized hangar would be a lot easier and safer for man or machine than forcing them to do an EVA to a separately moving and maneuvering object in a significantly more dangerous and hazardous environment. You are already pretty much-coming close enough to start landing in a secure bay in the first place to make EVA possible. There is significantly more that can go wrong attempting to work on two uniquely maneuvering and moving objects vs one that is effectively resting on the other ship and relatively motionless. Not having to expose personnel or even robots to space makes things a lot easier in a myriad of ways including no need for maneuvering equipment or tools made to work in space specifically. By ensuring the ship you want to work on is also secured you can eliminate human error from the ship's crew because they are no longer flying it and powering down the ship to work on it becomes less of an issue if it is secured inside a protected space. It would also offer myriad of benefits when dealing with a damaged craft that could have lost their ability to independently maneuver and/or have crew injuries or losses and any host of issues that would make trying to line up with a damaged craft a lot more difficult. Being able to halt its movement and secure it makes things easier on everyone. The key being able to halt and reel it in. No need to make a nice neat landing but getting down and in would be important. Sheltering it in a protected workspace makes a lot of things easier like extracting crew, dealing damaged or destroyed life support, replacing lost atmo from the damaged hull and plugging leaks, or even just doing basic repairs. That would be true of frigates carrying even a small fighter/ISR craft or a big purpose made carrier carrying around tens of craft.

^{There is a reason for assisted launches.}  A very good reason to use assisted launch is that some of the more interesting and energetic propulsion options for main drives are not something you want to be fired off inside any sort of enclosed space. Kicking it out as a boost to its velocity before it fires its main drive is generally better for everyone. That is unless you want to replicate "The Kzinti Lesson" and melt your enemies with your drives, that and meaningful acceleration across a short time frame eats into your Delta-V budget.

^{Different craft different performance and Delta V.}  No, my second point is valid and quite accurate. It simply doesn't work the way you are insisting on. We have gone over this before. First, the chance of two drastically different craft with drastically different designs and performance specs having the same performance in any regard in the exact same situation is almost non-existent. There is also no such thing as engines built on the same general principle having the exact same performance in two completely different craft or vehicles. Especially if they are not the same make or model. Just because it is of certain engine type, which even now encompasses a rather broad range of possible differences on its own, does not mean it has the same performance. Things like size, the available power plant for energy, the mass of the ship, maneuver requirements, acceleration requirements, differences in manufacturing techniques of larger vs smaller scale drives and engines, and untold other factors will create performance differences no matter you look at it. That by way affects your consumables, your mass, and most definitely your Delta V. The simplest example to illustrate this point would be to take two craft that are identical in every way except their mass. One is 5 tons the other 10. You are ultimately going to wind up with different performance profiles and Delta V budgets from the difference in mass alone for the same mission. The two craft will have to execute different maneuvers and have different acceleration and deceleration profiles. Even mass of a few hundred Kg can impact your Delta-V budget in a notable way. Small craft are the most drastically impacted because of mass and size constraints put harder limits on the design.

^{Still using up Delta V}  If your craft is moving with a fleet you are using up your Delta V to maneuver, accelerate, decelerate, and maneuver for resupply as the fleet makes it way through a given area. Even using gravity slingshot still requires the use of Delta V to set them up and do maneuvering after the fact. The fleet isn't going to be sitting still. They aren't geo-synced space stations or satellites they are a collection of individually maneuvering and moving craft. You will be consuming expendables constantly deployed compared with being stowed on a purpose made craft that already accounts for stowage of the smaller craft in its Delta-V budget. That is the whole point of the parent craft to make sure the small craft doesn't have to eat into its own expendables until they need to deploy it.

^{Limitations of mass on design.}  You will quite quickly find a point where designs hit a limit where they are either too small in terms of mass limits to be a strict escort craft as that limited mass puts constraints on everything including types of engines, hull, and consumables it can carry and impact its available Delta V. It would make more sense to go all in one way or another. You want a constantly deployed craft you basically say screw fighters and build something akin the Corvettes or Frigates. You want a small craft that is built for the roles carried fighters fill you build them differently and you build the craft that carries them differently.

^{Missiles are not the same as traveling craft.}  No, a missile is not just a scaled down spacecraft, that is a very misinformed and inaccurate statement in and of itself. That's like calling a bomb a personal hang glider because it has an aerodynamic glide body. They may operate off the same principle of motion but they have vastly different performance specs and designs and obvious end results when they reach the ground. A missile has a distinctly different mission and performance requirements than small or large craft. Missiles are a one-way trip and regardless if they hit their target or not, pretty much no one expects to get them back and designs reflect that. Missiles need notably different acceleration, cruise durations, and maneuver capability than a small craft and they are built to be expendable. Even then a missile designed for CIWS work has design differences to an Anti-Shipping missile because of a different overall mission. Small craft that are fighters also don't operate on the Launch, accelerate, cruise, terminal attack phases like missiles. Trying to build a missile like a fighter or fly it around like an escort craft is a quite frankly wasteful endenouver and bad design. The one variety of weapon I would argue that something may need a constant cruise ability is not a general munition but something more like a strategic weapon like an RKV or another similar high output asset that has some aspect of its operation that is constant acceleration up to a predetermined max velocity.

There are quite a few reasons to expect a small craft to have a different engine than the large parent or sister craft. You would select a drive that meets whatever collective constraints are placed on your design like mass and available internal space. That all but guarantees you will be seeing different drives as there will inevitably be a craft that needs a different drive because it fits the need better. There is no reason to see every craft in the fleet using the exact same drive if something different does the job better and more efficiently for a given design. Even if you use the same general type of drive as the larger craft that doesn't mean the craft will have identical performance or Delta-V budget as quite a bit more goes into both performance and Delta V than just drive type.

Type of drive has absolutely nothing to do with whether you dock a craft into a sheltered position for maintenance.

Children of Dead Earth missiles are built around mass constraints of the overall design especially KKV and Nuclear weapon warheads or nuclear EFP warheads. More importantly is the mass constraints for the forms of propulsion as well as costs if they are going to be used in the missions. Add in that some of the forms of propulsion do have actual minimum and maximum mass to be viable and physical size limits, which impact the missile design but also how many of those types of missile a ship can pack into a given hull.

Archon: No the fuel usage would not be the same. A purpose built parent craft regardless of what variety would already have accounted for the mass of the small craft and everything to support it in its design and fuel budget but that isn't where the onus lays. It lays with the fighter. The fighter deployed still consumes expendables and fuel or reaction mass. A fighter in a bay with its crew on the main ship is not expending anything from the stores for the small craft. They are not consuming fuel stores or other expendables from anything that is not already accounted for with the parent craft. A carrier doesn't dip into the avgas bunker for the ones that are still fuel based. They have separate stores. If it were docking with a ship that doesn't have that built-in consideration that is a different matter but that wasn't the question.

While modern pilots can make really long flights they still develop pilot fatigue especially if they have little or no room to move, stretch, and lie down for rest. Hell, even drone operators start to develop a form of fatigue and need to be switched out regularly. Every pilot I have ever heard talk about flights like trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific 17-20 hour flights even using mid-air refueling describe the experience as ultimately exhausting and need rest after the fact. The USAF pretty much makes a day of rest mandatory to avoid pilot fatigue outside of oh-shit combat or general emergency situations after long flights like that. Pushing pilots for days is quite likely begging for an accident. Having a place to offload your crew and see to ship maintenance while the crew rest would be a benefit in that regard.

Although, some fun floatplane trivia, there was a US Navy squadron made up of floatplane pilots which flew Spitfires throughout June of 1944. They were formed specifically to spot for artillery fire during the invasion of Normandy and disbanded pretty much immediately after their mission was done, making them one of the shortest-lived units in US military history.

The squadron was conceived because the US Navy's experience with floatplanes surviving contact with the Luftwaffe during the invasion of Sicily was rather discouraging, so for Normandy they were equipped with faster aircraft so they'd have better odds. Given the proximity of Normandy to England, they were able to operate from nearby land bases.

Edited by AFP on Dec 28th 2018 at 4:15:09 AM

Yeah the float planes were not exactly the best air to air assets but they were obviously useful until they found something better.

Re the reduncance of Fighter Carriers-Its a difficult case to make clearly, becaue it requires one to apply hard science criteria to a class of spacecraft that is inherently soft science (space fighters). The conclusions can be difficult to follow. Imagine two scenarios: 1) A space carrier that weighs 1000 weight units (wu), and a fighter that weighs 10 wu. They both use the same type of drive engine. This type of drive expends one ton of fuel to accelerate ten wu one additional kilometer per second. To accelerate the fighter, therefore, requires one ton of fuel, and to accelerate the carrier 100 tons, for a total of 101 tons of fuel. Now consider scenario 2), in which the fighter docks with the carrier. You can turn the fighters engine off (in fact you better!), but now the carrier weighs a total of 1010 wu (the carrier's original weight, plus the now docked fighter). If you do the math, you will find that the fuel requirements to accelerate 1010 wu are identical to those of scenario 1- that is, 101 tons of fuel.

In practical terms it's actually worse, because compared to a straight auxilary ship which provides resupply and maintenence with extravehicular humans or drones, the carrier is equiped with a pressurized hanger, which adds additional weight and structural requirements that the auxilary ship doesnt need. If there are benefits to direct contact between craft, then one could compromise in an economical way by utilizing intership bridges between auxillary and fighter.

Of course in another sense none of this matters. In any story-verse where fighters are a thing, the narrative is going to require carriers just for stylistic reasons. "Battlestar Galactica" would have been a much less compelling a story without the battlestar.

Edited by DeMarquis on Dec 28th 2018 at 11:04:06 AM

Wouldn't a actual hangar be better for protecting a fighter craft than having it fly right next to the ship as EVA activity fixes it? A hulled hangar on a ship at least has a chance to stop another attack better than having the repair guys out in the open.

After all, Shoot the Medic First

Unless you’re going straight up science fantasy hulls aren’t really going to be stopping any attacks.

We're talking about space fighters, we're already in the fantastical, a wall of metal containing the fighters would be more likely to reduce extra damage and allow repairs to be completed more easily compared to just having them sit out in the open where enemy sensors could see them and then get a easy potshot in.

I didn't say it would absolutely, I just said it would be more likely.

At that’s point you’re pretty much operating on rule of cool then, so as long as the way the fighters are stored is sufficiently awesome it shouldn’t matter whether they’re in a hangar or on the exterior.

You might want a covering for your workspace so your socket wrench doesn't float off to another planet.

^ Along with the rest of your toolbox too.

"Wouldn't a actual hangar be better for protecting a fighter craft than having it fly right next to the ship as EVA activity fixes it? A hulled hangar on a ship at least has a chance to stop another attack better than having the repair guys out in the open."

Seems like it should, right? But actually, just take the armoring material that you would have used on the hanger, put it on the vac suits and the fighter instead, and you save weight for the same level of protection. There are some forms of armor that do not scale down well, like whipple sheilds, but you dont need a pressurized hanger to take advantage of them.

Edited by DeMarquis on Dec 28th 2018 at 3:00:42 PM

Carrier or not, covered or not if the enemy is able to take shots at the fighter even doing station keeping or sitting in a bay your support craft you have a lot bigger problems to worry about and so would the fighters in either scenario. Regardless of which argument or option you choose cutting off a small craft from support is not good for the small craft or if they are attacked in a vulnerable state like in a station-keeping position or an approach to link up with bigger craft, the small craft is in about the same amount of trouble. Even sitting in a sheltered position would still mean the fighter and the support craft it is around are in a lot of trouble. The one thing the hangar can do is at least conceal the fighter from direct observation and targeting. Small consolation if the enemy can already attack your rear areas including loitering craft in the midst of repair or support ships housing them. In the end everyone is pretty much in the same amount of trouble.

De Marquis: No, you aren't getting the same level of protection on the vac suits compared to a larger mass of metal. The vac suits or even drones. At least with the hangar it conceals the fighter from being directly targeted, small consolation though when either way they are a sitting duck until they can get back under their own power.

You are still deliberately ignoring the huge problem with your assertion on the same drive type and that is we are not talking about identical craft in any respect. And again same engine type built for different craft and in different scales =/= same performance even on the bench or on paper. You literally have to break the laws of physics to make your assertion work. Even making engine outputs and fuel capacity and consumption equal does not give you equal performance at even the most basic level unless the craft is identical.

Going right back to the difference of two craft by mass alone. The 5 Ton craft and the 10 Ton. Everything identical except their mass. You will get different Delta V budgets and consumable rates no matter what you do. Different performance across identical missions and different Delta V budgets and rates of travel. You are not ever going to be getting the exact same levels of fuel expenditure even using the same general type of drive across two drastically different craft designs especially craft with drastic differences in available mass.

Even using a simplified Delta V calculator with both crafts having equal quantities of fuel and the same engine with different ship masses gives different results. Here from Atomic Rockets. A very simplified and bare bones Delta V calculator. Give both of those otherwise identical crafts the same amount of fuel to expend say one ton of fuel overall. Full mass is their mass before any expendables are used. Dry mass is their mass after expendables used. All you have to do is leave the rest exactly as it is. You will get notably different answers. The 5-ton craft is 2231 the 10 ton is 1053. But that is assuming that mass difference is not fuel. The question becomes what are you doing with that extra mass? You can get the same result as the 5 ton by having one more ton of fuel. But that is a difference right there. The larger craft is expending more fuel for the same Delta V but the other end of the trade-off is what you can do with that 8 tons vs 4? You could dedicate a couple more tons to fuel and gain a bigger Delta V and still have more free mass for additional equipment than the smaller and lower mass craft. That difference in mass you can work with makes a huge difference and has a drastic impact on design and performance.

So no even having the same drive with the exact same output using the same quantity of fuel does not mean they will have the same Delta V. Your assumption that having the same engine somehow gives them the same fuel consumption and Delta V is wrong on even a basic level when two craft are not identical. You are trying to claim that two quite drastically different craft will have the same performance with even the same drive type which doesn't hold up to even casual examination.

This goes right back into my point. A purpose built parent craft that already accounts for the added mass of housing the small craft and calculations for Delta V assume it will have that mass aboard for maneuvers quite notably changes that picture. It doesn't matter what the larger craft is as long as it already accounts for the mass of the small craft and everything to support being on board in its fuel and Delta V budget from the get-go. And in the context of the original question it isn't an issue of Delta V at that point as you already account for that from the start. It is what can you do with a limited selection of small craft to make them useful to a larger craft housing them that can already handle more powerful equipment and weapons. In my opinion, AFP already gave us a good broad answer to work with and you would have to arrive at your own specific details. If you can't drum up something that makes sense then the answer is there is no point to them.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Dec 28th 2018 at 3:29:54 AM

So what I'm thinking is that you use folding external repair bays to service the fighters. Not much more than a roof to keep out debris, you'd bring the fighters in to refuel, rearm, and occasionally repair but outside quickly swapping out components serious repairs are done internally in actual machine shops.

Eh, that still sounds like more of a hassle.

When I was in Germany, Crew Chiefs used to bitch a lot about the F-16s they had to service, I couldnt even imagine what they'd say if they had to do it in Zero-G

They would bitch in a futuristic dialect.

Less of a hassle than bringing the fighters into a pressurized bay.

I rather like how the carriers in Gundam worked, where the Hangars weren't pressurized, especially not on active duty, and later hangers had a storage area for the MS's.

Of course Gundam also had a reason for the Carriers because Mobile Suits didn't run on thermonuclear rockets and expended fuel faster than the carriers.

I thought everything in Universal Century Gundam ran off the Minovsky Drive a sort of ion fusion drive hybrid.

Even the mobile suits which was one of the reasons you avoided shooting one in the reactor lest it go BANG really big like.

No that was much later UC where tech was crazy.

From 0079 to 0123 all ships ran off of thermonuclear thrusters with oxygen plasma based thrusters in Earth atmo, mobile suits used outright rocket boosters and verniers as they provided more thrust and acceleration and could be used in atmosphere, while minovsky craft systems were particle lift systems that needed to continuously pump out minovsky particles from the reactor to float in atmo due to the particle's reactive nature and predisposition to fly away from other particles.

There were thermonuclear pulse thrusters which were effectively more effective ion drives but they weren't very useful on ships so they were attached to space colonies and asteroids to move them from the Asteroid Belt.

The minovsky drive was a refined minovsky craft which was only ever stuck on one ship as a experiment.

Edited by EchoingSilence on Dec 28th 2018 at 7:36:35 AM

Bitching about having to do work is a time-honored military tradition. If they weren’t bitching I’d be more worried.

We'd probably program our robot workers to bitch because it'd bring a sense of familiarity as we have them do work.