I am not really convinced. The main difference between fightercraft and missiles is that they serve completely different goals. A missile is supposed to go somewhere and explode, while a fighter is supposed to go somewhere, do something, and then return. At least that is how i understand it. Now, this means that a lot of the stuff you build into the fighter will be used multiple times. Sure, if all you worry about is fuel efficiency/payload, a missile is obviously better. Though i also would not agree with the *4 factor you guys use, since that assume that the ideal way to rerendevous with the mothership is to completely decelerate, accelerate into the opposite direction and then decelerate again to meet the mothership. While that might be true in absolutely empty space, if you have some gravity wells in the area you probably can have a cheaper return voyage.
You're probably right here, although designing a strikecraft with the idea that you'll always have gravity wells around seems like poor design choices. If I were, for some reason, designing a space fighter, I would work from the baseline assumption that no gravity wells were around, just to be safe.
You're also forgetting that whatever payload it drops needs fuel too, and that fuel doesn't do ANYTHING for the fighter as it moves, it just slows it down.
I was not forgetting anything. How the fighter delivers its ordinance is fundamentally not relevant for this discussion. Of course, you wouldn't design your fighter around the assumption that gravity wells are around, but you can plan your attack around those, and thus take the amount of fuel with you that you need. You can expect an empty fuel canister to be of a smaller mass then a full one, so it would have an impact, but again is not really relevant for this debate. Also, fighters probably don't need to return to the mothership at combat speeds, so you could safe fuel here, too.
But that is besides the point anyways. Fuel efficiency per payload is probably not the most important thing for space weaponry.
I'm going to stop you right there. Are you familiar with F=ma? That's force equals mass times acceleration. We can move the equation around to get a = F/m, or acceleration equals force divided by mass. Fuel weighs mass, and it will always weigh mass because a reactionless engine violates conservation of mass and energy. The cost of the fuel is besides the point-- your space fighter is hauling a ridiculous amount of fuel around with it, fuel that has to be stored, protected, and whose enormous tanks will continue to weigh your fighter down even when empty. A fighter is slower, more vulnerable, thanks to its massive fuel tanks, and inevitably delivers a smaller payload than a missile. What is the advantage?
People seem to be getting tripped up on this whole 'reuseability thing'. Reuseability is a great thing when the thing you're reusing is really useful, but what does a space fighter do to its payload that's an advantage? Whatever it launches is going to be subject to whatever perceived flaws you have of missiles one way or another. If you think a missile is more vulnerable to point defense than a space fighter (for some reason) then a space fighter launching missiles is just as likely to have its payload neutralized as it was before-- in fact, more so since its missiles would inevitably be smaller than if you had just launched a missile of equal mass.
This is the core point about missiles and fighters in space that people don't understand. THEY ARE THE SAME THINGS. There is NO inherent advantage to having something come back other than the fact that you're getting something back. That confers no actual advantage to anything you're doing, other than forcing sci fi to emulate surface navies for no goddamned reason. If you want a fighter weighting 4 to deliver a missile weighing 1, why would you be happy when you get the 4 back when you could have just used the missile? In the end, a missile weighing 1 is still on target.
It would be nice if you would be a bit less condescending. I do indeed know basic physics. Now, what you seem to be getting hung up on are those "massive fuel tanks". Lets talk numbers for a moment. To accelerate 1 kg of mass to 0.01c (which sounds like a reasonable ballpark of what you might want in space combat), you need 4.5*10^12 J energy. I was calculating classically here because i was to lazy to do it relativistically, but the change through relativity should not be exceedingly large at that speed anyways. Now, if you use kerosine or rocket fuel, that is indeed quite a lot, especially since you would need to accelerate the remaining parts of that fuel at all points in time, too. However, in the best case, you have some sort of annihilation reaction where you would be able to do a complete mass-energy transfer. 4.5*10^12 J have a mass equivalent of 5*10^-5kg, or about a twentieth of a gram. So even if you need to accelerate and decelerate twice, in the best case where you get 100% efficiency out of your fuel, you would need about 0.2 grams of fuel per kg of fighter. Of course, this is very much a best-case scenario. Any realistic engine will have a lower efficiency, probably far lower. However, that fuel efficiency, and the efficiency of the fuel itself, are something that is very much dependent on the technology involved, and not limited by the simplest of physics. Indeed, annihilation reactions with 100% efficiency are known even now.
This might involve shields, guidance systems, PD systems, scramblers, cloaking technology, etc... If any of those or others are far more expensive then fuel and fuel storage on the mothership, and also bolster the probability of hitting the target by a large margin, it can increase the fighters effectiveness beyond that of missiles. Basically, you only need something that increases the probability of hitting your target by a percentage large enough to offset the larger amount of missiles you could launch which would make fightercraft cheaper in total because of the increased probability of retrieving the tech (over 0 for a rocket)
Cloaking is complete nonsense and I'll not repeat myself on this. Stealth is impossible in space. Period. Again, the 'costs' of fuel and fuel storage aren't just economic ones, they're costs in agility and in tactical flexibility. A carrier is slow and can only launch as much offensive power as it has fighter wings. A missile boat can keep launching everything it's got if it feels like it.
This does not make sense. I don't really care about stealth in space, so i won't argue that point any further. As you stated, the main difference between a fighter and a missile is that the fighter is supposed to return while the missile is not. Since there is a lot of space in space, the bomber can even fly a pretty much similar trajectory to a missile with only very minor changes to barely miss the enemy ship while having its payload hit it. And so, the carrier can only launch as many fighters as it has fighter wings, and the missile boat can only launch as many missiles as it has missiles. That is both obvious and very uninteresting. A carrier will probably have less fighters then a missile boat has missiles, but not necessarily by a very large margin.
Now, it is completely dependent on how that technology works whether fightercraft can be better than missiles or not.
No. Technology can't apply to missiles and not apply to unmanned fighters. Now, if you're talking about manned fighters, I've already laughed at you enough, so you can go back and read some of my other posts about why that's hilariously stupid. Any technology that can be applied to fighters can be applied to a missile. If it isn't economical to apply to a missile then it is LESS economical to apply to a fighter, because the fighter is just a missile that needs to come back, and consequently delivers a smaller payload slower and more clumsily.
You did not read what i wrote. Also, i feel the need to state this again, you could really be less condescending. It is quite annoying. Technology can very much apply to missiles and not to fighters. Unless your war consist of exactly one single battle, reusability is very much relevant. War is most often won by economics. Thus, cost efficiency of your weaponry becomes interesting. While you can surely have your first wave of missiles be exactly the same as fighters would be (- the return plan), if some of the fighters return to the baseship after some fights, the longer the war goes on, the better the situation for the fighter-user becomes. If only half of your fighters return home after each bombing run, they only need to be more then half as useful as a missile to be worth it in an infinite war.
It becomes a simple cost-result calculation. There is also a possibility that there is an other point where cheaper missiles again outperform the fighters with more expensive tech on board through sheer mass, which is what i assumed was the more probable situation. And in that case, it is indeed important, because the cheaper missiles won't have all the tech the fighter uses on board, because they are cheaper. If you want to only talk about missiles = fighters without a return plan, then you just need to calculate cost efficiency. The only difference is that some fighters will return, and fighters will perform less good then missiles in a single fight. By how much is dependent on the propulsion technology, which determines how much of a fighter/missiles consists of fuel storage. If you are only talking about a single fight in a war, missiles are superior. The longer the war persists, the more effect the reusability of your fighters has. And depending on the coefficients, fighters with sufficiently efficient engines will be superior to missiles in a sufficiently long war.
