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[Soda Savvy]

Something that has always bugged me about the setting is that there's all of these factions with relatively limited populations, and they use carriers with fighters that can and do often measure their lifespans as "One Way".

An Astral or Mora can lose their entire fighter/bomber compliment on a single attack run. And then they just spit out replacements because everything is running off of autofactories. More to the point, the onboard fabricators and replacement rates straight up suggest that they don't expect to get most of the spacecraft back.

If anything, they should at least be remote operated, with the pilots being in command stations back on the carrier, much like modern day military drones are controlled.

Or should I believe that it's normal for a Condor with two wings of Talons to lose a fifth of its crew after three sets of fighters get spit out against that fleet with a bunch of burst PD and Paladins?

[prav]

Limited population? The sector is overflowing with refugees from lost worlds and habitats. A crewman costs me 12 credits on Umbra - I can get 250 500 pilots for the price of one Wasp LPC

No, wait, make that 500, I was looking at the sale price.

[Big Bee]

I think it's cause most of the ships and fighters were NOT designed post-collapse. Back when carriers with autofactories were originally made, the Domain was still around and population issues were not that relevant. Some fighters ARE uncrewed though, but those are mostly simple mining drones or high-tech stuff.

The bigger worlds have millions or tens of millions (or hundreds of millions in Chicomoztoc) so with how many ships are being used canonically (a single Paragon for example is much more significant in lore than in-game where task forces can just have several), I doubt it's that much of a problem.

Also, people piloting fighters is cool. Like in Star Wars when they attacked the Death Star, I guess.

[Amoebka]

The setting is supposed to be grimderp, so pointless loss of human life is expected.

[CapnHector]

The population is pretty limited. The largest colony, Chicomoztoc, has x*10^8 inhabitants. Earth would be a size 9 colony if it were in the Sector. Now if you were to kill 1 Hegemony fighter pilot per second and they just kept producing fighters and sending them at you then you could actually kill the entire population of Chicomoztoc in 3 to 30 years.

[Megas]

For the game to have the fantasy of Starbuck and Apollo shooting down Cylon Raiders.

[Igncom1]

I suppose for the same reasons why all real life aircraft haven't been replaced by drones. The tech just isn't always there, but people sure are.

And the last time someone tried to use fleets of automated fighters and spaceships, they fought 2 maybe 3 wars over the topic. So old classics will have to do.

[robepriority]

I figure that the population metrics on the colony screen represent people productive/relevant to production.

[ANGRYABOUTELVES]

AIs capable of piloting fightercraft are illegal, remote control is practically impossible due to all the jamming and EWAR being thrown around in space combat, and human life is cheap.

[BCS]

AIs capable of piloting fightercraft are illegal

Wasp tho

[Igncom1]

AIs capable of piloting fightercraft are illegal

Wasp tho

More of a drone. Like a program vs an AI which is more like a person.

[Jackundor]

sub-gamma level AI is entirely legal, look at the tempest.

[Aethelric]

Life can be treated cheaply even when it's actually rare. Limited resources can be extracted beyond any reasonable point, or in ways that cost a society more in externalities than they produce in actual value.

The Sector is decaying. Dying, even. There aren't a whole lot of people around, sure, but there also isn't a whole lot of new places to move if the population *was* expanding. There are precious few inhabited places where you can breath "free" air. The technology to improve anything substantially belongs to a lost era. This is a perfect recipe for people to be treated as disposable.

If matters don't get sorted out with the Sector soon, the last two people alive might just die ramming their Talons into each other.

[Killian]

The Sector is decaying. Dying, even. There aren't a whole lot of people around, sure, but there also isn't a whole lot of new places to move if the population *was* expanding. There are precious few inhabited places where you can breath "free" air. The technology to improve anything substantially belongs to a lost era. This is a perfect recipe for people to be treated as disposable.

I dunno, I've found some pretty nice places whilst exploring across my various games - a lot of them once even having been inhabited, just abandoned or decivilized. But the Powers of the Sector are too busy squabbling to send colony expeditions of their own it seems - perhaps they fear that launching and supporting such an operation would require enough resources to weaken them and leave them vulnerable to an attack from their neighbours? Or that their new colonies would simply be jumped on by their opponents to avoid anyone gaining the upper hand?

Why don't they do the same to the player colonies? One, because you're an independent operator they may not be spying on constantly (so, by the time they know you're established, it's too late for them to intervene) and two, because it would just suck from a gameplay perspective to have all these neat colony establishment/management systems and then basically say to the player "lol, lmao, you thought you could use these? no. you sweet summer child. you absolute fool. go back to scrounging in the dirt just to survive." Might as well not even let players set up colonies at all if it could be that kind of noob trap that gets them gameover'd - or worse, just kills their interest in the game and causes them to not recommend it to their friends.

In reality I think it's best to realize that it's one of those things that is there for rule of cool and gameplay alike. There need to be some consequences to fighter usage, otherwise they risk becoming too powerful compared to conventional weapons. It also allows there to be a handful of unmanned aerospace vehicles (like Wasps, and [REDACTED] fighters) that stand out more in this context and provide a glimpse at What Could Be, for better or worse.

[Pratapon51]

It wouldn't feel like Space WW1, WW2, and Cold War without human pilots. 

(By the way, the existence of recovery shuttles does suggest that many pilots do, in fact, survive the destruction of their craft. Whether fleets bother to pick them up, on the other hand...)