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[DeltaV_11.2]

Yes, a fighter must carry at least 4 times, if not more, fuel than a missile must. Whether the reduced price of delivering ordnance to target is worth it depends on the specifics of your technology. Fighters of course incur costs on the ships that launch them, which depend on how fast you want to launch, retrieve, and rearm fighters. This doesn't make them impossible, just means that they may not always be useful. If the benefits of being able to use more advanced systems outweigh those of requiring more fuel then they are, otherwise they are not. I'm just trying to make a case for fighters as a feasible weapons system, not as a universal one.

[Avan]

this thread sure grew fast...

hmm, how about a thought experiment. what if we ditched ships and went entirely with giant interstellar missiles?

[Liberthas]

this thread sure grew fast...

hmm, how about a thought experiment. what if we ditched ships and went entirely with giant interstellar missiles?

What if the missiles... launched missiles?

[Iscariot]

how does a missile provide Close air support to an infantry action?

I'm talking about space fighters and space fighters alone.

Yes, a fighter must carry at least 4 times, if not more, fuel than a missile must. Whether the reduced price of delivering ordnance to target is worth it depends on the specifics of your technology. Fighters of course incur costs on the ships that launch them, which depend on how fast you want to launch, retrieve, and rearm fighters. This doesn't make them impossible, just means that they may not always be useful. If the benefits of being able to use more advanced systems outweigh those of requiring more fuel then they are, otherwise they are not. I'm just trying to make a case for fighters as a feasible weapons system, not as a universal one.

Barring the existence of a horizon in your battlespace, ie, orbit or atmospheric operation, fighters are completely and utterly inefficient and ineffective methods of ordnance delivery. They penalize their carrying craft, they offer markedly poorer mass to thrust ratios, offer worse ordnance loads, and limit the offensive powers of their mother craft. This doesn't 'depend on your technology', because technology applies across the board: any benefit you get out of any particular technology that could be applicable to a fighter is equally applicable to a missile. IF, in the future, a fighter becomes successful, it is IN SPITE of its basic concept, not BECAUSE of it.

Is recovering an empty weapon bus more, or less expensive than paying for four times the amount of fuel per warhead and extensive modifications and tactical penalty to your mother craft? I don't think so.

this thread sure grew fast...

hmm, how about a thought experiment. what if we ditched ships and went entirely with giant interstellar missiles?

What if the missiles... launched missiles?

We already have that, it's called the Hurricane MIRV.

[arwan]

we need a new fighter type in space.. Gundam lulz. what huge hulking human like robots in space is a possibility. 

[Iscariot]

That always made me laugh in Gundam. Most Gundam series spend the majority of their time in space, despite being about human shaped mecha. What are the legs for? xD

[Flare]

I think it gets even more confusing on the ground, in space there might be an argument made that though the legs might not do anything for the vehicle, it doesn't hinder it all that much. But on the ground, there's really no reason for them to use legs at all, or at least on the scale of which they're currently implemented. Why you would want to build a vehicle that stands up above almost all types of cover is beyond me.

[DeltaV_11.2]

Indeed, recovering an empty weapon bus is much more expensive in fuel and time than having said weapon bus recover itself. This requires that not only your entire ship go catch it, but moreover places said weapon buses behind your opponent, making them tactically impossible to recover. If you give your missile buses a bunch of technology, this means that every time you fire you are placing valuable equipment behind your enemy.

The point is that you can't just apply any technology to a missile and a fighter and derive the same effectiveness from it over a campaign, because each time you fire your missiles they destroy the technology. Fighters let you recover equipment during a battle and use it multiple times. They also let you use one piece of <<insert technology here>> for multiple missiles.

[Iscariot]

Indeed, recovering an empty weapon bus is much more expensive in fuel and time than having said weapon bus recover itself. This requires that not only your entire ship go catch it, but moreover places said weapon buses behind your opponent, making them tactically impossible to recover. If you give your missile buses a bunch of technology, this means that every time you fire you are placing valuable equipment behind your enemy.

The point is that you can't just apply any technology to a missile and a fighter and derive the same effectiveness from it over a campaign, because each time you fire your missiles they destroy the technology. Fighters let you recover equipment during a battle and use it multiple times. They also let you use one piece of <<insert technology here>> for multiple missiles.

If you're going into a fight worrying about people finding out about how your equipment works, then you have a serious crisis of priorities. While it is true that captured technology can be quite valuable, it's only ever created a crisis in the case of covert operations, where you're not supposed to be caught. Any piece of technology designed for open warfare must be an acceptable loss. Any thing in open warfare must be an acceptable loss.

Nevermind the fact that if you outclass your enemy enough that that technology would be overtly valuable, there shouldn't be people alive after the battle to pick up your trash anyway. Also nevermind the fact that whether or not technology is fieldable by a nationstate is more often about whether they have the logistics to produce said technology more than it is about understanding the technology itself. America and other western nations make wide use of ceramic rifle plates in infantry body armor, while Russia, China, and other third world nations do not. This isn't because they don't understand how to laminate plates of kevlar and ceramic together and back it with ballistic fabric. It's because they don't have access to the minerals required to make such plates in a reasonable quantity to implement them in their militaries at large, so they use steel plates instead.

And again, given that a fighter would be less agile than a missile, I would say your chance of leaving behind valuable technology is MUCH higher with a fighter than it is with a missile.

And YES you CAN apply the same tech. There's NO REASON you can't. Both a missile and a fighter are just objects at the ends of rockets. It's not like you're trying to strap a jet engine to a submarine, they operate in the same medium and are slaves to the same laws of physics. A = F/m will not change because technology advances. Mass will always slow you down.

I think it gets even more confusing on the ground, in space there might be an argument made that though the legs might not do anything for the vehicle, it doesn't hinder it all that much. But on the ground, there's really no reason for them to use legs at all, or at least on the scale of which they're currently implemented. Why you would want to build a vehicle that stands up above almost all types of cover is beyond me.

I could see it being a way to get around large ditches and other rough terrain, but yeah, absolutely, I have no idea why you'd want to have a base of fire that unstable and exposed.

[Hopelessnoob]

Missiles are more vulnerable to point defenses. Missiles also have less counter measures to any sorts of defenses. The shell of a missile is much more vulnerable to a laser than a fighter would be, they can't even take rudimentary movements like spinning to balance the heat like a fighter could.

[Iscariot]

None of that makes sense. You could make a missile just as well armored or defended as a fighter, there's no reason you can't.

[Gaizokubanou]

None of that makes sense. You could make a missile just as well armored or defended as a fighter, there's no reason you can't.

Yep.

Assuming that space combat techs don't include some stuff that changes the way we understand distance/time/space, my outlook is that most reasonable space war vehicle would be a giant engine with accelerator for missiles/guided missiles and laser based PDS.  And it wouldn't be conducted in any way similar to how it is portrayed in popular Sci fi...

What I would bet on is that these crafts would accelerate and orbit around large objects to sustain the momentum without having to move away too far, and launch its warheads from orbit to surface or other planets.  The warheads themselves will accelerate themselves, and the idea is that these will arrive at the target with such speed that anything but laser based PDS would be useless.  Not to mention you can end up just hurling rockets without warhead and the damage will still be significant since the kinetic energy behind an object that has been accelerating between planets must be huge.  This could also mean that closer you are to the front line, the "safer" you are since the distance for weapons to build their momentum would be less and PDS can have better chance of getting a lock on the target.

Basically, every space based weapons can easily turn into strategic weapons and most tactics wouldn't matter because both sides can obliterate any static elements of strategic significance, aka cities, factories, bases.

[Hopelessnoob]

Right because surrounding a warhead in armor isn't counter productive at all.

[Simberto]

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.

But that is besides the point anyways. Fuel efficiency per payload is probably not the most important thing for space weaponry. If, for example, some tech thingies are far more expensive then fuel, it is not always reasonable to build them into a thing that is designed to never return. But it might make sense to build them into a fighter whose mission involves returning to base. 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)

Now, for space combat to be interesting, it is also strictly necessary to have some sort of deflection for basic relativistic nonguided weaponry, because otherwise if two fleets charge each other at relativistic speeds, both just need to spread some sand out of an airlock for complete destruction of both fleets through sand pieces with kinetic energy equivalent to smaller nuclear bombs. If you don't have any tech that achieves that, any space combat between fleets of any size will end in complete destruction of both fleets, and any attack on an inhabited planed will make that planet inhabitable. That "tech" could just be problems with actually detecting fleets, but that would mean that there is no way to defend your planets, so interstellar wars would end in fleets flying around blowing up planets, and both sides completely annihilated pretty fastly. So lets just assume that there is some sort of shielding that prevents that kind of relativistic weaponry. Now, it is completely dependent on how that technology works whether fightercraft can be better than missiles or not.

If it is a technology that can be overwhelmed by large amounts of firepower, and unless any of the stuff i mentioned in the above paragraph is relevant, missiles are superior because they can deliver more payload per fuel/cargo space. But those are pretty large "ifs". If the technology can not be overwhelmed by pure firepower, and needs some other way to be circumvented (non-frontal assault, cloaking, scrambling, shield-penetrating technology, whatever), and if that technology is not cheap, fighercraft who penetrate the relativistic shielding, deliver their payload, and are retrieved after the battle might suddenly be better just because you get your expensive shield-penetrating tech back afterwards.

Also, i can envision a fleet where fightercraft are deployed in some distance in front of the mothership and used as forward PD nodes against enemy missiles/fightercraft to increase your chances of deflecting them by having multiple lines of PD weaponry spread out ahead of the mothership.

[Bobakanoosh]

'sees thread about tactics used in Starfarer'
'gigantic fighters vs. missile argument'

i had hoped this thread stayed on topic...