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.
Sure, they don't need to return to the mothership at combat speeds, but that doesn't change the fact that they have to at LEAST null their delta-v, which means they need at least double the burn of their initial 'combat' burn. Personally, I wouldn't want to stick around in an area after I just tried to bomb a ship, if I wanted the strikecraft back. I would want to burn back at at LEAST combat speeds because that is the worst possible situation, and you design for that, not a rosy picture where you eliminate the enemy threat and can leisurely take your time coming back-- and even if you did eliminate the enemy threat, who's to say that there aren't other targets to hit that require you to rearm?
A fighter requires at least four burns, one to get you started, one to null your delta v after you've made your run, one to push yourself back, and one to null that delta-v so you can dock without kinetic-killing your own carrier, and you need fuel to maneuver on top of that.
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.
I don't see what bearing the efficiency of the reaction has on this discussion. An efficient reaction merely means a missile can go that much faster and maneuver that much more than a fighter, given that its fuel consumption is at least 75% less, given its mission parameters.
I apologize if I sound condescending to you, but I'm barely even reading nameplates at this point, people have been coming at me all of yesterday and half of the day before that and none of what they're saying passes any kind of muster so I'm getting a little annoyed.
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.
Yes, necessarily by a very large margin. By its nature, a carrier has devote mass to mechanisms to retrieve, rearm, and maintain its fighters. These are all mass penalties. A missileboat of similar size can simply use all that wasted mass on engines, bigger missile magazines, or other weapon systems. That is without talking about the inherent mass differences between an object designed to deliver a particular mass of ordnance and come back an object designed that same ordnance and not do so.
Which is, again, besides the point. At the end of the day, a carrier is restricted by how many missile it has ALSO. It just puts them out slower and more inefficiently.
To address your impressions on the viability of a bomber let me ask you, what are the things that a bomber has to do to put rounds on target? Well, it has to hit with its ordnance, and it has to itself evade fire and the target during its time-on-target, and then it can go back. A missile just has to hit with its ordnance. So let me ask you fighter people again: what is the actual advantage of sending a fighter instead of a missile? Again, reuseability is nice, but only if you're reusing something that produces an edge in delivery, or else what's the point.
On Earth, an F/A-18C carries four or so sidewinders because if you tried to fire those sidewinders from a carrier, they'd run out of fuel from having to fight gravity the whole way and splash into the ocean. The F/A-18C makes sense as a delivery device-- it uses less fuel because it has wings and is therefore an efficient delivery device to go places where the carrier cannot. They operate in fundamentally different mediums, the plane and the carrier, and under gravity. In space, those sidewinders can go just as far as the F/A-18C, and the carrier is operating in the same medium and go to the same places, so why wouldn't you just carry sidewinders? Imagine how many sidewinders you could fit in the space of a single 17,000 kilogram F/A-18C.
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.
Again, sorry for the condescension.
You'll have to explain how technology can apply to missiles and not to fighters to me, because that's utterly preposterous. If you just took a space fighter and flew it into the enemy craft instead of launching its payload and coming back, that would be a missile, and therefore whatever you could put on that fighter you could put on a missile.
Again, I'm still not understanding your argument on cost efficiency. Why is it cost efficient to spend four times the fuel to deliver the same ordnance?
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.
You're making an assumption here that missiles can't have the exact same onboard tech as fighters. I agree that it wouldn't necessarily economical to spend all the tech you can to defend a warhead, but spending all the tech you can to defend a smaller warhead makes even less sense, and a fighter will definitely deliver a smaller warhead-- or other weapon-- than a missile of the same mass.
If staying power is the concern carry more missiles. You're going to have to do that anyway, even if you were using fighters to deliver those missiles, since at the end of the day, the carrier is just using up ammo. It's just using some of that magazine space for a useless sabot that comes back.
