Pro Military Tactical
Pro Military Tactical
Do you think space battle should include starfighters? Why or why not?
I'm writing a military sci-fi/space opera. One of the major components is therefore space combat. I was weighing the pros and cons of having fighter-sized craft in the midst of massive (up to) two kilometer long warships, and what tactical advantage would they truly bring to the arena? Would not corvettes (large gunships) be a better option?
Any suggestions?
It depends which you like more - Star Wars or Star Trek :-p Or on what sort of balance you want between realism and heroism.
Fighters are valuable because they're small, fast and manoeuvrable, all of which make them hard to see and hard to hit. If there are enough of them, they can overwhelm the enemy's ability to target them and shoot them down - some of them will always get through. That's the heroism part - one guy (or two guys if it's a slightly bigger fighter) in charge of his own destiny, taking on the might of the enemy war machine and making a difference.
The realism part is that it's practically impossible to hide in space - a small ship with a powerful engine might not put out much visible light, but it's a beacon in the infrared. (If it's got humans on board, at least part of it has to be at a temperature that's comfortable for them, 300 degree Celcius hotter than the surrounding vacuum.) The presence of humans also imposes a limit on acceleration. No matter how you cushion the crew, an unmanned ship can accelerate harder and turn tighter than a manned one. It follows therefore that a missile will always be able to outfly a fighter, as long as its guidance is sufficiently intelligent.
Now, if you're willing to bend the laws of physics, you can negate the advantages that unmanned ships have over manned ones. (Since, as I recall, you have faster-than-light travel in this story, you've already bent the laws quite a bit.) So you can posit, for example, an inertial damper that allows a fighter to accelerate at 100g without turning the pilot into a red smear, and electronic warfare that can scramble a missile's guidance computer but doesn't affect a human pilot.
EDIT: For an interesting take on the acceleration problem, see Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds. He has police interceptors flown by people who are surgically modified to remove "inessential" parts of their bodies - bits that are most vulnerable to high acceleration, basically. This has the added advantage of making them smaller and lighter, so the ship can be smaller and faster. I think they're semi-permanently inserted into the ship - they might stay inside it for several years. The body parts that were removed are kept in storage, so they can eventually be put back. Eww... These ships probably still aren't faster than a missile, but because they're for police work, they don't need to be - they just have to be faster than the ships that civilians and criminals fly.
See also the new Battlestar Galactica - the Cylon Raiders are part machine, part organism, making it hard to tell where the pilot ends and the ship begins. As Starbuck says when she gets inside one, "I guess the only thing flying you... is you."
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