Advice Thread OOC Future Tech Only

[SquareDisc City]

Relying on converting biologically-generated heat to electricity will be horribly inefficient due to the temperatures involved. I think you'd be far better off either using living things to produce combustible substances (which is biofuel, same as in the real world), or to use electrochemical reactions that produce electricity directly (a biotechnological battery or fuel cell).

[Yes Im Biop]

SO I can basically call em whatever I want. The suites are basically each one of a kind for their job. Be it a Walking tank or a shadow.

He's not talking about the suits, he's talking about the soldiers in the suits. You can't train and equip people to fight a conventional field battle in ultra-heavy armor as well as perform ultra-covert insertions in light stealth suits. It's the same reason why militaries give specialty training to their soldiers. Highly-trained special forces units will usually have very basic training in most areas since they operate without support, but they are no substitute for an actual group of dedicated EOD or field battle personnel. For a given length of training, adding in additional skill sets inevitably results in taking time from others, so every week you spend training these troops in EOD is a week not spent training them in infiltration, and if the equipment varies so much, you now also have to devote additional time to training them on the different equipment types, which isn't necessarily cross-applicable (I'd wager movement techniques in heavy armor are a bit different than in a stealth suit).

Although on the matter of the suits, if the thinnest the armor gets is 3 inches around the arms, then it'll be rather uncomfortable, since the soldiers can't bring their arms to their sides.

O! I see i see. Yes they can't Be ALL trained. They are All trained in basic's of every specialization, and then get picked in which they excelled in.
I have a training thing somewhere. Basically the Omega's already have a Full training in Army...what's the damn word...Anyway they already have 2 month's of training, Then 2 years of actual live combat service before they are picked for Trials to become an Omega.

[New Amerik]

Well, the most straightforward means would be to harness the thermal energy generated by biological processes. Said energy - at least in oxygen-breathing organisms - is produced via a sub-process of metabolism called catabolism, which (to keep things simple) takes big molecules like fats, proteins, and complex carbohydrates and turns them into waste products (like carbon dioxide) and free energy, either in the form of ATP or as waste heat (the latter being what you'd be harnessing).

If you really wanted to optimize your energy-producing organisms, you could start breeding monocellular organisms that minimize the amount of ATP created relative to waste heat. This would, however, reduce the ability of cells to reproduce, since they'd have no energy to do so (ATP serves as an energy transport, so less of it means less energy being transported to the cellular structures needing energy). Thus, such an optimization should be done via hormonal control, if possible.

Some recommended reading from Wikipedia:

Metabolism
Energy metabolism / Bioenergetics
Catabolism
Citric acid cycle
Glycosis

Hopefully that helps. If you have more questions, post here or TG me

Relying on converting biologically-generated heat to electricity will be horribly inefficient due to the temperatures involved. I think you'd be far better off either using living things to produce combustible substances (which is biofuel, same as in the real world), or to use electrochemical reactions that produce electricity directly (a biotechnological battery or fuel cell).

Ooh, thank you both for the responses! I'll be reading up on the links provided, and go to you YA via TG later I think.

For now, I guess my question is out of the three suggestions (breeding the organisms and using chemicals and hormonal balances to roughly control their output, using conventional biofuels, or using electrochemical reactions), which would be the...I guess most practical in terms of local area power maintenance? We're talking using 1960s level computers and manufacturing levels here, and they're only covering a relatively small area.

This would discount other sources like coal, natural gas, and so forth as these would be more self-contained semi-permanent military installations.

[YellowApple]

Well, the most straightforward means would be to harness the thermal energy generated by biological processes. Said energy - at least in oxygen-breathing organisms - is produced via a sub-process of metabolism called catabolism, which (to keep things simple) takes big molecules like fats, proteins, and complex carbohydrates and turns them into waste products (like carbon dioxide) and free energy, either in the form of ATP or as waste heat (the latter being what you'd be harnessing).

If you really wanted to optimize your energy-producing organisms, you could start breeding monocellular organisms that minimize the amount of ATP created relative to waste heat. This would, however, reduce the ability of cells to reproduce, since they'd have no energy to do so (ATP serves as an energy transport, so less of it means less energy being transported to the cellular structures needing energy). Thus, such an optimization should be done via hormonal control, if possible.

Some recommended reading from Wikipedia:

Metabolism
Energy metabolism / Bioenergetics
Catabolism
Citric acid cycle
Glycosis

Hopefully that helps. If you have more questions, post here or TG me

Relying on converting biologically-generated heat to electricity will be horribly inefficient due to the temperatures involved. I think you'd be far better off either using living things to produce combustible substances (which is biofuel, same as in the real world), or to use electrochemical reactions that produce electricity directly (a biotechnological battery or fuel cell).

Ooh, thank you both for the responses! I'll be reading up on the links provided, and go to you YA via TG later I think.

For now, I guess my question is out of the three suggestions (breeding the organisms and using chemicals and hormonal balances to roughly control their output, using conventional biofuels, or using electrochemical reactions), which would be the...I guess most practical in terms of local area power maintenance? We're talking using 1960s level computers and manufacturing levels here, and they're only covering a relatively small area.

This would discount other sources like coal, natural gas, and so forth as these would be more self-contained semi-permanent military installations.

With 1960's computing technology... well, it might get complicated. I imagine that this would equate to not yet having the precision to go for direct electrochemical reactions. Biofuel would be the most feasible, in my opinion. However, thermal harvesting is certainly not out of reach, and definitely satisfies the rule of cool factor a lot better.

[Our Most Resplendent Goddess Sen]

Question; would a high-gravity planet have a denser atmosphere?

Sort of. Higher-gravity planets will, assuming a roughly earthlike atmosphere and temperature, have a smaller scale height, meaning that the pressure will fall off faster with altitude. If you have the same amount of atmosphere over any given area as on earth, then the sea-level atmospheric pressure (and therefore density) will actually be higher since the lower scale height means that the atmosphere is, effectively, shorter. I think, but don't quote me on this, that if you have the same amount of atmosphere over your head as on earth then the sea-level pressure will be proportional to the worlds gravity, since the pressure at any given point is equivalent to the weight (not mass!) of air above you.

Running this in the opposite direction, worlds with lower gravity will in general have a have a higher scale height, meaning that for the same sea level pressure they will have substantially more atmosphere. If you had a terraformed mars, with an earthlike atmosphere and temperature, the scale height would be three times larger since mars has a third the gravity!

[Caecuser]

I'm going to regret this but can somebody tell me the problem of fighters in space combat? Apparently it is like a taboo here or something.

[Escalan Corps-Star Island]

The standard rant is that missile spam and drones make fighters obsolete and useless on attack, and point defense is the end-all-be-all for protecting one's ship. And can apparently kill any fighter, making them useless against capital ships.

[Kreanoltha]

I'm going to regret this but can somebody tell me the problem of fighters in space combat? Apparently it is like a taboo here or something.

Read --V--

If point-defense can mow down far more aggressively-maneuvering missiles like cavalry before Gatlings, then there is nothing to save a more sluggish fighter from being ripped to shreds by the same DP. If there is no Stealth In Space, and if combat takes place over large distances, it could give the defenders plenty of time to detect incoming fighters and take them out from afar.

Missiles can do whatever a fighter can better. They're less expensive, they can pull maneuvers that would liquify a living pilot, they don't need to make return runs, they don't need pilots who will take up room in the barracks allowing the ship to mount more missiles, weapons, and generators (or more fuel), and they don't have to slow down as they approach their targets. By that same logic, you'd think that drones might be a happy medium, but we'll see why they're aren't so good in the next post.

Modern fighters and bombers are a threat to wet navy capital ships and land fortifications because they can carry weapons that effectively damage them. You might think that the same would hold true in space, but even without gravity to prevent from mounting massive weapons, there are still engineering limits to keep the fighter from mounting large enough weapons to damage a capital ship. The fighter’s power source can only power so potent a weapon, and as capital ships no longer have to worry about buoyancy, they can mount as much armor as they please. With a reactor several dozens of times larger than the fighter itself, it will still be able to maneuver while shrugging off hits from the fighter as through it was nothing. If the techbase includes shielding then this shielding's protective abilities will doubtless scale with the power output of the reactor it is tied to. This means that even the heaviest of the fighter's weapons barely be able to scratch the capital ship, much less disable it, making the fighter hopelessly outmoded in an offensive role.

While there are advantages as well as disadvantages to space fighters when directly compared to larger ships, a good look at the concept from the very base upwards is necessary. The first question shouldn't be "What advantage does a fighter have over a big ship?" but "What can a space fighter do?". Because we're talking about military ships here, the answer is generally to bring some sort of weapon payload (bullets, lasers, blaster bolts, missiles, bombs) in contact with a target. But the conditions of combat in space make fighters pointless for that. On planet, fighters are needed to extend the range of whatever deploys them (an airforce base or a carrier). If the base were to shoot the guns or the missiles that a fighter carries directly, it wouldn't have nearly the range that a fighter can achieve. The horizon on planet prevents direct targeting beyond a limited range. The friction of the air slows down bullets and missiles so they drop to the ground short of the target when they have been slowed down enough or their fuel has run out respectively. The engines and shape of an fighter allow far more efficient travel in atmosphere than those of a missile (or bomb or bullet).

Not so in space. There is no horizon, so everything can be targeted directly. There is no friction, so ranges are not limited. There is no aerodynamic design, so missiles are far more effective than fighters. For comparison: if one were to use a missile that is the same size as the fighter i.e. using the same engine and same amount of fuel, it would have four times the range of a fighter, because the fighters needs a lot of fuel to brake and return to base again. So, unlike in an atmosphere, where mounting missiles on a fighter extends the effective range of the warheads, in space it would seriously limit it.
As for guns, those are even less effective. Unless there is some sort of magical technology at play that makes 5 tons of gun components, propellant and bullets somehow capable of more destruction than just 5 tons of warhead (not the case with real physics) then carrying a small gun close to a target to shoot it is a colossal waste of time. With energy weapons, the smaller reactor (or power source) of a fighter makes them even more useless.
Targeting is another thing that potentially looks like a reason for fighters to exist. But it is again not the case. Getting closer to the target does exactly the same thing as using a bigger lens (because there is no horizon) so the bigger lens wins. (does not get closer to danger, doesn't need refueling, etc.)

Intercepting incoming missiles works pretty much the same as launching attacking missiles, attaching a space fighter makes it worse, not better. This for a point defense role, fighters also have a worse sensor suite than a capital ship, making the same anti-missile missile attached to a fighter worse than the ones attached to a capital ship.
In the end, while one can point out plenty of advantages that a space fighter has over a larger ship (in a universe with real physics), there just is no task that a space fighter is best suited to perform. Either a bigger ship will outperform several small fighters, or one or several missiles will outperform one fighter.
Cost is usually played up as to why fighters might be used, but in the end this is a pointless, misguided argument as well. This comes in two flavors. The first being the high-end SF post-scarcity society where resources are not an issue. Assuming some other kind of limiting factor that will be what determines ship sizes. For example if resources are infinite but the number of pilots is limited, ships will be designed in a way to capitalize on that i.e. the most powerful ships operated by the least crew.
The second flavor being the erroneous (but often told) assumption that space fighters being cheaper than bigger ships is an advantage. Yes, a space fighter is cheaper than a space battleship. No, that does not necessarily translate into an advantage for space fighters. A single space fighter may be cheaper, but would not stand a chance in a fight alone. For space fighters to be a viable alternative to big ships, one needs to have enough of them to win against the bigger ships, so the question becomes what that whole swarm of fighters costs compared to the single big ship. And there is no reason why a whole group of fighters would be inherently cheaper than a single bigger ship. Maybe economics of scale make fighters cheaper. Maybe the greater efficiency of larger systems make big ships cheaper. There's no hard answer which will be the case. What it comes down to is that you aren't likely to loose a lot of capital ships, but you'll probably loose half that swarm of fighters. The cost isn't so much a factor hear as the effectiveness of the ships.

[Frizzbeez]

TL;DR
Apparently, anything not on a ballistic trajectory will be annihilated halfway between ship A and ship B with 100% success. Fighters can also only mount missiles consisting of dynamite and a bottle rocket, two uzis, and a single pilot in a NASA space suit. Their thrusters are re-purposed MAC truck engines, and the entire thing is held together within a card board box. Pilots are also required by regulation to be blinded and crippled.

[Our Most Resplendent Goddess Sen]

From the standpoint of actual rocket dynamics, a fighter must be capable of at least four times the velocity change, or dV, as a missile if it is going to do an attack run at the same velocity. You have to accelerate to attack speed, kill your velocity, accelerate back to your carrier (probably doing a second attack run to get the most bang for your buck), and kill your velocity again to rendezvous with the carrier. Because the rocket equation is exponential in nature, this can have a very large effect on the mass ratio, or the ratio of the rocket's fueled mass to its empty mass.

Even if you're using some sort of engine that cheats the rocket equation, it still makes sense that a drive system and power source is going to be larger and more expensive if it must deliver more velocity change per mission over a much longer life span.

Will post more later.

[Kreanoltha]

From the standpoint of actual rocket dynamics, a fighter must be capable of at least four times the velocity change, or dV, as a missile if it is going to do an attack run at the same velocity. You have to accelerate to attack speed, kill your velocity, accelerate back to your carrier (probably doing a second attack run to get the most bang for your buck), and kill your velocity again to rendezvous with the carrier. Because the rocket equation is exponential in nature, this can have a very large effect on the mass ratio, or the ratio of the rocket's fueled mass to its empty mass.

Even if you're using some sort of engine that cheats the rocket equation, it still makes sense that a drive system and power source is going to be larger and more expensive if it must deliver more velocity change per mission over a much longer life span.

Will post more later.

Exactly, which makes it more practical to mount that drive system on a missile and run it full bore into the target.

[Kreanoltha]

TL;DR
Apparently, anything not on a ballistic trajectory will be annihilated halfway between ship A and ship B with 100% success. Fighters can also only mount missiles consisting of dynamite and a bottle rocket, two uzis, and a single pilot in a NASA space suit. Their thrusters are re-purposed MAC truck engines, and the entire thing is held together within a card board box. Pilots are also required by regulation to be blinded and crippled.

Read the fucking thing before assuming you can be a wise-ass.

[YellowApple]

I'm going to regret this but can somebody tell me the problem of fighters in space combat? Apparently it is like a taboo here or something.

It depends on your technology level and your preference, as well as how you define "fighter". I'm among the minority that finds fighters a better use of mass than a single large ship. There are several reasons for my opinion:

• Consider two equal amounts of physical matter fighting against each other. One group is a large warship, while the other is a group of fighters and corvettes. While all components of the large ship are stationary relative to one another, each of the small ships can move freely relative to the rest of the group. Therefore, the single large ship is a much easier target than the many small ships, since there's only one target to aim for rather than dozens of individual targets.
• Consider those same two sides of our hypothetical battle - one big ship and one group of smaller ships, with both groups having equal mass. Because of the square-cube law - where the volume of a three-dimensional object grows faster than the surface area - you start to see efficiency and acceleration issues with the larger ship. Most players here RP with cigar-shaped capital vessels - long ships with engines at the rear. This means that the engines only cover one face of a rectangular prism representing the volume and surface area of the ship. As the ship gets bigger, the mass grows at a rate faster than the overall surface area, and therefore faster than the area of the face representing the engines.
• Consider those two sides again. Square-cube law has another effect - available surface area for weapons. Since the group of fighters and corvettes has more surface area than the single ship with the same amount of mass, there is more room for weapons in the small-ship group.
• Consider those two sides yet again. The big ship is a large monolithic vessel that - realistically speaking - would take weeks, months, possibly years to construct. Lots of labor costs, lots of energy costs, lots of design costs, all for one ship. Each individual small ship, on the other hand, is much faster to build - probably stamped out in a factory in an FT setting. Much lower labor, energy, and design cost per unit of mass. Sure, you can split the big ship into little pieces when making it, but you still have to add in the overall assembly, and there will be a large variety of individual pieces manufactured, rather than a bunch of small ships that are mostly (if not completely) identical.

A real-life analogue to this is in computer science. Once upon a time, supercomputers consisted of single, giant, monolithic machines. A few were modular, but still a single machine. Now, supercomputers consist of clusters of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual smaller machines working together. Why is this preferred? Simple: more cost-effective. For the same amount of energy, manpower, and physical space, a computing cluster can pack more cores, more memory, and more capacity for redundancy and error recovery than the single monolithic machine could ever dream of.

Next, let's go into the definition of "fighter". Usually, when one talks of "fighter", they picture a space-opera-style craft sized roughly equivalent to a current RL craft. This is simply not rational. Space has different requirements than our atmosphere in terms of how vehicles need to be built. Space is big. There needs to be space for fuel, supplies, and breathable air to last for rather extended journeys. Meanwhile, there needs to be space for weapons capable of travelling that same scale in a usefully-short amount of time. A fighter the size of an F-16 ain't gonna cut it. I personally RP my fighters with a minimum length of 32 meters (for reference, an F-14 Tomcat is around 20 meters long); your own mileage may vary, but it needs to be much bigger than atmospheric fighter scales in order to be viable in space.

Kreanoltha brings up good points when comparing fighters to missiles. Missiles are certainly effective; however, comparing them to fighters is comparing apples to oranges. If you're bringing your fighters within range of your target's point defenses, you're doing something wrong. Your fighters are better off launching missiles from an intermediate distance between a home carrier and the target itself, and it's with that application - with the fighters firing individual missiles from a large number of individual trajectories relative to the target - that fighter-based tactics in deep space really shine.

TL;DR
Apparently, anything not on a ballistic trajectory will be annihilated halfway between ship A and ship B with 100% success. Fighters can also only mount missiles consisting of dynamite and a bottle rocket, two uzis, and a single pilot in a NASA space suit. Their thrusters are re-purposed MAC truck engines, and the entire thing is held together within a card board box. Pilots are also required by regulation to be blinded and crippled.

Read the fucking thing before assuming you can be a wise-ass.

Please consider a civil discussion on the subject. Both of you.

[Dolmhold]

Snip

Just wondering, but what would be the point of using fighters to launch missiles when that same ship could also launch said missiles, and due to the fact that there is no friction in space, or at least in any way that actually affects anything, wouldn't a missile from the carrier be as good as that of the fighter's missile?

[YellowApple]

Snip

Just wondering, but what would be the point of using fighters to launch missiles when that same ship could also launch said missiles, and due to the fact that there is no friction in space, or at least in any way that actually affects anything, wouldn't a missile from the carrier be as good as that of the fighter's missile?

Targeting. The fighters could go to a halfway point, aim, fire, and return. This is useful on space-scales because space is big, and therefore combat will often take place with light-second distances or more.

Missiles was admittedly a bad example; I'm more picturing kinetics, particle beams, or lasers being more accurate.

Plus, there's again the issue that the carrier is one ship, so if the carrier was attacking alone, everything would be firing from one location, making it easier to counter. Spreading out the area of attack using lots of smaller ships would make it harder to dodge, since there are more directions that the attack is coming from simultaneously.

[North Calaveras]

i agree with drone fighters, i use them as well, they are also very customizable, some can be outfitted with FTL drives, others have room for troops, they also have shields, they are expensive and heavy fighters but i like them. They are also able to be swtiched to a manuel control.

[Dolmhold]

Targeting. The fighters could go to a halfway point, aim, fire, and return. This is useful on space-scales because space is big, and therefore combat will often take place with light-second distances or more.

Missiles was admittedly a bad example; I'm more picturing kinetics, particle beams, or lasers being more accurate.

Plus, there's again the issue that the carrier is one ship, so if the carrier was attacking alone, everything would be firing from one location, making it easier to counter. Spreading out the area of attack using lots of smaller ships would make it harder to dodge, since there are more directions that the attack is coming from simultaneously.

With missiles, shouldn't they be able to independently aim, or else what is the point of the missiles in the first place? As for the latter three, wouldn't that fall right into Kreanoltha's rant about how the ship has bigger, stronger and better everything and so would be able to swat them out? In general, that is. There are exceptions such as super-extreme glass cannon tech. At the same time, if you're going with those weapons, wouldn't it put your fighters at risk of the enemy's point defense weapons as if it can zap the enemy, the enemy could zap it?

Also, couldn't the missile maneuver around to spread out before converging back towards the enemy ship using some maneuvering propellant? While spreading out the attack is good, especially if you can get around to the other side of the enemy ship which, in space it seems, would be rather hard to hit because while there is nothing to hide with, there is also no gravity to allow arcing without penalties and so all weapons being line of sight only (except maybe missiles), wouldn't a cheaper and equally effective method be to have the missiles slowly spread out and then converge again?

[SquareDisc City]

It's true that a bunch of small ships may be able to shoot at something big with impunity by staying far enough away to be unhittable by targeted fire from the big ship, though the big ship can use guided weapons or insane volume of fire to counter that. However while a small ship might pack in more weapons per unit mass, those weapons will be smaller and thus if of similar design weaker, so the fighters may well be shooting with impunity but not actually doing anything to their target, like small-arms fire against a tank. A lot of this depends on the balance between offence and defence, and I suspect that realistically "fighters" could actually damage "capital ships", but with most everyone running defensive magic shields and/or unobtanium armour materials to make their capitals not glass cannons, the fighters are rendered impotent against them.

(And you can get rid of surface area to mass problems on large craft by making them hollow, a feature of many of my own designs.)

Also equal matter is not necessarily the right comparison. The basically-uniform armour on a battleship may well mass as much as a thousand fighters, but it's a lot less complex than a thousand of fighters and so is probably cheaper and easier to build. I can argue the exact opposite to you on construction. To build a thousand fighters I have to build a thousand reactors, a thousand warp drives (if I want FTL fighters), a thousand bunches of engines, a thousand control systems, a thousand life support systems, and so on. To build a single larger ship I'll need far fewer of each such component. True, they'll be bigger examples, but I'd venture it's still cheaper to build 4 250 jiggawatt reactors than a thousand 1 jiggawatt models.

[Escalan Corps-Star Island]

I'm going to regret this but can somebody tell me the problem of fighters in space combat? Apparently it is like a taboo here or something.

It depends on your technology level and your preference, as well as how you define "fighter". I'm among the minority that finds fighters a better use of mass than a single large ship. There are several reasons for my opinion:

• Consider two equal amounts of physical matter fighting against each other. One group is a large warship, while the other is a group of fighters and corvettes. While all components of the large ship are stationary relative to one another, each of the small ships can move freely relative to the rest of the group. Therefore, the single large ship is a much easier target than the many small ships, since there's only one target to aim for rather than dozens of individual targets.
• Consider those same two sides of our hypothetical battle - one big ship and one group of smaller ships, with both groups having equal mass. Because of the square-cube law - where the volume of a three-dimensional object grows faster than the surface area - you start to see efficiency and acceleration issues with the larger ship. Most players here RP with cigar-shaped capital vessels - long ships with engines at the rear. This means that the engines only cover one face of a rectangular prism representing the volume and surface area of the ship. As the ship gets bigger, the mass grows at a rate faster than the overall surface area, and therefore faster than the area of the face representing the engines.
• Consider those two sides again. Square-cube law has another effect - available surface area for weapons. Since the group of fighters and corvettes has more surface area than the single ship with the same amount of mass, there is more room for weapons in the small-ship group.
• Consider those two sides yet again. The big ship is a large monolithic vessel that - realistically speaking - would take weeks, months, possibly years to construct. Lots of labor costs, lots of energy costs, lots of design costs, all for one ship. Each individual small ship, on the other hand, is much faster to build - probably stamped out in a factory in an FT setting. Much lower labor, energy, and design cost per unit of mass. Sure, you can split the big ship into little pieces when making it, but you still have to add in the overall assembly, and there will be a large variety of individual pieces manufactured, rather than a bunch of small ships that are mostly (if not completely) identical.

A real-life analogue to this is in computer science. Once upon a time, supercomputers consisted of single, giant, monolithic machines. A few were modular, but still a single machine. Now, supercomputers consist of clusters of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual smaller machines working together. Why is this preferred? Simple: more cost-effective. For the same amount of energy, manpower, and physical space, a computing cluster can pack more cores, more memory, and more capacity for redundancy and error recovery than the single monolithic machine could ever dream of.

Next, let's go into the definition of "fighter". Usually, when one talks of "fighter", they picture a space-opera-style craft sized roughly equivalent to a current RL craft. This is simply not rational. Space has different requirements than our atmosphere in terms of how vehicles need to be built. Space is big. There needs to be space for fuel, supplies, and breathable air to last for rather extended journeys. Meanwhile, there needs to be space for weapons capable of travelling that same scale in a usefully-short amount of time. A fighter the size of an F-16 ain't gonna cut it. I personally RP my fighters with a minimum length of 32 meters (for reference, an F-14 Tomcat is around 20 meters long); your own mileage may vary, but it needs to be much bigger than atmospheric fighter scales in order to be viable in space.

Kreanoltha brings up good points when comparing fighters to missiles. Missiles are certainly effective; however, comparing them to fighters is comparing apples to oranges. If you're bringing your fighters within range of your target's point defenses, you're doing something wrong. Your fighters are better off launching missiles from an intermediate distance between a home carrier and the target itself, and it's with that application - with the fighters firing individual missiles from a large number of individual trajectories relative to the target - that fighter-based tactics in deep space really shine.

Read the fucking thing before assuming you can be a wise-ass.

Please consider a civil discussion on the subject. Both of you.

Thank you for this brilliance. Also, the Escalan counter-rant is incoming.

[YellowApple]

Targeting. The fighters could go to a halfway point, aim, fire, and return. This is useful on space-scales because space is big, and therefore combat will often take place with light-second distances or more.

Missiles was admittedly a bad example; I'm more picturing kinetics, particle beams, or lasers being more accurate.

Plus, there's again the issue that the carrier is one ship, so if the carrier was attacking alone, everything would be firing from one location, making it easier to counter. Spreading out the area of attack using lots of smaller ships would make it harder to dodge, since there are more directions that the attack is coming from simultaneously.

With missiles, shouldn't they be able to independently aim, or else what is the point of the missiles in the first place? As for the latter three, wouldn't that fall right into Kreanoltha's rant about how the ship has bigger, stronger and better everything and so would be able to swat them out? In general, that is. There are exceptions such as super-extreme glass cannon tech. At the same time, if you're going with those weapons, wouldn't it put your fighters at risk of the enemy's point defense weapons as if it can zap the enemy, the enemy could zap it?

Also, couldn't the missile maneuver around to spread out before converging back towards the enemy ship using some maneuvering propellant? While spreading out the attack is good, especially if you can get around to the other side of the enemy ship which, in space it seems, would be rather hard to hit because while there is nothing to hide with, there is also no gravity to allow arcing without penalties and so all weapons being line of sight only (except maybe missiles), wouldn't a cheaper and equally effective method be to have the missiles slowly spread out and then converge again?

That's why in retrospect I stated that missiles were a bad example. However, one ship with moderately bigger and stronger capabilities than an individual smaller ship doesn't counter that - mass-wise - there's more overall potential of firepower with the many smaller ships because of increased combined surface area per unit of volume - and mass. Recall my analogy to cluster computing; one monolithic machine will not run as fast as a cluster of individually-slower but aggregated smaller machines combining their efforts without significantly higher expense.

Missiles spreading out and converging again would be an option, except that you have to make the missiles bigger to cover not just a linear distance from launch to target, but rather two distances - one to the intermediate point and one to the target. That's more fuel being spent, and more complexity in the missile's guidance systems since it has to watch the target over a longer duration of time. Using fighters/corvettes as an intermediate allows for that same distributed attack while keeping the missile forward-facing the target (relatively), therefore avoiding aberrations at significant fractions of c.

It's true that a bunch of small ships may be able to shoot at something big with impunity by staying far enough away to be unhittable by targeted fire from the big ship, though the big ship can use guided weapons or insane volume of fire to counter that. However while a small ship might pack in more weapons per unit mass, those weapons will be smaller and thus if of similar design weaker, so the fighters may well be shooting with impunity but not actually doing anything to their target, like small-arms fire against a tank. A lot of this depends on the balance between offence and defence, and I suspect that realistically "fighters" could actually damage "capital ships", but with most everyone running defensive magic shields and/or unobtanium armour materials to make their capitals not glass cannons, the fighters are rendered impotent against them.

Sure, the individual ships' firepower will be weaker, but when combined, you have significant firepower from an indeterminate number of directions. Again, recall my cluster computing analogy; each individual node in a computing cluster is significantly less powerful than a large monolithic mainframe, but when combined with the rest of the nodes, the cluster as a whole is more powerful with the same amount of money invested into hardware.

(And you can get rid of surface area to mass problems on large craft by making them hollow, a feature of many of my own designs.)

But then you still have a large target, and now without any gain. Compact that hollow space and you have a smaller target for your opponent to hit. But then it's once again not as energy-efficient as splitting that mass into smaller, freely-moving, independent assets.

Also equal matter is not necessarily the right comparison. The basically-uniform armour on a battleship may well mass as much as a thousand fighters, but it's a lot less complex than a thousand of fighters and so is probably cheaper and easier to build. I can argue the exact opposite to you on construction. To build a thousand fighters I have to build a thousand reactors, a thousand warp drives (if I want FTL fighters), a thousand bunches of engines, a thousand control systems, a thousand life support systems, and so on. To build a single larger ship I'll need far fewer of each such component. True, they'll be bigger examples, but I'd venture it's still cheaper to build 4 250 jiggawatt reactors than a thousand 1 jiggawatt models.

You're forgetting something: mass production. Sure, I have to build a thousand reactors for my thousand fighters, but if each reactor is identical, then automated manufacture is straightforward. Plus, I can manufacture multiple reactors simultaneously. In the time that it takes you to build your reactor, I'll already have many reactors stamped out. Same goes for the other parts. And even if you manufacture lots of little reactors to power your big ship, you still have to assemble them together into a unified power source; the big ship has big assembly costs, while the little ships each have little assembly costs.

[Escalan Corps-Star Island]

The Escalan Fighter Rant

---

Part One: An Appeal to Sanity

So, given the amount of discrimination us fighter-wielding blokes has suffered, it's time to take a stand. This may be incorrect on some counts, and feel free to correct me if you wish. But above all else, I simply implore you to respect everyone's unique style. Code of Bro, everyone. So don't hammer the newbie about how pathetic fighters are. After all, you can just destroy his fighters with your PD in RPs to prove your point. To each his own, I say, and to hell with the consequences.

• Firstly, the assumption is that all enemy capital ships have point defense. There are several flaws with this reasoning, namely that said point defense is expensive and that not all civilizations have progressed to the point where it is feasible. For example, if one's fleet has never encountered point defense ICly, why would they be thinking about it as a weakness of their fighters? Also, given the already astronomical (no pun intended) cost of capital ships, not many nations would really have the sort of money to build point defense on all of them in an EFT society.
• Secondly, depending on the shape of one's ships, point defense cannot safely fire on something near the hull. Therefore fighters with warp drives could at least theoretically slip past the point defense's effective interior range limit. In this case, the capital ship would be helpless without fighters of its own.
• Now, on to the fighters themselves. In terms of cost-effectiveness as compared to capital ships, if the fighters take their power from the parent vessel and store it in onboard batteries, the need for a power-plant is negated, thus cutting costs. Next, a fighter can enter the atmosphere of a planet and conduct low-level surveying and ground support operations, which a larger ship cannot. A fighter also is not typically going to have as much armor as it would be pointless.
• In terms of armaments, it is most certainly true that a fighter cannot mount weapons as large as those of a capital ship. However, a fighter retains the invaluable capacity to rapidly change position and thus alter the trajectory of its weapons or its firing angle. Therefore a fighter can keep a ship occupied in self-defense from all directions, thereby providing a distraction to be exploited. Now, the weapons a fighter can mount are definitely capable of dealing crippling damage to or even destroying a larger ship. Large thermonuclear warheads can damage guns and most importantly propulsion systems, and the EMP they generate can damage electrical systems if the bomb hits an unshielded location. In a case specific to the Escalan, semi-singularity weapons known as "voidspace" armaments are capable of damaging hull structure and pulling armor plating apart due to their intense gravitational signature and aftereffects. As for lasers, I for one have a problem with lasers realistically being able to do damage at any significant distance. Small railguns mounted in fighters are also a potential threat, as high-explosive or shaped-charge shells could injure vulnerable areas such as gun ports. Fighters are also naturally a useful tool for combating other fighters, but that will be addressed later.
• In terms of speed, fighters can actually accelerate to much greater velocities than normal humans could withstand because of two things. One, again Escalan-specific, Aláranidni have evolved under higher-gravity conditions than average, and two, suits and gravity-dampening machinery can lower g-forces tremendously. As for velocity, since Escalan fighters are launched via railgunesque catapult systems, no propulsion is necessary to accelerate to attack speeds. In addition to that, gravitational propulsors maintain speed without the use of main engines and with minimal power consumption. When turns are required, counter-firing thrusters are capable of inducing very rapid rotation. Upon the necessity of returning to the carrier or parent vessel, the same process can be used. Fuel can also be gathered from stars that happen to be nearby.
• Fighters are capable of blocking missiles themselves with decoy maneuvers and electronic jamming. Onboard armaments can also destroy inbound missiles with relative ease. Where lasers are concerned, electromagnetic disruptors function beautifully. Fighters are also harder to target than larger vessels due to their inherent maneuverability and unexpected warps in some cases.
• When compared to drones, the main difference is that even with full AI, it is the human aspect of often-detrimental emotion that makes the real difference. Over-detachment from what one is doing can result in unnecessary bloodshed and destruction. Conscience is also necessary if one's society hopes to maintain any semblance of morality. And lastly, who but a human can predict irrational human responses so well?
• For defensive purposes, fighters serve to extend the range and adaptability of one's point defense or interception capability. Having forward-mounted missiles and kinetics can mean the fraction of an instant between life and death. And if heavier fire is being taken from one side, it is then possible to shift more fighters to one side of the ship, increasing the effectivity of the defense with less overall expenditure.

The final plea I wish to make is merely this: that all RPers alike respect the chosen style and tech base of their compatriots and treat it accordingly. No system of armament distribution is truly inherently "better" than another- the vision is I'm the eye of the beholder, or so to speak. In addition to the standard Rule of Cool and convention of hospitality, one must remember that not all nations are at the same tech level within FT; some are just beginning interstellar travel, while others are almost god-like in ability. The Escalan are evidence of this themselves; the Star Fleets in 17200 are radically different and infinitely more powerful than those in 13575. Such disparities mean the parties involved must decide how to reconcile these differing levels of advancement accordingly- it's their choice, not ours. Every one of us, myself included, should remember that NS FT RPing is not "Deadliest Warrior" nor a competition to see who can wank the hardest- it is collaborative storytelling by nature. The point is not to impress upon others their own insignificance, irrelevance, impotence, and inability to compare with everyone else, but to support, demonstrate, and perpetuate the reputation of warmth, acceptance, and kindness that NSFT has long been known for. I hope we all strive to follow this convention more closely in the future. And if any one of us does not seem to fit in, perhaps it is because he marches to the beat of a different drummer. I know I do- but then again, don't we all?

~Grand Admiral Ryveril Inika Amilánsk Cuiruseínal Afálaken CMXXXIII, Green Star Fleet

[YellowApple]

The final plea I wish to make is merely this: that all RPers alike respect the chosen style and tech base of their compatriots and treat it accordingly. No system of armament distribution is truly inherently "better" than another- the vision is I'm the eye of the beholder, or so to speak. In addition to the standard Rule of Cool and convention of hospitality, one must remember that not all nations are at the same tech level within FT; some are just beginning interstellar travel, while others are almost god-like in ability. The Escalan are evidence of this themselves; the Star Fleets in 17200 are radically different and infinitely more powerful than those in 13575. Such disparities mean the parties involved must decide how to reconcile these differing levels of advancement accordingly- it's their choice, not ours. Every one of us, myself included, should remember that NS FT RPing is not "Deadliest Warrior" nor a competition to see who can wank the hardest- it is collaborative storytelling by nature. The point is not to impress upon others their own insignificance, irrelevance, impotence, and inability to compare with everyone else, but to support, demonstrate, and perpetuate the reputation of warmth, acceptance, and kindness that NSFT has long been known for. I hope we all strive to follow this convention more closely in the future. And if any one of us does not seem to fit in, perhaps it is because he marches to the beat of a different drummer. I know I do- but then again, don't we all?

This.

I could really care less about the science and logic behind any FT decision, as long as it follows Code of Bro.

[Escalan Corps-Star Island]

The final plea I wish to make is merely this: that all RPers alike respect the chosen style and tech base of their compatriots and treat it accordingly. No system of armament distribution is truly inherently "better" than another- the vision is I'm the eye of the beholder, or so to speak. In addition to the standard Rule of Cool and convention of hospitality, one must remember that not all nations are at the same tech level within FT; some are just beginning interstellar travel, while others are almost god-like in ability. The Escalan are evidence of this themselves; the Star Fleets in 17200 are radically different and infinitely more powerful than those in 13575. Such disparities mean the parties involved must decide how to reconcile these differing levels of advancement accordingly- it's their choice, not ours. Every one of us, myself included, should remember that NS FT RPing is not "Deadliest Warrior" nor a competition to see who can wank the hardest- it is collaborative storytelling by nature. The point is not to impress upon others their own insignificance, irrelevance, impotence, and inability to compare with everyone else, but to support, demonstrate, and perpetuate the reputation of warmth, acceptance, and kindness that NSFT has long been known for. I hope we all strive to follow this convention more closely in the future. And if any one of us does not seem to fit in, perhaps it is because he marches to the beat of a different drummer. I know I do- but then again, don't we all?

This.

I could really care less about the science and logic behind any FT decision, as long as it follows Code of Bro.

Thanks. It took a long time to write that on an iPod Touch, too. Like 45 minutes.

[Vernii]

This may be incorrect on some counts, and feel free to correct me if you wish.

"some" is an amusing understatement.

[*]Firstly, the assumption is that all enemy capital ships have point defense. There are several flaws with this reasoning, namely that said point defense is expensive and that not all civilizations have progressed to the point where it is feasible. For example, if one's fleet has never encountered point defense ICly, why would they be thinking about it as a weakness of their fighters? Also, given the already astronomical (no pun intended) cost of capital ships, not many nations would really have the sort of money to build point defense on all of them in an EFT society.

Why are you assuming that point defense weaponry is expensive? Furthermore, given the capabilities of point-defense and missile interception weaponry in today's world, it would be nonsensical to assume that any civilization capable of traversing the stars isn't going to figure out how a laser works. Not to mention that depending on the targets being engaged, main anti-starship weaponry could be employed in a point defense role (incoming kinetic weaponry is a good idea of what I mean, given that it doesn't maneuver). Also, don't assume capital ships are "astronomically expensive" either. Its a brain-bug that I am beginning to find particularly irksome. If a state can't afford to put standard weaponry on its warships, then it can't afford them period.

[*]Secondly, depending on the shape of one's ships, point defense cannot safely fire on something near the hull. Therefore fighters with warp drives could at least theoretically slip past the point defense's effective interior range limit. In this case, the capital ship would be helpless without fighters of its own.

The prevalence of shields (particularly bubble shields) would make this tactic a rarity to even employ, let alone succeed. Furthermore, tactilol FTL tends to be viewed as poor sport, because it tends to show a lack of imagination on the part of the user.

*Now, on to the fighters themselves. In terms of cost-effectiveness as compared to capital ships, if the fighters take their power from the parent vessel and store it in onboard batteries, the need for a power-plant is negated, thus cutting costs. Next, a fighter can enter the atmosphere of a planet and conduct low-level surveying and ground support operations, which a larger ship cannot. A fighter also is not typically going to have as much armor as it would be pointless.

The batteries will still need to contain the same amount of energy required for the mission profile + a safety buffer unless you're fine with your pilots spiraling helplessly into the dark when they run out of power. Furthermore, why are you assuming larger ships cannot enter an atmosphere?

[*]In terms of armaments, it is most certainly true that a fighter cannot mount weapons as large as those of a capital ship. However, a fighter retains the invaluable capacity to rapidly change position and thus alter the trajectory of its weapons or its firing angle. Therefore a fighter can keep a ship occupied in self-defense from all directions, thereby providing a distraction to be exploited. Now, the weapons a fighter can mount are definitely capable of dealing crippling damage to or even destroying a larger ship. Large thermonuclear warheads can damage guns and most importantly propulsion systems, and the EMP they generate can damage electrical systems if the bomb hits an unshielded location. In a case specific to the Escalan, semi-singularity weapons known as "voidspace" armaments are capable of damaging hull structure and pulling armor plating apart due to their intense gravitational signature and aftereffects. As for lasers, I for one have a problem with lasers realistically being able to do damage at any significant distance. Small railguns mounted in fighters are also a potential threat, as high-explosive or shaped-charge shells could injure vulnerable areas such as gun ports. Fighters are also naturally a useful tool for combating other fighters, but that will be addressed later.

Most competent navies build their warships to have weapons covering every firing angle, though I won't presume to speak for yours. Same with little things like shields and point defense. Thermonuclear weapons tend to get tossed around like candy, and most FT warships are generally rated to survive multiple contact hits if not substantially greater poundings. EMP is also not generally a threat in a space combat environment given the ease of hardening electronics now.

[*]In terms of speed, fighters can actually accelerate to much greater velocities than normal humans could withstand because of two things. One, again Escalan-specific, Aláranidni have evolved under higher-gravity conditions than average, and two, suits and gravity-dampening machinery can lower g-forces tremendously. As for velocity, since Escalan fighters are launched via railgunesque catapult systems, no propulsion is necessary to accelerate to attack speeds. In addition to that, gravitational propulsors maintain speed without the use of main engines and with minimal power consumption. When turns are required, counter-firing thrusters are capable of inducing very rapid rotation. Upon the necessity of returning to the carrier or parent vessel, the same process can be used. Fuel can also be gathered from stars that happen to be nearby.

And in Verniian-specific I have high megaton/low gigaton mass spaceboats routinely pulling triple digit G accels. We aren't arguing about how our own personal technologies would do in these situations, but rather approaching it from a hard science viewpoint, which is that acceleration is limited by what your crew can handle and what your delta-v is.

[*]Fighters are capable of blocking missiles themselves with decoy maneuvers and electronic jamming. Onboard armaments can also destroy inbound missiles with relative ease. Where lasers are concerned, electromagnetic disruptors function beautifully. Fighters are also harder to target than larger vessels due to their inherent maneuverability and unexpected warps in some cases.

Anyone who has missiles that can be decoyed from their primary target (presumably an actual starship) by a fighter doing maneuvers around it should lock up their engineering departments for providing aid to the enemy. Harder but not impossible. Probability-based targeting systems with self-composing threat libraries (and for people like me, FTL communications to go with said fire control), make it a lot easier than you'd think.

[*]When compared to drones, the main difference is that even with full AI, it is the human aspect of often-detrimental emotion that makes the real difference. Over-detachment from what one is doing can result in unnecessary bloodshed and destruction. Conscience is also necessary if one's society hopes to maintain any semblance of morality. And lastly, who but a human can predict irrational human responses so well?

A computer is going to beat a human (or any biological really) embarrassingly badly in where it counts: reaction time. It doesn't matter if a computer wouldn't be able to predict an 'irrational' response, if its able to put a laser through the cockpit before the human pilot is even done finishing his thought process. Sentimentality likewise has no place on the battlefield, if your nation is unable to handle the moral costs of war, it shouldn't engage in it.

[*]For defensive purposes, fighters serve to extend the range and adaptability of one's point defense or interception capability. Having forward-mounted missiles and kinetics can mean the fraction of an instant between life and death. And if heavier fire is being taken from one side, it is then possible to shift more fighters to one side of the ship, increasing the effectivity of the defense with less overall expenditure.[/list]

Point defense drones would do it better.

I can agree with respecting different roleplaying styles, but that's not what it is being argued here, and certainly not being argued by you. It's rather hypocritical to get involved in a debate and then pull a 'can't we all just get along?' after you've made your points.

[Arthropoda Ingens]

That's why in retrospect I stated that missiles were a bad example. However, one ship with moderately bigger and stronger capabilities than an individual smaller ship doesn't counter that - mass-wise - there's more overall potential of firepower with the many smaller ships because of increased combined surface area per unit of volume - and mass. Recall my analogy to cluster computing; one monolithic machine will not run as fast as a cluster of individually-slower but aggregated smaller machines combining their efforts without significantly higher expense.

Power plants aren't computers. Power plants are power plants. And power plants become more, not less efficient as they increase in size. Sauce.

Sure, the individual ships' firepower will be weaker, but when combined, you have significant firepower from an indeterminate number of directions. Again, recall my cluster computing analogy; each individual node in a computing cluster is significantly less powerful than a large monolithic mainframe, but when combined with the rest of the nodes, the cluster as a whole is more powerful with the same amount of money invested into hardware.

Concentrating energy on one point has different effects than concentrating it on a thousand. Guess which one is more likely to penetrate. This doesn't even get into the difficulty of coordinating simultaneous impacts, nor into the issue of smaller beam diameters meaning less range (Macrokinetics: Shorter barrel length meaning less speed).

And as pointed out above, re: Size & Efficiency, your last sentence is just a flat-out lie based on you using a false analogy.

But then you still have a large target, and now without any gain. Compact that hollow space and you have a smaller target for your opponent to hit. But then it's once again not as energy-efficient as splitting that mass into smaller, freely-moving, independent assets.

As pointed out above, a flat, ignorant lie. Just noting this again to kill this bullshit as quickly as possible.