Space fighters vs. space battleships

Cafe Society
21

Figure that depending on the circumstances, electronic warfare (or in bigger engagements, the fog of war) would also be a big factor, potentially making it difficult for the capital ships to single out fighters and destroy them. Then again, in the latter half of WWII, Navy gunners were taught not to try and single out targets, instead simply filling the sky around the ship with overlapping fields of spray-and-pray with some liberal application of radar-assisted proximity-fused 5 inch shells.

Sometimes “Effective” has nothing to do with “Efficient.”

I’ve seen some settings where the fighters really can’t take down an enemy warship, barring some jarring weakness (like an exposed thermal exhaust port leading to the reactor core) or unusually skilled flying (the old Wing Commander standby of flying into another ship’s hangar bay to liberally lay down point-blank-range destruction before hopefully escaping again).

In the Honor Harrington books, they don’t have proper fighters, but they do have Light Attack Craft, which end up filling some of the same niches. They end up not being capable of destroying most major warships, but are plenty capable of using their superior acceleration and numbers to swarm the smaller picket and escort ships, giving them something considerably more pressing to worry about than screening incoming fire from the enemy fleet. Essentially, on their own, they are little better than patrol boats, only really being able to sound the alarm if an enemy force arrives. In larger numbers, they become team players, supporting each other and their own major warships.

22

I think that would make for some of the most boring imagery ever.

23

I suspect that ships in combat will constantly be making tiny random changes in their course and acceleration. Even a 0.1 degree shift in direction will cause a laser fired from a million kilometers away to miss by a comfortable margin (and yes, I’m assuming engagement ranges of millions of klicks. Why not?)

24

Doesn’t really work that way. A large capital ship would have much greater mass to accelerate, including the fuel. A smaller fighter would be able to accelarate quicker but wouldn’t be able to carry much fuel.

If you go by Star Wars or BSG, space combat doctrine dictates that large capital ships (typically up to several miles long and hundreds of thousands of tons) use FTL drives to travel close to a planet, space station or other object. Once they are within more reasonable travel distances, they use conventional sub-light drives to position themselves into orbit. Presumably, an enemy ship would use its drives to position itself into an orbit where it would stay in close proximity to its target. Remember everything is moving at thousands of miles an hour. The big capital ships never really seem to menuver that much. Typically they just drift near each other.

Once they drift within a few thousand miles of each other, they deploy their small strike craft.

Of course, IRL such small fighers would serve no real purpose that couldn’t already be acomplished by the capital ships lasers, phasers, plasma cannons, rail guns, or whatever else it is carrying. IRL, the reason aircraft carriers are superior to battleships is because their aircraft can engage enemy ships at much longer ranges over the horizon. In space, there is no horizon, so a large gun platform like a space battleship has no need to deploy small fighters carrying small bombs. It can just fire large bombs directly.

25

I once heard it suggested, rather facetiously, that scifi battles are mostly just the Battle of Jutland transferred to outer space – that the strategic planning and types of naval units are more or less directly copied. As critical theories go, it’s not that far wrong.

Though in the case of fighters, the skiffy guys go all the way up to the age of the aircraft carrier.

I’d be interested to know if there is any SF that tries to approach to idea of space warfare on its own terms – with units and strategies that reflect the unique problems of fighting in space. Singularity Sky by Charles Stross sort of goes there, when he pitches the old-fashioned notion of a “space fleet” against something truly futuristic.

26

Because space fighters aren’t going to do a lot of damage a million klicks away. Not with energy weapons - and if you are firing missiles, fire them from capital ships.
Plus, with the spread of even a focused energy weapon, it would have to be powerful enough to take out a fighter if any part of the beam hits it - which makes things a lot easier.

27

The only advantage fighters have is that they are faster. And that is not of much use unless you are running away.
Let’s look at an engagement. Fighters are zooming around a million klicks away. Big deal. The capital ship, with no worries, picks them off, though it might take a while.

Okay, the fighters attack. They are still moving fast - on a vector right to the capital ship. They don’t last long. You might get some ships through if you send enough, but it is going to be very expensive.

Now, a few have made it and are near the capital ship. Some fire energy weapons at the ship. Since they are going so fast, and the capital ships are not all that big, they get one shot off, if that, before they are past the ship and can get picked off again. If they slow down, they are picked off immediately by computer driven energy weapons.

Some make a bombing run. Ship going very fast releases the bomb. Oops - the bomb’s vector is a lot more in the direction of the figher than the direction of the capital ship. By the time it reaches the capital ship, it will be way past it. If you slow down enough to drop the bomb effectively, see above.

We are assuming good defense here, of course. If one clown in a fighter can take out a capital ship by crashing into it, the situation changes dramatically, and we bring back the kamikaze.

But there is one weapons system, used today, that sf movies seem to neglect, which is missiles. Today’s fighters don’t machine gun each other, they fire air to air missiles. A batch of fast, maneuverable, missiles fired by a capital ship at a swarm of incoming fighters is going to make short work of them. We already have drones. Smart missiles won’t even have to worry about civilians, and you can afford hundreds for the cost of one fighter, not to mention that the “pilots” are nice and safe, not to mention being computers.

So, the squadron of fighters who figure this out on their way to battle would no doubt make good use of their superior speed by heading for a neutral star empire.

28

George Lucas admitedly used WWII footage to influence the battles in the Star Wars films. In film and television, the Rule of Cool applies for space battles. Audiences want to see giant capital ships blasting away with lasers, missles and rail guns while fighters zip in and out of the behemoths dogfighting in a manner that has been obsolete for almost 50 years.

In reality, one of the major problems with two ships fighting each other is everything is typically in orbit around a planet. So if you are chasing a ship and accelerate to catch it, you will also move to a higher and more elongated orbit taking you away from your target. And your target can’t just “serpentine” away from you. In fact, you would want that because your target would decelerate possibly taking it the atmosphere. But orbital mechanics doesn’t make compelling war drama.

29

I like Banks’ take on space warfare: Humans are of no consequence at best, a hindrance (because their fragile bodies need protection) at worst. While a spread of munitions is always handy, the best weapons are the electronic warfare ones that make your opponents tear themselves apart. And size and numbers count, but only when it comes to equivalent tech. A single superior Ship can take on a fleet of lesser ships.

Oh, and fighters are non-existent for warfare. I think the closest he comes is repurposed civilian modules used to blow up a Hegemonic Swarm, but that was an ad hoc solution to an immediate problem and something a proper militarized Culture Ship would likely have handled very differently.

30

Although it’s more described than shown, capital-ship combat in Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand seems relatively well-thought-out: long distances, energy fields, laser weaponry, missiles and ultrafast computer targeting, with human crews just along for the ride in very short, very lethal battles.

31

And best of all, no space drives - the ships have to obey the laws of physics. It puts a lot of constraints on battles, but I think that it makes them more interesting.

32

Stealth is hardly possible in space - any propulsion system will generate heat and light, which will always travel infinitely faster than the ship producing it. And since the background for those emissions is either a) mostly immobile stars that can be programmed into the detection system and ignored from then on or b) the Black, it would be trivial to pick up any new heat or light sources from abritrary long distances away, certainly long before any sort of weapon system is in range. And that’s with 100% passive sensors, mind.

That’s the real problem with Sci-Fi space dogfights - they would never happen in the first place, because between the time the incoming spaceships have been detected and the time they can fire their own weapons, the planetary defence systems (who do not need to move, and are therefore much more difficult to pinpoint) have had days if not months to analyze the bogeys’ course (including any random evasive manoeuvers), plot a solution and let loose with the biggest doom ray they’ve got.
Or preferably 5.000 of them firing at once on the ship and every possible point the ship could conceivably have moved to by the time the beams have arrived downrange.
That would make for pretty boring films, however.

33

Except that the whole point of a propulsion system is that the heat and light so produced are highly directional.

34

Heh, the whole point of David Weber’s Honor Harrington series is that it’s just Horatio Hornblower in space. The entire physics of his spaceships is based on his desire to have the tactics of his spaceships essentially identical to the wooden fleets of Nelson’s Trafalgar. Obviously this changed later in the series, but basically he wanted space fleets duking it out broadside vs. broadside.

35

A minor quibble, but “infinitely”? Heat and light doesn’t even travel infinitely faster than my Subaru.

36

Depends on how you define it. Multiply the speed of your Subaru by a thousand, it’s less than the speed of light. Multiply it by a million, it’s less than the speed of light. Multiply it by a googol, it’s still less. No matter what finite number you multiple any non-c speed by, it’ll always be less than c. So in that sense, you could say that light is infinitely faster than spaceships.

37

I dunno. Are we talking physics or math? I think Kobal was discussing the amount of warning an opponent would have. So if I’m going 100 mph in my Subaru (which I guess could happen, on a good day, on a down slope, with a following wind), and I’m 186,282 miles away, then you’ve got 1,862.82 hours (or 6706152 seconds) to figure out what to when I arrive. My headlights, on the other hand, show up 1 second after I turn them on (assuming I’m one of those jerks with HID lights that can be seen from lunar orbit). So light is traveling 6706152 times faster than my Subaru by that measure.

Now granted, no matter how Top Gear I get on my Subaru, I’m never going to be able to accelerate it to light speed, but I don’t think that’s the issue here.

38

Fortunately, objects in space don’t need propulsion to move. If I were planning a sneak attack, I’d burn my engines when I was still out of sensor range, then go dark and coast right up to my target. If it takes weeks or months, who cares? Space travel is slow, anyway.

Besides, I think you’re underestimating the sheer size of space. Everyone is talking about accurate targeting systems, but targeting systems will have to be *really *accurate. Hitting a ship in space is like hitting a specific grain of sand with another grain of sand, across Lake Superior. Any molecule-sized error in your aiming will cause your shot to miss by miles. Space is big.

39

So how would the combat actually go down?

Friendly ship in orbit around planet. Enemy ship jumps into system 1 AU out.

Each ship picks up the other at the same time, which is about 8 minutes after the enemy ship shows up. Both ships have to observe a little bit in order to actually plot the movement of the other ship.

Once a firing solution is achieved, each ship fires. Depending on the weapon, there’ll be a lag time. If lasers/beam weapons, it’ll be that 8 minute delay. If missiles, we’re talking months, so it’s likely that they’d probably fire a couple, then begin accelerating toward the planet / waiting on the enemy.

We can assume that the ships would change course; I’m guessing that the real tactics would be in the timing and nature of the course changes relative to the known weaponry and sensors of the enemy.

40

Maybe, maybe not; that would depend on the weapons technology, as well as on the defensive-shield (material, force-field, or whatever) technology.