Interceptors in Outsider

[Arioch]

I am of the opinion that starfighters as they are depicted in most sci-fi settings are flawed and completely unrealistic. Maneuvering in space is all down to mass to thrust ratios, as long as you have a high enough mass to thrust ratio you can make a ship of any size dance around like a starfighter, as thus a screen of light escorts would both be just as maneuverable as fighters while boasting far greater firepower and staying power. In a realistic setting starfighters would be swept aside effortlessly by a combination of light escorts and point defense missile systems.

Maneuverability requires both rotation and acceleration. Acceleration is just a matter of the thrust to weight ratio, but rotation isn't. The moment of inertia increases linearly with mass, but exponentially with the radius from the pivot point, which means that as the ship gets larger, it will rotate more slowly even with the same thrust to weight ratio.

Whether or not small craft are viable combatants will depend on the very specific limitations of a variety of technologies.

[G. Janssen]

after a volley, a dash into a bayonet attack usually followed, and the side that decides to lie down in order to protect itself from enemy fire will be vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat.

That is an excellent point. Thanks!

[Demarquis]

Maneuverability requires both rotation and acceleration. Acceleration is just a matter of the thrust to weight ratio, but rotation isn't. The moment of inertia increases linearly with mass, but exponentially with the radius from the pivot point, which means that as the ship gets larger, it will rotate more slowly even with the same thrust to weight ratio.

Whether or not small craft are viable combatants will depend on the very specific limitations of a variety of technologies.

Of course, that's why turrets were invented!

[Demetrious]

Remote control will be in wide use, but there are limitations on range according to lightspeed lag and line of sight, and the potential for jamming. I recently read the US Air Force's specifications for what they wanted in a sixth-generation fighter, and one was the capability to fly either manned or unmanned.

This is the answer I would have given as well - "man-machine teaming." The reason the USAF is looking at this is also applicable to space combat: jamming and ECM. One cannot assume they will always have the luxury of remote control in every circumstance.

I am of the opinion that starfighters as they are depicted in most sci-fi settings are flawed and completely unrealistic. Maneuvering in space is all down to mass to thrust ratios, as long as you have a high enough mass to thrust ratio you can make a ship of any size dance around like a starfighter, as thus a screen of light escorts would both be just as maneuverable as fighters while boasting far greater firepower and staying power. In a realistic setting starfighters would be swept aside effortlessly by a combination of light escorts and point defense missile systems.

Thrust-to-mass ratios are why you don't want to attempt high-speed dodging with a ship that's lugging around latrines, mess halls, crew accommodations, washing machines and all the other things that make ships deployable for more than a few months without the crew going insane. To say nothing of the fuel consumption very high thrust drives tend to have - engineering is always a series of trade-offs and it's hard to think of a technological epoch where higher speeds didn't typically come at the cost of lower efficiency and/or durability/reliability for the engine. All of this nudges one towards separating the bus (the ship) and the shooty bit (be it a fighter, drone, fighter-drone, or plain ol' missile) so you get high efficiency and long deployment times, but also get the high thrust in combat by way of leaving everything but the most essential combat mass behind on the mothership.

Something I think is oft overlooked with space fighters is the potential of space torpedo bombers, i.e. a missile bus. You'd prefer these over just launching missiles from the mothership for the same reason aircraft carriers exist in real life - magazine depth. A missile that only has to go 250,000km is a lot smaller than one meant to go 1,000,000km, after all. It's a lot more efficient to re-use as much of the weapon system as you can (the bus.) An American supercarrier can fit a lot more bombs and missiles into its magazine than its strike group can bring Tomahawks, even if they devoted every cell to them. And naturally, if you have torpedo bombers in use, you might well develop a small craft meant to destroy hostile bombers outside of their missile range. You could make small unmanned fighter drones, or even larger, manned ships optimized for the role, called torpedo boat destr- wait, I think we did that one already.

In my own novel I'm using a modular concept - fighters have a "command bay" that can accept either a cockpit module, complete with controls and integrated life support systems, or... a modular computer core to run the ship unmanned. One manned ship acting as a control node for several unmanned ships (man-machine teaming) is standard practice in many combat scenarios, but unmanned is preferred, as their primary role in vacuum is as missile busses, forward point-defense, or anti-FAC (Fast Attack Craft) work. All those jobs tend to have high attrition rates and so human lives - and well-trained pilots, a very expensive and precious resource - aren't risked in combat unless the highest possible performance must be had and the mission must be accomplished.

The one scenario in which fighters are almost always manned is during orbit-to-surface assault - the fighters are actually aerospace fighters; marvels of engineering that have been optimized for maneuverability in atmosphere while still retaining excellent vacuum/zero-g capabilities (which mostly boils down to efficient dual-use engine systems utilizing ducting of the main powerplant's thrust.) Most planets worth fighting over have atmosphere (nobody's keen to live on a barren airless rock) and Ye Olden Schoole Dogfighting is complicated enough that even a full computer core struggles to perform given the number of variables. (AI-assist flight control software is as standard and familiar a feature in a cockpit as a trim wheel is today, of course, and managing its use is an integral part of mastering the craft.) Of course, any and every variation on this technology that one can think of has been tried, and is likely in service with some polity's military, somewhere, ranging from dedicated atmosphere-only air/ground attack craft (popular with planetary garrisons and sometimes used in major planetary assaults, launched from their own dedicated assault carriers,) to vacuum-only fighters that resemble a ball of thrusters, sensors and guns wrapped around a powerplant. The modular aerospace fighters are simply the most commonly seen solution given their flexibility more than makes up for the increase in efficiency more dedicated solutions can deliver, in most realistic scenarios (though polities that prefer matched sets of specialized craft do exist.)

I've found that whenever you're stuck choosing between something "cool" and something "realistic" as concerns sci-fi, the best answer is always "por que no los dos?" It works for everything. SSTOs or staging? Por que no los dos? Tanks or mecha? Por que no los dos?

[Demarquis]

"To say nothing of the fuel consumption very high thrust drives tend to have - engineering is always a series of trade-offs and it's hard to think of a technological epoch where higher speeds didn't typically come at the cost of lower efficiency and/or durability/reliability for the engine."

If the space fighter and the larger carrier ship are using the same drive design, then the fighter is just a carrier scaled down, and the carrier is just a very large fighter. All performance parameters, including the thrust to mass ratio, should be identical. This means that they will have the same fuel consumption, efficiency and acceleration, per kilogram. If the choice is between one large ship with ten weapons, or ten smaller ships each with one of the weapons, the choice is purely tactical, not technical. If you are in fact using both the larger ship and the then smaller ones, then the fuel used and the battle space performance will be identical to two of the larger ships (or twenty of the smaller ones). In fact, there is no reason to carry the smaller ones inside the larger one, that's just a needless complication.

Missiles on the fighter work out exactly the same way: if the missile is equipped with a smaller version of the same drive design as the fighter is, then it's just a small unmanned fighter, with the same overall performance parameters per kilogram. Why bother with the fighter, why not just launch the missiles from the larger ship? Why doesn't your fleet consist of 100 autonomous missiles (in which case they become drones)?

Now, your concept of a space torpedo bomber is a much better one, and you are not the first to think of it: http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/200 ... s-not.html (do read the comments section on that website, it's well worth it). However, they aren't ideal for a missile platform, more efficient is using them to fire kinetic slugs (perhaps with some minimal delta-v for minor trajectory correction). Lasers are plausible as well, but if you are firing a missile, just fire the missile from one large launching platform, and leave the "fighter-bomber" at home (or, conversely, the carrier). Rocketpunk calls this design a "Lancer", and of course Lancers (Bombers) can engage each other, at which point they become "Interceptor-Bombers", but not fighters as most people envision them (mostly from movies). From that website:

"Now things start to look interesting, because it has probably already occurred to you that lancer ships can engage each other. In fact, if lancers are technically and tactically viable at all, the best way to protect your big ships from them might be to send your own lancers out to engage them. A battle between lancers even looks quite a bit like a dogfight, though on a vastly larger physical scale. We can imagine small, handy ships, hurtling along complex curved trajectories, trying to line up for clean shots at their enemies while avoiding getting lined up on - especially getting boxed in, where evading one enemy sends you right into the path of another."

I'm going to quote myself from another forum, where I described what I thought such a battle would look like: "I imagine that the most likely "maneuver" will be a high-speed pass pat each other. One or both of the ships could end up destroyed in that first pass. If not, then what happens next depends upon how much delta-g the two ships have. If they have the capacity to pull it off, the two ships could turn around for another pass. This would be a very large scale maneuver- curved trajectories hundreds if not thousands of kilometers in diameter. Actually, if they have enough fuel, I imagine them beginning to circle each other at that distance, traversing the circle in a matter of hours or days, all the while firing at each other from across the "circle" (the munitions do not go in a straight line, they also curve around the center of the circle- except for the lasers, of course). Add in a few dozen more ships on each side, and that's what a deep space battle looks like: a slowly spinning swarm of death."

That's as close to a hard science "space fighter" as I could get it. I like your modular concept, including the roles you foresee for small manned combat spacecraft. The concept of "magazine depth", however, does not apply in space. You can put 100 missiles on one large platform, or 10 each on ten smaller platforms, and again, if they are all using the same drives the performance will be the same, including range. The ultimate solution is to just have a fleet that consists of nothing but Tomahawk missiles (or their equivalent), and maybe one manned command module to control them all.

[Arioch]

Maneuverability requires both rotation and acceleration. Acceleration is just a matter of the thrust to weight ratio, but rotation isn't. The moment of inertia increases linearly with mass, but exponentially with the radius from the pivot point, which means that as the ship gets larger, it will rotate more slowly even with the same thrust to weight ratio.

Whether or not small craft are viable combatants will depend on the very specific limitations of a variety of technologies.

Of course, that's why turrets were invented!

Turrets don't help a ship dodge shots, which is the main advantage of maneuverability (as opposed to pure acceleration).

[Bamax]

Maneuverability requires both rotation and acceleration. Acceleration is just a matter of the thrust to weight ratio, but rotation isn't. The moment of inertia increases linearly with mass, but exponentially with the radius from the pivot point, which means that as the ship gets larger, it will rotate more slowly even with the same thrust to weight ratio.

Whether or not small craft are viable combatants will depend on the very specific limitations of a variety of technologies.

Of course, that's why turrets were invented!

Turrets don't help a ship dodge shots, which is the main advantage of maneuverability (as opposed to pure acceleration).

Normally I would say that turrets are still great at taking out counter fire.

Yet I think it is rather obvious that at the hyperfast accelerations that Loroi ships move, if turrets are taking on counterfire you are close to being killed anyway.

Outsider is not unlike the ocean battles of the colonial era, only at far greater ranges. Since battles are decided mostly by cannon fire, missiles are of limited utility... mostly good for swarming attacks.... and even those Elite strike groups like Stilly's can still wipe out all the missile swarms even while outnumbered.

Coincidentally that is the very thing that kind of justifies space fighters in Outsider.... at least for the Loroi.

Spaceflighters can in theory actually DEAL with missile swarms by shooting them down with their blaster beams, and even take out capital ships with well struck missile hits.

[Demarquis]

You don't have to rotate to maneuver, just include thruster nozzles pointing in every direction. But time to rotate isn't going to be decisive anyway. I don't know what the ranges are in Outsider, but in real life space battles are going to be on the scale of tens if not hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers. Targets will be pixels on a screen, movement measured in arc seconds per minute. The most common offensive weapon depicted here are beam energy weapons--you don't dodge those.

[Arioch]

You don't have to rotate to maneuver, just include thruster nozzles pointing in every direction. But time to rotate isn't going to be decisive anyway. I don't know what the ranges are in Outsider, but in real life space battles are going to be on the scale of tens if not hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers. Targets will be pixels on a screen, movement measured in arc seconds per minute. The most common offensive weapon depicted here are beam energy weapons--you don't dodge those.

Ships do have thruster nozzles pointing in every direction -- these are maneuvering thrusters. They really don't help a ship dodge, because their thrust is not strong enough to displace the ship even one ship-length in a second, which means most incoming shots will still hit. To effectively dodge, you need to rotate the ship and then accelerate with the main drives. This is something small craft do much better than large craft; because the moment of inertia increases exponentially with ship length, a smaller vessel can turn more quickly than a large one, even if they have the same relative acceleration.

Beam weapons can be "dodged" by evasive maneuvers, with is constantly throttling up and down and rotating to throw off your predicted position in the time it takes the beam to arrive at lightspeed. At 1 light second distance, a 30G change in acceleration can displace more than a ship-length from its predicted location in the 1 second it takes the shot to arrive.

Ballistic or minimally guided projectiles can sometimes be dodged with the maneuvering thrusters alone, but torpedoes are very difficult to dodge, because they can usually accelerate faster than the target.

[Demetrious]

If the space fighter and the larger carrier ship are using the same drive design, then the fighter is just a carrier scaled down, and the carrier is just a very large fighter.

They're not the same design, though. While they may both utilize the same underlying technology, there are still significant engineering challenges involved in applying that technology that are sensitive to economies of scale, and multiple engineering trade-offs that can be adjusted to favor one dimension of performance over another. For instance, the powerplants of WWII era destroyers were optimized for speed over all. Battleship propulsion plants also used the same underlying steam-turbine technology, and they even pushed for high power outputs (thus enabling the "fast battleship,") but were nowhere near as fuel-hungry as their smaller escorts. Not just in terms of consumption to available on-board fuel tankage, but also in pound-for-pound terms - efficiency was sacrificed for raw power output from a small, dense powerplant.

Another excellent example of this is an airliner's jet-turbine engine compared to a fighter jet. The commercial engine only needs to achieve a peak power-to-weight ratio sufficient to move an airliner at most optimal cruising speed, while the fighter engine needs to be capable of significantly more peak output, even if it cruises at the same speeds. And then there's the afterburner system - a case study in sacrificing fuel efficiency for short-term performance. It's technically an oversimplification to say that it's a rocket-boost system for a turbine engine, but it's more than accurate to characterize the power output and the fearsome fuel consumption that it costs. There's also other aspects of performance to consider - for instance, durability and maintenance demands. Military requirements make life difficult because they need all these aspects at the same time - high performance in combat, efficiency and durability out of combat to enable long patrols - but the engineering requirements for each are almost always mutually exclusive. This strongly incentivizes splitting your sustainment mass and combat mass - put efficient, durable engines on the carrier, and fuel-hungry but high-performance engines on your fighters. (Note that this applies to full-size warships, too, not just fighters - tugs/tenders that use external docking collars to tow Fast Attack Craft or destroyers are perfectly viable, or even a tanker/tender support vessel if fuel costs are minimal and the real concern is simply logistical.)

Missiles on the fighter work out exactly the same way: if the missile is equipped with a smaller version of the same drive design as the fighter is, then it's just a small unmanned fighter, with the same overall performance parameters per kilogram. Why bother with the fighter, why not just launch the missiles from the larger ship? Why doesn't your fleet consist of 100 autonomous missiles (in which case they become drones)?

Production efficiency. To wit, it is far cheaper per-unit to build a small, short ranged missile than it is to build a big, long-ranged missile that's functionally (and financially) equivalent to a manned craft. If you can reuse 75% of your system indefinitely, you can then afford to build far more actual expendable munitions, allowing you to saturate enemy defenses on the tactical level (as your "booster" stages are re-useable) and simply out-produce the enemy on the strategic level. An all-VLS, all-missile strategy will of course always generate bigger salvo weights ("alpha strikes") but those do face a point of diminishing returns (i.e. after you've saturated enemy point-defense and achieved target over-kill margins on hostile hulls.)

Now, your concept of a space torpedo bomber is a much better one, and you are not the first to think of it: http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/200 ... s-not.html (do read the comments section on that website, it's well worth it). However, they aren't ideal for a missile platform, more efficient is using them to fire kinetic slugs (perhaps with some minimal delta-v for minor trajectory correction). Lasers are plausible as well, but if you are firing a missile, just fire the missile from one large launching platform, and leave the "fighter-bomber" at home (or, conversely, the carrier). Rocketpunk calls this design a "Lancer", and of course Lancers (Bombers) can engage each other, at which point they become "Interceptor-Bombers", but not fighters as most people envision them (mostly from movies). From that website:

"Now things start to look interesting, because it has probably already occurred to you that lancer ships can engage each other. In fact, if lancers are technically and tactically viable at all, the best way to protect your big ships from them might be to send your own lancers out to engage them. A battle between lancers even looks quite a bit like a dogfight, though on a vastly larger physical scale. We can imagine small, handy ships, hurtling along complex curved trajectories, trying to line up for clean shots at their enemies while avoiding getting lined up on - especially getting boxed in, where evading one enemy sends you right into the path of another."

I should've known Winchell Chung had already covered this. This is exactly what I was alluding to with the joke about "torpedo boat destroyers" in my last post, as this is precisely how the naval destroyer of 1930s-1950s came to be. Back when "torpedo" was the term for a naval mine, some madmen would mount them on a pole ("spar torpedoes") and try to do mischief by closing in to ram with small, fast boats. The threat was roughly akin to fireships in the age of sail - considerable, but only in limited circumstances and with luck. Then in 1866 Robert Whitehead invented a self-propelled torpedo and suddenly these torpedo boats became a problem. Thus was born a gunship meant precisely to defeat them, the "torpedo boat destroyer," and it didn't take long before people realized that a small, fast, well-armed vessel was quite suited to delivering torpedoes itself.

I'm going to quote myself from another forum, where I described what I thought such a battle would look like: "I imagine that the most likely "maneuver" will be a high-speed pass pat each other. One or both of the ships could end up destroyed in that first pass. If not, then what happens next depends upon how much delta-g the two ships have. If they have the capacity to pull it off, the two ships could turn around for another pass. This would be a very large scale maneuver- curved trajectories hundreds if not thousands of kilometers in diameter. Actually, if they have enough fuel, I imagine them beginning to circle each other at that distance, traversing the circle in a matter of hours or days, all the while firing at each other from across the "circle" (the munitions do not go in a straight line, they also curve around the center of the circle- except for the lasers, of course). Add in a few dozen more ships on each side, and that's what a deep space battle looks like: a slowly spinning swarm of death."

It sounds very much like a high-velocity closing engagement, and while the likelihood of those occurring owe heavily to the tactical/strategic situation for capital ships, when you're talking dedicated fast attack craft with high thrust/weight ratios it's a lot more likely to develop in their own duels. It makes the "Lancer" term even more appropriate.

Ships do have thruster nozzles pointing in every direction -- these are maneuvering thrusters. They really don't help a ship dodge, because their thrust is not strong enough to displace the ship even one ship-length in a second, which means most incoming shots will still hit. To effectively dodge, you need to rotate the ship and then accelerate with the main drives. This is something small craft do much better than large craft; because the moment of inertia increases exponentially with ship length, a smaller vessel can turn more quickly than a large one, even if they have the same relative acceleration.

Such a design (as opposed to the oft-seen concept of a space fighter as a unisymmetrical craft with primary thruster nozzles for every axis) also has the advantage of being a bit more mass-efficient, as you're only lugging one thruster nozzle instead of multiple. The devoted "thruster ball" will still be superior at dodging, but inferior at having the dV to make the intercept to begin with, and the ranges at which energy combat are conducted at mean the maneuvering capability of a "traditional" fighter is more than sufficient. (The thruster-ball would definitely have its uses in closer combat and/or dedicated point defense screens, of course!) Incidentally, the traditional layout also allows for aerodynamic streamlining and thus multi-use capability, which is always good given that you have the ships you brought with you and nothing more, to quote a certain strategist.

Beam weapons can be "dodged" by evasive maneuvers, with is constantly throttling up and down and rotating to throw off your predicted position in the time it takes the beam to arrive at lightspeed. At 1 light second distance, a 30G change in acceleration can displace more than a ship-length from its predicted location in the 1 second it takes the shot to arrive.

There is also the resolution limitations of targeting sensors to contend with - once your target is a spec that is smaller than the smallest "pixel" you can resolve, you have problems. Of course, people zipping around with improved antimatter drives probably have very nice sensors, but that also goes for their multi-spectral jammers and ECM. But as you say the lightspeed limit really is the defining factor here - not only does it take time for your DEW to reach the target, but it takes time for the light reflected off the target to reach you! The information flowing into your sensors or even your Mark 1 eyeball is already obsolete. How much lag is required to generate a miss depends on the maneuvering thrust the target has available and, of course, their overall cross-section, two things that small ships happily tend to have an advantage in.

[Arioch]

Ships do have thruster nozzles pointing in every direction -- these are maneuvering thrusters. They really don't help a ship dodge, because their thrust is not strong enough to displace the ship even one ship-length in a second, which means most incoming shots will still hit. To effectively dodge, you need to rotate the ship and then accelerate with the main drives. This is something small craft do much better than large craft; because the moment of inertia increases exponentially with ship length, a smaller vessel can turn more quickly than a large one, even if they have the same relative acceleration.

Such a design (as opposed to the oft-seen concept of a space fighter as a unisymmetrical craft with primary thruster nozzles for every axis) also has the advantage of being a bit more mass-efficient, as you're only lugging one thruster nozzle instead of multiple. The devoted "thruster ball" will still be superior at dodging, but inferior at having the dV to make the intercept to begin with, and the ranges at which energy combat are conducted at mean the maneuvering capability of a "traditional" fighter is more than sufficient. (The thruster-ball would definitely have its uses in closer combat and/or dedicated point defense screens, of course!) Incidentally, the traditional layout also allows for aerodynamic streamlining and thus multi-use capability, which is always good given that you have the ships you brought with you and nothing more, to quote a certain strategist.

I don't think a "thruster ball" would be superior at dodging, since it's maximum acceleration will be limited to how many nozzles are pointing in the correct direction; all the others will be idle dead weight at any given moment. Whereas a craft with two (or four, as in the B5 Star Fury) engines with nozzles pointing in the same direction can use all of its engines at the same time for maximum acceleration, and it can also use differential thrust between its engines to rotate much more quickly than maneuvering thrusters would allow.

It may be possible to have a Harrier-type craft where the drive plasma is shunted through nozzles that can be pointed in any direction, but I think that will require extremely high tech for the super-hot drive plasma of these engines to do much more than just blast it out the back.

[Demarquis]

@Demetrious:

"Not just in terms of consumption to available on-board fuel tankage, but also in pound-for-pound terms - efficiency was sacrificed for raw power output from a small, dense powerplant."

I can see how this would apply to spacecraft--for example, it is entirely possible, even using the same basic drive, to achieve a higher final velocity using lower thrust, because the fuel lasts longer (though it takes longer to achieve this). Therefore, one might not want to design a thousand missiles to launch from Earth to a target around Saturn, because they wouldn't be optimized for the high sudden acceleration (or deceleration) expected in combat. There *is* a universal incentive to specialize different craft for different functions that will likely carry over into space combat. And this is precisely why I recommend "cutting out the middleman", and reducing the specialized craft types in your fleet to just two: the larger carrier and the missiles. There isn't any reason to design a "fighter-carrier" which contains a squadron of fighters, each of which is equipped with a salvo of missiles. This just describes a three-stage rocket design, and why does one need three stages in zero-g? You don't, and so reduce it to a larger, fuel efficient missile carrier with centralized sensors and other complex infrastructure, and make up the balance with an expanded supply of missiles (which themselves can be optimized for different missions).

Now, there might be tactical or operational reasons to prefer a squadron of smaller craft rather than one larger one, as there are things a squadron can do that one larger platform cannot (such as deploy themselves into multiple trajectories). But that additional flexibility isn't free, it comes at certain costs (redundancy in complex infrastructure for example). You might even want to deploy of fleet of large missile carriers, smaller escort ships with fast attack capabilities, and a swarm of missile/drones. But a "Fighter-Carrier" doesn't make sense.

"I should've known Winchell Chung had already covered this." Actually, I think you are confusing Atomic Rockets with Rocketpunk Manifesto--two entirely different sites. If you haven't been to Manifesto yet, I strongly recommend it--it's a deeply fascinating look at the topic (or was, it hasn't been updated in years). There were some very knowledgeable commenters there.

"It sounds very much like a high-velocity closing engagement, and while the likelihood of those occurring owe heavily to the tactical/strategic situation for capital ships, when you're talking dedicated fast attack craft with high thrust/weight ratios it's a lot more likely to develop in their own duels. It makes the "Lancer" term even more appropriate."

Maybe, but at the ranges all this is likely to be happening, and the tactics they will be using, I think duels between individual ships are unlikely. See my answer to Arioch below.

@Arioch: "I don't think a "thruster ball" would be superior at dodging, since it's maximum acceleration will be limited to how many nozzles are pointing in the correct direction; all the others will be idle dead weight at any given moment. Whereas a craft with two (or four, as in the B5 Star Fury) engines with nozzles pointing in the same direction can use all of its engines at the same time for maximum acceleration, and it can also use differential thrust between its engines to rotate much more quickly than maneuvering thrusters would allow."

As you point out, multiple nozzles do not imply multiple drive units (although that is the typical configuration on current spacecraft). One drive can feed nozzles in any direction on the ship, although in your universe it's your rules that matter, of course. On the other hand, I doubt that even a difference in rotational speed will prove to be a decisive factor. If we take as given that sensor performance will very roughly track missile performance, and that at any given time more powerful and capable missiles will be accompanied by sensors that can provide a targeting solution at longer ranges, then I think that most battles will take place at a range in which munition transit time between origin and target will typically be measured in hours. At that distance, a difference in rotational speed of a few minutes will likely be outweighed by multiple other factors (such as total delta-v). However, I will concede that a smaller ship may have some advantage in pre-emptive "jinking" (but only at mid range. Longer than that and it doesn't matter anymore, and at ranges where the munition arrives in seconds, well, nothing rotates and thrusts that fast). This incentivizes specialization across different ship masses, but I don't know if that gets us all the way to a classic style "space fighter." Once again, I point out that no fighter ever designed could out rotate a missile, so why bother with the design? (though, as I say, light escorts or fast attack craft still make sense).

One exception to the range rule I posit above would be when rival fleets originate from the same planet; ie "US vs. China in space." Opening hostilities while in orbit would reduce ranges to the point that minutes might matter. But that is the only scenario I can think of where it would.

[Bamax]

Dodging matters because both Loroi and Umiak use inertial dampners.

Modern REAL missiles can pull 30 gees, or turn with the force of 30 times the earth's gravity.

Loroi can do that all day not feel any pull at all.

Fighters obviously go higher, high enough likely where they need special suits.

Probably 40g at most.... which makes them 20g slower than torpedoes, but unlike torpedos they have farther range and cam even blast torpedoes with long range beam weapons.


If it were not for inertial dampners, a legitimate case for fighters not being useful could be made.

The whole point of a fighter is to have agility and speed that a large spaceship does not have.

Inertial damping allows fighters to at least somewhat compete with missiles.... some of them anyway.

[Demarquis]

Arent the larger ships using such dampeners as well?

[Bamax]

Arent the larger ships using such dampeners as well?

Of course, but they obviously won't accelerate as hard as fighters do.

Due to limits in engine or fuel or even inertial dampener technology, Loroi vessels can so accelerate so fast before maxing out the inertial dampeners.

Obviously engine drives can be designed to accelerate harder than their i ertial dampeners can dampen.

[Arioch]

The fighters don't have inertial dampeners. The pilots use a liquid breathing medium to allow them to withstand 40+g acceleration.

Ships large and powerful enough to mount inertial dampeners (mostly jump-capable starships) are limited in thrust only by the power of their engines... the dampeners can cancel out nearly any amount of acceleration. Such acceleration pales in comparison to the gravitational tides experienced during jump out.

[Bamax]

The fighters don't have inertial dampeners. The pilots use a liquid breathing medium to allow them to withstand 40+g acceleration.

Ships large and powerful enough to mount inertial dampeners (mostly jump-capable starships) are limited in thrust only by the power of their engines... the dampeners can cancel out nearly any amount of acceleration. Such acceleration pales in comparison to the gravitational tides experienced during jump out.

Hmmm.... I guess Loroi are tougher than us at least for taking acceleration.

Since although humans have taken 200g for a nanosecond ((race car crash) and survived they were worse off for it.

I doubt if an ordinary human could do liquid breathing at 40g for a few seconds without ill effects.


Though it is quite possible that science indicates otherwise and you already looked into that.

Not that it truly matters, I just cross reference data automatically with what I already know is sll.

[Arioch]

Though it is quite possible that science indicates otherwise and you already looked into that.

Yes, I have. Liquid is not compressible, so if you're floating in a liquid, the only pressure you'll feel is in the air pockets in your body (your lungs and sinuses). If you fill those with a liquid that can carry oxygen, then in theory you can sustain very high pressures. Testing has been done in deep diving using perfluorocarbon as the liquid breathing medium, and it works (though as you can imagine, taking in the liquid is not a pleasant experience (as demonstrated in the movie The Abyss).

At higher and higher accelerations, eventually the different density of the various tissues in your body will become a factor, and your bones will start to tear through your soft tissues... but this would only happen at hundreds of g's.

[Demarquis]

"Of course, but they obviously won't accelerate as hard as fighters do."

I was going to challenge this statement, but then Arioch's comment made it all moot. Ah well.

[Bamax]

Though it is quite possible that science indicates otherwise and you already looked into that.

Yes, I have. Liquid is not compressible, so if you're floating in a liquid, the only pressure you'll feel is in the air pockets in your body (your lungs and sinuses). If you fill those with a liquid that can carry oxygen, then in theory you can sustain very high pressures. Testing has been done in deep diving using perfluorocarbon as the liquid breathing medium, and it works (though as you can imagine, taking in the liquid is not a pleasant experience (as demonstrated in the movie The Abyss).

At higher and higher accelerations, eventually the different density of the various tissues in your body will become a factor, and your bones will start to tear through your soft tissues... but this would only happen at hundreds of g's.

Cool... so either a particularly bold or insane Loroi fighter pilot could dodge torpedoes all day.... even take out a few Umiak cruisers with well placed shots and missile strikes.

Well... so long she had fuel anyway. Which would not last for long if she is doing extreme maneuvers... though still much longer than modern technology would suggest.

Purely because of their not-antimatter-but-just-as-good fuel.

If fighter pilots are that overpowered no wonder the Loroi rack up such high kill counts.

The Umiak must have skill too to even hit them at all... either that or they don't... they just spray enough torpedos and anti-missiles (the sprint missiles on steroids 200-300g) in the Loroi fighters direction and watch them die.

Stll... that's a lot of ordinance exhausted to kill a relatively smaller number of of Loroi fighter pilots... since you already mentioned they do employ drone fighters with manned fighters as well.