I was referring to Bobucles' example, where the ship is following a preprogrammed patrol route. It doesn't have to be a straight line, you just have to know where the ship is going to be at a given time. That said, lasers are still superior to other types of weapons. It may take a laser 8 minutes to reach earth from the Sun, but it would take a fighter... a year or two? Unless they have hyperdrive.

But all this is moot. If mankind doesn't evolve past its tendency to solve its problems by blowing someone up, there won't be any space combat because people are going to be too busy trying to eke out a life from within a cave.

A few things to mention.  These things assume that a)we haven't found a way to 'cheat' inertia (too much), and b)we have thrusters that don't suck in deep space.  In short, it roughly assumes Babylon 5 level tech.

1)without resistance (and it is resistance, not gravity that presents the largest speed challenge), a big ship can go very, VERY fast, but volume is based on the CUBE of the radius(or diameter), where thruster surface area is based on the SQUARE of it. This puts advantage in raw thruster space in the corner of smaller craft.

2)in space, the largest factor, assuming we have sufficient thruster power to overwhelm reduced levels of gravity, is inertia.  This is where rear surface area vs. volume comes in.  If we assume doubling the volume of a ship roughly doubles the materials needed to support it (not going to go into THAT one further, it's more math than anyone wants) that doubles the mass, for less than double as much 'rear thruster space'.  This does not affect max speed, just acceleration.  If fuel weight is a factor, it scales up at the same rate as volume and thus mass, and is thus not a size issue.

3)If we speed up a weightless object as fast as we can, and that object is a person, unless our engines suck, that person will likely pass out and/or die.  This leaves the option of ships with more predictable paths and tons of inertia screaming past each other, slowing down fairly slowly, then taking another approach (remembering that speed is not the problem, acceleration is), slowing for combat and most combat happening at no more than say 5x-10x terrestrial air combat speeds, or unmanned craft (which could be larger or smaller, but smaller allows for more thruster space per mass).  Unmanned fighter craft (with good AI) can slow down and speed up quickly, refuel after all that massive fuel burn on a larger craft, wash, rinse, repeat.  The smaller size serves to make them harder to hit, as well as to increase maximum change in vector velocity.

4)There have been countermeasures and counter-countermeasures for quite some time.  Lasers should be more accurate than mass drivers or plasma weapons, period.  Missiles continually recalculate their lock.  This means there are more chances to fool them, BUT their final relevant attempt to get a lock is at a significantly shorter range, and thus may help if the fighters are hard to track at significant distance.  Lasers should be killer accurate, but more deflectable than plasma or mass drivers.  All that has been simplified because it was decided that the weapons differences should be mostly cosmetic.  If the fighter is nearly transparent, a laser may be largely ineffective against it.  Same if it is HIGHLY reflective.  Also, our best lasers at present, with much refocusing, still expand to about a mile wide by the time they hit the moon.  Weapons traits are "gun flavor 4" space opera,and not really the main factor here, though of all the weapons, it is most likely that lasers or missiles would be the weapon of choice against strike craft, whereas the strike craft themselves might be best served simply dumping a bucket of sand(or tech version thereof) into the hull of the target at massive velocity.

5)it IS a space opera based game, so all of this is somewhat moot, but yes, I would expect (unmanned) fighter craft would be quite useful in a high tech setting and if the inertial affects could be mitigated for the pilot, perhaps even manned (or consciousness transferred).

As much as I wish otherwise, space fighters won't be of much use. Why? Because, regardless of their thruster area being more in relation to their volume as compared to large ships, their small size allows them to carry much less fuel. Fuel provides acceleration(by providing reaction mass while getting rid of some mass on the ship), fuel provides Delta-V.

Of course, you could always say that larger ships require a LOT more fuel to move their MUCH fatter rumps. But those larger ships don't need to accelerate in combat anywhere near as much in as the dodge-happy fighters need to. This is obvious, seeing as they're much tougher with more armor and point defenses(shields are too unrealistic to be considered here), and this is also represented in Sins.

And, my point thus far(and after this paragraph too) has been considering Advent-style semi-autonomous remote-controlled fighters. You can forget about putting a human in there. They'll die of the inertia unless your engines are extremely, hideously lousy(which defeats the point anyway).

It's not like aircraft carriers, where the surface ship moves through water, which provides a lot more friction than what air provides to fighter aircraft. Also, on a planet, ships with long-range missile have to shoot over the horizon with an AWACS plane or satellite doing the targeting, while planes can fly over the horizon, target the opponent and attack by themselves if required. In space, there is no horizon(unless your fighting really close to a star or something). And both the big ships and the fighters are moving in the same medium - space.

Yet another problem is that fighters have to be recovered. This means that they need fuel to launch accelerate towards the target, fuel to pull off the maneuvers required for their strafing passes, fuel to dodge missiles/kinetic-slugs/particle-beam fire, and fuel to return home. This means that they need ~4 times the fuel of a missile with the same non-reactant mass.

The only advantage is that they allow your larger manned carrier-ships to stand off at ranges well beyond the engagement envelope of lasers or particle-beam weapons. But if your opponent has invested the same amount of resources into a missile, he'll have a beastly weapon that can easily out-range your fighter, by 4 times at least. Another possible advantage is that they can be used as aerodynamic atmosphere-capable craft with a scramjet, but then they'd have to be really resilient to not melt/disintegrate. Besides, you can always bombard a planet with nukes or mass drivers using your large ships, which negates the need for entering the atmosphere.

Two pieces of difficult-to-engineer but physically possible technology that can help fighters be a bit more useful though, are these: 1) Some kind of kickarse fusion-rocket with a thrust-vectoring mechanism to avoid the need for having a dozen thrusters all over the thing, and 2) a Bussard ramjet. Basically, the Bussard ramjet would allow the fighter to suck it's fuel from it's environment, but it would only work in a nebula or a suitable planetary atmosphere(in which case a much simpler atmospheric scramjet could be used). This problem can to an extent be negated by having the carrier-ship release a nice large cloud of premium-quality deuterium fuel that the fighters can fly through to refuel between attack runs. But the entire thing is still a much bigger mess than simply using missiles. If one argues that missiles are vulnerable to laser-based point defence, well, space fighters are vulnerable against 'em too.

Read this to know more.

The viability of fighter craft would be entirely dependent upon weapons and targeting technology. Even if small craft a reduced to oversize missiles, it's useless if the enemy can blow it out of the sky before it enters its own engagement envelope. And if a fighters weapons are only effective against other fighters, then it becomes irrelevant. Unless you can fit capital ship grade weapons into a fighter-size spaceframe, small craft are unneccesary.

If you make a fighter into a kamikaze weapon, you waste money as it would be more cost effective to simply create a purpose-built missile, which would have a greater explosive yield and greater maneauverability.

It does seem likely that the reaction times neccesary would exclude the idea of human pilots. What would be neccesary for that would likely be some sort of computer-brain interface capable of translating neural impulses into computer signals and thus into the motion of the craft. And even then, it may be better to make it into some form of remote control technology, so that the loss of the craft does not mean the loss of the pilot.

However, it seems likely that space-borne fighters will never play as large a role as they do in modern wet-navy warfare.

I am assuming we can fit ample power STORAGE in a small area (the power does not even have to be generated for a fighter, only stored).  If our craft are in a constant gasoline crisis, I highly doubt they will be shooting lasers at each other and blocking them with shields.  On the subject of power, there is another reason for fighters.  IT IS MUCH EASIER TO PRODUCE POWER IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THE AREA BEING SAFE FOR HUMANS!  This is the case for fission reactors and given our biology, there is a good chance our bodies will need to be shielded from most power generation mechanisms.  As for propulsion, it will come in one of two forms.  1)something that needs to be at the 'front' or 'back' to push or pull the craft with contact to the outside or 2)something internal that is a matter of power poured into it vs. mass of the object.

Either way, unmanned craft have several advantages over manned craft in terms of maneuverability and efficiency.  Size, other than thruster space, has little difference here, as, if you can get enough thrust, the fuel load on a juggernaut would produce the same total change in vector velocity as the fuel load on a fighter.  Difference is, a smaller hull is inherently harder to crack due to curvature, more targets need to be hit, and any countermeasures launched are FAR more likely to mask a small fighter than a larger craft.

As for those who say missiles are more efficient, where does the missile end and the strike craft begin?  Why should that advanced missile not drop it's payload then come back to be loaded with another if it survives?  Why NOT have something that evades heavily, drops off a warhead or two, then comes back to the carrier for a reload?  It's all a matter of what is more advanced, tracking and weapons or countermeasures, power generation, and maneuvering.

As is normal with the development of military technology, there are constant struggles between offense and defense.  I was recently reading up on Dragon Armor as well as the Grendel 6.5mm shell.  Examples of recent advances in defence and offence.  The armor has serious weight considerations, but now that it is lighter for it's purpose, they are actually exploring leg protection versus IEDs, something that was just plain too heavy 5 years ago.  The Grendel 6.5mm rounds are designed using tungsten composites, and address the previous situation where one was forced to use a 5.56 round or a 7.62 assault rifle round.  The first lacked punch, the latter was too heavy and was lacking in flight ballistics.  Point is, all things change and increase in efficiency, and when they do, technologies that have fallen out of favor come back into their own.  Whether space fighters are useful or not comes down to just one question.

Can a space fighter wreck someone's day enough before blowing up to be worth fielding?  My guess is that they will be able to do so in some incarnation, even if they are small craft used to paint targets for volleys of missiles then impact themselves, or very complex countermeasure resistant substitutes for missiles.  Long range rocketry itself was seen as not feasable ... until the V-2 rocket changed all that.  I propose that there will be vehicles ranging from missiles to motherships and just about everything in between somewhere within the sphere of space combat.  Figuring out whether in the mythical world of Sins, fighters will be in or out of favour is something of a moot point.  They will be there unless physics preclude them from being built at all.  The question is whether it will be 1% or 60% of your average fleet.

Of course, all this is assuming we haven't one way or another figured out how to get along without blowing up ourselves and our neighbors or invented WMDs on the kind of cosmic scale that makes shuffling around frigates obsolete.

As pointed out gravity has almost no effect in the lage empty expanses of space. But why would ships be fighting in the middle of no where? Most Space battles would take place near some form of objective. excluding ambushing an enemy fleet in transit most battles would take place near a planet, moon or large astroid, something of vallue that one side controls and the other wants to take away.

Near a planet gravity would play a role and would put the massive battleships at a disadvantage. The closer you get to the planet the less effective larger ships become, and only fighter craft could resonably enter the planets atmosphere and attack targets there.

Even if you could get large ships next to a planet no one would want to. When that mile long 100,000 tone battleship gets killed its going to get pulled into the planet, and when a dead 100,000 ton hunk of metal falls on you its going to ruin your day.

The other obvious advantage to strike craft would be the fact that they cost a fraction of the massive battle ship. you could field hundreds of small fighter instead of one battleship. Not only that but your 100 fighters could all be made at the same time and be finished in weeks, where as a massive warship could take over years. And a huge warship would need some kind of obital shipyard to build it, i could upgrade an auto body shop and have it make strike craft.

Strike Craft might not be able to go toe to toe with battle ships but there are definatly situations where they would be useful to have and they are way more economic.

@Bobucles,

"and to navigate through hostile space they'd be the slowest."

WRONG. Large ships have larger engines and more fuel, and probably larger and more powerful Bussard ramscoops if you consider that piece of tech to be present. They can attain higher top speeds and go further, even though smaller ships might be able to accelerate and turn faster thanks to their lower mass.

"Good luck docking with an enemy ship while it's still shooting at you."

Good grief. After ramming, this is the second dumbest combat tactic I've heard of. Why the HELL would the enemy let you dock with them and have a close-quarters boarding fight? I'd just blast the troops to dust in space itself. Whether they're coming at me on a capital ship or on a flying carpet, it doesn't matter. Lasers will shoot both.

And even if it was a good idea for some reason, you'd send troops on a shuttle, not a fighter. We're talking about fighters here.

"They can maneuver through thick asteroid clusters, which would cream a big ship"

WRONG. I've already posted a link to this website, but I'll post another one to this specific page. See the Initial Idea bit. So unless you plan to duel it out in the rings of Saturn, this advantage is moot.

"A small ship can can be carrying troops, guns, or sensors that a big ship can not bring to bear"

WRONG. If the troops are for boarding another ship, I've already made my point above. If they're for planetary invasion, what you have is a dropship(a kind of shuttle) and again, not a fighter.

Apart from that, the big ship has more guns and can keep shooting for longer whether your using missiles, hypervelocity cannons, or particle beams. The little ship has the advantage with lasers because of the ease of heat dispersion for them, though, which is the only limiting factor since lasers are the only non-expendable weapons. That's why I keep mentioning missiles as the weapon for the big ship - because they don't cause any heat dispersion problems and can just be thrown off the ship with springs.

As for sensors, big ships can carry more of 'em and work independantly with their own sensors or deploy ultra-cheap quasi-stealthy sensor probes, but fighters should hopefully have something else paint the target for them because they can't afford to waste Delta-V looking for the enemy. That "something else" could be a big ship, a sensor probe, an orbital space station, or an asteroid/moon base.

"Fighters also have one important thing that big ships don't. Heat dispersion."

Valid point. But this only gives them an advantage in laser weaponry use, since missiles, charged particles and kinetic slugs are all expendable while photons are not. The big ship can carry a lot more expendables, but it has a problem dealing with waste heat from lasers. Fighters don't have this problem. The fighters' atmospheric wings can also double up as heat radiators, yes.

"What happens if you run out of missiles? What happens if your missiles are countered"

You either get outta dodge, or you get in closer and keep fighting with HPV cannons/particle beams/lasers. Missiles have the most range, so they're the opening volley.

"Drones are versatile, can be reprogrammed, and can be rebuilt"

Ultra-minimalist disposable sensor probes make better scouts, although they only fly in a straight line or in a slowly decaying orbit. Their minimal heat output makes them much harder to detect too. As for rebuilding and reprogramming, you can do that with missiles and probes too.

"You won't trust drones to paint a target."

Yes you will. The U.S Air Force does it all the time. Predator may be remote controlled, but Global Hawk is an autonomous bird. Not to mention unmanned(="drone") satellites.

"Drones are fun until you realize how STUPID they are."

Stupid? Hell no. It's manned fighters which are stupid, putting severe, massive, hideous and downright ridiculous penalties on their accelerative and maneuvering performance because the stupid human body inside can't tolerate it despite all that tech you put in there to pamper it. And you lose people when they get destroyed. Drones, computing, robotics and AI are rapidly advancing technologies, and by that time, they'll easily be able to severely outweigh any advantage you get from keeping a person in there. Semi-autonomous remote control is a much better option as long as the controller is not too far away. If they are, you can always fall back on the autonomous half, the AI, which will be much smarter then than they are now.

Heck, if you compare a prototype X-45 UCAV or an X-47 Pegasus drone-bomber to an F-117 Nighthawk(which was state-of-the-art 20 years ago), you'll see that the drone outperforms the manned plane everywhere. They're autonomous and have proved that they are capable of working autonomously, but they can fall back on remote control if needed. Heck, even manned fighters like the F-22 are mostly controlled by the computer and commanded from afar by AWACS.

Correct. Saturn's also a pretty good strategic target, with the somewhat habitable moon of Titan, a bunch of other moons for resource mining operations and antimatter production, a good water supply from ice asteroids in the rings. It has a nice, large gravity well too and ample space for starbases and orbital habitat stations.

In late World War 2, the Luftwaffe collapsed not from lack of fighters, but from lack of fuel, and lack of experienced pilots. The loss of the experience was a bigger loss than the loss of people.

But that isn't the point. The main point is that the life support systems will be a big setback in terms of mass, volume consumed, power consumed, and waste heat generated. Even more importantly, the acceleration and maneuverability of the craft would have to be really pathetically lousy, because otherwise the pilot would die from the G-forces(inertia, not actual gravity as such). Special suites can only protect you so much. A semi-autonomous AI would simply be better. Much better.

Space fighters ceased to be a practical combat vehicle with the invention of the self-guided missile.  Whatever you can put inside a space fighter, I can put inside a space missile.  This scales up as far as you want it to go. 

space battleship < space missile

big space battleship < big space missile

space deathstar < space deathmissile

You can quibble over details until you're blue in the face, but anything you use to insta-destroy my space missiles, I can use to insta-destroy your space ship.  Leaving us with nothing but missiles.

Believe it or not, this kind of question has come up before in real application settings, such as the defense of artificial satellites.  When smart people think about it, they discover that armed spaceships are impractical.  That's because you can kill anything in space with a missile.  Listen to the smart people.  They have doctorates, and a basic understanding of science.  For that matter, I have a doctorate and a basic understanding of science.  Listen to me, or for God's sake, learn some physics and figure it out yourself.  It's really not that difficult to comprehend.

-Dr. B

There's little point in turning this into a reference on myself.  What I do and do not know I will leave you to glean from what I say.

Missles can destroy space vehicles, remember?  If someone desires your "ground forces" dead on arrival, they have a variety of options ranging from nukes to railguns.  To spearguns.  To bags of quarters.  Frankly, your entire armada could be wiped out by placing a few rocks in its path.

Assume that anything can be destroyed in space at any time, by anyone.  In your hypothetical war, if you decided to invade Saturn, they would have months to devise amusing and ironic ways to kill you before you reached orbit.  This makes armed spaceships obsolete.  Imagine a world in which there is no atmosphere, negligible gravity, no shelter, and you can see everyone else around you.  Now imagine that you have a glass house on this world, and everyone else has stones.

Would you really want to start throwing stones?

You followed the logic yourself.  They are all useless and no one wins.  Welcome to ballistic nuclear warfare.

-Dr. B

I'll amend my last post by saying that I expect all ships to need some level of fuel, but that there is 2 sorts. The first is what most people seem to think fighters will carry, being the same as fuel now. The other is the equivalent of submarienes nuclear reactors. While they need something added to keep them running, its a long term engine, not a short term one.

Everyone assumes fighters will have a short term engine and I think that even fighters will have an engine that doesnt require more than occasional fueling.

Think WC Privateer's ships, where turbo is a function of having spare engine power, against the earlier Wing Commander games where turbo was actual fuel that once you ran out of, you dont have a turbo. I go with the unlimited engine (eg neclear) rather than the current fossil fuel type engine. Only taken several hundred years into the future.

Just so we're clear, exactly how many missiles do you think it would take to destroy a spaceship?

Space warfare is ballistic warfare.  We're both using rockets; my rockets are simply much, much cheaper.  Also faster.  And, if I want them to be, invisible.  You can't make your spaceships faster, cheaper, or invisible if your lugging around a bucket full of passengers.

Don't mistake my point.  I'm not advocating the use of ballistic warfare in space, I'm arguing against all warfare in space.  It's pointless, uneconomical, and mutually destructive.  Terrestrial wars are much cleaner.

-Dr. B

@Bigglesworth

Well, if you try launching your missiles from a planet, or even a moon, they'll be wasting energy just to get into space. I'd suggest the use of heavily armored orbital missile platform things, maybe using coilguns as launchers, and with other stations nearby loaded with laser & shrapnel-based point-defenses and verious other countermeasures. They don't have to move much, so Delta-V is a non-issue.

Hey wait a second. Doesn't this have a strange resemblance to an exchange of fire between two Novalith spammers? The difference being that Sins has no point defense. And that the missile combat system would not be so expensive compared to ships as it is in Sins.

@Silveus

When the missiles launch from the Saturn bases, they give out a heat signature. You get this heat signature 32 minutes after the launch.

If the missiles have some space-warping FTL gizmo, they'll get here before you see them and your dead without much effort on part of the Saturn guy. They're invisible. But they're deadliness will depend on what kind of warhead is in them(kinetic or nuke fusion or antimatter).

If the missiles are moving at high relativistic speeds(>86% of C), you have negligible reaction time, and when they hit, it'll be like getting hit by a projectile made of pure antimatter. Frickin' deadly. They don't even need a warhead.

Now lets assume that the missiles are comparatively tame, moving at a smaller fraction of C. When you see the missile launch, you need to immediately calculate where the missiles will be 64 minutes after their launch(32 minutes from now) and shoot your lasers at that place. That is assuming that your lasers are still deadly at that range. If they don't, you need to do keep watching the heat signature given out by them until they are almost within your laser range, and then shoot 'em with everything you've got. Some of them will get through and face your armor. The deadliness of non-FTL non-relativistic missiles will depend on how fast they're going, how well they're armored, how good their AI, guidance and ECCM systems are, and what warhead they have.

If a missile were to be moving at locally relativistic speeds within the warped bubble of space created by an FTL system, then it would be the ultimate interstellar instant-kill weapon. A civilization possessing them would be able to exterminate any less-advanced civilization they meet, and two civilizations possessing them would be capable of inflicting MAD on each other at interstellar ranges.

Warfare with giant missile salvos is boring though, and while it might be realistic, it's no good for SciFi games or novels or movies or TV shows. Because it's boring, mechanical, cold.

Exploration is done by unmanned probes. The unmanned probes of the future will simply be more advanced than the unmanned probes of today, with better engines and AI. Colonization would be done by huge, lumbering colony ships with plenty of life support, big engines, and long range, but no combat capabilities.

@apricotslice,

Nuclear reactors use fuel. Fission reactors(probably obsolete by then) use uranium rods, and they only produce electricity. You still need reaction mass if you want to use fission power as a starship engine, and that will be expendable too, for more easily than the uranium-rod fuel. Fusion reactors also need fuel, which I've mentioned in an earlier post, although they don't need seperate reaction mass. I've mentioned this in an earlier post too(Reply #35), if you bother to read it.