Actualy i have read that before any of this started. I didn't read all of it since there is a substantial bit of text there, but i read atleast half of it. It brings up valid arguments on just about everything it says. However they talk about theory in very technical terms and don't allow of creativity or inovation.

Case and point, There article on antimater weapons. According to that website 1 gram of matter and 1 gram of antimatter annihilating creats a blast that is twice as powerful as the Nuke droped on Nagasaki (if i read the chart correctly). But the article points to a problem, if i take a brick of antimatter and a brick of matter and slam them into each other, only the atoms that actual touched each other would annihilate, and that the explosions would push the rest away. And thats true. The conclusion they drew was that Animatter would not make an effective weapon because of that. What I thought when i read that was, "why not just have a thing of antimatter and matter that is 1 atom thick?" You could have layers of matter and antimatter that is one atom thick and then slam those together.

But back to the fighters. Fighters are going to work out like every other thing that has ever existed and will ever exist, as long as there is atleast 1 thing that they can do well, some one will use them. So unless some one here can disprove all of my 8 points on why fighters will exist, they will still be around.

Secondly, resources are not evenly distributed. This is clearly seen on our own planet, but given even our own solar system, it is plain as day to see that they are not all made of the same materials. Looking out into the cosmos, we can already tell that not all solar systems are the same. It's not a big leap of faith to boldly assume that some planets will have different resources than others in abundance. In fact, it's virtually a guarantee.

Thirdly, resources are not evenly desired. This comes back to demand. A steelworks doesn't want copper, they want iron. A papermill doesn't want steel. A bank wants paper!

Now, this is the tricky part. This is where those ass blasting resources come into play. You see, just because YOU have lots of goods, doesn't mean that everyone else does. They may be far away from them. Maybe they do have resource deposits, but it takes them a huge amount of effort to get what you have too much of! What happens next is a little magic that I call TRADE. The person lacking a resource can get it cheap from you, and you make money providing him the resource. In the end person A gets rich, and person B gets the last ingredient to build their trinket(be it a toy, food, engines, structure, etc.).

Eco 101. You should have tried it. But I'll keep going.

Fourthly, resources are not static. An asteroid ore processing mill runs great, until it runs out of asteroids. Gem mines are wonderful until they're empty. Farms require a constant supply of raw minerals, fertilizers, and ingredients to keep going. All the great providers of resources are NOT viable until the end of time (solar power excluded, as it's pretty damn close to the end of time). After a point you will exhaust the local area, and have to either replenish from external sources or move on. If the population keeps growing this will be a guarantee.

Fifth, resource demands are not static. For a future example, a fledgling colony will want food, water, and life support systems to keep everyone alive. As the demands for food and life support become expensive(straining the budget), the colony will want to build their own, so now they're requesting huge piles of machinery. The colony is still losing money, but guess what. They have the best asteroid ore processing plant for weeks around. This strategic resource makes the colony profitable, and it runs great for the next 500 years. The place is so well established and stable for so long, that it's now a major population center. The colony now has massive trading centers, great industry, with excellent science and engineering fields. This gives them so much abundance that they can now field a colony of their own.

1a. ) Naturally hospitible. You might find that you can leave your house without wearing a space suit. As seemingly mundane this may be, try that anywhere else and you're dead.

1b. ) Synergetic environment. Unlike the barren wastes of space, we have everything we need for basic survival on this planet. We can grow our own food, water, industry, and we don't even have to try very hard. We have our own oxygen, completely free! Try growing corn on Mars, and you can see that this is a valuable asset indeed.

1c. ) Cheap real estate. This may seem like a contradiction for some of you, but think of this. You can afford to get your own piece of land, even a few acres if you look in the right spots. In space, every cubic meter of land has to be buffered against the harsh, lethal environment around it. Take the basics of survival, living space, industrial space, and cram that ALL into a self sealed biodome. It's not easy, and it sure as hell won't be cheap.

2a ) Established industry. Anything we have on Earth, we produced ourselves. Like it or not, it took humanity hundreds, if not thousands of years to establish its level of industry. You start in space, and you're starting from scratch. A colonist only has what he brought with him.

2b ) Established science and engineering. We've got a solid foundation of several thousand years developing our sciences. Just look at our own computer industry, which would not be a success without a computer industry to develop it. It's a circular dependancy, one that can't simply be done overnight. It is not possible to build a modern CPU without a using a computer to do it!

2c ) Massive population core. Sure, a few billion people may seem a drop in the bucket by future galactic standards, but the more people you have the more you can do. We have millions of varying levels of scientists, researchers, and engineers, all of which make earth a great intellectual asset. Don't want those minds plotting against you, that's for sure.

2d) Established war machine. While this is more of a stance between countries on our own world, in the future this will mean at least one thing. Colonists: You don't fuck with Earth. That is, until Mars becomes the largest industrial and military center of the core worlds (thanks in part to its proximity to Earth, and very lenient environmental standards.) Then you don't fuck with Mars.

It's a pretty short list, but the point stands. Earth is a valuable resource on MANY levels. It has treasures that we aren't even sure exist anywhere else. You can bet your ass it's going to hold a high strategic value.

Factions can start like this: You have one idea how the world works. I have another idea how the world works. After several pages of debate, you decide that the other side is no longer worth talking to. You sever all ties with them; getting distance over the internet is quite easy. Congratulations, you just became your own faction! Sure, both sides don't have an empire under their belt to emphasize this severence, but a spaceship wasn't even required. Add in the physical distances space has to offer, and you'll be lucky to have a coherent entity at all.

Factions can also start like this: Honda, Toyota, and Ford. Same product, same goals, different leaders and ideas. All fighting for the top. Yes, they're called corporations, and they don't shoot at each other(yet...), but they're in heated conflict just the same.

Oops. I may have gone off topic a bit. But give me another few chapters, and I'll eventually reach the point that space is possible, space is profitable, and thus stuff will be built in space. Military facilities are expensive, are out of the reach of (modern) businesses, and far beyond civilian access. Thus the vast majority of this space infrastructure and ships are not going to be designed for military use or conflict. Therefore it is going to be outclassed by the first thing to come around with a gun. Space fighters are right up that alley!

As for space fighters vs. capital ships, that does not really matter. The fighters are there because they can take on over half of the non militarized galaxy. Only future technology can truly discover how efficiently fighters can pare up against not only other fighters, but vs the biggest and meanest ships the galaxy has to offer. The more efficient fighters are, the more you'll see. If not, you'll see them only in very minor use.

Just a thought regarding some of the 'beams', 'projectile', 'missile' theories. while beam weapons require high energy to initiate and to maintain for the firing period, it can be deflected relatively straightforward using reflective surfaces or materials. Projetiles however use less energy to start and maintain, and do not suffer from reflective diffusion, however it does take a given time and trajectory to actually 'hit' the target, in addition to being 'uncorrectable' once launched. Beams can be re-calibrated and re-fired as often as we like, though at the higher energy cost. However missiles achieve a 'correctable' solution to the 'launched projectile' problem by being in the middle road between cost and reliability and responsive hits, as they can be self guided, as well as self-propelled, and therefor are more cost effective and energy efficient.

I am not a scientist,   But this seems reasonable to me.

-Teal

I disagree.  Why would you use space fighters when you can use something less expensive but twice as powerful?  If you really want the ultimate space weapon, build giant robots.  Listen, not only do giant robots have rocket feet to propel them to FTL speeds, but they can grapple capital ships, and literally crush them to pieces.  Plate the giant robots with adamantium armor, and not only will missiles be useless, but so will lasers and kinetic projectiles.

In all practicality, a giant robot can be built in less than a second, and the pilots need only watch a half-hour video for proper training.  This provides significant advantages over space fighters, which are much more complicated to build and operate.  As far as tactics are concerned, giant robots can simply smash space fighters between their mighty fists, like so many flies caught under a space-paddle.  So my question becomes this: if another galaxy sends over an invasion of giant robots, do you really have a chance to fend them off using impractical space fighters?

The answer is no.  You are all fools for backing space fighters.  Giant space robots are clearly superior, and I can only mock your idiocy for not seeing that.

-Dr. B

So now it's time for a flashback:

Manned fighters are a simply idiotic idea, so I'll leave 'em out. In fact, even larger ships could do with semi-autonomous AI control.

Drone "Fighters":

+Quick to build

+No humans inside to ruin things(Big Plus Point)

+Maneuverable(will need Thrust Vectoring)

+Acceleration bonus due to low mass

+Atmosphere capable(will need some kind of complicated dual drive system)*

+Can intercept shuttles, dropships and aircraft without much trouble

+Can execute precision attacks on surface targets with minimum ordnance expended

+Significantly better heat dissipation ability for engines and energy weapons

-Significantly lower top speed due to lower fuel capacity

-Lightly defended and vulnerable to lasers, particle beams, and shrapnel-warhead missiles

-Very limited ammunition for missile, mass driver or particle beam weapons

-Needs space stations or larger ships to operate from

I'm assuming Fighters to be slightly larger than the modern-day Space Shuttle.

Capital Ships:

+No humans inside to ruin things, but needs more complex AI

+Significantly more firepower of all kinds(except for laser)

+Much, much, much tougher with heavy armor, countermeasures, and point defenses

+Interplanetary or interstellar range(Big Plus Point)

+Higher top speed because of larger fuel capacity

+Shock effect

+Can bombard planets more thoroughly with mass drivers and nukes

+Can retreat if damaged and be repaired

+Superior deep-space battling capability(with no "terrain" of an asteroid/rings/moon/planet/space stations)

+Can deploy dropships, shuttles, sensor probes or, yes, drone fighters

-Lower maneuverability and acceleration

-Much slower to build

-Significantly worse heat dissipation

I'm assuming the "Capital Ship" to be as big as NCC-1701 Enterprise.

The size comparison is here.

As for the missile-based unstoppable mass destruction theory, any sufficiently large capital ship or space station can execute it. I'm not counting the cost of resources, because the resources you'll need to build a fleet of fighters capable of taking on the cap will probably be near the amount of resources needed to build the cap. It's just that the 100 fighters can be assembled at 100 small facilities while the 1 cap needs a large orbital shipyard.

Yeah sure, you can have a command capital ship which is manned and is used to remote control the drone operation. It'd have to be fitted with every defensive technology you have on hand though, everything from slabs of ablative armor to anti-missile suicide drones, because you don't want it dead. If your the one being attacked, you can also run the operation from the planet/moon/asteroid/starbase. But everything smaller than a few command capital ships, IMO, should be semi-autonomous drones. Whether they're fighters or heavy cruisers, they're unmanned.

In that case, the aformentioned "Capital Ship" in my previous post can be restructured as "Cruiser" while the term "Capital Ship" is used to denote manned capital flagships. The drones would have to have some semi-stupid AI that keeps them fighting even if their command link breaks, that allows them to navigate to home port from wherever they are in the system, and they must be programmed to never attack their faction's capital ships or stations no matter what anyone tells them.

I ain't talking about fighters returning home. I'm talking about the cruisers. They're larger than "space fighters". About the size of #26 in the pic in the link in Reply 110.

You'd have to convince them that you're one of the capital ships or stations they've been coded to recognize, and exactly match the recognition criteria varying with time. You'd have to take over one of the capitals or stations to do this.

Alternatively, they could just be preceded to the target gravity well by a cap and given orders to blow up X, Y, and Z targets before executing objective A and only then being open to new commands.

While I don't believe or hope that there will be spacewarfare, I think it's reasonable to conclude that spacefighters will exist. A society of generally peacefull beings won't go building large ships of destruction if there isn't any threat worthy of it. Fighters or more accuratly, small patrol craft could play a vital role in policing the space around a planet. While not capable of even challenging larger dedicated craft, they could prove useful in curtailing criminals or even stoping a large transport vessel gone out of control dangerously near a populated planet.

First the ship would have to know that it was being targeted to change course.  Its reasonable to assume a ship would not take too many maneuvers, because while in orbit major changes require a lot of energy (of course it depends on the source, if energy is of no concern you could maneuver a lot) Since a laser is moving at the speed of light, by the time you could 'sense' the laser coming, it would have already hit you.

As has been argued, I would strongly argue against any assumption that fighters are irrelevant.

Suppose though that you do presume that fighters are irrelevant.  Then your strategy and tactics would presume that you'd only be facing capital and support ships and would thus attempt to devise methods to counter those ship types.

If an enemy suddenly introduces a strike fighter equipped with anti-capital ship missiles.  It's superior manuevarability will give it an inherent tactical advantage and your inability to combat it effectively, even if your capital ships possesed anti-fighter weapons, would be drastically reduced.

Not so much. The number of guns you could put on a decent-sized capitol ship (and the fact that bigger ships can, by definition, carry better guns and more bullets) would make fighters much less useful than you'd think. The difference between big ships' guns and smaller ships' guns is only going to increase as we get better systems and more room to make big ships bigger. However, I'm willing to admit that this is more debatable and really can't be completely resolved until we actually put it into practice.

Fighters are useful because of the fact that a smaller target is harder to hit. This will allow them to thread the needle and attack the enemy starship, unless it has guns for taking it out.

Think of it this way. Would you fire the Death Star's planet destroyer at an A wing?