((I still don't like dynamic bonuses greater than +-1, feels cheap.))
Yeah, but what're you gonna do?
-snip-
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The intent is to say that the weapons themselves are easier to hit than the fighters. That the fighters can be hit with relative ease by laser weapons I'll take for granted here.
Overall, there's not much difference unless the fighters are burning delta-v like candy and there is some good range between them. Otherwise, the fact that the mobile turrets can change velocity easily means that such systems would probably be harder to hit!
At the stage when both sides have mobile turrets on the ships' hulls, and the turrets become too hard to hit reliably, one of two things happens. Either the engagement ranges close, or the turrets themselves stop being the first targets - the first order of engagement becomes to knock out their means of mobility on the enemy ships. Unless they're tiny magnetically-attached tanks scooting along the armor, they will have a stationary network of supporting features - rails, what have you. These rails will become the priority target, as the side that can knock the opponents' rails out first can be the first to defeat the opponents' mobile PD, and proceed with the rest of the attack plan.
Is there a point to this?
The general notion of combat, if ships are merely captured instead of destroyed, would lean towards that, yes.
So wouldn't the tendency be to make PD turrets instead of fighter weapons, and then PD weapons instead of all the other fighter-associated systems?
To a point, that would happen. More and more PD weapons. Except at some point someone would clue in to the fact that less PD weapons that can move around to evade fire (@BFEL: a double-edged sword to be sure, but non-continuous-beam weapons require only a short spot of immobility to fire, and continuous-beam weapons are easier to keep pointed at a target you're accelerating relative to rather than the other way around - can't use accelerometers to correct for light lag) - are more effective on the overall than a huge cluster of static PD weapons. At first it'll be as smaller and more mobile ships with regular PD, but eventually the tactical advantages of those will be exhausted - a ship still can't maneuver its mass quickly enough.
I quite disagree the idea that fighters could replace several times their number in PD guns, stationary or no. See, the PD guns can draw on the power of the ship, so they'd be a lot stronger than the fighters' guns, and they would probably be smaller and harder to see (against the hull of the ship) than a fighter (against the blackness of space). The fighter would also be a lot bigger, and a hit most anywhere would take out some vital function--fuel, power, weapons, life support...something. Moreover, your estimates of the maneuverability of fighters are overrated. Sure, they can fly around ships and whatnot, but dodging is nigh impossible over all but the longest distances (again, the "quarter-second to dodge over 20 megameters" figure comes to mind). Not to mention that dodging or even evasive action will burn your precious reaction mass like there's no tomorrow--which for your fighter pilots is probably the case.
And, of course, you haven't explained why these "flying turrets" should be fighters and not drones of some kind.
A reasonable enough assumption, given that we're talking about large weapons here. A laser powerful enough to count as anti-ship, and focused to a distance of greater than a light-second, may well have a focusing lens measured in meters. At distances of over a light-second, any opening in armor more than a foot wide, be it for lasers or projectile weapons, aimed anywhere in the general direction of an enemy ship, may as well be a tunnel straight through it as far as weapon reach in concerned. No matter how rugged the design, several megawatts of laser pulse delivered directly to the operating mechanism is going to be bad for the weapon. If it's a turret, it's similarly doomed - being permanently exposed and likewise having to face towards the enemy in order to fire.
On the other hand, you also have to hit a pretty small target. And that the exposed part is the important part.
Turrets are pretty vulnerable, if you hit them.
A turret, like I said, is at least as good a target as a fighter. And, again, there's no "unexposed parts". Whatever opening you point at the enemy, is a hole pointing directly into the heart of the weapon for the enemy's lasers. Unless you've got something like a spiral gauss accelerator or a similarly structured weapon - which are still vulnerable to heat deformation of the exit point, with the potential to cause serious damage on misfire.
I thought of two other ways that turrets are harder to hit than fighters, mentioned above:
1. Fighters are going to be bigger than all but the strongest turrets. And really, if the turret is even a significant fraction of the fighter's size, the gun is significantly more powerful than the fighter's.
2. What is behind and around the turret? More metal starship, much the same as the turret. What's behind and around the fighter? The very much distinct cold inky blackness of space.
"Mobile" becomes an advantage over static due to static weapons being vulnerable, as per above.
Ah. That would support the definition of "mobile" that does not require large amounts of delta-v to be expended on dodging.
It takes more delta-V to quickly turn a large ship than to quickly move a small ship. Also, at this specific point it's only the weapons that are mobile, yes. If it's not obvious, I am (have been, in that post) describing a progression of weapons designs leading up to the creation of drones and fighters. Mobile weapons start out attached to the hull.
However,
smaller ships can only carry small amounts of reaction mass. Assuming that the ships will both hold together under the stress, with identical designs it will take identical relative quantities of reaction mass to accelerate identical amounts. If fighters are going to be more maneuverable than big ships, they're going to need either a lot more reaction mass or a drive that forgot to study Newton's Laws of Motion.
There are many problems with mobile weapons affixed to the ship's hull - far from the least of which is that they're never going to be as armored as the ship itself, and unless they're literally little magnetically-attached scooting tanks they will introduce weakpoints in the armor they're attached to.
The fighters you're proposing will also never be as well-armored as ships, and have a variety of weak points.
That's only one weak point - hit them and they're dead. Equally true for turrets, and fighters do not compromise the defense of the ship they are escorting. Note, at this point the fighters do not yet rush forward to attach the enemy - they sit around next to their ship, moving in erratic patterns to dodge laggy laser fire. They're nothing more than detached auxiliary weapons platforms, and delta-v concerns are not their thing - resupply is not far away.
Semantics.
The turret's weakpoint is smaller, and hitting it may or may not completely disable its function depending on the spread of the weapon and the scale of the turret. Breach the fighter's hull and
something important is going to be lost to the airless void.
So, your fighters are wasting fuel dodging laser fire (which must be being done by evasive action for obvious reasons). And they're also using it to go back and resupply. Good to know. That means that the enemy ship probably has barely any fuel for itself. P.S. Why not just shoot the refueling dock? That seems like it would cripple your strategy pretty easily--and since the side that didn't put guns on fighters has a lot more guns to put on its hull, it has the turrets to spare on such secondary tasks.
Half a second of light lag in either direction is enough to make lasers pitifully ineffective against anything capable of suddenly changing direction. You assume mobile turrets are only going to be used by one side - if they're so effective, both sides will use them. With both sides using them, the tactics of countering them changes from destroying the turrets themselves to destroying their means of moving around. The next logical step is disconnecting the turrets from the ship - making a weapons platform drone.
Alternate strategy...use these same turrets to disable the enemy turrets, which will be less numerous than your if they expend resources on fighters.
And the turrets are much better at "suddenly changing direction" than fighters are. No delta-v restrictions.
Again, up to a point. At the point where both sides are using mobile turrets, the tactics have evolved to counter mobile turrets. If they are too hard to hit themselves, the fire is focused on their means of travel - rails or support systems, or just shooting up the hull to hinder their mobility (if they are little magnetically-attached scooting tanks). This will continue until someone tries strapping an engine to a weapon, and have it maneuver on its own next to the ship.
Unless they realize that this is a waste of reaction mass and doesn't actually help them much. And also costs several dozen times as much as a turret, and is a lot harder to replace/repair.
Yes. Assuming realistic engagement ranges, again. At close range, less than some ten thousand kilometers, missiles and fighters alike can be used because their travel time to target becomes survivable, especially with counter-PD fire. The whole idea of fighters being useless stems from the fact that they can never get into range before being destroyed, because real engagement ranges in space are going to be vast.
On the other hand, such close distances make dodging even harder. And the enemy is likely going to have more turrets than you do fighters...
Assume two ships that carry the same complement of direct-fire weapons. They come up into close range, and let loose, destroying each other's PD and anti-ship weapons, or rendering them too few to matter.
One ship launches its backup weapon, a massed missile array, to take out the other ship.
The other ship launches its fighters.
Fighters shoot down incoming missiles, and even if they do not succeed in saving their ship from being crippled they will be able to move in and disable the enemy ship unopposed. If both sides have their fleets in the area, the fighter-using side gets to make away with a usable ship and a flight of fighters, while the missile-using side gets to salvage a wreck.
You're ignoring that missiles and point-defense turrets are a lot cheaper and therefore will be more
numerous. Moreover, "Missile" was meant to be more of a catch-all term for fire-and-forget, disposable weapons, not just things that go boom. Besides, unless you're using giant missiles, you're not going to be destroying the whole ship...not more than a bunch of laser holes or whatever from the fighters would.
Oh, and the fighter-using side wouldn't get away with all of its fighters. It would need to replace all of them that got lost, at great cost.
The whole thing with drones began exactly because everyone had those accurate lasers in the first place - any heavy weapons you so much as point in the direction of the enemy while not covered by protective armor covers are going to be slagged as a first priority. So everyone focuses on taking out those long-range accurate lasers first, and then someone has the idea to put long-range accurate lasers on something more agile and less restricted than a turret running around the ship's hull.
However, they then become limited in delta-v because it depends on reaction mass, and they also get even more restricted in armor, and they have to cram a pilot in there. And they fly right at the enemy, an easy target.
Not a great tradeoff.
Between having to lose a fight because the enemy has adapted to your tactics and having to do those things?
Why would you lose a fight? You've adapted to the enemy's tactics as much as they have to yours.
Also, in the early stage there are no pilots in the "fighters", and they do not move towards the enemy - they hover around as mobile detached turrets.
Aside from wasting reaction mass, what's the point of that? It seems much more likely that turrets would go from a rail system to a more flexible system, like the magnetic tanks someone suggested, than deciding to make them fly.
Only later development of tactics forces the engagement ranges to close (drone turrets have no rails to destroy, no hull-surface to shoot up, the only way to stop them is either shooting them, which is hard, or destroying the carrier that resupplies them, which is harder as long as the drones are up and can snipe your weapons) and the fighters becoming more fighter-like.
I'll mostly cover this with a general thing below. I'd also like to note that this is kinda silly; the drone-resupply thing would be as much a weak point as the weapons, and the drones would also cost many times more than even a mobile PD turret. More guns is typically an advantage, Sean.
Patch it once, twice, how many times? Programs are never perfect, and every error in combat is a fight lost. Drones will always need human supervision, because it's impossible to account for all the possible changes in tactics the enemy can employ.
Humans are also fallible. More so than machines, because they can miss much more easily--and a miss is pretty much death, given the likely rocket-tag nature of space combat. Especially in little unarmored fighters.
Not by human alone or by machine alone... that's the reason for mixed wings. Human controller to provide decisions and counter-tactics, drones to shoot and fight accurately. It doesn't even have to be a human pilot in the classic sense - he can be suspended in a pressurized pod with tactical data being fed to him for processing and evaluation while the machine itself - effectively still a drone - does the actual flying and shooting.
Why have the human on the fighter? Sure, there's some lag, but if the drone is doing everything except general strategy stuff so what? Besides, the delay at 50,000 kilometers (probably the very outer edge of what this relatively close-quarters combat your scenario calls for) would have a delay of only 3.33% of a second, give or take and assuming lightspeed communication. And that's accounting for both ways; send a signal, and before you can perceive that time has passed you're seeing the drone following it. Unless you're hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, human reaction time is going to slow you down more than lightspeed lag.
Heh. Fake life support. Why not simply extra batteries? Maybe some redundant sensor arrays? CPU cooling systems?
My oint being that it makes the drones more expensive.
One drone per flight to always keep control of the situation. Fair cost, I'd say.
Again, why bother? See above.
Overall, your arguments seem to require that
you dictate the scenario. Any time I point out something that changes how space combat could, quite possibly would, take place, you feel the need to change it--and rightly so! You realize that any change in conditions from this perfect little line you've drawn will make fighters not at all useful. And you also insist that we start from a point where the only targets worth worrying about are weapon systems, which function as the ship's only PD system but can also be used at range. Overall, the scenario you've plotted out is pretty unlikely and relies on many assumptions. You want those assumptions? Fine, you can have your damn fighters. Anywhere other than this perfect little universe, though, and space fighters will be something for antique sci-fi films.
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Topic: Einsteinian Roulette: OOC and NEW PLAYER INFO (Read 2544331 times)