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[Radio Controlled]

that Point Defense is accurate and strong enough to shoot down a hypothetical fighter, and that ships are valuable enough to avoid destroying them outright in favor of capture

You see Sean, this is what I meant that one can prove just about anything if you can choose your starting positions as you wish. In your scenario: suppose that we take those two assumptions at face value, and two empires start duking it out in space. After a few battles, it becomes apparent that one has the advantage over the other, and he will win the war if things continue as they are. So, the other side decides to say 'screw this' and makes two changes to their fleet:
-better self-destruct sequences so that, even if the ship is all but crippled, there won't ever be anything left for the enemy to capture
-increased focus on destroying the enemy's big ships, and a few dedicated point-defense ships specifically designed to take out enemy fighters/independent weapons platforms that survive their carrier going down

Also, remember that hangars pose both a significant resource cost, and a big weak point in your ship.

I haven't even touched most of this argument, other than the initial dissenting point and also pointing out that combat in space is not going to be like most people seem to envision it.

Indeed, but again, if one argues from an in-game ER point of view, a lot of real-world assumptions go straight out the window.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Still, you couldn't have found ANY other way to word it?

Heh, nope. Words aren't my strong point, evidently.

Just to point out, your whole argument kinda falls apart if ships are cheap enough that people throw away tons of them on fairly minor battles, or for slightly-above-average-wealth people to drive around in like high-end cars. Which is basically every science fiction thing ever.
Why would the mobile weapons need to be low-power? We've repeatedly pointed out that no, they really don't.
Why would holding weapons in reserve be "meaningless"?
Wouldn't fighters also need to close? Missiles as in explody things maybe, but they have the advantages of being smaller and being able to pack a higher amount of reaction mass while not needing as much (since they don't need to fly back), and "missiles" which are one-use drones armed with railguns or lasers or whatever are as capable of attacking enemies as similar-sized fighters. And they're also cheaper.

That final idea of yours is almost exactly what these drones would be, at first. Except they would be expected to hover around the ship, and be able to come back if they survive.

Also, I don't deny it. This whole "evolutionary path" of mine hinges on the ships being too valuable to destroy, and if they are cheap and plentiful it flies out the window. The reasons why the ships could be too valuable can be various. One is scale and range - a spaceship, and armored combat spaceship, cannot be "small". To even have a notion of a full-scale space war, ships must travel interplanetary at the very least. Crewed ships, even with efficient and powerful fusion drives, will have transit times measured in months. The smallest spaceship imaginable must be the size of a modern nuclear submarine, because it must carry itself, its armor, its weapons, its fuel and power system, its crew, the life support, food, water, amenities, entertainment et al for said crew, plus complements of shuttles and other external systems for disembarkation and crew escape, plus supplies for en-route repairs, etc, etc. Ships would be large, or else they would be seconded to even larger ships as part of a battlegroup, making their own operational range and staying power less important. This would mean that they are anything but cheap, even if by themselves they hold no value bar the investment of effort their construction represents.

Another, related but more exotic possibility, is taken straight out of Battletech. FTL drive. Ships could be cheap as heck but for the interstellar drive system they carry, which, for whichever reason (economy of scale perhaps, again) can't be fitted to small ships. Whether by dint of using hard-to-process exotic matter, or having production costs way above mere "construction" costs, FTL systems could be immensely important - allowing their use as a sort of self-hostage. "Destroy this ship and you're taking its FTL drive with it", in essence, making the combat again focused on disabling and capture rather than destruction of the enemy.

A rather more extremely idealistic option is simply that both sides abhor incurring unnecessary loss of life in their wars... heh. Apart from unlikely, it does mean that manned fighters have no chance of appearing, so there's that too.

Like I said, many options. Some less likely than others.

Ha ha. Um, first off what kind of non-ship-destroying weapons are melting large sections of hull?!? Second off, molten metal is also magnetic, and if it was molten enough to slip off you'd have problems of big holes appearing in the ship because you basically jellied a big section of hull, and since it's big and loose enough to impede a magnatank rolling across it, it's by far big enough to blow outwards under the pressure of air inside and cause major problems for people in the ship. Forget fighters, that laser is the big weapon.
Anyways, the idea that fast-moving turrets are going to be flying off the hull...not happening with smart design, and if it is for some reason you just have competition between railturrets and magnatanks. It's not enough of an issue for people to waste the resources and such on fighters.

I was thinking more in terms of heat deformation, not loss of magnetic capacity. A pulsed laser will crater the surface, creating a mighty speedbump for any wheels (roller spheres, more likely) fit for rapid movement and change of direction. Or do you propose magnetically propelled maglev hovertanks? They'll lose all hope of magnetic attachment the moment they overheat due to induction forces. Space is hot. Not to mention they won't be able to draw power from the ship readily, making them no different from fighters - and with a much more limited and finicky propulsion system to boot.

Don't try to look for the perfect weapon--there isn't one.

Hence "evolution of weapons".

Well, I'd be glad to do that if I had time to think this through and a better handle on the starting conditions. Sociopolitical/Economic issues are implied but not stated. Why are they fighting a war? How much resources do they have? And past that, what "tech level" are we talking about?
...Did I mention that I'll probably overthink it?

Hmm. Actually, I'd be happy to discuss that sort of thing. I like worldbuilding.

You still have limited fuel, which is kind of a major issue. And how the heck are you going to be maneuvering without sending mass in the opposite direction? Isn't that a violation of Newton's Third Law of Motion?
And, um, are you saying that fighters wouldn't need to be repaired? Because that implies that they would keep getting destroyed.

Yep. They can't evade forever - one way or another they are going to get hit. And with them being not much more than a gun, a fuel tank, and an engine, the moment they are hit they are gone, simple as that. Unless extreme-rapid-fire scattershot pulse lasers are made, I guess, to just chip away at them with lucky hits.

And limited fuel is less of an issue when fuel on the ship is plentiful, engines are efficient, and the ship itself acts as a shield when the fighter's on pit stop.

And the "ultimate" (at some point in time) solution is to make more ships, small and fragile enough that they'll be destroyed by any good hit?

The "ultimate" solution is to make ships small and cheap enough to allow to destroy them with impunity, I guess. I don't know how to take that hypothetical war beyond turret fighters without starting to break the underlying paradigm of big ships being nominally safe from casual destruction.

that Point Defense is accurate and strong enough to shoot down a hypothetical fighter, and that ships are valuable enough to avoid destroying them outright in favor of capture

You see Sean, this is what I meant that one can prove just about anything if you can choose your starting positions as you wish. In your scenario: suppose that we take those two assumptions at face value, and two empires start duking it out in space. After a few battles, it becomes apparent that one has the advantage over the other, and he will win the war if things continue as they are. So, the other side decides to say 'screw this' and makes two changes to their fleet:
-better self-destruct sequences so that, even if the ship is all but crippled, there won't ever be anything left for the enemy to capture
-increased focus on destroying the enemy's big ships, and a few dedicated point-defense ships specifically designed to take out enemy fighters/independent weapons platforms that survive their carrier going down

Yep, certainly. Just covered that. All it takes to send this idea tumbling down is to make ships no longer important. Don't have an argument against that. Consider it being the same thing the USA did to Japan to end the war. Once ships/cities are valid targets for total destruction, you either go to the same level if you can, or fold if you can't.

In your scenario, once the losing side starts destroying ships outright, the winning side can change tactics and do the same, making the war a little more conventional.

Also, remember that hangars pose both a significant resource cost, and a big weak point in your ship.

Hangars, small ones, I see as existing almost regardless of ship type. In absence of teleporters, you want to have a way to send someone over to somewhere that doesn't have a standardized docking port in your ship's size, and you have to have a shuttle or two - and leaving them hanging in the open on the outside of the hull is just asking for them to get accidentally blown off.

[GreatWyrmGold]

That final idea of yours is almost exactly what these drones would be, at first. Except they would be expected to hover around the ship, and be able to come back if they survive.

Which kinda negates most of the purpose of the missiles in the first place, because it means they need to be a lot bigger and more expensive and have more fuel.

Another, related but more exotic possibility, is taken straight out of Battletech. FTL drive. Ships could be cheap as heck but for the interstellar drive system they carry, which, for whichever reason (economy of scale perhaps, again) can't be fitted to small ships. Whether by dint of using hard-to-process exotic matter, or having production costs way above mere "construction" costs, FTL systems could be immensely important - allowing their use as a sort of self-hostage. "Destroy this ship and you're taking its FTL drive with it", in essence, making the combat again focused on disabling and capture rather than destruction of the enemy.

Well, in that case the FTL drive is more or less the most valuable part of the ship. Strategy? Determine where the FTL drive is and destroy everywhere else until you've knocked enough holes in the hull that they surrender or die.
I could maybe see fighters here, but mostly used as scouts with some kind of space-warping or whatever stealth technology exists alongside FTL, confirming the location of the FTL drive, rather than actually...fighting.

A rather more extremely idealistic option is simply that both sides abhor incurring unnecessary loss of life in their wars...

Thanks, I needed a laugh.
You seem fully aware of why this is unlikely, though, so I won't go into it.

Ha ha. Um, first off what kind of non-ship-destroying weapons are melting large sections of hull?!? Second off, molten metal is also magnetic, and if it was molten enough to slip off you'd have problems of big holes appearing in the ship because you basically jellied a big section of hull, and since it's big and loose enough to impede a magnatank rolling across it, it's by far big enough to blow outwards under the pressure of air inside and cause major problems for people in the ship. Forget fighters, that laser is the big weapon.
Anyways, the idea that fast-moving turrets are going to be flying off the hull...not happening with smart design, and if it is for some reason you just have competition between railturrets and magnatanks. It's not enough of an issue for people to waste the resources and such on fighters.

I was thinking more in terms of heat deformation, not loss of magnetic capacity. A pulsed laser will crater the surface, creating a mighty speedbump for any wheels (roller spheres, more likely) fit for rapid movement and change of direction. Or do you propose magnetically propelled maglev hovertanks? They'll lose all hope of magnetic attachment the moment they overheat due to induction forces. Space is hot. Not to mention they won't be able to draw power from the ship readily, making them no different from fighters - and with a much more limited and finicky propulsion system to boot.

I was imagining more like a tank with magnetic treads. I didn't give the matter much thought at any point, but it seems like the surface area of the treads would let them stick to any crater small enough for the slope to risk drifting away.
And you know what the propulsion has that the fighters' propulsion system doesn't? A way to avoid violating Newton's Third Law of Motion without carrying most of its weight in fuel. Or not maneuvering much.

Don't try to look for the perfect weapon--there isn't one.

Hence "evolution of weapons".

If your complaint is that magnatanks have issues...well, they do. But let's look at your analogy, eh?
Evolution, despite what I really hope you don't think, does not create an organism that is genuinely better than previous species; it merely comes up with a set of trade-offs better-suited for this generation than a thousand generations ago. Similarly here. If you're trying to find "the perfect weapon" or "the perfect organism," you're going to either need to go to fiction or else find your favorite weapon/organism and figure out how to spin its flaws as strengths.
Simply put, you can't claim a weapon is terrible because it has a few flaws. You have to compare it to the other possible weapons and such, see which has more strengths and fewer flaws.

Well, I'd be glad to do that if I had time to think this through and a better handle on the starting conditions. Sociopolitical/Economic issues are implied but not stated. Why are they fighting a war? How much resources do they have? And past that, what "tech level" are we talking about?
...Did I mention that I'll probably overthink it?

Hmm. Actually, I'd be happy to discuss that sort of thing. I like worldbuilding.

We'll need to find a time and a place to do that.

You still have limited fuel, which is kind of a major issue. And how the heck are you going to be maneuvering without sending mass in the opposite direction? Isn't that a violation of Newton's Third Law of Motion?
And, um, are you saying that fighters wouldn't need to be repaired? Because that implies that they would keep getting destroyed.

Yep. They can't evade forever - one way or another they are going to get hit. And with them being not much more than a gun, a fuel tank, and an engine, the moment they are hit they are gone, simple as that. Unless extreme-rapid-fire scattershot pulse lasers are made, I guess, to just chip away at them with lucky hits.

You left out the cockpit and the life support.

And limited fuel is less of an issue when fuel on the ship is plentiful, engines are efficient, and the ship itself acts as a shield when the fighter's on pit stop.

So, the fighters are going to be sticking right next to the ship and sniping rather than engaging in techniques anything like what people think of when people say "fighter"?

And the "ultimate" (at some point in time) solution is to make more ships, small and fragile enough that they'll be destroyed by any good hit?

The "ultimate" solution is to make ships small and cheap enough to allow to destroy them with impunity, I guess. I don't know how to take that hypothetical war beyond turret fighters without starting to break the underlying paradigm of big ships being nominally safe from casual destruction.

Well...I dunno what to say there.

Also, remember that hangars pose both a significant resource cost, and a big weak point in your ship.

Hangars, small ones, I see as existing almost regardless of ship type. In absence of teleporters, you want to have a way to send someone over to somewhere that doesn't have a standardized docking port in your ship's size, and you have to have a shuttle or two - and leaving them hanging in the open on the outside of the hull is just asking for them to get accidentally blown off.

Well, yes, but a shuttle or two requires much less space and such than a bunch of fighters. And reserve fuel and such.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Which kinda negates most of the purpose of the missiles in the first place, because it means they need to be a lot bigger and more expensive and have more fuel.

Bigger than a missile, yes. Doesn't need to come up close to do damage either.

Another, related but more exotic possibility, is taken straight out of Battletech. FTL drive. Ships could be cheap as heck but for the interstellar drive system they carry, which, for whichever reason (economy of scale perhaps, again) can't be fitted to small ships. Whether by dint of using hard-to-process exotic matter, or having production costs way above mere "construction" costs, FTL systems could be immensely important - allowing their use as a sort of self-hostage. "Destroy this ship and you're taking its FTL drive with it", in essence, making the combat again focused on disabling and capture rather than destruction of the enemy.

Well, in that case the FTL drive is more or less the most valuable part of the ship. Strategy? Determine where the FTL drive is and destroy everywhere else until you've knocked enough holes in the hull that they surrender or die.
I could maybe see fighters here, but mostly used as scouts with some kind of space-warping or whatever stealth technology exists alongside FTL, confirming the location of the FTL drive, rather than actually...fighting.

You misunderstand. Taking the possibility Radio expressed as example, remember that the owners of the FTL drives are perfectly aware of their value. They can and will use the FTL drive as a "hostage" to ensure that their ship is spared from destruction. Not anything as silly as "we'll blow ourselves up if you shoot us" or "we'll blow up our FTL drive if you shoot us", which doesn't work as a deterrent - instead the FTL drive would be literally the first (or second/third after armor and weapons) thing standing between the crew and annihilation. Shoot to destroy the ship, and unless you have a flanking position to shoot from the side or the back, you are guaranteed to take the FTL drive out with the first shot. It only really works if the FTL system is sufficiently valuable, but it's one of the ways for it to work.

Ha ha. Um, first off what kind of non-ship-destroying weapons are melting large sections of hull?!? Second off, molten metal is also magnetic, and if it was molten enough to slip off you'd have problems of big holes appearing in the ship because you basically jellied a big section of hull, and since it's big and loose enough to impede a magnatank rolling across it, it's by far big enough to blow outwards under the pressure of air inside and cause major problems for people in the ship. Forget fighters, that laser is the big weapon.
Anyways, the idea that fast-moving turrets are going to be flying off the hull...not happening with smart design, and if it is for some reason you just have competition between railturrets and magnatanks. It's not enough of an issue for people to waste the resources and such on fighters.

I was thinking more in terms of heat deformation, not loss of magnetic capacity. A pulsed laser will crater the surface, creating a mighty speedbump for any wheels (roller spheres, more likely) fit for rapid movement and change of direction. Or do you propose magnetically propelled maglev hovertanks? They'll lose all hope of magnetic attachment the moment they overheat due to induction forces. Space is hot. Not to mention they won't be able to draw power from the ship readily, making them no different from fighters - and with a much more limited and finicky propulsion system to boot.

I was imagining more like a tank with magnetic treads. I didn't give the matter much thought at any point, but it seems like the surface area of the treads would let them stick to any crater small enough for the slope to risk drifting away.
And you know what the propulsion has that the fighters' propulsion system doesn't? A way to avoid violating Newton's Third Law of Motion without carrying most of its weight in fuel. Or not maneuvering much.

A tank on magnetic treads can't maneuver quickly enough to compete with a maneuvering fighter for being a "hard target". A turret fighter on fusion engine(s) can change its velocity and movement vector with downright frightening speed - several dozen meters per second per second. Any tank that propels itself normally can never match that if it uses friction against the armor surface for propulsion. It can weigh literally a ton, as much as a good-sized car, and it must change direction quickly and suddenly to avoid being shot to bits. About the only variant of a tank I see working at all is a tank on metallic ball rollers, propelled along the metallic surface via electromagnetic torque. If it draws power from the ship to function, it will be able to put out enough power to match the newtonian engines of a turret fighter, but then you have the heating problems. And you're probably drawing more power to move the magnetic tankette than you do to fire its weapon.

It's probably apparent that I am just as fond of overthinking things. Except my direction is technical.

Don't try to look for the perfect weapon--there isn't one.

Hence "evolution of weapons".

If your complaint is that magnatanks have issues...well, they do. But let's look at your analogy, eh?
Evolution, despite what I really hope you don't think, does not create an organism that is genuinely better than previous species; it merely comes up with a set of trade-offs better-suited for this generation than a thousand generations ago. Similarly here. If you're trying to find "the perfect weapon" or "the perfect organism," you're going to either need to go to fiction or else find your favorite weapon/organism and figure out how to spin its flaws as strengths.
Simply put, you can't claim a weapon is terrible because it has a few flaws. You have to compare it to the other possible weapons and such, see which has more strengths and fewer flaws.

I was half-hoping you would say that I couldn't possibly be stupid enough to think that. Because then I could say "Ken if I vants to be!"

But seriously, no. Fighters are not the perfect weapon. They are highly situational and it takes a fairly specific set of circumstances to allow their appearance. You might notice that in my descriptions, actually. I am describing how weapons progress towards those turret-fighters, explaining how the changes in the weapons affect the environment (the tactics used), and how the weapons start changing again to be better. The turret-fighters I describe have a lot of trade-offs, and as soon as tactics change enough or new weapons appear, they will probably be gone entirely.

They are, however, for reasons I described, better than little scooting tanks, and, in the circumstances of their appearance, are better than rail-turrets because the existing tactics for fighting the rail-turrets do nothing against similarly mobile yet less restricted turret fighters.

You still have limited fuel, which is kind of a major issue. And how the heck are you going to be maneuvering without sending mass in the opposite direction? Isn't that a violation of Newton's Third Law of Motion?
And, um, are you saying that fighters wouldn't need to be repaired? Because that implies that they would keep getting destroyed.

Yep. They can't evade forever - one way or another they are going to get hit. And with them being not much more than a gun, a fuel tank, and an engine, the moment they are hit they are gone, simple as that. Unless extreme-rapid-fire scattershot pulse lasers are made, I guess, to just chip away at them with lucky hits.

You left out the cockpit and the life support.

Not me. The fighters' designers. At the ranges involved in acting as a turret, the fighters can be controlled remotely.

So, the fighters are going to be sticking right next to the ship and sniping rather than engaging in techniques anything like what people think of when people say "fighter"?

At the very least initially, yes. A turret fighter. With, in the right conditions, the capacity to become a more true fighter. Like, if the ships remain valuable and no new weapons appear, the tactics might change to a much closer-range combat, to eliminate the chance of dodging for the opposing side's turret fighters. One of the possible responses to this is engagement in missile spam and rush attacks - overwhelming the point defenses of the turret-fighter screen and taking out the fighters with missiles, simultaneously using dedicated sabotage fighters to flank the ships and deliver precise debilitating blows to life support, engines, and whichever.

[GreatWyrmGold]

You misunderstand. Taking the possibility Radio expressed as example, remember that the owners of the FTL drives are perfectly aware of their value. They can and will use the FTL drive as a "hostage" to ensure that their ship is spared from destruction. Not anything as silly as "we'll blow ourselves up if you shoot us" or "we'll blow up our FTL drive if you shoot us", which doesn't work as a deterrent - instead the FTL drive would be literally the first (or second/third after armor and weapons) thing standing between the crew and annihilation. Shoot to destroy the ship, and unless you have a flanking position to shoot from the side or the back, you are guaranteed to take the FTL drive out with the first shot. It only really works if the FTL system is sufficiently valuable, but it's one of the ways for it to work.

It also requires the FTL drive to be a certain size and shape.

A tank on magnetic treads can't maneuver quickly enough to compete with a maneuvering fighter for being a "hard target". A turret fighter on fusion engine(s) can change its velocity and movement vector with downright frightening speed - several dozen meters per second per second. Any tank that propels itself normally can never match that if it uses friction against the armor surface for propulsion. It can weigh literally a ton, as much as a good-sized car, and it must change direction quickly and suddenly to avoid being shot to bits. About the only variant of a tank I see working at all is a tank on metallic ball rollers, propelled along the metallic surface via electromagnetic torque. If it draws power from the ship to function, it will be able to put out enough power to match the newtonian engines of a turret fighter, but then you have the heating problems. And you're probably drawing more power to move the magnetic tankette than you do to fire its weapon.

Well, firstly I'd like to point that unless you have some kind of reactionless drive or your ship is mostly fuel tank, your fighter is either going to be going in a predictable straight line most of the time or it's going to run out of fuel. I'd say that affects things more than sheer speed.
And why not do a little of both? Lots of magnetic ball rollers--the contact area of treads, the maneuverability of wheels, the stickiness of magnets.
And I kinda doubt that the energy to move the tank is more than firing the weapons. Unless the weapons are pretty weak or the movement system pretty inefficient.

It's probably apparent that I am just as fond of overthinking things. Except my direction is technical.

Oh, is that why this whole thing is taking so long?

I was half-hoping you would say that I couldn't possibly be stupid enough to think that. Because then I could say "Ken if I vants to be!"

Dot's right, Oggie.

But seriously, no. Fighters are not the perfect weapon. They are highly situational and it takes a fairly specific set of circumstances to allow their appearance. You might notice that in my descriptions, actually. I am describing how weapons progress towards those turret-fighters, explaining how the changes in the weapons affect the environment (the tactics used), and how the weapons start changing again to be better. The turret-fighters I describe have a lot of trade-offs, and as soon as tactics change enough or new weapons appear, they will probably be gone entirely.
They are, however, for reasons I described, better than little scooting tanks, and, in the circumstances of their appearance, are better than rail-turrets because the existing tactics for fighting the rail-turrets do nothing against similarly mobile yet less restricted turret fighters.

I suppose the question comes down to what we're arguing for. You seem to be arguing that there are circumstances where independent spacecraft of some sort could be useful in a fight; I'm arguing more that fightercraft that anyone would be likely to label as such is unrealistic to expect to see in a space-battlefield. Battlespace?

[Sean Mirrsen]

...crap I started replying to this post on another machine. Okay, let's condense then.

It also requires the FTL drive to be a certain size and shape.

True. For instance, that Alcubierre drive derivative (it has its own name, and has some difference in operating principle, but is functionally based off the Alcubierre drive) that NASA's been looking at, allows the whole damn crew section to be built into the functional hub of the FTL drive's frame, with the reaction engines and fuel in the back, and the weapons and combat powerplants at the front. The FTL drive's geometry will naturally protect the crew and the core of the ship - it's essentially built around them. The rest of the ship can even be a cylinder, allowing easier designs for the rail-turrets' rails.

Well, firstly I'd like to point that unless you have some kind of reactionless drive or your ship is mostly fuel tank, your fighter is either going to be going in a predictable straight line most of the time or it's going to run out of fuel. I'd say that affects things more than sheer speed.
And why not do a little of both? Lots of magnetic ball rollers--the contact area of treads, the maneuverability of wheels, the stickiness of magnets.
And I kinda doubt that the energy to move the tank is more than firing the weapons. Unless the weapons are pretty weak or the movement system pretty inefficient.

Just move it, no. Stop it and move it elsewhere, maybe. How much energy does it take to impart one gee of acceleration to a one ton vehicle? Something like... ten kilojoules? Ten kilowatts-second? Nine point eight something? I can't brain formulae without the wiki. Depending on how much of that is lost to heat... argh. Pyro! Thine physico-mathematical expertise is needed!

Oh, is that why this whole thing is taking so long?

That, plus my fondness for worldbuilding, plus my general levels of boredom, plus an unyielding desire to get some of my point across for once.

I suppose the question comes down to what we're arguing for. You seem to be arguing that there are circumstances where independent spacecraft of some sort could be useful in a fight; I'm arguing more that fightercraft that anyone would be likely to label as such is unrealistic to expect to see in a space-battlefield. Battlespace?

Again, depends on circumstances. For instance, what if laser weapons are rendered impotent by advances in heat-dissipating materials? What if xasers and above turn out to be unfeasible as combat weapons except in unwieldy bomb-pumped implementations? What if FTL drives turn out to be not only possible, but can be made compact enough to mount on small craft, and can be used with casual abandon? What if, what if, what if? Any circumstance that allows or requires ships to deploy into the immediate vicinity of each other instead of slugging it out at extreme ranges with deadly accurate weapons, may allow for a classic space fighter to make an appearance.

I may simply not be content with taking something as "impossible" at face value. Why find reasons for something cool to be unfeasible, instead of finding ways to make it feasible?

[GreatWyrmGold]

...crap I started replying to this post on another machine.

That's always fun.

True. For instance, that Alcubierre drive derivative (it has its own name, and has some difference in operating principle, but is functionally based off the Alcubierre drive) that NASA's been looking at,

Wait, NASA's seriously looking into that? Sweet.

allows the whole damn crew section to be built into the functional hub of the FTL drive's frame, with the reaction engines and fuel in the back, and the weapons and combat powerplants at the front. The FTL drive's geometry will naturally protect the crew and the core of the ship - it's essentially built around them. The rest of the ship can even be a cylinder, allowing easier designs for the rail-turrets' rails.

Indeed. Um...do you know any search terms I can use to identify this drive?

Just move it, no. Stop it and move it elsewhere, maybe. How much energy does it take to impart one gee of acceleration to a one ton vehicle? Something like... ten kilojoules? Ten kilowatts-second? Nine point eight something? I can't brain formulae without the wiki. Depending on how much of that is lost to heat... argh. Pyro! Thine physico-mathematical expertise is needed!

Indeed. And also important is how much energy the weapons draw, which requires us to figure out what kinds of weapons are being used, which is getting pretty specific and whatnot...

Oh, is that why this whole thing is taking so long?

That, plus my fondness for worldbuilding, plus my general levels of boredom, plus an unyielding desire to get some of my point across for once.

Man, I've been there. All of the theres. Did I tell you about the time that I spent days working on a post-apocalyptic Chicago for a game, realized I hadn't thought about the plot, and then panicked and sent them outside the city?

Again, depends on circumstances. For instance, what if laser weapons are rendered impotent by advances in heat-dissipating materials? What if xasers and above turn out to be unfeasible as combat weapons except in unwieldy bomb-pumped implementations? What if FTL drives turn out to be not only possible, but can be made compact enough to mount on small craft, and can be used with casual abandon? What if, what if, what if? Any circumstance that allows or requires ships to deploy into the immediate vicinity of each other instead of slugging it out at extreme ranges with deadly accurate weapons, may allow for a classic space fighter to make an appearance.

Or, contrariwise, may move them even more firmly into the "fiction" side of "science fiction".

I may simply not be content with taking something as "impossible" at face value. Why find reasons for something cool to be unfeasible, instead of finding ways to make it feasible?

Mainly because, with the right explanations, anything can be made feasible (See: Dune making futuristic combat take place almost entirely with swords and such), so that's less interesting to talk about.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Wait, NASA's seriously looking into that? Sweet.

Indeed. Um...do you know any search terms I can use to identify this drive?

Googling "NASA Alcubierre Drive" gets some good hits, this one for instance.

Spoiler: And some amusing images (click to show/hide)

Also, the White Warp drive. That's what it's called.

Or, contrariwise, may move them even more firmly into the "fiction" side of "science fiction".

Also true. That's the problem with the future, it's damn hard to accurately predict.

Mainly because, with the right explanations, anything can be made feasible (See: Dune making futuristic combat take place almost entirely with swords and such), so that's less interesting to talk about.

Maybe they're not the right explanations after all, if using them makes it less interesting?

[GreatWyrmGold]

Ah, but how does one determine which explanations are "right" and which are "wrong"?

((Unrelated: Those sci-fi ships don't look a lot like the White Warp drive. Especially the Vulcan one.))

EDIT:

And in fact, White says that the warp drive could be powered by a mass that's even less than that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft...The reduction in mass from a Jupiter-sized planet to an object that weighs a mere 1,600 pounds has completely reset White's sense of plausibility — and NASA's.

I dunno. I mean, from what it mentioned earlier...

And indeed, early assessments published in the ensuing scientific literature suggested horrific amounts of energy — basically equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter (what is 1.9 × 1027 kilograms or 317 Earth masses).

...it sounds like the paper/study/whatever is referring to energy, not battery size. That is, if you turned Jupiter into energy and invested 100% of it into the Warp Drive, it would work, but not if you didn't give it close to that. So you'd need a way to turn about 725 kg of matter into energy at 100% efficiency if you wanted to power the new thing. Something tells me that no fuels we have today would work.

I'm also annoyed that the more useful details aren't shared. Most importantly: Is this energy a flat cost for any size of spacecraft, and if not how big of one does it permit?

[PyroDesu]

Just move it, no. Stop it and move it elsewhere, maybe. How much energy does it take to impart one gee of acceleration to a one ton vehicle? Something like... ten kilojoules? Ten kilowatts-second? Nine point eight something? I can't brain formulae without the wiki. Depending on how much of that is lost to heat... argh. Pyro! Thine physico-mathematical expertise is needed!

To move 1 short ton at one gee, you require an impulsive force of 8890.4 Newton-seconds. Say... a massless (it would normally mass 20 short tons) Colloidal ESTAT plus change (in terms of at least 2 massless low-gear VASIMRs) to do it in approximately one second.

And never, never add a seconds modifier to Watts. That way leads to broken kneecaps.

[GreatWyrmGold]

What about Newtons per second?

[Sean Mirrsen]

Just move it, no. Stop it and move it elsewhere, maybe. How much energy does it take to impart one gee of acceleration to a one ton vehicle? Something like... ten kilojoules? Ten kilowatts-second? Nine point eight something? I can't brain formulae without the wiki. Depending on how much of that is lost to heat... argh. Pyro! Thine physico-mathematical expertise is needed!

To move 1 short ton at one gee, you require an impulsive force of 8890.4 Newton-seconds. Say... a massless (it would normally mass 20 short tons) Colloidal ESTAT plus change (in terms of at least 2 massless low-gear VASIMRs) to do it in approximately one second.

And never, never add a seconds modifier to Watts. That way leads to broken kneecaps.

All our household electricity meters are in kilowatt-hours. :shrug: Just a different time unit.

[PyroDesu]

Just move it, no. Stop it and move it elsewhere, maybe. How much energy does it take to impart one gee of acceleration to a one ton vehicle? Something like... ten kilojoules? Ten kilowatts-second? Nine point eight something? I can't brain formulae without the wiki. Depending on how much of that is lost to heat... argh. Pyro! Thine physico-mathematical expertise is needed!

To move 1 short ton at one gee, you require an impulsive force of 8890.4 Newton-seconds. Say... a massless (it would normally mass 20 short tons) Colloidal ESTAT plus change (in terms of at least 2 massless low-gear VASIMRs) to do it in approximately one second.

And never, never add a seconds modifier to Watts. That way leads to broken kneecaps.

All our household electricity meters are in kilowatt-hours. :shrug: Just a different time unit.

1 Watt is 1 Joule over 1 second. A joule-second, if you like. Saying watt-seconds is the same as saying joule-second-seconds. Appending another time unit changes the meaning depending on the new unit, while remaining equivalent to watts. A watt-hour is 3600 joules per hour, still equivalent to one joule per second.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Is it just me, or is less happening here now?

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, we scared everyone away with our massive posts, and then stopped posting. That's one way to stop a runaway OOC train.