EDIT: I've got to go, can someone point to the place I screwed up quotes?
They hit the power plants though, that would open every window for an assaults.
Wait, how do they hit the power plants?
And while they would have less supplies, they're able to be resupplied from outside whereas you cannot.
Um, actually we can. I highly doubt that Hephaestus is heavily dependent on food imports, and if so we can just have the AM ignore conservation of energy and make some.
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!
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
