@GWG: I meant that the defending ship's PD may be a smaller target for the carrier than the incoming fighters are for the defending ship's PD, but they're also far more stationary.
...Which part was this referring to?
And there can be far more fighters than PD weapons.
Depends on ship design and how much money you're throwing away. And again, unmanned drones and the like would be even more numerous, because they can be several times smaller and don't need all them fancy life-support systems or quite as much fuel.
A carrier launching fighters only needs to focus on the defenders' counter-fighter weaponry, as long as there are other ships to deal direct damage to enemy ships. With the deadly accuracy and penetrating power of laser weapons, numerous small targets can be preferable to a single large one.
So, you're saying that no one is making any kind of big ship-killing weapons, only small ones for disabling surface systems? Seems like a pretty big hole in their defenses. And also like it would make fighters totally useless. If the dedicated ship-killing ship can't kill the carrier before the carrier blows all the guns off the dedicated point-defense ship (a pretty silly concept to begin with, I'd like to note), then the fighters--who need to have much smaller, weaker weapons than the big ships can have by their very nature--won't be able to do squat to the shipkiller.
In this setting,
Which setting are you talking about?
weapons evolve to be PD-against-PD, with the fights starting out as several ships exchanging fire and attempting to remove each others' PD capability, in addition to causing damage with bigger guns. Once PD capability has been removed, missiles and fighters enter the fray. Missiles are dumb destructive weapons - even the best missiles will be inaccurate, and will need to blast through enemy armor to deal significant damage against a maneuvering ship. More likely than not they will be nuclear, and if the ships have sufficient value to make taking them in a repairable state worthwhile, they will see limited use, or as a desperation tactic. Fighters and drones, however, will be precision-attacking weapons, capable of closing distance and attacking various vulnerable areas of the ships. Drones have their own set of advantages, and if the fight is at a close enough distance they can be remotely controlled with enough accuracy to make them preferable. If the fight is over light-second distances, manned fighters and gunships would be used instead, as command centers for drones and attack units with individual initiative.
This doesn't make much sense.
1. If most of the weapons on the big ships are no good for destroying anything except PD guns, missiles, and fighters, how the hell would the guns on the much, much smaller fighters do anything?
2. Wouldn't those manned command centers be ideal targets?
3. If this is the ER!Verse, why not just put in advanced AIs or, if needed, some kind of brains into the drones?
4. Wouldn't the ships who focused on devoting space for power or ammo for the big guns rather than for the fuel, hangar space, spare parts, etc for fighters have an advantage, since they could smash the enemy hull while they were still in the PD stage of combat--or possibly before, if the PD guns are specialized for, you know, close-range point defense and not long-range sharpshooting--instead of relying on the weaker guns of fighters?
That's what comes to mind immediately.
ninja edit: a "fighter escort" is, in this situation, used to replace the point-defense where it is inevitably destroyed by enemy fire. Unlike point-defense turrets, fighters can move to cover different areas of the ship.
I'm not sure why the "PD-on-PD" style of combat would be adopted at all.
1. equal total mass meaning roughly equal buildcosts.
2. engines
3. focused fire. the large ship's guns on every side but the on the fighters pick are completely irrelevant, and as a result the fighters have more available firepower. also the big non-pd guns don't matter to the fighters either.
4. the larger weapons are on the surface in turrets, with a limit on have much armor they can have while still being able to turn to switch from target too target. it doesn't matter that they can one-shot a fighter if after they 1-shot one of them there's 70 left and they can't turn fast enough to aim at a second one.
5. again, netlag. notice how the gunner bot ai is completely inappropriate for this kind of work. there's a reason the UWM uses sods instead of bots. you need a brain in control, and with the kind of distances you have to cover in space, light-speed communications will not cut it. you ever try playing a shooter with 900ms of latency? we're talking about some of the most finnicky kinds of positioning trickery possible in space combat and you want to do that while lagging?
either you get a good ai and a laggy controller, a bad ai that can't do the job, or you put a brain in there... which, with life-support systems and armor, only takes up the torso of one of our robo-teammates.
yeah, a brain is worth it.
1. Building costs rely on a lot more than mass, you know. There are expensive components in each ship, things like computers and probably reactors and skilled personnel and life-support and stuff that will take up a much higher percentage of mass in smaller ships than larger.
2. Ha ha. They would be shot at. And dodging isn't really reasonable unless the projectiles are going very, very slowly. And, of course, going really fast means they need a much larger delta-v, which means they need a lot more fuel, which means they need to be that much bigger and more expensive.
3. I highly doubt the second half, and of course we're disregarding the possibility of other ships helping. Or of the PD guns being...effective. Or that the fighters couldn't possibly all approach from one side if there's an equal mass of them.
4. There would be more than one weapon, especially considering the PD turrets, which are much cheaper and smaller than fighters and hence could be much more numerous.
5. Why would you need distant controls? Automated combat machines have their drawbacks, but not nearly as big of ones as the space and life-support requirements of a fighter would.
And what functional difference is there between "drone" and "drone controlled by a brain"? Your complaints of brains needing life support are laughable, incidentally, when you're defending an option with LS costs several times higher.
Turrets on rails will have even less firepower than fighters.
I would like to point out that power can be transmitted through rails. Many a modern train proves this. Moreover, the turret's power supply could be almost wholly devoted to the weapon, rather than the possible two or three, plus flight computer, plus engines, plus life support, etc. Hence, your claim is not true, since power is pretty much the biggest limitation in the fighter weaponry.
delta-V limits are deceiving - it takes a swarm of fighters less fuel to move here and there than a capital ship,
Wrong. Even assuming equal speed (and hence equal acceleration/deceleration), the sizes of fighter swarms Lenglon was talking about would have quite close to the same fuel. And why would the capital ships need to zoom around, anyways? Their maneuvering requirements during combat are limited, whereas fighters need to accelerate to get there, decelerate to not crash into or overshoot their target, and maneuver once there. Oh, and the fraction of fuel-to-total-mass would be precisely the same.
and missiles and drones have their own disadvantages in the overall picture of war.
Such as?
Turrets on rails would only needlessly complicate the design of a ship,
Only if PD-on-PD isn't a thing. If PD turrets are an important target, then it's important to move them about.
and magnify the expenses. Better and cheaper to just get a few smaller ships dedicated to anti-fighter duty.
"It's too expensive to build some simple rails and guns to move on them; let's build some new ships!"
And thus the UWM fires another engineer.
Manned fighters would be an incredibly bad idea though, due to the manpower needed for that. It would be easer to use robotic-operated ones instead.
Aren't those basically drones?
PD against PD happens before fighters and missiles are launched. It's not the fighters' business to shoot at PD turrets.
So, in that case, the RC extra-weapons-ship has PD turrets when the SM carrier runs out (and more than just the extras, since the extras can concentrate fire), making the SM's fighters face some dangerous territory.
The fighters are not taking away from PD or counter-PD strength considering they themselves are PD, and replace PD that is not facing the enemy during engagement. This is basically the only way for either fighters or missiles to make an appearance.
Well, it's extremely contrived, and based on the idea that fighters aren't significantly more expensive than turrets.
Therefore, a ship that focuses on PD weapons loses to a ship that focuses on counter-PD tactics.
...such as PD turrets, in this weird scenario of yours.
If your strategy is to render the enemy incapable of point defense, and then deploying fighters, then fighters and missiles both are viable as part of that strategy.
Big if.
ninja edit: not what I meant by "drawing power". For the same size of generator installed, a ship with a multitude of PD lasers has less power to devote to its main weapons - or it needs a bigger generator.
So? In your scenario, the PD turrets are the important weapons. For some reason.
