Which means an orbital base out-guns a combat spacecraft of the same mass by several orders of magnitude. You see, Traveller maneuver drives are only used for interplanetary travel, between planets in a given solar system. Can you even do that? Â, All of the above discusses the usefulness (or lack therof) of fighters to a deep-space fleet engagement, and combat will obviously not be limited to that environment. This was designed for his Orbital Patrol service, which he covered in three previous posts. Not a lot of ship, just enough to steer it. and other comms factors — the turrets might well detach from the ship They’re either in deep space, or they’re in orbit about a planet, so there is (effectively) no gravity to fight. Used at a high altitude, the radars on the aircraft allow the operators to distinguish between friendly and hostile aircraft hundreds of miles away.  This idea has likely grown, as has much else, out of confusion between space flight and traditional air/naval combat. Thus, we shall begin our examination of fleet carriers with a look at the most common propulsion head in Imperial service, the Legends-class…”, – Megaships of the Imperium, Lorvis Maric, pub.  There has been occasional discussion by various powers about building more such ships, including by the US in WWII, but nothing came of it. But the lasers can energize interceptor engines at a longer range than X because the engines can utilize a more diffuse beam. That heat, in turn, is going to eat away at their PD efficiency in a variety of ways. It could travel to the target in the fraction of the time a conventional bomber would take, be very difficult to intercept, and carrying a human pilot/bombardier to deliver the weapon much more accurately than any missile. Encyclopedia Astronautica – Accessed 27th June, 2018, (ed note: this is from an alternate history story set in the 1960s when the US Air Force had crewed orbital capability). The simple answer is that at a young age fans imprinted on space fighters.  The biggest problem with it, and a serious problem with the wires, is the need to open holes in the heat shield of the fighter. Attempting to scale this efficiency to still lower cost, some manufacturers have in recent years adopted the term “light fighter” to also refer to light primarily air-to-ground attack aircraft, some of which are modified trainer designs.  This design promises low cost, but limits the utility of fighters, as they likely can’t be rearmed or refueled, and maintenance is very difficult. It looks cool, and the split-second reversal of advantage is suitably dramatic. It would stop at a safe distance, and send a remote controlled intercepter to the (possibly booby-trapped) Soviet satt. In order to launch an X-15A-3, the Valkyrie would basically have to be re-designed from scratch. Cargo can be attached to pallets, which are easily loaded, secured for flight, and quickly unloaded for delivery.  Lasers will likely have effective ranges measured in tenths of light-seconds at the outside (see Section 7). with laser boost, we could do it every hour on the The orbital taxi version is a civilian thing with cargo capacity, room for three passengers, a tiny jet engine inlet and a single jet engine. Exceptions include Russian, where a fighter is an "истребитель" (pronounced "istrebitel"), meaning "exterminator", and Hebrew where it is "matose krav" (literally "battle plane"). "lowest" to "highest:", Obviously these often blur together. We have the military It was his former classmate he sought — Josip V. Kolnichok — the one who had beaten him out his bid for a cushy transport command and who had also cast aspersions on his loyalty to the company. If the carrier maneuvers during the mission, it sets off a complex interplay of carrier delta-V expenditure, fighter delta-V expenditure, and transit time changes, leaving aside the tactical effects of the carrier’s maneuvers, which fall outside the scope of this section. Performance as per the tables below. So, in the event of conflict, we will need to sweep enemy satellites from the skies. At the end of the mission it would jettison the transtage, use the one-shot engine in the transition section to deorbit, ditch the transition section, do a reentry aerobrake exactly like the Space Shuttle, and finish as a hypersonic glider doing a dead-stick landing on some salt flats (again just like the Space Shuttle). Another type of fighter that has been suggested is the aerospace fighter. distance which is probably sufficient to project the fighter from a Military transport (logistics) aircraft are primarily used to transport troops and war supplies. of them to gang for boost power, we could build a An advanced gas core reactor, fusion, or matter-antimatter Designs dedicated to non-naval roles are often known as ground-attack aircraft. inspector/interceptor based on the Model 814-1050 DS-1 Kolnichok and the DesJardin into a bright, glowing gas. One interesting alternative is the use of an actual deck, probably on a lock-style carrier. FP: You have a list of factors that real navies must contend with, such as doctrine and acquisitions, that sci-fi navies don’t.  Given the expected rarity of major battles, lancers make little sense for the main fleet.  This takes less delta-V from the carrier, and significantly less time, but does leave the fighters vulnerable if things go wrong. craft would be designed for efficient atmosphere-based, planetary exploration, So isn't this our fighter, even if it doesn't look much like the Star Wars kind? The requirement for detailed integration because of proximity, fires or movement is the determining factor. However, in both cases the technological implications caught up with us, so we decided to stick with a simpler setup. If the fighter can maneuver well, such a short-range system might be satisfactory: even a hit that is sufficient to impact a small velocity change on an attacking ASAT could cause it to miss. And the United States Department of Defense has embarked upon at least two admitted spaceplane or space fighter programs.  There is no reason to use a fighter to launch a missile. Most sci-fi authors ignore that, and haven’t thought about what would be needed. Wars are fought for control of territory. Instead, Redding suggests the use of the steerable, flyable "parasail" used by thousands of sports parachutists every weekend.  Supply rates will be a few kg/day/person. However, you can see that the lenticular reentry vehicle is pure Pye Wacket. Within the Air Force, many of the glider’s proponents saw SAINT and SAINT II as a direct threat to Dyna-Soar and this in part led to the cancellation of these programmes in late 1962, but whilst direct internal competition to Dyna-Soar had been removed, the program now faced a far more serious threat to its continuation. That might be enough. Your spacecraft will NOT move like an airplane, it will act more like a heavily loaded 18-wheeler truck moving at high speed on a huge sheet of black ice. The space carriers are called Lance ships. If directed to, the inspector missile From Home One to Devastator, hangar bays seem to point out radially from the ship’s central axis. The pro-robot folks point to the many scientific successes of robotic spacecraft, such as Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and New Horizons, while the pro-astronaut types point to being able to share the human experience and context of exploration in a way that no robot can. What a powerful engine does give you is higher acceleration — so you can achieve any given delta v more quickly. This can be done by achieving space supremacy.  It is entirely feasible to keep the command ship out of range of the enemy without suffering serious light lag. To provide additional control (to the reaction wheel system) when in atmosphere, a number of multiple-purpose aerodynamic control surfaces are mounted along the leading edge of the hull, and to two small vertical stabilizers at the port and starboard edges of the drive shroud. Project SAINT (an acronym formed from "SAtellite INTerceptor") Developed during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the project was heavily over budget by the time it was cancelled in late 1962. Several designs for the exact method of destroying the target were suggested.  Other research suggests that the mechanism in question is the fact that a drone pilot spends more time over the target and has a far better view than the pilot of a conventional aircraft, exposing them more intimately to combat. No. Which you may have noticed includes the fuel tanks.  It is even conceivable that such a craft might be capable of SSTO performance, although the penalties for doing so would be significant. When an airplane turns, it banks. A secondary concern of forward air controllers is the avoidance of harm to noncombatants in the strike area. These self-propelled (or laser-propelled) relay satellites would The simplest reason is human factors. The interceptor would then scan the Soviet interloper with radar, infrared, and a TV camera. Another factor that pushes towards centralization of the humans in the constellation onto a few command ships is the strong economies of scale in crew quarters for a given level of comfort. The rocket engines are gimbaled on short arms around the waist of the torus, where they can impart spin, forward, or angular momentum, or thrust reversal. No Man's Sky contains an unimaginably massive open universe and it's simply too big to be fully explored by the community. it or not, until then we will have to use more well-developed technology. This is from Investigations of a Micro-Fighter / Airborne Aircraft Carrier Concept. One of the more tedious processes in No Man’s Sky, especially for new players, is repairing broken ships, blasters, and more. A lot of opposition to the TLAM was that it took away the offensive strike mission from carrier aviation. It is basically a mobile laser combat mirror. NMSMS Big thanks to any and all of you lovely people who offer donations! Dedicated interceptor designs became rare. A comprehensive and informative guide to purchasing Frigates - what to look for, what to avoid, and considerations for building fleets, and how to get the most out of your hard-earned units! lethal range. This was a system to travel into orbit, inspect evil Soviet satellites, and destroy them if they posed threats to US national security. It was based on the profile of hypersonic MIRV nuclear ICBMs, though scaled up a bit. In a counterinsurgency There are a lot of problems with the way they do it, but I’m willing to give them an A for effort. However, given that—. They never came out and said that directly. Of course for combat purposes, its either empty space, or full of weapons. The tiny ships really were more like missiles than space-fighters. craft could use the adaptive optics on its mirror-bright underside to receive, adapt, and focus a beam This idea that Captain Kirk leaves on a five-year mission? The Redding spaceplane could be flying in the 1980 decade. would occupy the space between propellant tanks and the 1-G centrifuge crew Due to fairly inexorable laws of physics, ships that don’t have to contain meat and meat-support systems always outperform ships that do – which means the classic notion of a space fighter inevitably loses to the autonomous kill vehicle (AKV), which combines a cross between a missile and an attack drone with an AI – naturally-evolved brains also aren’t good at handling three-dimensional, relativistically-distorted combat environments in which microseconds count. See my related post Michael for additional detail. I have speculated, though, on prohibitive, but the kinds of countermeasures involved simply cannot be However the designers heat strategy was a little surprising: garden variety radiative cooling. Some of the fighters actually have wings, which enhances the arrow motif.  During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, the Russians converted several vessels to carry torpedo boats, and a torpedo boat operating from the tender Veliky Knyaz Konstantin became the first vessel to sink another with a self-propelled torpedo. “Manned Anti-Satelllite System”, E.E.  In space, a fighter will have no environmental advantage over its carrier. needed many more years to develop the globe-girdling It won't be WWII in space. In military aviation, an intruder is a fighter aircraft or light bomber, often a night fighter, the crew of which are tasked with penetrating deep into enemy airspace to disrupt enemy air operations.  This involves the use of small amounts of antimatter in a fighter engine of some type as the name implies. The STAR was redesigned to launch from a conventional booster, which was a heck of a lot easier than squeezing it into a sub missile launching tube. A Blue Gemini? Subsequently, in response to a FOIA request, the clandestine National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in July of 2015 declassified tens of thousands of pages of MOL program documents and a gallery of images. This gives the interceptors much greater maneuverability than a Lance ship, and makes them very hard to be targeted by hostile weapons fire. It Even if mother ships someday become as massive as moons, my guess is that they'll be made up of redundant elements and separated by lots of open space. The most popular constraint is on faster-than-light radar. Has one of your No Man's Sky Expeditions resulted in a damaged Freighter? Jet-powered examples were relatively rare, but not unknown. Does sci-fi offer lessons on how the United States can resolve this? This is in order to avoid overflying a heavily defended target, or in order to distance the attacking aircraft from the blast effects of a nuclear (or conventional) bomb. We'll give it reactor-powered rockets, fed with pellets of solid fuel which is exhausted as vapor.  For the first two types of carriers, the chosen method of recovery, namely simple docking, is quite obvious. Until recently, most drone operators were regular Air Force pilots. Quite simply, I found that the nigh-overwhelming information release was much more interesting with regard to what it didn’t reveal as opposed to what it did…. Many fighters also possess a degree of ground attack capability, allowing them to perform surface attack and close air support missions. Characteristics Of Two Delta-Wing Enforcement from the air is further complicated by the necessary coordination with ground controller units providing persistent surveillance and possible identification when airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets are unavailable or denied necessary airspace access.  There are no stokers throwing uranium into the reactor, and no lookouts in the crow’s nest watching for the enemy.  To quote Milo, posting in the Rocketpunk Manifesto thread The Last Battleship: “You want warfare (or "predation") to always require putting humans at risk, because that makes war more moral by giving people an extra incentive to avoid it. I'll further note that "fighter" is — at least in the WW II naval Also having dramatic dialogue with the enemy. Pure combat starships can concentrate on the battle at hand, they do not have to always be simultaneously trying to protect their jump tender. This trick — separating the crew and weapons pod as a fighting unit while the fuel supply loiters off at a distance — greatly improves the battle craft's performance. The agency is looking for some sort of drone system that’s smarter than a missile but cheaper than a jet, good for about 20 uses. This time would be for real; no simulations now. Fighters do make sense in an orbital reference frame context, where, well, curvature of the earth matters, and where going into atmosphere matters. Instances of this maneuver I've manage to find include: You never see the Starfuries in Babylon 5 do this maneuver. colonies, and would contain superior space laboratory and observatory  It is not armed with conventional weapons, but instead contains a pair of linked telescopes. Therefore, for the defense to be effective, the ability to rapidly launch replacements must also be an essential part of the system architecture. Torpedo bombers came into existence just before the First World War almost as soon as aircraft were built that were capable of carrying the weight of a torpedo, and remained an important aircraft type until they were rendered obsolete by anti-ship missiles. Should I avoid ships with an off trait that just gives a plus one? (ed note: this is about atmospheric aircraft drones, but the same principle can be applied to space drones).  This is somewhat more plausible, as deep-space craft will almost certainly be incapable of atmospheric flight. Deep air support or air interdiction is carried out further from the active fighting, based more on strategic planning and less directly coordinated with ground units. But there is no definitive answer. Larger versions of the interdictor concept are generally referred to as penetrators. The drags covering the hydrogen propellant tanks do most of the work. It is boosted into orbit atop a three-stage rocket. Also, the following links may help in debugging of your math: @Psycho you're treating fuel cost stats WRONG, for more details read the wiki: If you're mining for fuel that's your problem right there: the best way to get di-hydrogen and tritium is to find a space station that sells them. SPACE FIGHTERS. Well, not everyone thinks so, especially in science-fiction, where "flat tops" still rule in TV shows like Battlestar Galactica.  The only situation in which this concept would be practical is one of overwhelming technological advantage, which is mostly outside the scope of this paper. Experimental aircraft are designed in order to test advanced aerodynamic, structural, avionic, or propulsion concepts. At the time except for BARCAPs and mine laying, the Air Force flew essentially the same types of missions as we did with the Navy, but mostly with different aircraft and different capabilities. Orbital laser or microwave power Ships of cruiser size or larger contain the manufacturing capacity to kickstarting an entire civilization given enough time and resources. World War II/Battleships/Fighters in space is about as likely to be an accurate model of space combat as, modeling jet air-to-air combat with pike square formations. The text of the novel is unclear on the number of crew manning the Gunships, but my opinion is no more than 2 would be required, and dialogue in the novel tends to back this up. This will be the standard Orbit Patrol ship. Many of the people who cling to fighters for space combat have internalized that difference and don't think about why it would (or would not) be true in space. Military aircraft can be either combat or non-combat: Combat aircraft, or "Warplanes", are divided broadly into multi-role, fighters, bombers, attackers, and electronic warfare support. maneuver until the fighter starts the burn. Enemy targets in the front line ("Forward Edge of the Battle Area" in US terminology) are often close to friendly forces and therefore friendly forces are at risk of friendly fire through proximity during air attack. aboard a small craft. will be on-station, call it picket duty if you like, for Transportation in support of combatants and civilians alike, including, Inter-Asteroidal Ballistic Missiles with MIRVed nuclear warheads, Fighter spacecraft (lots of anti-fighter weapons, limited nuclear bomb capability), Bomber spacecraft (limited anti-fighter weapons, large nuclear bomb capability), Fighter-bomber mulirole spacecraft (intermediate amount of anti-fighter weapons, intermediate nuclear bomb capability), Anti-fighter laser installations on asteroid, Life Support: a space suit. On the other hand — Winch's analogy to victorian era fiction about flying dreadnoughts and the "Who the hell thought of an Immelmann turn?" Sure, you might have gotten shot down once in a while by an AI program when you, as a pilot, were trying something new, but, until now, an AI opponent simply could not keep up with anything like the real pressure and pace of combat-like scenarios.”. question sort of underscores why I want to model how space combat works using known physics as a gameable experience. In Russia "I" was used (Polikarpov I-16), while the French continue to use "C" (Nieuport 17 C.1). It may not seem that they need protection because in all the years they have existed, we have not fought any wars against opponents with space power capabilities. Presuming that a fleet of the toroidal battle craft sets out on an interplanetary mission, the fleet might start out as a group of parasite ships attached to a mother ship. This could be a This role is increasingly being filled by satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). She stepped forward to look at the retracted panels of the bow-shields, ran a hand along the sensors masts that would extend to look past the shield, then stepped aft to inspect the reflector array that, once opened to its full twelve meter span, would help focus laser energy onto the interceptor's drive. Makes my freighter hunt much easier.Great write up! It's still likely wrong, but it's probably much LESS wrong. It allows you to create the universe you need in order to have the conversation you want to have. Even if the jump tender is safe, it still makes it difficult for the battle riders to escape a battle gone wrong by jumping outsystem. It seemed to be aware of my intentions and reacting instantly to my changes in flight and my missile deployment. There will be lulls in the battle where you can sleep, eat, play video games, read, as long as you stay inside and are ready to fight at a moments notice.  In the interest of accuracy, any vessel carried and deployed (that is to say, not merely shipped to a destination) by another vessel will be referred to as a parasite, leaving fighter to describe Hollywood-type combat parasites. The United States Air Force issued General Operational Requirement-170 on 19 June 1958 ordering the development of a system that was capable of destroying a satellite.  However, to what extent is this statement true when balanced against other factors. hydrocarbon fuel, and was equipped with wings, turbojets, They need refit. radians/s^2, and a torque of about 10,000 N-m.  If the vessel requires an average of 80 man-hours a day, then a crew begins to be viable. would stay with the spaceplane while in orbit, separating just You can really put yourself in the picture.  The problem is lack of role. In this case a stripped down Gemini spacecraft and its Equipment Module fits the bill nicely. The Star Wars carriers, on the other hand, never seem to incorporate this flaw. In current military parlance, a strike fighter is a multirole combat aircraft designed to operate primarily as an attack aircraft, while also incorporating certain performance characteristics of a fighter. SAINT here is painted with somewhat vague but intentional strokes, using phrases like,“satellite capture and neutralization.”. Some civilizations will of course build "cruisers" smaller than cities but bigger than buildings. (the problem is in the real world the answer appears to be ", (that all combat spacecraft with be huge ships with lots of crew), (Yes, the same false-analogy critique can be laid against the analogy of space warcraft to naval ships — but that's an issue for another post. Well, combat spacecraft behaving like fighter aircraft is just as silly. With the exception of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning and the de Havilland Mosquito, heavy fighters largely failed in their intended roles during World War II, as they could not outmaneuver the more conventional, single-engined fighters. This isn't even taking time dilation into account. Where To Find S Class Ships In No Man’s Sky Next Now I want to start this off by saying that even if you look in these areas, S Class ships are hard to come by, like less then 5% hard to come by. And that has caused friction within the Air Force as it tries to redefine what it means to be a pilot. As with their deep ocean submersible counterparts, our first space cruisers will Ain’t no air in space. For missions beyond the Van Allen belts the skin will have to be increased to 1.3 centimeters for more radiation shielding. When you’re zooming through space in No Man’s Sky, sometimes you’ll hear what sounds like a clap of thunder.That’s a freighter warping in. This class of aircraft is designed mostly for close air support and naval air-to-surface missions, overlapping the tactical bomber mission. Maximum velocity: 0.3 c (based on particle shielding), 4 x hardpoint mountings for AKVs, typically Slasher-class, (Hardpoint mountings can also hold single-legionary drop pods, Piton-class, or covert ops equivalents. There are no spacecraft shooting at each other, unless one chooses to count co-orbital ASATs. The designers went with a layer of D-36 columbium alloy, insulated from the René 41 by a layer of Q-felt silica fiber. Those are the autonomous mechagrunts and AKVs that the drones are slaved to, and which in turn answer to the actual people in the command chain. Since Rockets Are Not Boats, the force generally be in the direction the crew considers as "down", as defined by the rocket's design. artillery spotting), border patrol and fishery protection. Strategic bombing is a military strategy used in a total war with the goal of defeating the enemy by destroying its morale or its economic ability to produce and transport materiel to the theatres of military operations, or both.