posted
I'm working on an article about late pre-TOS (2230s-40s) warp-capable fighters for my Starfleet Museum. Can anyone suggest some possible ways that fighters (carrier-borne) might realistically be used in interstellar combat? I want to exclude the Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica-type of sublight mass-fleet melee because it doesn't make much sense to me. I would think that you'd want to be moving at faster-than-light speeds whenever possible.
Some possible uses: 1. Do you think carrier-borne fighters would be useful for attacking large capital ships in interstellar space? Fighters likely carry less powerful lasers/phasers and might be slower at warp than large ships but might be able to deliver warheads more accurately than can unmanned photon topedoes, at least in the early days. They also might be harder to detect and hit than capital ships because of their smaller size and better maneuverability. But missiles (and maybe even phasers, sometimes) are still faster than ships.
2. Travelling with convoys. Fighters would be useful for defending merchant convoys against attack, sort of like fighters on escort carriers hunting down u-boats.
3. Attacking surface and orbital targets. Fighters could be brought down to low orbit or even enter the atmosphere to attack surface targets. They could also attack targets in orbit. This stuff would have to be done at sublight speeds, I guess.
Thanks in advance.
-------------------- When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
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Rogue Starship
Ex-Member
posted
Hey, I would think it would depend on what type of battle the ships were in and who against. I dont mean race, I mean ship type. LIke if a carrier was protecting a convoy with some light to medium cruisers and some big ass romulans attacked. I would use them to shoot down the missles. THIs is how I would use them...it would just depend on what the weapon complement is.
posted
Hey, I would think it would depend on what type of battle the ships were in and who against. I dont mean race, I mean ship type. LIke if a carrier was protecting a convoy with some light to medium cruisers and some big ass romulans attacked. I would use them to shoot down the missles. Note-watch ANDROMEDA, the ship is almost a submarine...with the sonar pings and stuff...anyway, they use their fighter to protect the ship and fight smaller cruisers. THIs is how I would use them...it would just depend on what the weapon complement is.
posted
No, I'll scratch that. Masao--Is this thread (and the "Friendship One" thread) an old thread? They are familiar. If so, how did you get it back up here saying it was posted on February 27, today, not when you originally posted them? (Hope that makes sense)
[ February 27, 2002, 19:57: Message edited by: Veers ]
posted
Hmm... Space combat of any sort typically take place at sublight speed. So your idea of a warp-capable fighter avoiding operating at sublight speeds will not work. Your fighters will be considerably slower than the carriers and other capital ships, so it's unlikely they can catch an opponent at warp or run fast enough to make it back to her carrier. Also, having warp capability is meaningless if you're thinking of a trans-atmospheric support craft. You don't want to go to warp inside the atmosphere, especially with Pre-TMP tech. Fighters of that time are also unlikely to have the range and speed for interstellar travel.
With Pre-TOS, you're working with really limited technology. I'm not sure warp-capable fighters are even possible, unless they are large and unwieldly like the Pereguines, maybe even more so.
As for operations of the fighters, unless you're planning on warp strafing as the only thing they're capable of, forget warp. What fighters are used for is to extend the weapons range of the carrier vessel. A common tactic is to hit your opponent with your fighters, while your battleline keeps out of weapons range. This would keep up until your opponent is sufficiently weakened for your battleline to engage with minimal losses. But since Pre-TOS fighters would be slow, even with warp, they can be easily by-passed by the enemy ships. Since fighters are considered expandable, they are also used to cover withdrawls, and anything else to buy time for the capital ships to get away.
Fighters make poor convoy escort, this is not WWII and we're not dealing with U-boats that can barely shoot back. The fighters don't have the sensor to detect enemies far away, but normal sized capital ships can detect the convoy and her fighters just fine. Escort carriers are vulnerable to attacks themselves in the absence of battleline units. The fighters can't possibly keep up with the convoy, or even last that long, without support. If you rely on the convoy ships as fighter tenders, the fighters are vulnerable to surprise attacks, considering the lack of warning and poor compatability from being based from less than ideal facilities. Fighters also lack the decisive firepower to stop any convoy raiders. They can drop in, concentrate on a single target, and be gone before a single bird gets off the deck.
[ February 27, 2002, 20:33: Message edited by: David Templar ]
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Veers: As far as I know these aren't old posts, since I just started them today. Of course, someone (maybe even me) might have posted something similar before.
DT: Why does combat have to take place at sublight speeds? In TOS, ships often chased and charged each other at warp speeds and fired phasers or photon torpedoes. If these weapons are faster than light and you can fire when travelling faster than light, slowing down to sublight speeds just makes you an easier target. Sublights speeds only became the norm after Star Wars came out.
In TOS, shuttles made interstellar trips, so they had to be FTL-capable. My fighters will also be FTL because that's how I designed them. "Fighter" is really an aircraft designation based on mission rather than size: fighters attack other planes. That designation doesn't really work for spacecraft or boats since most are designed to attack other spacecraft or boats. So space fighters would have to be defined by something else, such as crew, basing, range, payload, or mission. Maybe their can go faster than light but can't travel interstellar distances (they need to be carried)?
-------------------- When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
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posted
You have ONE series where ships chased each other (forwards, backwards, and sideways) at warp speed while firing warp speed phasers, warp speed torpedoes, and warp speed coherent balls of hot gas which tracks and follows its target somehow.
You have, barring the occasional sillyness, FOUR series in which combat typically took place at sublight, including "Enterprise", which predates TOS and should be close to where your time is.
You can always try "gunboats" or "corvettes". Fighters are like you said... fighters.
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posted
For the moment, I'm ignoring Enterprise, since my museum started first!
Seriously, I think that the way Star Wars showed space combat made people believe that slugging it out toe-to-toe at sublight speeds was the ONLY way space combat could work. But TOS showed that you could have combat at FTL speeds. I don't care if the nine Trek movies or the four modern series showed only sublight combat, because I consider them all tainted by Star Wars.
So I'm looking for ideas here about how small, maneuverable craft with limited range and small crews might be used in an interstellar FTL environment; I don't want to only hear what can't be done because of what's been shown on screen. However, I might even decide that using small craft really can't be rationalized in any way. So, please try to think outside the box. Remember, space is very big and these ships go very fast.
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
I would tend to agree with the "gunboat" or "torpedo boat" idea. We're stuck on fighters in our time as they are one of the dominant warfighting tools - for now. Even today SAMS and remote operated vechicles are closing in on the manned fighter.
I tend to think of the smaller warships in trek more in the terms of Horatio Hornblower. In those books (in case you haven't read them) a ship of the line's boats could be used to some effect against enemy heavy units in particular situations. Boarding parties, demolition parties, etc. could be placed along side a heavy ship that's movement was restricted.
In a similiar way I'd use armed shuttles or peregrine style "fighters" to attack captital ships that are at some sort of tactical disadvantage that keeps them from using their full weapons and speed. Close in combat in a system -i.e. system defense. Fixed piece battles where a fleet is trying to bottle up another. Attacks on ships in orbit (use the planet to hide your approach - why if I was in orbit I'd set out a probe network).
respectfully submitted,
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posted
I'm not sure I'd go with the idea that small craft can go interstellar in pre-TOS, warp or no warp. The three shuttles we saw in arguable warp and supposed interstellar transit were exceptions of sort: In "The Menagerie", the shuttle was only trying to catch a recently departed starship, not travel to another star. In "Let That Be...", the shuttle was operated by a very long-lived and obsessed individual who could have planned to spend several centuries in interstellar transit. And in "Metamorphosis", the shuttle was negotiating an asteroid field, not a likely interstellar phenomenon.
Enough of that rant. But I do think endurance would be a big issue for pre-TOS fightercraft. There would have to be dedicated "auxiliary carriers" in the convoy to tend to the fighters (didn't we hear that designation in "The Maquis"?). Or at the very least something like the makeshift air defence ships of WWII convoys, merchant ships which launched Seafires or Hurricanes from catapults and then recovered the pilot from the sea after the one-off mission...
And I do think even a mere fighter could make a difference in escort duty, since any armed vessel would help deter the "look what we ran into" kind of pirates operating a single vessel and only attacking completely defenceless targets. If, OTOH, the convoy was ambushed by a determined and informed enemy, then this enemy would know the defensive strength and scale its forces accordingly - so even a big starship escort wouldn't help.
And in escort duty, it would be an advantage to have a distributed defence, so that 1/10 of your force is between the enemy and the convoy all the time, and the 9/10 can arrive in an emergency. With a single ship, no matter how powerful, you can't guard the convoy from every direction, nor chase the attacker. Starfleet might try to strike a balance and use a couple of corvettes instead of the numerous fighters or the one big ship, though.
Perhaps pre-TOS Starfleet would have a bifurcated fighter force: sub-impulse assault craft for planetary forays, and impulse- or possibly warp-capable escort craft for "auxiliary defence" of big formations and primary defence of low-priority shipments. No sense wasting any impulse or warp engines in planetary assaults where they aren't needed.
posted
*tries to think outside of the box, which results in two alternate timelines, one in which his head explodes, and the other in which he goes to watch some Seikai no Senki, which technically has FTL combat*
Hmm... anime... *drools*
Your level of technology is still a major factor, pre-TOS tech is so... crude. I would need to know what we have to work with to come up with something supportive. FTL combat requires FTL sensors, FTL weapons, and FTL computing. At the speed you're dealing with, there's probably more computer than man behind that trigger. I'm pretty sure I saw more than one microchip onboard the Enterprise...
Another problem is that smaller vessels like gunboats and such usually have a much higher top speed than their battleline, and relies on that speed advantage to overhaul or escape larger ships, plus their manuverability for protection. Unfortunately, Star Trek doesn't work that way. Smaller ships usually have much lower top speeds than larger capital ships, so FTL combat between a gunboat and a cruiser could be like a Vespa trying to chase down a drag racer. There's a big gap in relative velocity between even warp 3 and warp 5. You'll need some pretty heavy technobabling to convince anyone that the technologically backward Starfleet could produce something fast and small, when people are still recovering from being able to cruise the galaxy at warp 4.
Of course, if your intended victim is the Romulans... Well, "Their power is simple impulse." ^_~
Remember, if you make this idea *too* good, people will wonder why it's not in use anymore.
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posted
A fighter, defined as a tiny ship launched from a larger one, is only useful when it can do things the larger ship can't. So...what can't your pre-TOS ships do?
My suspicion is that, in Star Trek, a fighter or other distributed weapon system would only be useful if you could put a greater or equal amount of power into your distributed weapon as you have in your shipboard ones.
Considering the era, perhaps a good use for fighters would be as single (or at least limited) shot nuclear warhead launchers. Not to drag Enterprise into this, but...Enterprise suggests that pre-photon torpedo torpedoes were self-propelled. So you wouldn't need a fancy magnetic/gas launcher, and could just strap them to the bottom of a tiny craft. By spreading out your launchers, you presumably make it harder for the enemy to shoot down all the missles before they hit, as well as reduce the number of people at risk from any single counterattack.
Having read through at least some of your Starfleet Museum, I get the impression that beam weapons of the day were fairly sizable, so they wouldn't seem to be likely candidates for fighters. As far as I know.
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quote:Originally posted by Sol System: Considering the era, perhaps a good use for fighters would be as single (or at least limited) shot nuclear warhead launchers. Not to drag Enterprise into this, but...Enterprise suggests that pre-photon torpedo torpedoes were self-propelled. So you wouldn't need a fancy magnetic/gas launcher, and could just strap them to the bottom of a tiny craft. By spreading out your launchers, you presumably make it harder for the enemy to shoot down all the missles before they hit, as well as reduce the number of people at risk from any single counterattack.
This would fall in line with what I said before about fighters as a long-range punch for the battleline. Strap long ranged missiles on your fighters and your attack range is increased several fold. A fighter would also be capable of packing a huge punch, especially if all it packs are short ranged attack missiles. Basically a nuclear warhead with a short burning high acceleration rocket engine, such a weapons could be only two meters long, max, and with a yield of well over 400KT (I'm going by a W-88 here). Imagine a fighter packing four of those things and just salvoing them all at once.
Of course, the problem with all that is that ships in Star Trek can simple go to warp. There must be some reason for them to remain at sublight in order for tactics like this to work (ex. being inside a solar system, no warp drive, etc).
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posted
The way I've used fighters so far has only been for the Romulan War. For that time period I've have 50-m-long "fighters" which are carried four at a time within large carriers. The top speed of The carriers have a cruising speed of about warp 3.5 and take several weeks to travel between stars. The fighters can jump at warp 4 but have too short a range for interstellar travel. So, the carriers carry the fighters within a few hundred AUs of the target, where they fire off their missiles while travelling at high warp.
For the Pre-TOS period I'm thinking about (2230s-40s), the level of tech is only slightly lower than TOS. Basically we have everything we have in TOS, just a bit slower and shorter. I'm assuming that we already have FTL weaponry, sensors, communications, targeting, etc. as we have in TOS. I haven't decided whether effective, shield-busting beam weapons are small enough to be carried on fighters; if they were so small, you'd think a cruiser might carry a lot more of them.
I'm leaning towards the idea of FTL fighters with short ranges, so that they still have to be carried between star systems. I haven't decided about speed yet, but I'm worried that big ships with big powerplants might be faster than small ships with small power plants. If small ships aren't faster, they're probably more maneuverable, at least and maybe they can get closer to a target before they fire.
Thanks so far for the input.
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