Space Ships Thread

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About the size, if they will even exist (never say never) etc.

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Some Retro ships because they look comfy as fuck.

I'm not too sure if it's that /tg/ related, but I'm seriously hyped for Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock out at the end of the month. It's a pc game but it's turn based and seems to work similarly to tabletop BFG, so it might actually turn out more fun than the BFG game, especially if they allow mods.

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>>54730647
A meh game easy to mod> A good game without mods, peoples does crazy and cool things with them.
I really like Starsector for example, it has some awesome mods.

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>How autistic about Fighters

This is a theory of mine, please pick it apart because it's important to my setting details.

Fighters should be the primary weapons in space combat, massive starships shouldn't even see each other. A sortie of small fighter craft should be deployed to complete mission objectives and then return to the mother ship. Massive fleets in visible range of each other with hundreds of interceptors flying everywhere makes no sense.

If massive starships are going to be armed with weapons, then they should be powerful enough to be fired at such long ranges that they can support the fighters in their missions much like modern day surgical strikes. The days of capital ships sailing side by side firing guns at each other should be long gone by the time humanity is fighting space battles.

>>54731724
Probably accurate, I'd even go so far as to say that fighters are all robots with hulls stripped down to the bare minimum necessary to keep them from flying apart during high G maneuvers. They would essentially be a flying gun with only the bare minimum necessary power, fuel, and radiators necessary to pump a couple thousand rounds into an enemy capital ship or base and then try their hardest to collide with their target.

I'd imagine that every piece of space warfare technology will be built to be as light and disposable as possible except when it comes to protecting crew. Capital ships would probably be the only things with any amount of armor and would only carry weapons that demand too much power to fit onboard small fighters and a laser or high velocity gun CIWS to shoot down enemy missiles, fighters, and possibly even projectiles.

>>54731724

Well, what exactly there is that prevents RKV and AI spam? Most of realistic space combat would be space sniping from long distances and that is boring to most audiences.

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>>54731176
Starsector is an amazing game for something in Eternal-Alpha, due to both the dev(s) and the modding community

>>54731724
>This is a theory of mine, please pick it apart because it's important to my setting details.

Is your setting Hard SciFi or Space Opera?

>>54731724
>Fighters should be the primary weapons in space combat
This is highly unlikely.

Drones or missiles of equivalent size will inherently have better performance in relation to thrust to mass ratio and maximum acceleration. The need to accommodate a human pilot and life support for a human pilot will increase the mass of the vehicle and the physical limitations of human beings will put a hard cap on the ability of the vehicle to maneuver. In addition unless the space military in question considers trained pilots to be completely expendable the fighter must necessarily carry enough fuel to reach their mission area, perform their mission and then also return to their parent vessel, which increases their mass at the expense of payload.

Additionally given the enormous distances involved in space travel and how easy it is to detect an operating spacecraft drive anything that fighters are approaching will see them coming from a long, long way away and an armed spacecraft is going to react by either maneuvering or shooting at the fighters with its own weapons, in the event that the spacecraft is larger than the fighters is likely has a larger power plant and bigger laser optics, meaning it will have dramatically longer effective ranges so the fighters are going to be subject to invisible point defense fire from outside of their own weapons range.

The advantage to a fighter over a drone or missile is that they have a decision making human being in them. In many cases that just isn't necessary or even desirable. In cases where you need a force capable of independent decision making with human accountability you would want to use fighters, in cases where you need to blow up an enemy warship in interplanetary space you would use expendable and equally lethal anti-shipping missiles instead, using fighters would just be needlessly throwing human beings into a wall of CIWS for no reason.

>>54733241
It's also pertinent to remember that missiles, drones and fighters are all just different applications of the same technologies.

- A missile is a drone with a warhead instead of weapons.
- A drone is a fighter with a guidance system instead of a pilot.
- A fighter is a missile with weapons, a pilot, life support and extra fuel.

If you can build one of them you can and probably will build all of them.

>>54731863
RKV doesn't work against mobile targets with its acceleration times.

AIs are not needed when you can supplement your crew with expert programs. If you use AI it still will mostly use expert programs to run the ship. Because they are smaller and faster. So the difference in actual combat performance will be due to programming abilities of people/AIs at home base and not due to lack of reflexes.

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>>54726976

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>>54734905

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>>54735270

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>>54735309

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>>54735329

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>>54735356

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>>54735395

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>>54735309
This is fucking aids

>>54731724
It all depends on your setting background assumptions.

Is most combat in orbit around a planet? Intercepting a fleet in interplanetary space traveling between planets? Wacky space opera hijinks blazing all around solar systems?

These all entail different time scales. In hard SF, hours to split seconds for orbital combat or days to weeks for interplanetary combat.

Remember that space is a single medium unless you're using devices like hyperspace. Geography is measured in dv and range between orbits. In most such cases, if your megaships have sniper weapons, they are going to shoot down any fighters closing in from beyond the range of those fighters; unless they are hidden over the horizon or all weapons are incapable of inter-orbtal ranges.

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>>54726976
The "Space Fighter™" in real life won't be anything like a fighter plane for the same reasons nothing in space is anything like a ground, sea, or air vehicle.

>How autistic about Fighters are you

I think there's two types of spaceships in scifi. Soft scifi has spaceboats which tend to be based on loose impressions of whatever period of naval and/or air warfare catches the writer's fancy. Space fighters originate from this context. What's telling is that they usually behave as if they're flying in a different medium from the warships. They're really planes, and the ships are really ships. There's no real point in nitpicking them because the intention was never for it to make sense in any real world context. As long as it's consistent all is good.

Hard(er) scifi has spaceships based on the space environment, not on wet ships or airplanes. Building on that, it will have warships based on the tactical and strategic environment you derive and contrive from the space environment, and so on. You don't need to be 100% realistic to go in this category. I think the main distinction here is "based on space" vs "based on the sea and air". Space fighters tend to not make much sense here.

A lot of my favorite scifi is in the former category but the latter is what's really my jam. It also tends to be sorely underutilized and I wish people would do more with it.

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>>54731808
>>54731863
>>54733241
>>54733352
>>54734395
>>54736510

Thank you for your feedback, I feel like I might be on the right track, but I've learned some new concepts I hadn't even considered for combat between starships.

>>54732657
I'm creating a Space Opera setting, but I want to do some research into Hard Sci-Fi as a foundation for the setting's internal consistency. Even outright fantasy sometimes considers the logical conclusions to monster ecology and magic.

>>54733241
If primary means the most number available I'd agree. I'd also think with zero gravity, massive starships will have enough armors to prevent fighters or smaller class ships from taking it out. Thus, everybody will be trying to have the biggest starships possible. Like how germans went to try build maus tanks in ww2. Maus failed due to fuel consumption, size, and speed. In space none of these will matter (compared to smaller starships, anyway).
However, I'd think capital ships sailing side by side firing guns at each other might occur a few points whenever shielding technology overtakes weapons technology. Assuming, it is probably cheaper to use particle beam/laser weapons - since it is gonna be charged by reactors or something, thus having no need to create more missiles, they could be stopped if ships have electromagnetic forcefield - if you create negative electric field, most of the energy will be bounced back, if you use a strong enough magnetic field, the beam will just go around the same way lights travel around planets. If this happens simply blowing them up with missiles or kinetic weapons may be neccessary, and with smaller ships being unable to penetrate bigger ships with massive armors, capital ships may line up next to each other - close enough for the missiles to be effective anyway.

If I had a starship size classification that follows pre-carrier-beats-all navy theme, so that it is
fighter-corvette-frigate-cruiser-destroyer-carrier-battleship then what would you suppose be the most acceptable size comparison classification for non-military spaceships? I was thinking like naming ships something like dive boat(since landing on planets would be the closest to diving in this universe)-mining ship (with allusions to fishing boat)-passenger-freighter/cargo-colony ship or something like that, but I am not sure if that sounds okay.
On a probably unrelated note Dunkirk was a great film.

>>54740794
All of this depends heavily on your tech assumptions. Usually though I don't think armor would be a winner. Space is pretty friendly to offense, and the faster your propulsion tech makes you go the more true that is because the more energy anything you fling at the enemy ship has. It doesn't mean armor can't be useful - it might be particularly useful against laser fire and it might still help contain damage from a kinetic strike even if it can't stop it. Think of it like infantry body armor: It's helpful in many cases, but it's still not a good idea to stand up and try to tank a hail of machine gun fire.

That said, since it depends heavily on your assumptions you can probably make a set of assumptions that gets you big, armored warships. If lasers are your weapon of choice and they generally beat missiles, there might not be any practical way to actually do a kinetic or nuclear attack because the lasers would swat any missiles or small craft away at long range. Big ships would be heavily preferred since they can fit bigger optics and a laser with a longer effective range beats one with a shorter effective range every time. The square-cube law also makes the mass of armor work out nicer for bigger ships. You can tune the power of your lasers however you like to make armor as effective as you want it to be. You might end up with a situation where your beams can burn off laser optics, sensors, thrusters and anything else that needs to be on a ship's surface, but have a hard time actually piercing the hull. In that case missiles might be used to finish off crippled ships.

>>54736086
It's just about the only scientifically accurate ship here, dipshit. Educate yourself on both the setting and astromechanics.

>>54741028
>strapping giant turrets and space shuttles to the side of a giant bullet is "scientifically accurate"
And they appear to be just regular old fashion battleship pea shooters not railguns. The future is now old man. Why use those when missiles exist?

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>>54738501
>>54738682
>>54738702
>>54738719
>>54740447
Those are ace, very cool space ships.

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>>54742399
I'm not a great fan of that design but this is funny because the only real world design for a space battleship looks like this.

That drawing is bound to be somewhat speculative since this only existed in the form of a model which has been destroyed and was never shown publicly. It also wasn't a detailed design study as far as I know but just an illustration of what sort of thing they could do with the technology. But still, it's a giant bullet with strapped on naval turrets and shuttles for reentry.

>>54740936
I had an idea for a classification based basically on "how far can the ship go?"
Orbital (so basically super-shuttle) is a Corvette, Interplanetary is a Frigate, Stellar is a destroyer, Interstellar is a cruiser.

>>54742676
I thought size might be better since, with zero gravity, one might not really need to accelerate- thus with enough vacumn space, one could theroratically go forever. Like voyager records or new horizons satelite (the one that passed Pluto), would technically both be stellar. If you say those won't count since they are single use unmanned vehicle. At a universe that makes space battlecruisers, I assume it'd be easy enough to make a manned spacecraft that could hold at least one person for indefinite amount of time using either cryogenics or loads and loads of non perishable food and oxygen, just to ruin this classification system.

>>54743225
Someone makes a pointless gimmick craft just to break a classification system and go "gotcha!" and then... nobody cares people keep using it anyway.

If you're classifying spaceships by range it would be based on their intended use. You might be able to take a little boat across the Atlantic and go "See! This is a seagoing ship!" but it's really not gonna ruin any shipwright's definitions.

>>54740585
>I'm creating a Space Opera setting, but I want to do some research into Hard Sci-Fi as a foundation for the setting's internal consistency. Even outright fantasy sometimes considers the logical conclusions to monster ecology and magic.

I'd take a cue from modern naval warfare and use that as a starting point. Overwhelming a ship's defenses with a dozen cheap missiles is a sounder strategy than sending over a handful of planes to attack.

I rather like the combat as shown on The Expanse.

I like the idea of rail guns that use iron-rich asteroids as projectiles.

>>54743246
yes that is certainly true that gimmick craft wouldn't neccessarily break the definition once it becomes the norm, but since satelites can already travel upto interstellar and it hasn't even been a 100 years. If first serious boat ever in this universe's history was a seagoing ship anyway that could cross the atlantic. I don't see why that universe would classify ships by range, or minimum range would be significantly long - since first ships were interstellar anyway. How would that be classified? A smaller spacecraft that first went interstellar vs a newly created massive moon like spacecraft that only orbits for some reason, even though it isn't completely stationary. Would that be an exception?

Also, if the ships are ranged by their intended use. Who is standardizing the definition of intended use in their world? The shipwright who created the ship? A guild of shipwright? Government inspection? Would the criteria include something like average life support expentancy per maximum crew and passengers/cargo?

>>54743225
>>54743246
>>54743669
It's backwards thinking, for instance, interplanetary ships being Frigates doesn't mean that a frigate is a ship capable of interplanetary travel, but that ships build for a viable efficent interplanetary and not further are classified as frigate.

efficiency of travel would result in a certain size. My idea would be that they aren't tons of ships, really only hundreds at most, and those would mostly be shuttles/corvette, with only 3-5 interstellar cruisers, and therefore, there isn't a lot of different classes and generations of ships (2-3 at most), so like 3 types of corvettes, 2 types of frigates, 2 types of destroyer, 1 lose type of cruiser which are more one of kind but follow the same kind of specs.

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>>54726976
To be honest, much as I love space opera stuff, 'realistic' fighters will probably look like naval cannons with thrusters and drone or remote operated and designed to basically be giant, spess sniper rifles.

So in otherwards: 'dog fighting' is basically going to look like a 2fort sniper war.

But for personal preference, I tend to like fighters as being about the size of a large pick-up truck (albeit probably a lot heavier) with anything smaller usually being some super-minimalist machine either not truly meant for a fight, or expected to always have plenty of support.

>>54744040
I guess this wont work in my setting. Where travel efficiency difference is supposedly negligible. Tons of ships. Supposedly lot of different classes and generations.

What would your universe be calling your non-military ship classes, if at all? with names like cruisers, frigates, destroyers definitely military origin, I'd assume a large luxury liner type ship wouldn't be called destroyer class, or something like that.

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>>54745618
I like to use lots of terms for those.
Depends of the dT and how well armed they are. For example, a Galleon it's a well armed trade or freight vessel of great size (more than a tipical cruiser), used to freight important cargo in bulk and able to jump, the carrack is the less well armed and dt, poorer couisin. The brig is the same as a galleon but a lot smaller ( bigger than frigate tiers dt tough)being the poorer cousin the carabel, while the cutter is the name for the little, well armed jump capable trade vessels, the sloop for the less well armed.
Then you have free traders, Bulk freighters, Passenger liners, cargo containers, Bricks (little container tuggers for intraestellar hauling) etc.

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>>54726976
As far as ship scales goes I've always had a soft spot for smaller private ships that are heavily customized versions of mass production cargo and patrol ships.

I also like the idea of ships as long range boosters/weapon platforms for mecha, though realistically it'd proably make more sense to make it a regular ship sense there's no reason for humanoid machines bigger than an exoskeleton to exist in space. Though what if you had a privater ship crew that bought the failed prototype of a space type mech, but then mounted it on their ship as a gun turret/ manipulator suite? With the ability to fold in for out of combat cursing of course.

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>>54739801
As a mainly pulp/space opera peasant could you explain that a bit more? How would be a Space armada based on that, if they could have a FTL engine (using unbotanium/antimatter as fuel) but not more space magic .

>>54749142
I don't see why not, for a space opera game/setting mechs are okay. If you want to go full Hard sci fi it would be mroe complicated, but I can see very well a kind of otlaw Serenity/cowboy bebop with mechs instead of fighters/boats.

>>54726976
I see space fighters being used similar to patrol boats. Bigger is better in open space, but you can't just put a battleship anywhere when you're dealing with planets and space stations.

>>54750763
There's nothing to prevent you putting a battleship anywhere you can put a fighter.

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>>54750519
The thing is you don't often see a blend of mechs and fighter craft. Most mecha series tend to have mechs as the primary combat machine with big battleships providing support with long range cannons and acting as a repair dock. On the flip side series that use fighters hardly ever have anything beyond the power loader from Aliens.

I'd wanna see a setting where the two exist side by side, but serve different roles in the battle field. Maybe ships are more for high speed attacks over longer distances, where as mechs are better for mid to close range combat around space stations and asteroid fields.

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>>54751205
Seems like you would like Jovian Chronicles, the ones than did Heavy Gears (or votoms in the western way). It's basically Gundam being made be canadians as a table top game. It also has some of my preferd star ships.

>>54751201
It takes a lot more energy to shift a battleship's orbit than to launch a fighter.

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>>54751435
One of the mechs (than are meh, I prefer votoms/heavy gear style).

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>>54751576
And some starships with some space fighters.

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>>54751602
The setting, while not very exiting, it's quite well done and more into Hard Sci fi than lots of other.

Recently started playing Elite: Dangerous again, and reminded myself that they're developping an RPG, with a playtest adventure already out. But, being playtest, it's comparatively barebones, and it'll probably be a while until the actual core rules come out

So, I was wondering, are there are RPGs that can simulate ship-to-ship combat in a satisfying manner, be it one-man-fighter skirmishes, multicrew ships, or a mix?

>>54731724
It'd be cool to see a massive ship be hit from another ship so far away they could see it. This kind of tactic would be best since you don't have to worry about earths gravity, or better yet use planets and stars to fling projectiles at your enemy.

>>54751201
Yeah, but you can only afford to build a few battleships, compared to many smaller ships. So when Venus learns that the UNSC Ki Moon had been dispatched to Mars, the Venusians Rose up in rebellion against the Corps...

>>54751435
>>54751576
>>54751602
>>54751658
I remembering reading about this when I was looking into alternatives to Mekton and GURPS for a mecha campaign that never materialized. How is it? I'd be interested to know how it handles creating custom units and mech to ship combat.

>>54750763
There's definitely merit in the idea of a "patrol cutter" rather than a ship designed to fight a conventional war. It would be in part a monitor for shipping lanes, an on-call emergency response vessel, and a tariff and customs enforcement boat.

Of course, it would need to carry some arms in order to back up this mission with force. But they would tend to be smaller, shorter ranged, and precise.

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>>54753347

>>54750763
There's a definite merit to small craft in this role but I wouldn't call it a fighter because it doesn't really feel like one. For a well-equipped one, I'd think something like:

- High power propulsion good enough to outrun civilian ships (ideally in both thrust and dV)
- Good sensor suite to make sense of traffic around you and to gain lots of data on ships of interest
- Laser weapon because it's flexible and if need be surgical. Gives you the ability to disable iffy ships without killing everybody on board.
- Maybe add some kinetic missiles for when you do want to actually destroy a ship. You don't need to carry a lot since you wouldn't do this often, so missiles are probably more economical than a gun and the systems mass it entails.
- A big enough hab to have a decent number of crew to board and inspect ships with. Should include a brig and emergency med bay.

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>>54752451
It's not cheaper to use fighters. Unless your fighter is large enough to accommodate enough crew to facilitate rotating shifts and has enough space inside for sleeping quarters, a galley, a toilet, hygiene facilities, weeks of food, air and water and an enormous quantity of propellant it cannot possibly operate at interplanetary ranges.

This means you don't get to just build fighters, you need to also build much larger support vessels to carry those fighters as well as fuel and munitions for those fighters to wherever you want to employ them. Even if you intend to use the fighters defensively they still cannot be in operation for extended periods of time and must be based at a support facility which must contain habitation, fueling, munition storage for the fighters.

It may be cheaper to build individual fighters than it is to build a battleship, but building equal value of fighters to a battleship doesn't give you the capabilities of a battleship, the fighters must have continuous support to be useful and eliminating their support renders the fighters useless almost immediately.

If you want equivalent range and autonomy to a battleship or other kind of large combatant out of your fighters you need to build support vessels with equivalent drives and payload to the large combatant. The modern analogues of the support vessels and facilities fighters use are aircraft carriers and airbases.

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>>54756707
>>54740447
It does kinda depend on your assumptions. Is your primary weapon a swarm of tiny missiles or a giant laser? How well do your engines scale down? (real world engine types tend to scale up but not all of them scale down) Economics tend not to scale linearly so an equal tonnage in smaller craft may well be much more expensive than one big craft, though it could also go the other way.

You could make a case for smaller carried craft but even they wouldn't really be a parallel to fighters. They maneuver the same way as big ships do, they're not necessarily any faster, and they would still need some endurance. For a terrestrial analog, pic related is probably closer than a plane would be.

That interceptor (one of mine :3) is an example of one. Small carried ship, not a fighter. It's really small (relatively; it's still the size of a naval destroyer and could well fly for weeks) but it's no replacement for battleships - just a niche support craft. No dedicated carriers you'd have to worry about protecting either, you just strap a few of those to your battleship. I think it's justified in context but that's just with my set of assumptions.

>>54752702
I can't say, while I really like both silcore settings of heavy gear and Jovian chronicles, I'm the only one interested in those games where I live so I never had a chance to play them.

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So space fighters seem to have a bad rep in hard sci fi, but what about gunboats and patrol ships only big enough to do some extra planetery trips, or bigger corvettes and cutters to patrol the system?
Also fighters could be used as very maniobrable planetary/asteroid/satellite protectors, where big space ships wouldn't be able to turn very fast.

>>54759567
The limit to your ability to maneuver isn't only dictated by the size of your ship but also by the G tolerance of your crew. A robot ship will always and invariably be able to pull maneuvers probably violent enough to outright kill a human. A robot ship (presuming you have the efficiency and delta-v to do so) could pull a constant 10G burn without any harmful consequences while a human could only tolerate such accelerations for a short time before dying. A robot ship could pull violent 20+G maneuvers and not pass out or die while a human almost certainly would, and wouldn't be able to do so multiple times without a mounting risk of injury or death.

I'd wager that capital ships will mostly be carriers armed with powerful lasers and anticapital/antisurface torpedoes, possibly an RKV weapon or high velocity gun, and a large volume of robot fighters who's simple AI will allow them to operate independently of their mothership to carry out simple tasks ("go there, patrol this route, kill anyone without the clearance to be there", "Fly to here, attack this target that we will be lighting up with our laser"). I would speculate that by the time space travel is mundane and governments reach out into it computers will have advanced enough that they can make the simpler decisions and arrive at a conclusion of what to do as quickly if not more quickly than a human could, and therefor they will dominate the small space warship role.

>>54759655
I dunno if I would let ai drones with weapons, even if dumb, imagine if some one hacks them. At worse they could go full skynet in our asses.
Also, history has told us than we will advance a lot less in some areas than we think and a lot in others we never ever tought about, so I'm really hesitant to say things like that because not so long ago people tought we would be living in a blade runner/ciberpunk distopia with flying cars and androids for everyone or even in mars for 2020.

>>54759898
>I dunno if I would let ai drones with weapons
You would. Why do I say that? Because we already trust cruise missiles and heavyweight torpedoes to autonomously accomplish pre-programmed missions without any post launch human intervention. This has been the case for decades and nobody bats an eyelid about it. The idea that people will not trust computers to make life or death decisions in military situations is complete fiction, we already do and the range of decisions that we are willing delegate to computer systems consistently increases as those systems are demonstrated to consistently make correct decisions.

Also a military whose leadership consisted of Luddites who are afraid of technology and subsequently refused to use robotic drones is denying itself a capability for no benefit and placing itself at a disadvantage. That kind of policy would survive exactly up until the point that a war happened and they realized they were taking casualties, building manned craft and spending time and money training people to do a job that some off the shelf consumer electronics could do.

>>54760241
I can only imagine the propaganda disaster that would result from sending manned fighters to fight robotic drones, resulting in a shitload of fatalities on one side and zero loss of life on the other. I'd like to see the sweating politicians trying to explain to the families of the pilots why exactly their family members were in harms way at all when the enemy apparently didn't feel the same way.

>>54742399
Because it's a spaceship designed during the 80's with technology available during that time period.

It also uses nuclear shells and the propulsion nukes to fire X-ray lasers at the aliens.

>>54760280
It's entirely realistic for military forces to come up with completely wrong doctrines based on erroneous assumptions about the nature of threats they face. In particular this is likely if the doctrine is developed during peacetime and during a period of rapid technological growth.

A good example would be british naval air defense doctrine preceding the second world war. The royal navy incorrectly assumed that the airborne threat to warships would be high altitude bombing and that aircraft would ignore destroyers and only attack capital ships and subsequently developed the High Angle Control System fire control system, which was designed entirely for long range anti-aircraft artillery fire and had near zero close range anti-air utility and designed anti-aircraft guns which only had a maximum elevation of 40 degrees.

The result was that the RN went for much of the war with a fire control system so ineffective that it ships with it claimed only slightly more aircraft kills than those with no fire control system at all. The average amount of shells required to shoot down a single aircraft intended to be 136, in practice was estimated as 2,000-10,000.

However, they weren't just being retarded. They just reached a faulty conclusion based on limited information and developed a weapon system that was strictly limited to a specific niche that wasn't actually useful, lacked the versatility to counter the actual threats that existed and wasn't even good at its intended job anyway.

You can put this kind of dumb mistake in your universe if you want, just remember to have characters acknowledge the problems it causes and to try and correct them.

http://navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-066.htm

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>>54764140

>>54751997

asking again, just wanna play a cool space sci-fi with my group at some point, and i've no idea where to start looking without going somewhere established like star wars/trek, which, while great settings, focus a bit less on the ship-to-ship combat stuff

>>54766880
Traveller, GURPS Spaceships.

>>54761852
Mind you, the RN was more competent than the RAF.

>>54760241
>You would. Why do I say that? Because we already trust cruise missiles and heavyweight torpedoes to autonomously accomplish pre-programmed missions without any post launch human intervention. This has been the case for decades and nobody bats an eyelid about it. The idea that people will not trust computers to make life or death decisions in military situations is complete fiction, we already do and the range of decisions that we are willing delegate to computer systems consistently increases as those systems are demonstrated to consistently make correct decisions.
Meh, more or less correct, in reality there just needs to be a guy to say yes or no to these actions. However this does not take into account that these weapons have not been used against an enemy of similar strength and technological standing as the anon brings up the very real concern of hacking these systems, these very expensive systems. Therefor it seems more reasonable to trust drones and the like when launching missions against the space equivalent of hajis and manned and dumb systems for anything close to what you have, I am also sure cyber security will have its own room on board.

>>54760280
>I'd like to see the sweating politicians trying to explain to the families of the pilots why exactly their family members were in harms way at all
Because they were soldiers, were they under the impression they would live a long and comfortable life during wartime?

>>54768198
I love this picture and want the artist to do more.

>>54768414
Military services have a responsibility (in many cases an actual legal responsibility) to the personnel who serve in them to respect the value of their lives and their service and not to place them in needless danger. Service members expect to face danger due to enemy action and the inherent dangers of operating heavy machinery, they do not and should not have to expect danger due to systemic organizational incompetence.

You might remember the 2006 RAF Nimrod crash, where 14 RAF aircrew died because the RAF was using ancient, badly maintained maritime patrol aircraft to do the job of an unmanned drone. The response from the British public was not "Oh that's just part and parcel of military service" it was a massive media outcry accusing the RAF of incompetence, a board of inquiry, review of the Nimrod program and a successful lawsuit against the ministry of defense in which the MoD admitted that it had failed to uphold its duty of care for the servicemen who died.

If a military develops a doctrine or practice that results in casualties that might have been avoided they absolutely will face a massive blacklash over it.

Also in a purely pragmatic sense soldiers are a valuable military resource and wasting them in a time of war is criminally negligent.

>>54742399
Bear in mind it was built after Earth was already invaded, using what was on hand. If you don't know Michael and haven't read Footfall, please leave the thread until you have.

I'm not trying to be mean, the novel really does great an illustrating the challenges of combat in space.

>>54768414
Soldiers don't sign up to die for their country. They sign up to make other people die for theirs.

>>54769051
>Military services have a responsibility (in many cases an actual legal responsibility) to the personnel who serve in them to respect the value of their lives and their service and not to place them in needless danger.
Correct, as determined by their superiors, public opinion holds no sway here. And they swear no oath to respect their lives but to respect military property.

>You might remember the 2006 RAF Nimrod crash, where 14 RAF aircrew died because the RAF was using ancient, badly maintained maritime patrol aircraft to do the job of an unmanned drone.
An unfortunate incident of incompetence, yes.
>Nimrod program and a successful lawsuit against the ministry of defense in which the MoD admitted that it had failed to uphold its duty of care for the servicemen who died.
They should have said they failed to uphold their duty to care for property of the RAF, and then told the public to stay out of military affairs.

In short unfortunate incidences happen and should be avoided, and sometimes this is due to incompetence and others to a failure in doctrine and judgement.

>>54769207
>They sign up to make other people die for theirs.
Then they're doing it wrong, that's only half the fun.

>>54769419
>public opinion holds no sway here
That's not true at all. In a democratic country with voluntary military service public opinion is important. Things that damage the public perception of the military harm the military both politically and in its ability to recruit and retain personnel and a loss of confidence in the service in the eyes of servicemembers will have a negative impact on morale.

>>54769528
>That's not true at all.
It most certainly is. The military is not a democratic institution, it cares not for the opinions of the inferior and the uninitiated, the only civilians that matter to the military is the governing body which commands it. However such institutions are fluid and situations change, indeed in a severe enough disaster the line between government and military become irrelevant if they are not removed completely. And on subjects such as public perception and confidence, these things hold no realistic value, the military deals with actuality and force, it matters not what you think so long as you do as you are told, if there are not flattering opinions they will be censored, if there are not enough recruits they will be conscripted. Such an event requires the right circumstances of course, a disaster to the nation and a threat to its people. Or maybe not, perhaps a coup, in such a land as the English isles perhaps it could be done. It happened in Ukraine and Turkey.

>>54769840
>the only civilians that matter to the military is the governing body which commands it
Who are politicians, in the case of a democratic nation, elected ones, whose careers are based almost entirely on public opinion.

>>54770061
True, another failing of the democratic system.
We can only hope these politicians do the right thing and disregard public opinion.

>>54768414
>>54760280

I'm going to attack this from another angle. The soldiers themselves might not be so keen on the idea their lives are being wasted.

We like to think that military discipline is some kind of iron clad law which trumps all other concerns, but that's never been really true. The effectiveness of all military organizations ultimately rest on informal negotiations between soldiers and their commanders. The soldiers agree to follow orders, and the commanders agree to respect certain boundaries or law concerning the treatment and compensation soldiers. When either side breaks their end of the bargain or cross certain boundaries.

Near the end of WWI, the German Navy ordered the German Fleet at Kiel to raise anchor and attack the British Naval Base at Scapa Flow. It was essentially a suicide mission, designed to cripple the British Navy at expense of every ship in the German Army. When the soldiers got wind of this, they muitnied. These orders were perfectly lawful and strategically reasonable, but they failed to realize that soldiers are still human beings who want to live. If the soldiers like feel they're lives are being wasted, or they're being put in danger of certain, they'll respond.

>>54770468
>I'm going to attack this from another angle. The soldiers themselves might not be so keen on the idea their lives are being wasted.
Whoa, who said anything about wasting lives?
>The soldiers agree to follow orders
Amend that to "soldiers follow orders given by the officer or get the closed end of a rope".
>When the soldiers got wind of this, they muitnied. These orders were perfectly lawful and strategically reasonable, but they failed to realize that soldiers are still human beings who want to live.
This reminds me of a quote by a US naval Captain after catching wind of a rumor of mutiny. He said something to the effect of "I would sooner take a match to the magazine myself should such an event occur."
Faithful soldiers and admirable officers make miracles.

>>54770569
>Whoa, who said anything about wasting lives?

I was going back to the idea that sending soldiers to fly fighters against an army of drones is wasteful, both materially and in terms of moral.

>Amend that to "soldiers follow orders given by the officer or get the closed end of a rope".

You ideal fantasy world in which soldiers always obey officers and military discipline is always followed or else is a fantasy. All agreements are ultimately negotiated. If you push someone too far, they will eventually stop following you.

> This reminds me of a quote by a US naval Captain after catching wind of a rumor of mutiny. He said something to the effect of "I would sooner take a match to the magazine myself should such an event occur."
Faithful soldiers and admirable officers make miracles.

Soldiers are only faithful if its ultimately worth it to them. Faith does not stop bullets, or send money to families, or put food in bellies. You treat your soldiers poorly, waste, their lives, refuse to pay them, whatever, and even the loyalest solider will eventually mutiny.. You can see this again during World War I - you can keep sending men to deaths, but when whole armies decide its not worth it, what are you going to do? Execute them all?

>>54771014
>I was going back to the idea that sending soldiers to fly fighters against an army of drones is wasteful, both materially and in terms of moral.
I fail to see how. You notably insist on ignoring the role of cyber warfare and weapons that can render drones (and other hardware) useless.
>You ideal fantasy world in which soldiers always obey officers and military discipline is always followed or else is a fantasy.
There are several armies,divisions, and regiments throughout history that have faced the issue of "follow orders or else" usually ending in follow orders with a heavy helping of or else and some third options sprinkled in.
>If you push someone too far, they will eventually stop following you.
And push them farther still and they'll fear what will happen if they don't.
>Soldiers are only faithful if its ultimately worth it to them.
Debatable but I can see the logic.
>Faith does not stop bullets, or send money to families
No, but it does a good job of keeping bodies in the way of bullets. And why would those families get money? All they get is a letter of recognition, the deceased's belongings and not a bullet in their heads for treasonous actions.
>or put food in bellies
True, ration vouchers do that.
>You treat your soldiers poorly, waste, their lives, refuse to pay them, whatever, and even the loyalest solider will eventually mutiny
Two of those things should be avoided, but it's easy to not treat them poorly, the enemy does it. As for pay they aren't getting a dime, they get food and whatever they can send home that isn't of value to command. And they may mutiny, but they will not necessarily succeed.
>when whole armies decide its not worth it, what are you going to do? Execute them all?
I can try but I can't promise anything, honestly I have a lot of options here, bomb them, leave them where they are, hold their families hostage. Not an ideal situation but I have room to work. I could avoid this with proper indoctrination of course.

>>54771301
>You notably insist on ignoring the role of cyber warfare
I hope that you're just confusing cyberwarfare with electronic warfare because the role of cyberwarfare in a tactical situation is "none" because it requires the target to have exploitable, unaccounted for software vulnerabilities and for the attacker to know what those vulnerabilities are ahead of time and to also have access to the information system they are trying to attack. Because of that actual cyberattacks have to be orchestrated significantly in advance of the attack itself, which is why you see them used for espionage and sabotage of infrastructure.

What you probably actually talking about is electronic warfare which consists of destroying, confusing or disabling sensors or damaging electronics. Something that disables the sensors of a drone will also do the same thing to the sensors and electronics of a manned fighter and both will be rendered useless.

>>54756707
>...it cannot possibly operate at interplanetary ranges
That depends on your crew requirements, which are what you make them. And even so, what you've described is basically a small gunboat (attached to some large tanks of propellant, sure), which is a lot closer to a fighter than it is to a battleship.

Do fighters need bases? That depends on their role. Stick a good space superiority platform on a propellant bus, orbit it over to Jupiter, detach, and start your mission. Kill the pirates, or whatever. A space fighter, unlike the airborne kind, doesn't crash when it runs it out fuel, and doesn't need to maintain its speed to stay aloft. It'll need a base eventually, sure, but keep that in orbit around your home planet, don't send it out into harm's way.

It's maybe just semantics, but the idea that everything travels through the same medium is the key. So you might say that a tiny one- or zero-man space combatant isn't a fighter, it's basically just a very small battleship. And that's fine. All I'm saying is that two very-small battleships have an important capability that a single large one does not: the ability to be in two places at once.

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I'm working on some stuff.

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>>54738513

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>>54771899

>>54757288
You did the Nikito-ega? Holy shit son, you're featured on Atomic Rockets. Also my nigga for realizing that liquid breathing is the superior method of allowing for piloted ships.

>>54771301
This is the edgiest post I've seen in a long while.

>>54771758
>What you probably actually talking about is electronic warfare which consists of destroying, confusing or disabling sensors or damaging electronics. Something that disables the sensors of a drone will also do the same thing to the sensors and electronics of a manned fighter and both will be rendered useless.
Yes, this is the thing I meant, and that's why I mentioned other hardware as well.

>>54771853
When people say "fighter" they almost always mean "small manned combat vehicle with 1-2 crew". In this case the amount of time the craft can be engaged in its mission is limited by the biological requirements of the crew, which means you get about 18 hours before you pilot has to sleep otherwise his performance will begin to degrade substantially. Even with ridiculously powerful and efficient drives interplanetary distances will take at least days, but much more likely weeks or months of travel.

By the time you're designing a "fighter" that can accommodate a human occupant for that kind of time period the term "fighter" becomes inapplicable.

It seems like you're trying to tell me that building just one of the largest possible ship you can build is not a good idea, as if that isn't self-apparent, but it's equally the case that building only the smallest possible craft you can build is also a bad idea.

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>>54726976
Armada is fun. I don't know what all this shit is though.

>>54770150
well aren't you just an unpleasant fascist asshole

so anyone else here play Dreadnought, cause it's pretty fun

>>54772413
Hey, the post of mine that you responded to originally doesn't even use the word 'fighter' - all I said was "you can only afford to build a few battleships, compared to many smaller ships." You're the one who found fault in that, somehow.

So yes, I'm saying that building one of the biggest ship possible isn't smart. But I'll slightly disagree on the second point: as long as everything scales evenly, you DO want to build the smallest ship possible, or at least the smallest ship that can meaningfully accomplish the task you envision sending it to do.

In the ocean, we build big ships because they do things that two small ships can't. A big carrier doesn't launch twice as many planes as two small ships half its size - it launches many times more, and launches ones that physically can't land on a smaller ships. A destroyer is actually outgunned by an equal sized flotilla of missile boats, but we make destroyers because they can cross oceans and the missile boats have to stay coastal.

In space it's very nearly all equal. Size requirements will be determined by the largest non-scalable subsystem, but I think if that's your crew you're doing it wrong.

>>54772949
I am all of those things but they are not necessarily reliant on the other. You limp-wristed anarchist shit stain.

>>54772983
I would imagine so but alas it's not on xbone.

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>>54772056
spes

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>>54775484
Doing another ship right now, very unfinished. Bonus inty for scale.

>>54740585
Take a note from the expanse, and place your decks perpendicular to the axis of thrust, AS THE GODS AND HEINLEIN INTENDED.
Also, http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
read it, learn it, and then you'll really know how to break the rules (and have several new plot points show up)

>>54773085
And the post of mine that you responded to, and the post that post was responding to were specifically about fighters.

>>54775484
>>54775504
Those are cute,CUTE.

What it's the tonnelage do you enjoy for your ships? Traveller like, Star wars/40k like, homworld like (my personal prefered)?

>>54778142

>tonnelage

What is this?

>>54772050
This makes me feel all Itano down there..

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>>54778171
A bad traduction of tonnage, sorry. You could call it displacement tonnage (in water) more or less correlates with the size do you enjoys in your star ship(for example the Yamato had 72,800 dt), be it an Imperial Super Star Destroyer with millions of dt or the Firefly with a few hundreds dt at most.

>>54775949
Yeah, it seems like we got caught up in a semantic argument. Sorry about that - I feel like a lot of time in these threads is wasted over deciding on the right nouns.

In terms of what classes of ships there will be, the major factors (in my opinion) would be your drive type and your mission package. Since it's fiction, we can be a little flexible in adjusting technologies such that we don't get stuck in a tactical monoculture (all missile-boats, giant deathstars, etc.). Atomic Rockets suggests the distinction between missiles and torpedoes be that missiles are high-thrust/low-duration (running off chemical rockets, perhaps) and torpedoes are low-thrust/high-duration (using the same drives as ships). You might make the same distinction between ships: interplanetary warships might use a different drive system than your orbital defense monitors, perhaps.

>>54773850
It's fine, gramps. Go back to sleep.

>>54778295

I see. I guess on my setting things will keep their old names, tonnage and role seems complicated, with the names I can do powerlevels but on space.

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So, plausible classes of Space crafts oriented to fight intra-solar system? Would space ships designed to operate between moons and stuff be used in combat if there is something of value to protect?

>>54780733

They probably would have some sort of defence aginst bigger ships who are above intra solar range.

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>>54780769
It really would depend of what class of FTL magic they use. Wormholes are easy to defend, you only have to put war stations around them to snipe anyone coming from them with bad intentions. But something like jump or wrap, unless they have to use static points are a lot less easy to defend.

>>54780987

Well, perhaps low level lasers and missiles to fight pirates and maybe drones and skirmishers

>>54780733
Imagine a war between two planets. Each has orbital resources (communications satellites, orbital solar panels, some shipyards) that need to be defended. Each planet could send out a fleet of some type, but depending on the drive technology of your setting the actual route in is pretty much fixed. There's basically nothing you can do to prevent being intercepted. The other problem is that, once the fleet had been sent out, it is very difficult to return quickly or alter course significantly.

The strategy seems like it would (or could) boil down to a fleet-in-being policy for whichever side felt weaker - by keeping their mobile warships close, they can continuously threaten to sally and attack the enemy home world, while staying close enough to stay in peak readiness and under the protection of less mobile planetary defenses.

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>>54785309
Seems a good hook for mercs, people would hesitate a for fear to lose they stuff, but sending private contractors would, if expensive, at least give you a good leeway to do things.

>>54786256
At the very least, there's some room for a war that's not immediately won by the stronger side. That's a common problem in space combat: because there's so little meaningful terrain, it's really easy to fall into the trap of designing a system where everyone goes their missiles and then everyone dies, and whoever had more people left over afterwards is the winner.

Attrition warfare is never fun, but especially not when you were promised coo space battles.

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>>54732630
SDBsword is just Vic Viper.

>>54772056

What's liquid breathing? Also, how could space fighters even work? There's no way a pilot could react at relativistic speeds.

>>54786525
For some reason I can't grasp hard sci space battles. I found the lost fleet ones to be quite cool, and seemed quite hard, do you know any good book with good space battles? I'm starting the mote in god eyes right now.

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>>54778295

Can someone explain to me where the idea of captial ships having to fire from lightyears away in space combat comes from?
It seems like that would be insanly easy to dodge considering lasers go in a straight line and don't go faster than the speed of light.
What exactly makes space combat as seen in star wars or star trek so implausible.
inb4 oh anon

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>>54787033
I think the same desu, specially when lasers lose lots of power with diffraction and aren't very efficient to start with.
>>54787013
I ever found Star Wars ships to be too large, specially the imperial capitals.

>>54787033
Lightyears? To my knowledge, ship to ship combat pretty much never happens at that distance. You might see anti-planet kinetic kills, but nothing against something that can dodge.

>>54787033
>captial ships having to fire from lightyears away
>lasers
They usually aren't firing lasers, but relativistic missiles manufactured by the hundreds and other esoteric superscience weaponry. And battles are expected to take place over tens of thousands of kilometers, not at visual range or so absurdly far that you better have future-seeing machines to predict enemy movement.

>>54787033

Where does cap ship combat happen at lightyears? In most places you get thousands or in some cases millions of miles, but never light years. The closest thing I can think of to that is the Dreadnought from Star Trek Voyager or the Galaxy Gun from Star Wars, and those are missiles with their own FTL.

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>>54787116
>I ever found Star Wars ships to be too large, specially the imperial capitals.
I always found the ISDs were the perfect size. At 1600 meters/1 mile, they're huge and imposing, but not retardedly big for the sake of big. They emphasize the overwhelming might of the Empire.
And the Executor being even bigger is just fine since it's one of a relatively small handful of command ships.

In the years since, there have been too many sci-fi properties that throw in ships that are tens of kilometers long simply for the sake of having giant ships fighting other ships of similar tonnage, rather than one side being large as exemplary power over the other.

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>>54787300
>>54787116
>>54787013
We can't discuss giant Star Wars ships without the good ol' Freudian Nightmare.

>>54787257
At that point doesn't it kinda become pseudo magic anyway?
Although I tend to find hard scify to actually get pretty close to that anyway.
From what I gathered star trek is considered harder scifi then star wars and the first 4 episode are all about mind reading psychics fucking everybody up. Might as well have been a D&D campaign.

>>54787116
That's a pretty neat ship. And I always prefered star wars for the fighters for that reason. Although the star destroyers shape is very neat.
The arc 170 in that pictue is my absolute favourite fighter btw

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>>54787300
For one I can see why the Imperial Destroyers were that way, they were a power projection wet dream of a galactic wide Space Empire, only one of those would make any star system piss they pants, but then for some reason, a tiny corvette could ram them and destroy one of those or tiny bit interceptor fatally wound (with his tiny bitty mass) a 17km large space ship. Power levels in Sw are weird as fuck too.

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>>54787472
In both cases, they had had their defenses beaten down before those blows were struck.
The ISD in R1 had been ion-torpedoed and the Executor's bridge shields were knocked down and that one A-Wing hit that one in a million shot at Allahu Ackbaring it.

>>54787321
The extended universe was a mistake.
>>54787375
Yeah, I love Sw fighters and the small ships in general, I have a weird boner for the Y-wing myself, used to main it when I had five years or so with the SW X-wing vs tier fighter game. For some reason I had internet in those times (I'm talking early early 90') without a word of english, heck I barely could read and played the shit out of it.

>>54787472
In real life, if its defenses have been disabled, a carrier can be taken out by a single nuclear anti-ship missile. They're basically the modern equivalent of a star destroyer, a massive power projection tool used to scare the crap out of people. Most things can be destroyed if they don't have active countermeasures in place, even really big things. Size alone isn't much of a defense when you have weapons powerful enough to level cities, you need something like a fighter screen of your own.

>>54787375
Yeah, people say that Star Trek is hard, but only because they're comparing it to pure space operas. It's squishy-soft, but makes a few occasional nods to reality. It does at least have some combat occuring at long range, but because they have access to casual superluminal travel it isn't really that impressive.

Hard(er) universes have combat take place at very long range because in space, missiles and rail-guns have infinite range, and your sensors can detect enemies at very long range. So as soon as you see someone, you can start shooting, and you can see someone from across the system.

>>54787534
you know, in this moment I can appreciate some of the batshit amazing logic used in Rogue One.

>"None of our ships are powerful enough to break through the planet gate or take down the star destroyers!"
>"But... Maybe their ships are powerful enough! RAMMING SPEED!"

>>54787621
Dude I owned xwing alliance for years never got past the first rebel mission until this year. Game is amazing just took down a star destroyer with a ywing. The feels man why did they stop making those games!

>>54787839
But how do you hit someone from that far away with rail guns? Missiles I get but a sub light speed bullet hitting something moving that far away.
I have never read a book with battles like that so I can't picture it but I really want to.
Mass effect suppoosedly worked liked that but those battles look just like starwars (just worse).

>>54788762
Duno, but there is a lacking of good space fighters games (specially with a campaing), house of the Dying sun and not much more than I remember of late. Strike suit zero could count but it's more a mecha game.

>>54788800
You aim.
No, seriously, there's no atmosphere and no gravity (not as important as the no atmo). This means THAT IT DOESN'T SLOW DOWN.
Lead the target (easy), and fire a radar-absorbent coated metal slug at their projected location (since you know their distance and velocity, and a few seconds to minutes of observation will get you the track, and you know the velocity of your ammo, you can cross reference time to target distance and move the target point along the track until the matrix of time to target and projected target position at time of impact aligns)

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>>54788970
In a combat situation they are constantly making little manoeuvring thruster burns in random directions to avoid this kind of thing, you would either need to fire a shitload of railgun slugs to have a chance of hitting the opponent at longer ranges through pure volume of fire and luck or just use a burst of guided rounds.

Unguided railgun slugs are actually relatively short range weapons.

>>54731724
Fighters would stay primary weapons unless energy shielding was developed. Otherwise a squadron of fighters could just find and destroy a whole fleet with nuclear-tipped missiles.

If you have shielding which can take missiles though you'd need harder hitting large weapons that can only be mounted on large ships

>>54788970
That's about half right. Because of how easy that would be, any warship that knows it's going into enemy fire will vary its thrust and heading occasionally. Even a slight variation will cause unguided shells to miss by kilometers.

The best use of rail-guns (in my opinion) is as a launch mechanism for getting missiles and large munitions to the general area of the target. That way, your missiles can be much smaller - you don't need the boost phase at all, just a terminal phase.

File: ExeFile 2012-12-20 14-57-44-07.jpg (169KB, 1600x900px) Image search: [Google]

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>>54756707
Is that legit concept art? I like the caldari redesigns in general, but that looks noting like the orignal kestrel.

Seems like they're getting rid of all the boxy asymetrical ships, makes me sad. I liked the state ships when it seemed like they gave 0 fucks about anything but functionality.

>>54789631
That actually sounds pretty damn cool. Probably gonna use that idea at some point. Thanks for explaining it. Hoping there will be some more info in the thread tommorow.

>>54789631
Random heading changes would be a nightmare of fuel consumption and mechanical stress.

>>54789520
You are correct, in combat situations - any railslug is going to have attitude thrusters and a small engine.
In a surprise attack, you don't need it, as long as you can hide it from radar.
Or even better, all railslugs have radar-absorbing covers - because then you have the option for a surprise attack from massive distance.

>>54787033
There's an exceedingly long middle ground between WW2 battles in space and popping ships right across a solar system.

If you had low tech, you could easily justify combat ranges down to anywhere from dozens to thousands of km, with encounter speeds in the single digit km/s. This is still a lot longer ranged and a lot faster than Star Wars battles where ships (including the fastest ones) lumber about at what must be hundreds of meters per second and sit right next to each other. If you have higher tech, it only gets faster and longer ranged from there.

>>54787534

There is absolutely no way four fighters should be able to disable what is classified in universe as a "medium-weight peacekeeping battleship." I hate "plucky rebels" trope because is leads to shit like rag-tag fleets being able to overpower huge warships without effort or a single squad of infiltrators being able to destroy a whole dreadnought. Why would anyone bother building huge warships like star destroyers or dreadnoughts when you can take them out with a small squad of fighters?

>>54790004
If what you're doing is dodging unguided projectiles at massive range, it really doesn't need to be much. Nudge yourself 1 m/s in any direction and you'll no longer be there when the projectiles reaches you.

At really extreme ranges, this also applies to lasers. Where that gets fun is the realization that you will have a shorter effective range against a ship that can jink harder, so you might end up with capital ships with giant death lasers which place an emphasis on maneuverability.

I don't understand why the Executor or any ships for that matter would have an external bridge. The bridge ought to be deep inside the hull, buried under several feet of armour. I can understand an observation bridge, because on IRL battleships, the command crew would operate from an unarmoured observation bridge until battle began. Once any enemy ship was sighted, they'd move to an armoured battle bridge, which was often more heavily armoured than the ship's belt or turrets. The Executor's command crew should have moved into an auxiliary bridge inside the ship's hull once the Rebel's entered the system.

>>54790800
>no way four fighters should be able to disable what is classified in universe as a "medium-weight peacekeeping battleship."
Except World War 2 battles, where carriers ruled and planes killed battleships, is generally what Star Wars runs on.

You can REEE on the mysterious lack of fighter screening though.

>>54790800
The capital ships took down the shields and then the Y-Wings, which are heavy bombers, came and delivered the ion torpedo payload.

>>54790977

Star Wars is based more around large fleets than squads of fighters. We see a lot of fighter, yes, but ships as large as the Imperial-class have energy shields designed to stand up to sustained turbolaser fire. That, combined with point-defences, should render them invulnerable to anything but mass fighter spam, which a tactic the Rebellion is against.

>>54791023

This excuses a lot, but it also begs the question as to why star destroyers are not hardened against ion weapons. It's not like ion weapons are a rare thing.

>>54791047
>hardened against ion weapons
I don't think anything in Star Wars is protected against ion weapons, or even has the technology to protect against them. Droids, fighters and warships are all vulnerable to ion weaponry. Jawas disable R2 with ion blasters in episode 4, entire Star Destroyers get disabled in the Battle of Hoth in episode 5, etc.

>>54791150

R2 is a tiny droid though and the ion cannon in TESB was powered by the reactor of a Praetor star cruiser, which is around three times the size of an Imperial star destroyer.

>>54790977
>Except World War 2 battles, where carriers ruled and planes killed battleships, is generally what Star Wars runs on.
Ehh. Sort of.

>>54790949
>because on IRL battleships, the command crew would operate from an unarmoured observation bridge until battle began.
That was the idea, it was called the conning tower. But captain and admirals still used the bridge.

>>54790004
You wouldn't even need heading changes. In theory, just turn the engines off (or on) for a random amount of time, and you're varying your velocity by a few meters per second - enough that any rangey railgun sniper will miss by a few football fields (to use standard Murican distance measurements). Of course, I don't think a little heading change will hurt - tap the maneuvering jets a little to add a perpendicular component, and again you've got a miss from so far you can't see it.

A shell with little thrusters like you describe is much more my preference. Railgun purists tend to get caught up in wanting "cheap" dumb shells, and miss out on those options. Making it radar absorbent is probably a losing battle, though - no matter how absorbent you make it, it's probably reflecting a lot more than the infinite expanse of nothingness behind it. Absorbents tend to only work best against a particular wavelength, and lose effectiveness pretty quickly against systems that use multiple wavelengths. But that's a tech assumption on my part - maybe stealth will keep up with sensors better than I expect.

>>54789802
Thanks. I tried my hand at a spaceship combat game a few years back (I think it's still on 1d4chan somewhere), and while I was never really happy with some key parts of it, the railgun thing was one I was proud of.

>>54733241
>The advantage to a fighter over a drone or missile is that they have a decision making human being in them.

In Transhuman Space, you have AKVs, autonomous kill vehicles. They are missiles that can ram an enemy for tremendous damage, piloted by AIs. The AI has an archive copy made just before launch so that if/when it dies, it will come back.

However, for many missions you don't need to expend the whole AKV, or you want to screen your mothership against enemy AKVs. For this, the AKV is equipped with a weapon such as a coil gun or laser. The coil gun can launch kinetic kill munitions or nuclear bomb pumped x-ray laser. The akv can do its mission and then return to it's mothership.

Basically it's a fighter with no need for life support, not subject to the limitations of human biology, and able to do a kamikaze mission without dying permanently.

>>54789520
You could always just use bracketing with multiple railguns. That and you have to think about possible tactics perhaps early railgun equipped ships could be organized into lines to maximize effectiveness much like early hand guns.

>>54769150
>If you don't know Michael and haven't read Footfall, please leave the thread until you have


Fuck that was a great book. Seriously people who haven't read it really need to leave and read it before they come back.

>>54740311

That's Awesome.

>>54782157
consider yourself a newfag

>>54786687
The interceptor can spend hours burning at 4-6 g, which would normally be fairly unpleasant. The solution is to immerse yourself in a liquid of similar density to your body which gets you better g-tolerance. That goes for your lungs too, otherwise they'll get smushed. It turns out human lungs can handle liquid just fine, so if you have a suitable oxygen-bearing liquid, you can breathe that. Imagine how weird it would be though.

Crew in a spaceship (which probably won't be moving at relativistic speeds) isn't gonna be aiming or even flying manually most of the time. They're gonna make tactical choices on trajectory and expending ordnance and other consumables, overseeing all the automation on board the ship and intervening when necessary, and so on. If there is crew at all. I like to have crew, but the ships are still like 99% automated.

>>54738711
I mean other than the shuttle.

>>54751205
capital ships, fighters, tanks, mechs, armored suits, submarines, naval vessels, air superiority craft, all exist in battletech.

>>54791579
Sure, but if you want it to be able to return to the Mothership, it still needs twice as much propellant as one that isn't planning to fly home. AKVs are about the closest to space fighters we'll get, though.

>>54791512

The captain and any other officers would retreat to the conning tower when the battle began.

>>54799615
That was the idea. But it wasn't always (if ever) done that way.

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>>54802378
Fuck, wrong thread.

>>54802427

>when the navigator fucks up

>>54796648
Four times as much, if you want to be technical.

>>54802511
Wouldn't be better to only brake and let the mothership come to you?

>>54802622
Moving the mothership will use even more fuel.

>>54740585
"I'm creating a Space Opera setting, but I want to do some research into Hard Sci-Fi as a foundation for the setting's internal consistency."

Atta.

>>54802622
Damn, you're right. Can't believe I forgot that.

>>54806687
Meant for
>>54802511