Skyfox, on Sep 30 2005, 06:51 PM, said:

I think it would be really cool if solar sails was kinda a throwback to the sailing ships. Can you say glory days of piracy? Yarr. Space Pirates. Now there be one mighty fine idea thar.
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What about Mini-Magnetosphere Plasma Propulsion? That has the possibility of being able sail without the dangers of nasty meteorites destroying it. It protects your spaceship from radiation at the same time.

That would be cool. Still, it'd take a more than a year to get to Europa with it. I guess we'd be pretty restricted to Venus/Mars/Moon, as far as craft with personel goes.

Really folks, you're all jumping the Gun, here...

How we get between planets and systems will determine the dynamics of interstellar warfare:

When your FTL is restricted by inconviniences that restrict it to specific points, like wormholes or the even more ubiquitous "jump points", these locations become easily isolated choke-points, favoring a defense, unless one can find a new "warp point" that lets you bypass those defenses. Therefore, interstellar war favors the defensive, and warfare is limited to rare but massive assaults, and lots of scouting for warp points.

When your FTL is less restricted say, only limited by gravity wells (Eg. the Honorverse), warfare tends to favor the offensive, space is large, and attack can come from any direction. In this paradigm, the attack ALWAYS has the advantage, becaue he can concetrate forces on the objective, while the defender, uncertain of what to defend, must split his forces. Warfare tends to be free ranging, as both sides try to take the offensive.

When FTL is made extremely unrestricted, such as in Star Wars, or Alan Dean Foster's "The Damned" series, and Jumps acan be made almost to, or even into planetary atmosphere, Warfare becomes a series of "planetary seiges" with teh areas immediately around impotant locations being the sole focus of warfare.

When you have no FTL, or must still use Relatavistic travel even with FTL, like in Ender's Game or The Forever War warfare becomes extrmely disjuctend, with the possibility of "lost fleets" still fighting thousands of years after the war has "ended". Furthermore, offensive warfare becomes extremely difficult, as ajny attack fleet will be using outdated equipment by the time it reaches it's objective.

So untill we have a paradigm, it's really hard to say what were going to be shooting with.

A point though, I'd have say that Space Fighters are terribly unrealistic. Methinks fighters are cool to look at, but the only reason we even have the idea of spacefighters is because we culturally still haven't gotten over Star Wars.

Especially note the bolded in the following excerpt.

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SPACE FIGHTERS. Small, fast, highly maneuverable COMBAT SPACECRAFT. They have very limited range (never FTL), and no crew habitability to speak of; they can only operate for at most a few hours at a time. The crew is limited to one person, or occasionally two. At least among EARTH HUMANS and ALIENS with FOREHEAD RIDGES, these are usually males in their early twenties, known for their swagger, coolness, and fast moves on any attractive female of an INTERBREEDABLE species.

Because of their short range, Space Fighters usually must be carried into action by TRANSPORTER ships, though in some cases they will be carried piggyback on other, larger Combat Spacecraft. Their tactical value is unclear, since the are really just small spacecraft themselves. Since they don't operate in an essentially different medium, the way aircraft operate in a different medium from surface ships, there is no fundamental reason why they should be all that much faster. In naval terms they are more analogous to motor gunboats than to airplanes.

Mostly Space Fighters fight each other, which is logical enough in itself but doesn't explain why they are used in the first place. Only two other missions can be identified for them:

1. To destroy gargantuan BATTLE STATIONS, which are vulnerable only to attack by Space Fighters.

2. To give prominent roles to young males in their early twenties, so they can display their swagger, coolness, and fast moves on any attractive female of an Interbreedable species.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/l...aceguideS-Z.htm

And i must say, not everyone here seems to get physics...

Coolest Spaz, on Sep 16 2005, 03:15 AM, said:

Rail guns.... I dont think they will be using those you forget that a railgun the size of the ones we have here on the our current Battleships would literally roll the heavy ship. Unless they had thrusters or sumthing to that extent to counter the roll but I still think it will be to strong and probably tear the ship in half if they decide to use counter thrusters. They will more than likely use recoiless cannons. Hense "Lasers". Though you do not really need to consentrate the beam, yet you can "charge it" so to speak to create a high heated pulse of energy. Thus creating a very highly damage able projectile.
~Sp@Z
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Railguns have recoil but lasers dont? What universe do you live in?

put a laser projector in microgravity, and fire it, and it will accelerate so long as it is firing.

On a lighter note:

UE_Research & Development, on Sep 17 2005, 07:53 AM, said:

Operationally, saying 'we'll adapt atmospheric fighters to space combat' is as ridiculous as saying 'we'll adapt nuclear submarines into long-range strategic bombers by giving them jet engines'.
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Heh. In The Course Of Empire converted Submarines get used as Spaceships.

Why fighters?

Say you keep building capial ships. Everyone has capital ships. You can only get so big, and especially if everyone else is making bigger, slower, more ponderous ships with smaller and better defended weak points someone is eventually going to get around to making a smaller ship designed to attack those smaller, more isolated weak points. These ships, being smaller and therefore faster and more manouverable than the big cap ships, will be harder to hit with the big cap ship guns, as they tend to be specialized to hit large, capital-ship shaped targets. So what do you do? You make your own smaller, faster, more manouverable ships designed to a) target the other guy's small ships and do the same anti-cap ship raiding that the smaller ships were initially designed for. Or you make antifighter guns. Something tells me that a combination of the two will be implemented, in a manner very similar to today's navies. This is the logic that I eventually used on my own TC, and it makes a great deal of sense to me. Remember in early naval aviation, the planes were primarally anti-ship in nature, with anti-fighter roles coming later.

Size does not correlate to speed.

Size may have some impact on acceleration, but not much. As a ship gets larger or smaller, it can be assumed that the engine will be scaled to fit. Thus, it may be assumed that a drive with a linear effeciency rating will provide the same acceleration as long as the mass/drive ration remains the same.

While you might be able to fit an oversized engine onto a small ship to provide a large amount of acceleration, you have the problem of fuel. As in, not enough of it.

As well, with the higher acceleration rates, you risk injury to the crew.

About the fighter issue, fighter-scale weapons cannot harm larger ships- they would need to deliver large explosives, which would leave little room for anti-fighter weaponry on anti-ship fighters. So, the primary purpose of your anti-fighter fighters would be shooting down "torpedo bombers" (which, as someone pointed out, can also be referred to as "missiles", as I see no reason for them to be manned).
So, which is better at anti-missile/torpedo work, fighters, point defense, or both?

Edwards

Admiral Benden, on Oct 2 2005, 04:23 PM, said:

Size does not correlate to speed.

Size may have some impact on acceleration, but not much. As a ship gets larger or smaller, it can be assumed that the engine will be scaled to fit. Thus, it may be assumed that a drive with a linear effeciency rating will provide the same acceleration as long as the mass/drive ration remains the same.

While you might be able to fit an oversized engine onto a small ship to provide a large amount of acceleration, you have the problem of fuel. As in, not enough of it.

As well, with the higher acceleration rates, you risk injury to the crew.
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True. In space, without air resistance (or friction of any kind), it is possible to reach any speed with any ship, no matter how large. However, acceleration is important, and in turn, so is mass. F=MA means that the larger the mass you're accelerating, the more force is required, as you said. However, I think that this is important. As I mentioned previously, the biggest battleship in the universe is only so much use if the raider corvettes used by the enemy can skip in and out, accelerating too fast for you super-ship to feasibly intercept.

As for the fighter debate, as well as having advantages based on the above point, keep in mind that in order to have big guns on capital ships-only situation, if you want any kind of turret capability, these are going to be slow moving turrets. Why do you need fast? Everything moves fairly slowly. Then you introduce fighters into the equation, spitting rockets at you when your guns are pointing the other way, and you have a big problem. rmx has summed up the situation very nicely.
Finally, for anti-fighter action, I think that the ideal is to have a mixed fleet. You have a few big cruisers for anti-ship action, a carrier at the rear to provide fighter support, and then anti-fighter frigates, armed solely with PDS to deal with attacking fighters. They'd be reasonably speedy to outrun enemy capital ships, and would be able to fire off light turreted weapons rapidly and rotate aforesaid weapons fast enough to keep fighters in their sights. Think of modern day warfare - its mostly based around carriers at the rear, with escort cruisers to deal with anything that gets too close.

Edwards: I think that the ideal would be both. Fighters as a 'spearhead' to try and destoy incoming enemy missiles/torpedo bombers before they got too close, PDS to eliminate anything that got through the net.

Finally, we also need to take into account any additional technologies around. As I said before, even equipping ships with holograms of space would muck up gunnery a bit. If someone worked out some sort of actual cloaking device... well, imagine a squadron of fighters that swarmed through a fleet, only decloaking to fire? The defenders would be lucky to hit anything but each other.

Sure, the engines may be scaled to fit. So if you have a capital ship, by that logic, you're going to have some huge engines with a few guns strapped to the sides with no furthur considerations? If you have a large ship it is going to be for things other than just housing the engines. So although it may be possible to have a large ship that could accelerate as fast as a smaller ship- such as a fighter- it would not be practical, as some of the mass of a ship has to be for things other than the engines. If you have a warship the environs may be spartan, but you still need room for the weapons, the magazines, the crew and all that having a crew entails. Probably, even not a carrier, room will have to be made for enclosing other smaller ships for various purposes. Armor is a definate consideration. So a compromise somewhere must be made between engine power and ship capacity.

Edwards- fighter-scale weapons cannot harm a capital ship? Tell that to combat pilots and the navy. There is a reason that anti-aircraft guns esist By having pilots, fighters and bombers can react and manouver more creatively- as well as having greater discression in targeting and deployment than a single-use missile. A missile must undergo a greater development time than a pilot, which is expensive and error-filled (Patriot, anyone? Just an example.) and cannot improve with time or be taught new techniques, nor pass thier skills on to new generations of little bonnet-clad missiles. If it was as easy as firing a bunch of cheap missiles we wouldn't bother with having military aircraft today- the guided missile cruisers and destroyers in service would more than suffice. Even discarding the fighter analogy, even destroyers did not exist untill torpedoes came into real use- nececcitating a smaller ship designed to hunt and kill torpedo boats and escort ships-of-the-line, only later aquiring an anti-submarine role. Cruisers were initially seriously underarmored,light and fast battleships designed to outrun what they could not destroy. The various types of ships all have very specific roles- they are not just arbitrary names thrown on a vessel, and even fighters, bombers and short-range craft have a place in line

Not trying to be rude, just defending my point- I am also very tired and my wording is auful. I just got off work.

This post has been edited by rmx256 : 03 October 2005 - 07:35 AM

rmx256, on Oct 3 2005, 01:13 PM, said:

Sure, the engines may be scaled to fit. So if you have a capital ship, by that logic, you're going to have some huge engines with a few guns strapped to the sides with no furthur considerations? If you have a large ship it is going to be for things other than just housing the engines. So although it may be possible to have a large ship that could accelerate as fast as a smaller ship- such as a fighter- it would not be practical, as some of the mass of a ship has to be for things other than the engines. If you have a warship the environs may be spartan, but you still need room for the weapons, the magazines, the crew and all that having a crew entails. Probably, even not a carrier, room will have to be made for enclosing other smaller ships for various purposes. Armor is a definate consideration. So a compromise somewhere must be made between engine power and ship capacity.

Edwards- fighter-scale weapons cannot harm a capital ship? Tell that to combat pilots and the navy. There is a reason that anti-aircraft guns esist By having pilots, fighters and bombers can react and manouver more creatively- as well as having greater discression in targeting and deployment than a single-use missile. A missile must undergo a greater development time than a pilot, which is expensive and error-filled (Patriot, anyone? Just an example.) and cannot improve with time or be taught new techniques, nor pass thier skills on to new generations of little bonnet-clad missiles. If it was as easy as firing a bunch of cheap missiles we wouldn't bother with having military aircraft today- the guided missile cruisers and destroyers in service would more than suffice. Even discarding the fighter analogy, even destroyers did not exist untill torpedoes came into real use- nececcitating a smaller ship designed to hunt and kill torpedo boats and escort ships-of-the-line, only later aquiring an anti-submarine role. Cruisers were initially seriously underarmored,light and fast battleships designed to outrun what they could not destroy. The various types of ships all have very specific roles- they are not just arbitrary names thrown on a vessel, and even fighters, bombers and short-range craft have a place in line

Not trying to be rude, just defending my point- I am also very tired and my wording is auful. I just got off work.
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Amen. We've ended up with the current naval system through trial and error to combat all possibilities. Space combat will evolve through similar methods to produce a similar result, and unless something turns up to seriously mess up conventional warfare tactics. If you see what I mean.

There is an advantage to smaller ships. Say you are in a ship of arbitrary mass, and that mass is proportional to the force you have (so the acceleration will be the same for any ship), then, if they have a gun pointed directly at you, and you accelerate perpendicularly to the shot, the smaller ship will dodge and the larger ship will just get hit in a different part. A larger ship has a larger target sillouhette and a smaller surface area to mass ratio, both of these bad.

Smaller ships with surfaces covered either in radiators or weapons would have an advantage, unless the larger ships compensate for lack of hardpoints by carrying ammo.

If faster than light travel was possible, how would faster than light weapons work? Our current theories of time and space would be seriously broken if FTL really existed in any meaningful sense, so lets just see how far the current paradigm would go, if expanded a good hundred years (ie assume moores law continues to hold and we don't find a way to go faster than light.)

NebuchadnezzaR, on Oct 3 2005, 04:24 PM, said:

There is an advantage to smaller ships. Say you are in a ship of arbitrary mass, and that mass is proportional to the force you have (so the acceleration will be the same for any ship), then, if they have a gun pointed directly at you, and you accelerate perpendicularly to the shot, the smaller ship will dodge and the larger ship will just get hit in a different part. A larger ship has a larger target sillouhette and a smaller surface area to mass ratio, both of these bad.

Smaller ships with surfaces covered either in radiators or weapons would have an advantage, unless the larger ships compensate for lack of hardpoints by carrying ammo.

If faster than light travel was possible, how would faster than light weapons work? Our current theories of time and space would be seriously broken if FTL really existed in any meaningful sense, so lets just see how far the current paradigm would go, if expanded a good hundred years (ie assume moores law continues to hold and we don't find a way to go faster than light.)
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Hate to burst your bubble, Neb, but I think that we've eliminated FTL as a scientific possibility. It could be possible to go very fast, especially if you found some way of removing your mass from existance (try putting 0 into the above equations), but FTL is not possible.

Mind you, if you're taking FTL to mean any feasible form of interstellar travel (or similar), then it makes more sense. Anyone read Star Wars: Dark Empire 2? The 'Galaxy Gun' fires off huge missiles that go into hyperspace, come out right next to the target, and then give said target a one-way ticket to hell, 3rd class.

<Ponders> That could be really terrifying, actually. It would cost ridiculous amounts, but if you build a warship-sized missile, give it a decent amount of armour/shields/whatever and accelerate it to huge speeds, things get scary for the defense quickly. Of course, building something like that would, as aforesaid, cost inordinate amounts of cash and resources...

From a scientific standpoint, ACCELERATING past c is impossible. Transfering out to unknown particles that may already be traveling faster then light is a theory, while highly improbable is outside of our current understanding of the universe. Therefore freely open to speculation and theory. Take a look at http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Part...r/tachyons.html or just google Tachyons. I think it is highly IMPROBABLE that this form of FTL travel exists, hower FTL particles cannot be ruled out entirely. But that steers away from the combat aspect. This thread is suppose to be about generating/thinking about futuristic weapons, not whether or not FTL exists.

I've never understood this part about the 'TREK universe. If you have teleporters, why not just beam a friken nuke aboard the enemy ship? End of Story.

I think we will see teleportation come about sometime in the future, all it is is simply compressing matter into information, sending that information, destroying the parent matter and instantly rebuilding the object at the other end. Trick is just getting computers accurate enough to do part A, bandwidth large enough to do B, a way to do C & D with out killing someone (via q-entanglement you would exist in both places at once, then kill off one side of the entanglement.), and figuring out how to do D.

Perhaps a form of a sheild that disrupts energy would be able to make the teleportation screw up.

EMP weapons: Disabling & Boarding Parties

EMP weapons would be a very interesting concept, firing a small projectile that when it comes into contact with the enemy hull generates a Electromagnetic Pulse, disrupting and disabling the ships electronics systems. The question is, would the reactor be sensitive to the EMP burst, having your reactor go boom wouln't exactly be a survivable event, unless ships are desgined with a long neck and the crew portion up front, so that a reactor blast eats up the rear portion of the ship, but the front portion remains intact.

Boarding Parties is an interesting idea to play with, would the marine transport literaly ram the other ship, penetrating the hull and then vac-suit marines unload into the enemy vessel doing their stuff, or perhaps just the simple lock docking hatches. Would a standard starship crew be outfited with heavy personal weapons to defend themselves?

There's plenty more to think about, gotta go to class.

Nice, Satori, but you emphasized the wrong part. This is the real reason to have fighters:

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2) To give prominent roles to young males in their early twenties, so they can display their swagger, coolness, and fast moves on any attractive female of an Interbreedable species.

So far the only theoretically feasible way for information (not mass) to be passed "faster than light" is by quantum entanglement, which requires STL transportation of mass to set up, but once it's set up could conceivably transport information "instantaneously". Of course, even quantum physicists aren't certain exactly how quantum physics works, especially in light of most quantum mechanics being based on the probability of a given outcome, rather than a specific outcome always being the result of a specific input, so the whole thing is ahem uncertain, and hasn't yet been cough resolved.

Chrome Falcon, on Oct 3 2005, 12:46 PM, said:

Hate to burst your bubble, Neb, but I think that we've eliminated FTL as a scientific possibility. It could be possible to go very fast, especially if you found some way of removing your mass from existance (try putting 0 into the above equations), but FTL is not possible.

Mind you, if you're taking FTL to mean any feasible form of interstellar travel (or similar), then it makes more sense. Anyone read Star Wars: Dark Empire 2? The 'Galaxy Gun' fires off huge missiles that go into hyperspace, come out right next to the target, and then give said target a one-way ticket to hell, 3rd class.

<Ponders> That could be really terrifying, actually. It would cost ridiculous amounts, but if you build a warship-sized missile, give it a decent amount of armour/shields/whatever and accelerate it to huge speeds, things get scary for the defense quickly. Of course, building something like that would, as aforesaid, cost inordinate amounts of cash and resources...
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Uh... what? I was doing the bubble bursting myself. I never said it was, and in fact said this conversation would be better off if we dismissed the possibility.

FTL always and only means Faster Than Light, so anything that falls into that category is what I was talking about. Indeed, FTL missiles would be spooky. Ill give you a hint, the warp trails of a ship coming out of hyperspace towards you are backwards. They would start at the point where the ship is traveling at c (impossible) and go both directions, both towards and away from the observer from there. So you obviously wouldnt see it coming.

Qaanol, on Oct 3 2005, 02:29 PM, said:

Nice, Satori, but you emphasized the wrong part. This is the real reason to have fighters:
So far the only theoretically feasible way for information (not mass) to be passed "faster than light" is by quantum entanglement, which requires STL transportation of mass to set up, but once it's set up could conceivably transport information "instantaneously". Of course, even quantum physicists aren't certain exactly how quantum physics works, especially in light of most quantum mechanics being based on the probability of a given outcome, rather than a specific outcome always being the result of a specific input, so the whole thing is ahem uncertain, and hasn't yet been cough resolved.
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This doesnt really work. There is no way to actually transmit data between to quantum entangled particles. The particles, if you dont observe them, freely fluctuate between anti particles and particles, and the pair always adds up to zero, but there is no way to control which particle you have once the waveform collapses, so all you have really done is taking a black and a white marble, put them in pouches, and taken the pouches to the opposite sides of the planets. No information is conveyed because the choice was random.

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I've never understood this part about the 'TREK universe. If you have teleporters, why not just beam a friken nuke aboard the enemy ship? End of Story.
...
Perhaps a form of a sheild that disrupts energy would be able to make the teleportation screw up.

You answered your own question.

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I think we will see teleportation come about sometime in the future, all it is is simply compressing matter into information, sending that information, destroying the parent matter and instantly rebuilding the object at the other end. Trick is just getting computers accurate enough to do part A, bandwidth large enough to do B, a way to do C & D with out killing someone (via q-entanglement you would exist in both places at once, then kill off one side of the entanglement.), and figuring out how to do D.

Clever use of the word 'simply.' Anyway, it is much more complicated than you make it sound, and quantum mechanics makes it nearly impossible to re-create a 'perfect' replica of the target object. While this matters neither on the macroscopic nor mocroscopic scales, we may find that these tiny subtleties are what defines personality/etc. People also talk about teleportation as conversion of matter into energy and back. First of all, they are already one in the same, and second of all, what of the energy present in the person? What if your neuronx is firing at the moment? I am quite certain that creating a duplicate of a human being but causing all of the currently firing neurons to suddenly not be firing will result in a mightily dead human.

As for the EMP thing, if you can hit the hull with an EMP device, why not just stick a nuke in there instead? That is, unless you want to hijack the ship.

Boarding is always messy. Close quarters combat in unfamiliar terrain is evil.

Right. In order for entanglement to convey information there would have to be a method of evaluating whether a probability wave has collapsed without collapsing it in the process. Which we don't have.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Oct 3 2005, 12:18 PM, said:

You answered your own question.

A sheild that scrambles incoming energy would make sensers useless, completely. So perhaps futuristic engagements would be done entirely blind. That would be awkward.

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Clever use of the word 'simply.' Anyway, it is much more complicated than you make it sound,

No really?? :laugh:

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quantum mechanics makes it nearly impossible to re-create a 'perfect' replica of the target object. While this matters neither on the macroscopic nor mocroscopic scales, we may find that these tiny subtleties are what defines personality/etc. People also talk about teleportation as conversion of matter into energy and back. First of all, they are already one in the same, and second of all, what of the energy present in the person? What if your neuronx is firing at the moment? I am quite certain that creating a duplicate of a human being but causing all of the currently firing neurons to suddenly not be firing will result in a mightily dead human.

Well, we already have a primative form of cryogenic, we could slow down the neuron firing rate of the subject to a point where our mega-gargantuan multibillion-terrahertz computer can handle. But yes, that is the real problem can we just rebuild someone, or is there some other aspects of personality that can't be transfered through raw information.

Just because it looks next to impossible from todays standpoint doesn't nessisarily mean that it won't be possible with future technology. I think we will make at least some breakthroughs in the next 100-200 years. Have some imagination, be creative.

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As for the EMP thing, if you can hit the hull with an EMP device, why not just stick a nuke in there instead? That is, unless you want to hijack the ship.

Well, a salvaged vessel is always more usefull to your side then space debris. Especialy if it contains the enemies computer codes.

rmx256, on Oct 3 2005, 06:13 AM, said:

Edwards- fighter-scale weapons cannot harm a capital ship? <snip> ... By having pilots, fighters and bombers can react and manouver more creatively- as well as having greater discression in targeting and deployment than a single-use missile.View Post

I should put a couple more lines in that post:
I can see no reason for fighters to have human pilots, assuming someone comes up with a good combat AI in the next few hundred years.
Fighter-scale cannons cannot do very much damage to capital ships, although bombs, etc. can (these torpedo bombers/missiles would likely be more than a single-target warhead, although with a properly-done computer "pilot" they wouldn't need to return).

NebuchadnezzaR, on Oct 3 2005, 01:18 PM, said:

There is no way to actually transmit data between to quantum entangled particles.View Post

I would like to refer you to the January 2005 Scientific American, specifically the "Quantum Encryption" article (page 3). It mentions an actual, successful experiment using quantum entanglement to transmit data. Admittedly, it is rather limited so far, and there are other reasons for teleportation to not work, but your objection doesn't hold water. Sorry.

Edwards

Edwards, on Oct 3 2005, 08:02 PM, said:

I should put a couple more lines in that post:
I can see no reason for fighters to have human pilots, assuming someone comes up with a good combat AI in the next few hundred years.
Fighter-scale cannons cannot do very much damage to capital ships, although bombs, etc. can (these torpedo bombers/missiles would likely be more than a single-target warhead, although with a properly-done computer "pilot" they wouldn't need to return).

I would like to refer you to the January 2005 Scientific American, specifically the "Quantum Encryption" article (page 3). It mentions an actual, successful experiment using quantum entanglement to transmit data. Admittedly, it is rather limited so far, and there are other reasons for teleportation to not work, but your objection doesn't hold water. Sorry.

Edwards
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Ah, I appologise. I thought my data might have been outdated and I was right (wrong), thanks.

There are a number of weapons (plasma/ion/etc) we dismiss because of limited range. Perhaps this is the purpose of fighters, to get a mini weapon platform close enough to deliver high power, rapid decay energy weapons. And yeah, AI might be a big deal, but that machismo argument actually holds some water. People do what they want to do, and war is not objectively self serving, it needs to prove something about the relative manlinesses of the two sides. This psychological aspect really depends on the evolution of culture.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Oct 3 2005, 08:07 PM, said:

Uh... what? I was doing the bubble bursting myself. I never said it was, and in fact said this conversation would be better off if we dismissed the possibility.
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Lo siento, senor. I misunderstood.

The idea about fighters as close-in weapons platforms reminds me of an idea for a ship that I came up with a while ago. Essentially it was a small carrier equipped with a cloaking device, which launched remote-control fighters. That way you could never tell where the ship that was controlling the fighters was, the lack of a cockpit would strip a lot of room off the fighter, and you didn't have the possibility of losing a good pilot due to a small mistake.

Of course, jamming the signals would make that pretty useless, but it's not impossible that some bright spark might come up with some sort of unjammable transmissions...

This post has been edited by Chrome Falcon : 04 October 2005 - 10:49 AM

Chrome Falcon, on Oct 4 2005, 11:47 AM, said:

Lo siento, senor. I misunderstood.

The idea about fighters as close-in weapons platforms reminds me of an idea for a ship that I came up with a while ago. Essentially it was a small carrier equipped with a cloaking device, which launched remote-control fighters. That way you could never tell where the ship that was controlling the fighters was, the lack of a cockpit would strip a lot of room off the fighter, and you didn't have the possibility of losing a good pilot due to a small mistake.

Of course, jamming the signals would make that pretty useless, but it's not impossible that some bright spark might come up with some sort of unjammable transmissions...
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not only unjammable, but undetectable. If its REALLY cloaked, then the RC signal couldnt get out, if it isnt, it is essentially shining a flashlight into the night.

Perhaps sending each fighter off on a predetermined mission with a rendezvous(sp?) point, so they do their mission in radio silence, then either dock with the mothership, or, if it is unavaliable, self destruct as to hide the routing orders.