Wouldnt smaller craft such as starfighters be useless in space combat?

I think your ignoring the basics under which most games operate. If you discuss them with the people who know the physics, its always a lot more complex than is immediately apparent. There are a lot of assumptions built into space games, and a lot of argument over the physics model used.

I'm not aware of what model Sins uses, but X3 for example assumes some measure of subspace usage, especially for stopping (subspace anchor some called it).

Talking basics though, isnt speed a factor of burn rate and weight ? So a small fighter with a superior burn ratio will attain a much high speed than a carrier. As long as it continues to burn, it will continue to gain speed, regardless of size.

In terms of our technology level now, anything above a couple of g's is too punishing anyway, but all space games assume inertial dampners are standard and there isnt any g factor to the burn.

sorry, highschool student. evaluate?

Well, acceleration = force/mass. So the bigger the ship is (= bigger mass) the less acceleration it can generate (with the same power engine) and therefore the less manoverable it is.   Mass doesnt change with gravity.

Objects in space may be weightless, but they still have mass. Weight is the amount of force that gravity exerts on something (i.e. how much the Earth pulls on it), so a common misconception is that objects in space, being weightless, react to forces the same way. This is not the case. Gravity does not come into play, but other forces still do.

Think of being in a swimming pool... If you are floating in the pool with Michael Moore, who I estimated to be somewhere around 400 lbs., and you (being 190 lbs.) try to push him, what will happen? Well, despite being suspended in the pool, he has more mass and therefore instead of him being pushed away from you, you move away from him. Its that equal-and-opposite thing Newton was babbling about.

The real advantage in small ships is maneuverability and speed. It takes a boatload of energy to get a 1,000,000 ton battleship moving from a standstill, but a little "starfighter" can go from 0-60 in half a second. To compound the advantage, they can make extremely fast turns because they don't have to worry about centrigufal forces tearing open the billions of joints that make up a battleship.

Tactically, small fighters are invaluable. If I were to argue against them, I could only say they weapons given to them in SINS are pitiful. An good starfighter would first and foremost be a nuclear warhard delivery system, not a simple bomber.

ACK ANOTHER SPACE DEBATE THREAD! These can get hairy.

Yes, fighters might be useless when we start getting into space, but if they didn't use them in the game then I would think it would definitly be duller. I llike seeing all the fighters buzzing around in Sins and following them through the battle as they pass the big starships is AWESOME!

Added Note: If we have to discuss the physics of space then let me set ground rules. Here is the only rule.

1. The Internet is out of bounds, no searching Physics sights or Wikipedia. Only your own knowledge. (I just realized how hard that rule is going to be to enforce.

Here is a quick fact I did learn in a Physics class back in high school. (not to prove any points just FYI)

1. Objects in space are not actually weightless. You could be hundreds of thousands of miles or kilometers (depending on your country) away from the Earth and you would still be pulled by it's gravity. But the pull would be so minor that it wouldn't affect you, so you experience the sensation of weightlessness.Your weight is determined by the amount of pull gravity has on you. So in space you always "weigh" something.

There you go. There is an equation, but I can't think of it off the top of my head and the Internet is Out of Bounds, so no equation for you. Anyway, enjoy the discussion!

Ah lol, welcome to the world of science fiction forum discussion.

Sorry, I promise I'll shave the first chance I get.

Force of gravity = (mass of oject 1 * mass of object 2)/distance between them^2

If you go far enough from anything, eventually the pull of gravity will be so small you can ignore it. Yes, it is there, but only after several hundred decimal places...

Yes that is true as I said, to quote "But the pull would be so minor that it wouldn't affect you, so you experience the sensation of weightlessness." But my point is still valid, since weight is a measure of how hard gravity is pulling on you, in space you always weigh something because you are always being pulled on by something. Even a star BILLIONS of lightyears away is pulling on us right now on earth and astronauts in space, but the force of the pull is SO small that it has no noticeable effect if an effect at all.

Lets say you are out in space and no stars or planets or anything exists in the universe besides this one planet and you are far enough away from it so that the planet's  gravity is pulling on you with a force of 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000004 whatevers (can't remember the units but as you can tell very small pull, scientific notation would ruin the point also) Then that is what you weigh. You still have weight no matter what, it just can be be so insignificant that it won't affect you in any noticeable way. And that was my point.

I just thought of something, does Atomic Lattice Armor for the Vasari (Armor 4.5>5, Mass -4%>-8%) make your Strike Craft and Capital Ships move faster since it decreases mass?

I dont shave for anyone, sorry !

Camcan13, I dont remember anything from high school so have no context for changing what I said.

I think this argument comes up with the release of every real time space game thats been released so far. The physics is always wrong for someone !

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Fighters, the 'guy-in-a-cockpit' variety that we know and love, isn't something that's will realistically occur in any universe, bar maybe Asimov-esque 'no computers' universes.  They make very little economic or military sense, mainly due to the 'guy' part of 'guy in a cockpit'.  Hauling several hundred kilos of soggy human and the assosiated support equipment along, when said human can be outperformed by several kilos of electronics (higher acceleration limits, better reaction time, lower chance of getting cancer and dying mid-mission...) is not the kind of decision that indicates a great military.  You'll also need enough extra reaction mass to haul your ship home - yet more mass and effort that is utterly superflous to whatever mission the craft was tasked to perform.  Hell, what kind of lunatic would become a fighter pilot, anyway?  The absurd amounts of high-energy radiation that abound in a warzone would fry a pilot after a single mission, even if he pilot escaped being irradiated by their own high-performance engine.

Take the pilot out, however, and you've got quite an effective military unit.  Even an absurdly large capital ship can be taken out by a hit or two at interplanetary velocities.  Sure, the fighter will lose to dust grains, but all it takes is a couple of good hits to eliminate something that cost far more than the fighter squadron did.

Of course, at this point you have a missile bus, not a fighter craft, but the point remains the same.  There will always be a place in space combat for small, absurdly fragile ships. 

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I think Sins did a pretty good job representing fighters in their game. None of us here can even begin to say what space combat will actually be like in the future, but I like it how big of passes fighters in Sins make on their targets. The fighters scream past the ship and fire their missiles and they get pretty much to the other end of the solar system before they slow down and get turned around, then they make their next pass. In my opinion a very good representation of how long it takes to slow something down traveling at high speeds in space even if that wasn't their intention.

The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second.

Assuming a range of say 20 kilometers, a light speed beam weapon would strike the target in .000067 seconds.  Yeah, it's fast.

One simply has to take the maneuverability and speed of the target to determine whether dodging is possible.  If a fighter is ten meters in radius, that fighter need only change position at one two thousandth the speed of the projectile.  In the case of a light speed beam weapon, that means being able to shift position by ten meters in .000067 seconds.  That's an acceleration of oh... 4.5 billion meters per second or so?

Dodging beam weapons is, shall we say, unlikely?  Of course, you only need half that to get missed by a perfectly accurate targetting system if you're changing direction at the exact instant that the lightwaves used to target you bounce off your ship.

Less impressive projectile weapons have much much slower speeds, and are actually quite likely to be dodge capable.  You can only accelerate a mass so fast without running into nuclear fusion.  Other problems are likely to pop up much much faster.  Current railguns fire projectiles in the thousands of meters per second.  At those speeds, dodging them is simplicity itself, but impossible for a large battleship kilometers long.

The internet is a science discussion poster's best friend.

There is a neat thread that discusses real space combat, and I think the consensus in the thread was that strike craft would not be useful.  Unless perhaps they were kamikazi, all engine and fuel mass and kinetic kill vehicles - not sure if this idea was mentioned in the thread.

Just realized I sort of restated Photino's post 12 on the kinetic kill strike craft, still I think a pilot may make better decisions over an automated algorythm run craft - based on my experience with AI in games to this point.

hey, i no im prob alittle late to this question and after reading about 2/3's of the thread i decided to jus answer. a small ship has less inertia than a large ship, and so a large ship would need alot more force to get it up to speed, and a hell of alot more to stop. personally i dont think the small fighter craft can handle the stress being put on the craft, and so a small fighter zipping around deep space prob wont happen unless a really really really strong material is found and there is a way to negate the forces on the pilot. also the reason we "feel' weightless is space is because while in orbit we are in a constant state of free fall moving thousands of miles an hour and there is almost no friction to slow us down. thats what i kind of hoped sins would have, like stuff would orbit the planet as if they didnt they would just fall to the planet, but i guess this makes the game less frustrating.

Of course, in theory, it would be better to remove the pilot from the fighter.  But where's the fun in that?

I think that most space games assume a propulsion and navigation system/tech that still resides in sci-fi for us.  Speed is irrelavent as is the assumption that battles happen in any particular way.  there is the possibility that the inverse of what we assume is at least a possibility in whole or in part. 

for example, one can assume that manuvouering ability is best served by a smaller object with no other gravitational forces acting on it rather than it's forward momentum and any other counter force.  A smaller object would react more quickly.

conversely, a large battleship with life support for 1000's and with the ability to stay in space for a long time would no doubt require huge amounts of room.  Imagine also that the engines required to move such an object at even once the speed of sound would seem to have it's work cut out for it when it takes less energy to move a 2,000 lb space vehicle rather than a 10X10^9 metric ton! 

however, you can flush all of this down the toilet if you merely take a look at recent advances. 

I can't see how a human pilot would ever be viable in a small spacecraft fighter unless for kamikaze runs, or at least not without some incredible artificial intelligence helping the pilot. 

My reasoning is that manuevering a craft that's supposed to be agile and precise would be insanely difficult. Aircraft on earth can make turns and such by using and manipulting air currents and resistance, but obviously in space you wouldn't have that. A craft has to be manuevarable by having propulsion systems attached to various points. Trying to coordinate the amount of engines that would be needed for movements in many directions quickly would very likely be quite difficult. At this point anyone designing a craft like this would probably just nix the pilot, make the craft less manuevarable and make it into more of a missle desingned for ramming.

So I doubt there will be any small one man space fighters and I can't see how there would ever be space dogfights as shown in many sci-fi movies(Star Wars is the first thing to come to mind).      

Don't mix NASA with space opera games. Strike craft are not useless in space combat because Star Wars clearly shows that they can be quite effective. Are you saying that Star Wars is wrong?

On a serious note, with out current technology we can barely build a space tin can which can poke its nose in orbit for a couple of days and then needs to go back. So we are a long way away from any kind of starship which even resembles those we can see in the movies. Not to mention the already overmentioned gadgetry like shields! and very convenient inertia dampeners. And no, you can't dodge lasers. So it doesn't matter if you can dance with your fighter, you are still going to get pwned. Probably from across the Solar system.

If anyone wants to get a pretty good idea of what future space combat might look like (though I hope human race will wisen up before it comes to that), read the Reality Dysfunction series from Peter F. Hamilton.

Basically ships launch swarms of sophisticated combat missiles, most of which are based on the MIRV principle, in the hopes of one getting through the counterswarms of the same and blowing up the opposing ship. Also they use arrays of various laser and maser weapons to try and cut each other in half. The fights usually last a few seconds.

I think that would make a pretty boring game, even though the book battles are very well written.

#1 current pilots are already aided by AI 

#2 any weaponry viable against craft abides by the same laws of physics as the craft.  thus, in space, the physics greatyly change. 

No ship can avoid a good laser, but if you can place your ship somewhere outside the kill zone before lead can reach your location, then you won't be easy to kill.

Also, some guns don't turn very well. A large ship with a spinal mounted gun can never maneuver to hit a fighter. Bigger guns usually means slower turrets, or at least you'd have to sacrifice turret armor to bring it up to speed. Both situations favor the utility of a small fighter craft, and the bombers that would feast on such targets.

The main appeal of a figher would be the ability to get in and out of firing range(or a firing arc) very quickly. Big guns will turn them into space dust, but that won't matter if the guns can't secure a firing solution in time.

For one possible scenario, you're patrolling around in your big ship, taking an encrypted route. The enemy has decrypted the route. They launch fighers from a week's distance away, spending two days accelerating towards your location. They're running cold after that, are tiny, and are nearly impossible to pick up on sensors if they're more than 20 mins away (except with their catapaulted speed you have 3 mins). A minute before before contact, they release their payload, and zip by you never to be caught. Forget shooting them, you have to keep your ship from blowing up! You had a 2 week window on patrol to be attacked, and out of that you had to be ready for an attack that would only last 5 minutes! Good luck making it to the bridge in time to get briefed. It's kind of an extreme scenario, but you definitely couldn't do that with a big ship!

Why not then just launch big missiles... they would be even smaller and even harder to detect. Or better yet, why not fire a big laser at your big ship and melt it? And while we are speaking of lasers, since they don't need bulky ammunition, they can be fitted on fast-turning turrets and deliver point defense of such precision no amount of dodging would help a fighter... they'd simply get sliced in half. That includes missiles. In fact, US military already has such a weapon, mounted on a plane, designed to pick off missiles and slice them in two.

Also, lasers do not have dispersion in space. So you could basically shoot a ship in the orbit of Jupiter from the Moon, if you knew where the ship is. Since in your scenario you stated that the trajectory of the big ship is known, a laser attack is all you need to do.

People make a classical mistake when they try to imagine space ships built as naval ships. In space, with immense velocities you can achieve with your projectiles and collosal energies you could release by zero-g laser platforms, armor means nothing. So no spaceship would ever be armored beyond the necessary coating to protect its hull from micrometeorites.

It takes light 8 minutes to reach Earth from the Sun. It would take 32 minutes for a laser from Earth to reach a ship near Jupiter. So, no, despite their range, even a highly focused and intense laser would only work if the target was dumb ebough to cruise in a straight line at a constant speed ALL THE TIME.