One thing I always missed in GalCiv2 was the lack of interceptors as a weapon. We all know a fighter can travel to another star which means they are not a one crew craft. There has to be a pilot, navigator, engineer, maybe some gunners. So my impression is the traditional Fighter in GalCiv probably has a crew of 3-10.
But what about truly one man craft that are short range slower than light? So I have some ideas.
1) an interceptor bay would be a large expensive module placed on a ship, multiple allowed. Relatively medium tech.
2) they would provide an across the board offensive increase by some balanced % for an entire fleet.
3) This would allow you to build a carrier that enhanced the whole fleet.
4) it really just behaves as an offensive modifier but the coolness value is there. Everyone wants Tie fighters and Colonial Vipers, even if it's just for show.
5) Quite a number of variations of techs could be researched: Interceptors, Advanced Interceptors, Bombers and so on. Each simply adding more of a modifier at each tech like the Stellar Marines does.
6) You can even add a planetary structure called Interceptor Base that would increase the offensive ability of ships in orbit or increases the HP or something, and can add a soldiering bonus when invaded. Makes it realistic...
A lot can be done with this without adding to much fuss to keep track of. I'm looking forward to hearing others ideas regard the topic.
You know carriers are being implemented. And tiny hulls are one mand craft, it even says so in galciv2. I don't know much else about carriers but as a condolence it is similar to your idea.
DARCA.
There are carriers and they can launch small ships from themselves, but we don't know what they're going to be like
Interesting, that is good news. It seemed like a no brainer but I'm not paying to play the alpha. Thanks for the info.
Anything for a guy/gal with a Planetary Deadlock forum handle
This "guy" was wondering what people think about having a dedicated structure for an interceptor base. If one is going to devote an entire tile to a structure it would be interesting to augment a race with a lower soldier score to even the odds against an invading force. GalCiv2 had "planetary defenses" but that is rather vague.
I'm sure it's a generic term for land/air/sea defenses but an interceptor base would be a super defense structure that could not stop an enemy from invading but would sure help destroy those pesky landing troops before they hit the ground. If I saw a transport coming to one of my planets and I don't have ships in range, I could quick buy an interceptor base to at least even the odds.
Any thoughts?
I guess the planetary defense improvement could be renamed or have a double.
why limit it to offense only?
what about defense or repair drone bays or some such?
I just watched the Dev Stream. I heard some about the carriers. I am pleased. Odd how I posted this one day before the Dev Stream. I suppose they were light years ahead of me. No pun intended.
I always thought it strange, the idea of fighters in space.
The reason fighters work on Earth (or a planet) is they travel much faster, and can carry weapons that can hurt the ships that they are hunting. This does not apply in space.
In space, the ships would travel faster and have the stronger weapons.
A closer analogy would be if submarines would launch frogmen squadrons to attack other submarines. With harpoons.
So true. I expect it to make tiny hulled ship more effective. If they don't need engines or life support they can have more defenses and weapons. Other than that it seems its they are here just to make people happy.
I once read a great article about how strike craft in space are a stupid idea. They are only used in scifi for the coolness factor, and cool they are (same for alot of things really)
It pointed out things such as:
-fighters can only be mobile/do dogfights in a atmosphere, such sudden movements in space require the entire engine output to be able to be directed in every possible direction and even then you don't simply change your momentum in a few seconds.
-the sheer scale of distances and speeds in space is nothing like you see in scifi, in reality ships would be many hundreds if not thousands of kilometers apart, making the pilots eyesight useless. This goes for weapons fire too, a pilot would never ever be able to dodge any space based weapon except for possibly a missile. This also applies to all the cool fights in asteroid fields, in reality there will rarely be 2 asteroids within a couple hundred thousand kilometers of each other.
-Fighters are too small to carry big powerplants, on top of that part of the powerplant has to be used for life support. Life support/the pilot/the cockpit also takes up alot of mass on the ship, making it less maneuverable. Because the ship cannot carry a big powerplant, the power of any lasers of mass driver weapons it may carry is limited, as such the only powerfull weapon it can carry is a missile type weapon. But each missile it carries increases the mass of the ship, further reducing its performance. As such, a missile performs better then a fighter in just about every way. Missiles also take up less space on a carrier then hangars and crew quarters etc, and are cheaper, the list goes on. a missile is much better then a fighter in just about every way.
wonder if i can still find that article.
edit: tvtropes seems to have some discussion on it but its not the article i meant http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/SpaceFighter
We also know lasers in space would be invisible as well as why Tie fighters scream when they fly by even though there is no air. It's simply for the cool factor.
I will point out that one thing that this type of argument commonly ignores is that if you want to use line-of-sight weapons at these kinds of ranges, you need to have very high accuracy in where you're pointing the weapon, especially when trying to hit smaller targets (if you're trying to hit a 1km target at 1000km, then it's not so bad - you 'only' need a 0.05 degree resolution on the weapon firing direction to come within 1km of the center of the target at 1000km; if you want to hit a 50m target at 1000km, you need to have 20 times better angular resolution to give the same error relative to the target's size, e.g. be off by 50m). I will further point out that guided weapons are subject to countermeasures such as jamming or various types of decoys, which are as liable to limit BVR combat in space as in atmosphere. Just because a mass driver projectile has theoretically infinite range does not mean that it has an infinite effective range.
Moreover, even if you do have the requisite level of accuracy in pointing the weapon in the direction you want it to fire, you still need sufficient accuracy in the sensor measurements to aim it properly in the first place, and all the countermeasures have to do is mess up your knowledge of where the target is just enough that you're off by that 0.05 degrees or whatever it is that makes you miss. Nor is it necessary for each vessel in the fleet to carry its own full suite of countermeasures, especially for the stages of combat which take place at extreme range (wherever that happens to be for the technology involved; I'm not saying one way or another whether 1000km or even 1000000km is extreme range, because without knowing something about the capabilities of sensors, jamming, and countermeasures, and the relevant aiming performance of the weapons mounts, I cannot reasonably come up with a limit on the effective range for the combats).
While I tend to agree with your point about the practicality of dogfights in space, I disagree with your assessment of the maneuverability of small craft, as that is entirely dependent on the thrust-to-weight ratio and which ways you can point it if you assume a reaction thruster; if you assume a reactionless thruster, then all bets are off because there's no practical example to use as a model. Additionally, within limits a smaller structure is better able to survive high-acceleration maneuvers than a larger structure is, and will have less momentum to overcome when performing said maneuvers.
Additionally, the main thruster need not be able to be directed in every possible direction as long as the vehicle itself can be rotated into the desired orientation. While lesser thrusters would necessarily be unable to redirect the vessel as rapidly as the primary thrusters could, they should be able to reorient the vessel without having to fight the vehicle's momentum, only its rotational inertia, and the rotational inertia of a smaller vessel should generally be lesser than the rotational inertia of a larger vessel, though of course the larger vessel can have more (or more powerful, or more and more powerful) maneuvering thrusters than the smaller vessel.
But how long does it need to have life support for? Certainly not as long as the larger vessels, if we're speaking of WWII-inspired carrier-borne fighters. If the expected duration of the combat isn't more than an hour or two, you could reasonably not include any form of life support on the fighter at all, and instead equip the pilot with a more advanced form of real-world space suits. Additionally, if we are speaking of WWII-inspired carrier-borne fighters, then the fighters need not have the equipment necessary for independent superluminal travel unless combat takes place at superluminal velocities or at ranges too great to allow the almost certainly less powerful fighter-borne weapons to be useful without some form of superluminal drive to get the platform (or the weapon) into a more effective range before combat is over.
Additionally, arguments about whether or not a small vessel can carry a sufficiently powerful powerplant to power the weapons and other systems it carries are rather pointless unless the setting is relatively hard science fiction (which isn't something I consider Galactic Civilizations to be) or unless we know something about component power requirements and the scale of both those components and the power generators. In fact, within GCII, the best evidence that we have points to fighters not only being something within the capabilities of the races involved, but also that fighters are capable of mounting the same kinds of weapons as capital ships without any loss in the performance of the weapon while maintaining similar levels of endurance and superluminal speed as the capital ships; this on a package 50m in maximum dimension which requires 2 crewmen, as compared to the capital ships which can be upwards of 2km in maximum dimension and a few thousand crew. And yes, I know that the capital ships in GCII can be built with better all-around capabilities, including maximum range and superluminal speed, but the point is that things that aren't all that much larger than modern-day fighters can be built in GCII and are more comparable with GCII capital ships than modern aircraft are with modern capital ships.
I'm not going to defend starfighters as a great and shining example of practical ideas in science fiction because I don't think they are, but I do want to point out that the arguments typically set against the use of starfighters are not necessarily correct, certainly not in all cases. Moreover, unless the setting is trying to pass itself off as hard science fiction, I really don't care whether starfighters are present in the setting; if they are present, then what I care about is that they seem reasonable within the rules of the setting, and from what I see in GCII I cannot say that I feel there's any great stretch in bringing starfighters into the picture for GCIII. Moreover, it's been indicated that carrier-borne fighter craft are going to be in GCIII whether you like it or not, so I would tend to say get used to it, or play with house rules that forbid their use.
don;t have much time right now, but yes it would be a hard setting. basically, anything a fighter does, a missile can do better.
another example is that a missile doesn't need to make a 2 way trip, which means that if it has the same mass/fuel as a figher, it can use 4x more fuel on range/evasive maneuvers then a fighter can, who would need that fuel to return to the carrier.
That would be completely negated by having wireless power transfer from the larger carriers, allowing the fighters to not have a power plant and only very small ion engines that don't require explosive reaction of propellant. And unless we have an organic operator/intelligent AI guiding the missile from the ship, then a fighter will be more adaptable
wireless power transfer has a whole slew of problems with it, if its a omnidirectional power field its power will drop off with the cube of the distance. at which point your better off using that power for a big canon. If its a directed/beam power transfer, the fighter cant be more then a few lightseconds from the carrier before the beam not hitting the craft becomes a serious problem because the carrier cant predict where the craft is going to go (and if the carrier controls the craft, that lag will get it killed). And again its more efficient to just use a lazer beam instead of the power transfer beam.
A missile is more adaptable then a fighter, because a fighter is limited by the G-forces a pilot can withstand, a missile is not. A AI controlled fighter doesn't have this problem but still faces all the other problems of a fighter.
A missile doesn't need to be more adaptable then a fighter, because you can sent multiple missiles each having the same payload as a fighter for the same cost as a fighter. Increasing your chances of bypassing or overwhelming defense systems.
Adaptable in the sense that a pilot can make tactical decisions etc, I can't think of a situation where either a missile or a bigger ship wouldn't be better at whatever the task is your accomplishing.
Are we talking about fighters or tiny hulled ships? Because without miniaturization fighters will all be useless and maybe tiny hulls too.
Directed lasers or theoretical "FTL lasers" or whatever could go several light minutes or hours without any significant power degradation.
Lasers and power transfer beams work on exactly the same principles in many cases, so they're not less efficient so long as the fighter does something useful that a laser cannot.
Also, Galactic Civilizations has FTL communications and transmissions.
Galactic Civilizations has anti-gravity and inertial compensation.
That depends; you're assuming the fighters only shoot and leave, when they can also carry energy weapons, jam enemy targeting and a bunch of other things
Bigger ships are harder to accelerate and maneuver due to their massive...mass. Missiles are guided by unintelligent computers. Only fighters, preferably piloted by sapient machines, would have the ability to out maneuver the enemy and bring firepower to bear on specific targets in a dynamic, 3 dimensional battlefield.
You don't really have to maneuver if your weapon has range. And any weapon you want to put on a fighter, I can make more powerful/better range and put on a ship. And protect that weapon with heavier armour/shields.
The same inertialess FTL drive that is suggested to make a fighter more maneuverable also applies to ships. So my ship can act like a great big maneuverable fighter. And it doesn't have to be a massive Death Star either.
And of course, your fighter is still travelling slower then my ships, since the ships can have bigger engines. Unless there is some upper bound that everyone hits for speed. So any direct LOS weapon will never get to fire, since the frogman swimming with his harpoon will never reach my sub.
But how well can you aim it? It doesn't matter if your death ray can fire 1,000,000 times further than my death ray can if my death ray can be mounted on something that your death ray cannot reliably hit from beyond the range of my death ray, and it is not necessarily true that adding armor will necessarily improve the survivability of vessels; certainly the current trend in naval design seems to indicate that passive defenses (namely armor) are an insufficient answer to the threat posed by modern weapons, to the point that modern warships are effectively unarmored even at the capital level.
It also doesn't matter if your death ray is 1,000,000 times more powerful than mine is if both of them are capable of killing the same kinds of targets; yours just hits the ridiculous overkill level far faster and could therefore be less efficient. And in GCII, the indications are that weapons are at a point where capital-grade weapons can be carried by fighter-size vessels; since GCII doesn't include more powerful weapons for capital ships, that would tend to indicate that either the weapons in existence are at the upper limit of what the factions can currently produce, or that there is no particular need to build even more potent weaponry. Granted, this is an aspect of GCII that I would be happy to see change, but it is what it is.
Bigger = faster is not necessarily true. Larger vessels will require more and/or more powerful thrusters in order to attain the same accelerations as smaller vessels, and additionally the structure of a larger vessel will be more severely stressed by said accelerations than the smaller vessels will, and will be particularly vulnerable to bending moments when the vessel rotates. As a result, there are real-world physics reasons why larger vessels might be limited to lower 'speeds' in combat.
Additionally, if we assume that combat takes place at sublight speeds (which I would think reasonable when the available categories of weapons are 'mass drivers', 'beams', and 'missiles', especially when the basic 'beam' weapon is the laser, which cannot possibly describe a weapon which propagates at superluminal velocities if we assume that the weapon names used are even remotely accurate descriptors), then we have an upper bound on the speed of the vessels involved - c - and most likely the in-combat speeds are substantially lower since the missiles and projectiles take appreciably more time to reach the target than the beams do and yet the vessels involved cannot outrun them, and at least one of the beam weapons should propagate at the speed of light. We can also infer from the fact that one of the weapons is a laser that the upper bound on the engagement range is likely not more than a few light-seconds, although this is a much more questionable assumption than that the speed of the vessels during combat is not greater than the speed of light.
It is moreover a false assumption that a line-of-sight weapon will never get to fire due to an inability to reach the target, as that would indicate that in the setting missiles are far and away superior to beams and mass drivers, yet the performance of all three weapon categories is comparable. Therefore, line-of-sight weaponry must be able to reach a suitable firing range despite the theoretically superior engagement range of guided weaponry.
I would tend to think that the point is more that if you can hit a fighter with a 'power transfer beam', then you can most likely hit a larger vessel with the same beam. And without significant energy storage on the fighter, the 'power transfer beam' would need to carry a power similar in magnitude to any beam weapon that the fighter might carry in order to allow the fighter adequate performance (using beam in the sense of the GCII weapon category). Of course, since the fighter's weapon should be much closer to the target than the origin of the 'power transfer beam', the fighter's weapon could be better-focused and perhaps better-aimed, though this does not address the issue of fighter survivability in the combat environment.
Additionally, 'power transfer beams' do have a potential loss of efficiency relative to a weaponized laser - namely, some portion of the power carried by the 'power transfer beam' is almost certainly being used to power some portion of the fighter's systems, which represents a loss in energy delivered to the target even if there are no energy losses involved in the internal mechanisms of the power receiving system and the weapon system used to translate the 'power transfer beam' into attacks on the target vessel. Obviously, internal efficiency and intensity loss through beam spreading are going to determine at what point it becomes 'better' to use the fighter than to use a more direct method of attack, but you cannot claim that a fighter need not carry its own internal power supply and then argue that said fighter can translate 100% of the power of a proposed 'energy transfer beam' into an attack against a target.
Which is not necessarily a guarantee that manned craft can sustain the same kinds of accelerations as unmanned craft, as that assumption would require that inertial compensation and/or artificial gravity be capable of protecting living beings from accelerations up to the limits imposed by the vessel's structural strength or engine and thruster capacity. All real systems have limits; it isn't that much of a stretch to assume that even magitech in soft sci-fi universes likewise have an upper limit to their performance.
But do they bring enough to the playing field to justify the cost? If I can use a 1 million dollar missile to shoot down a 1 billion dollar fighter, was the fighter worth bringing to the party to begin with? Am I better off swamping the enemy defenses with million dollar missiles (of which I can afford to lose 1000 times as many as I can afford to lose of the billion dollar fighters), or am I better off with the presumably more accurate fighters?
Based on the fact that in GCII there exists a hull category similar to modern-day fighters (the Tiny hull category) and based on the fact that these can be made to work reasonably well at certain points in the game, or under special conditions, I would say the answer to the above questions are more in the line of 'maybe' than either 'yes' or 'no', though tending more towards 'yes' than 'no'. If we want to look at it from a realism perspective, which is at best marginally helpful since Galactic Civilizations is much more of a soft science fiction setting than a hard one, then the answer is still very much a 'maybe', since we'd need to know something about targeting performance, guidance accuracy, countermeasures, and vessel performance in the Galactic Civilizations setting before we can come up with a reasonable answer based on real-world math and physics. And if we want to look at it from the so-called 'developer's intent' point of view, then the answer has fairly strongly been indicated to be 'yes', although I don't know that that is certain because I don't recall them saying anything specifically about starfighters, only about carriers - though I could be wrong as I have not watched either of the podcasts, so if there were something there I would not know of it.
I wrote about half of my response to this post until Google Chrome decided it had enough and closed.
So I'll just boil the argument for space fighters to the bare bones:
1. We like things that go fast.
2. We like things that go "Pew, Pew"
3. Something that goes fast and goes "Pew, Pew" is therefore good.
4. Ergo, space fighters are feasible.
Point defense systems+miniaturization= a good enough mass produced planetary defense ship. (I only use missiles in my games because of the facts stated here, and they have the highest damage output.)
fighters are like any other ship but smaller, its there strength and weakness. Missiles hurt destroyers too by the way, (what I call medium hull ships.) and alot of missiles/fighters will have a high initial fire power ratio. But alas, death comes quick and easy.
Also life support and engines may be skipped now since carriers are...carrying. Maybe transports will be included.
This discussion started of with Liquid Sky's comment about fighters in a realistic/hard setting. Fighters in scifi are the coolest thing ever, but in a hard/realistic setting they just don't work.
Telescopes and Satelites today can already see things with incredible precision, like exoskeletons planets etc. Presumably this technology would be improved upon (smaller, less sensitive to minor damage, faster) as one of the first requirements for freeform space travel. Accuracy isnt the problem, it's estimating where your enemy will be after a) light has traveled from him to you to tell you where he was x seconds ago, and then b ) your lazer (or slower weapon) reaches him.
The only way to dodge a laser like weapon is to make pre-emptive evasive maneuvers at like at least a light second orso from your enemy, since you can't see it coming and all. The deciding factor is more who can stilll effectively dodge at closer and closer distances, rather then accuracy. If your to far away, the enemy could have moved anywhere so you will likely miss, if your to close, whoever shoots first gets the first hit.
That's pretty much confirmed already, because we have two different engine-types in GalCiv 3: Interstellar Drive and Sublight Drive. The former uses EffectType MovesCap, while the latter uses EffectType TacticalSpeed.
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