Mark wrote:Fighters are great.......if you can overcome certain obvious problems. The question begs, how do create a fighter with enough power to mount weapons heavy enough to pose a threat to a shielded and armored ship, without sacrificing speed and manuverability, and make it surviveable enough to live long enough to launch it's payload, and get it's pilot back to it's "carrier" alive?
I like fighters, but I just don't see them as a feasable option in Trek. They are fine for stinging enemies, pinpoint shots agaisnt unshielded spots on a ship, and so forth. But lets look at it this way. A Romulan Warbird (TNG) attacks a small convoy. The convoy is defended by carrier with two squadrens of fighters, as well as a couple of lighter starships. How do you make the fighters useful until the point where they aren't even really needed anymore?
Fighters have the advantage where their surface area compared to their volume is much higher than for a larger vessel. This allows the fighter to get rid of heat faster per ton than a larger ship, allowing it to run its reactor at higher power settings.
Unfortunately, that higher surface area means its shields and armor will be proportionally thinner than for a larger ship, meaning fighters will be even easier to kill than a straight tonnage comparison would indicate.
The best method for fighters vs capital ships would be to follow a larger ship in and let it take the hits, then as the capital ship dodges to the side, the fighters rapidly unload their weaponry. The capital ship they followed can have its own rear weaponry charged, in case the target redirects its shields against the fighters.
Tactically, Fighters would be used in environments where long range automated ordnance could not be relied upon. By placing a sentient being inside the vessel, the fleet gains potentially better decision making skills at the risk of losing trained personnel. I.e. the enemy uses coordinated low-level tractor beams to divert incoming photons from directly hitting their ships. The fighter commander sees a hole in the tractor defenses, and transmits the adjustment to his strike wing. They manage to fire their weapons through the hole, inflicting heavier damage on the enemy ship.
Another example would be where the fighters being closer can take advantage of their sensors and spot a critical enemy target (flagship, comm center, jammer control, etc) and attack. Photons would attack the ships in front (again, depending on programming and trust of automated weaponry), while the enemy flagship is able to handle the battle easily as it is not being distracted.
Strategically, given the ability for shuttlebays to handle different types of small craft, pretty much any type of vessel could serve as a fighter carrier, replacing some or all of its shuttles with fighters. Freighters could be drafted to serve as emergency carriers, making enemy ships have to attack convoys in higher strength than normal to avoid getting ambushed and killed by freighters mounting hidden bays.
Fighters (and similar smaller ships) also offer the advantage that they can be deployed to many locations across a volume, allowing several planets to be protected, vs a single larger ship only able to protect one planet at a time (but that planet is very well protected).
On a manufacturing level, fighters allow a planet to provide combat forces without having any space industry available. The fighters would be built in factories on the ground, and launch themselves into orbit (I am figuring that the fighters have enough power to go from ground to orbit and back on brute thrust alone). That planet provides military equipment, pilots, spare parts, body bags, and likely the bodies to fill them.
Still, fighters would suffer from being damaged by weaker enemy shots, pilot comfort (or lack thereof), minimal redundancy in equipment and spare parts (100 fighters with the same 10 ton repair kit are not as flexible as a single ship with a 1000 ton machine shop).
