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I read an interesting article on tv tropes regarding the abundance of battleship type craft that seem to make up the majority of scifi universe's capital ships, despite the fact that the modern aircraft carrier largely killed the battleship. The obvious reason for this return to gun covered sluggers for most cases is the existance of shields; the typical scifi capital ship is just too well protected for fighter craft to hurt, you need a big ship to kill a big ship.

However shielding as it is shown in scifi seems, at least to me, to be one of those technologies that's a ways off, like FTL drives, artifical gravity, and transporters. I rather expect us to be colonizing the sol system, and as a result building ships to defend these colonies, long before we have reliable versions of any of this tech.

In that regard, it seems more likely that our capital ships would remain geared towards the carrier role, serving as a mobile base for starfighters that would do the actual combat. However I also read an article about how the carrier might end up getting phased out by smaller missile frigates as satilight and missile technology improve. (and before you ask, no I don't have the source, as I didn't consider making this post at the time of reading it. I will see about finding it again though.)

So now I wonder, what seems like the most likely real life future of space combat? And since it is the way of a forum, there's a poll to go with the question of course.

Starfighters don't make much sense if you look at it realisticaly. A warship can have larger engines, greater fuel reserves and thus can be much faster. Not to mention the fact that proper point defence weapons would tear any fighters or bombers apart long before they got into range.

Realisticaly, we should expect starships to be much like sea-faring cruisers. Their main armament would consist primarily of missiles, probably nuclear ones, with a shitload of PD weapons to try and down small enemy craft and missiles and a small handful of larger cannons.

Thus my choice is for the missile ship.

Gotta agree. Once you're in space the traditional carrier/fighter dynamic changes completely. It's now more like a cruiser vs. a speedboat and even that's not entirely correct. If you do it realistically then like Rochey said a large ship can accelerate longer. Except when you're around something like a planet where the enemy has to come to you fighters aren't likely to be able to accomplish much. Missile ships are likely but so are big battleships. Fighters are likely to be a non-issue simply because they can't keep up.

I tend to agree with SG... depending on the particular individual's imagination you're talking about, cap ships are really the only ones who can mount the big guns/missiles/torpedoes/weapons-of-the-week to hurt another cap ship.

That said, much of SF seems to combine the roles rather than eliminate one. Many SF universes have "battleships" or cruisers which field a significant fighter wing.

Well once you get up into the size of something like an ISD the facilities to accommodate a large group of fighters are totally inconsequential. No reason not to even if their utility is limited.

A really good example of this would be to play Battletech's space based component Aerotech... without the shitty squadron rules. In that game lone fighters are utterly useless against warships and can't hope to catch a warship until it gets to where its going and slows down.

For any large ship you would realisticaly want a number of shuttles on the ship to move personel around the fleet. When you've got a sufficiently large ship, making the hangar a few times longer and shoving in some short range fighters or bombers is pretty simple.

One other thing I forgot to mention.

I'd actually argue against the re-emergence of battleship-style vessels. Presumably this thread is assuming a hard sci-fi situation, where the main armament of ships would be nuclear missiles and railguns. How would a ship armed with cannons stand up to a ship armed with missiles?

Any combat between ships is going to take place at extremely long range. By firing a cannon, an enemy ship could simply avoid the round by just moving. At such ranges even the slightest change in position could throw enemy fire way off. Compare this to a missile, which can home in on its target, regardless of whatever evasive maneouvers it's pulling. To effectively hit the missile ship at long range, the battleship would need to pretty much blanket an entire area with ammunition to achieve what a single missile could.
Additionaly, any shell which hopes to seriously damage a space-faring warship would presumably need to be quite large. Large enough, presumably, to target with a CIWS system. And since the shell is going to be going in a straight line, it'll be an easy target. With a missile, on the other hand, it wouldn't be too hard to program in some basic evasive maneouvers which would make it slightly harder to hit.
While I fully admit I've no real knowledge of this, I'd imagine missiles would also be quite a bit faster in space than a shell. With a shell it gets one kick to accelerate it towards its target. A missile has an engine strapped on the back which will be constantly accelerating it towards the target. Hell, if you wanted to then you could even launch the missiles by firing them out of some sort of gun, after which the engine would start up. That would certainly make it pretty damn fast.
Another issue that should probably be looked at is that of colateral damage. In any realistic scenario, ships are going to be fighting in orbit of a planet. This means that there is a risk of ammunition hitting the planet's surface and potentialy causing casualties. With a missile it'd be easy enough to just rig it so that it will explode once it runs out of fuel. With a shell it's going to just keep going.

But you're assuming solid shot. There's no reason that in this scenario a projectile can't incorporate pretty much anything you stated. Guidance systems, terminal maneuvers, auto destructs, etc. In fact a gun/missile hybrid is highly likely.

A few things about guns you're forgetting though. If you do go with solid shot you could quite easily accelerate to a much higher velocity than even a missile could attain without the missile becoming inordinately large. Additionally a solid projectile firing rail gun could blanket an area of space with shots, far more than a CIWS could deal with not to mention that unlike a missile a solid shot doesn't care if you mangle it, if it hits it still damages.

I'd suspect you'd see a combination of missiles and guns. Missiles for long range engagements or difficult targets with guns for medium to short range work where their weight of fire could be key.

Depending on the technology of the time, I can imagine some form of rail gun being able to accelerate a slug at the speed of light. That would negate the distance issue quite comfortably.

Not to the speed of light, but even a decent percentage of it, say 10%, would be enough to do just about anything you want to with it.

Can we choose two? I'd go for a battleship-type vessel (i.e. the bigger the better) armed with huge numbers of missiles. Fighters are out for two main reason: 1) fighters have to get to the target and back, missiles only have to go one-way, ergo missiles have twice the delta-v, 2) fighters require pilots, who extremely fragile, have a very large mass, and are expensive.

Tyyr wrote:But you're assuming solid shot. There's no reason that in this scenario a projectile can't incorporate pretty much anything you stated. Guidance systems, terminal maneuvers, auto destructs, etc. In fact a gun/missile hybrid is highly likely.

A few things about guns you're forgetting though. If you do go with solid shot you could quite easily accelerate to a much higher velocity than even a missile could attain without the missile becoming inordinately large. Additionally a solid projectile firing rail gun could blanket an area of space with shots, far more than a CIWS could deal with not to mention that unlike a missile a solid shot doesn't care if you mangle it, if it hits it still damages.

I'd suspect you'd see a combination of missiles and guns. Missiles for long range engagements or difficult targets with guns for medium to short range work where their weight of fire could be key.

Fair points. I agree that you'd see both types of armament on vessels.

Though, personally, I have a small issue with your first point. To me, if you start including homing systems and some form of propulsion, you've got a missile and not a shell.

It looks like I agree with the majority that missile frigates are the way to go. Another disadvantage for fighters, that I don't think was brought up, is the speed that they would be working in. When you start flying at 40-60 x the speed of sound things get dicy on manuvering and the like. Not saying dog fights can't happen, they would just have to happen over an entire hemesphere instead of a few miles. You don't need to worry about that kind of thing with missile frigates. I'm not saying that fighters won't be useful but they just can't compete with long range missiles / energy weapons.

And besides in Homeworld 1 the best ship is easily the missile destroyer

I went with missile ships but I think placing them both smaller and larger ships of war makes sense. A bigger ship carries more missiles and can take more damage.

I think a fair point is from the Dune Saga. The ships they used were based on two classes. Destroyers and Battleships. The Destroyers primary job was to defend the fleet from enemy missiles. While their secondary job was to add their own fire power to the battle. The Battleships were the reverse of this of course.

IMO, real space combat would run much the same. Fighters would still be needed. But mostly for ground support.

So who voted for the carriers?