Fighters, per Discovery

[FredH]

Since “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2” establishes that not only fighters, but huge numbers of fighters are perfectly viable in ship to ship combat, what in-universe explanation can one come up with for why they don’t do it all the time? (In, say, “Balance of Terror” or “Yesterday’s Enterprise”?)

(And please, don’t bother with “Because Discovery ignores canon!!!” responses.)

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Out-Of-Universe? Lack of budget!

In-Universe? Not enough volunteers want to fly fighters that have the shield strength of a wet paper bag relative to the StarFleet equivalent level Phasers?

Is it me, or is combat distances WAY too close for my comfort given how vast space is?

At least this time shields seem to last a decent amount of time and don't just crumble in under 5 minutes.

 

[Pauln6]

I didn't like it. They only needed them because they arbitrarily gave S31 similar vessels for a flashy visual. A smaller number would have been more consistent.

As an aside, in, say, Elaan of Troyus, it's established that Impulse engines lack enough reserves to power shields for more than a few blasts. How do armed small craft power their weapons and shields? Surely ships that small will have much smaller fuel supplies and, considering space, their anti-matter chambers must be tiny.

We also know from the Menagerie that shuttles don't have enough fuel for long distances at higher warps. Has it ever been established where on a shuttle the warp core or fuel is based ?

TMP, sensible as ever, used a warp sled, which would be a detachable warp engine and fuel supply for longer distance travel. That does make sense. Discovery's engineering logic, I'm not so sure...

 

[uniderth]

(And please, don’t bother with “Because Discovery ignores canon!!!” responses.)

Translation: Please answer my question, but don't tell me the truth.

 

[Tenacity]

(And please, don’t bother with “Because Discovery ignores canon!!!” responses.)

I'd go with "because Discovery is a separate Trek universe, and they do things differently."

why they don’t do it all the time? (In, say, “Balance of Terror” or “Yesterday’s Enterprise”?)

The TOS Enterprise is quite a bit smaller than the Discovery (and the Discovery-verse Enterprise), carryed only a few shuttle-craft, and didn't have the room for the BSG type launch tubes that the Discovery possessed.

Could the TOS Enterprise exchange some of it's shuttles for a equal number of fighters? Sure, but you'd have to balance the limited utility of a couple of fighters against the then missing shuttles.

At least one of the novels said the TOS shuttles could be armed.

 

[Timo]

...why they don’t do it all the time?

This part is sort of consistent. Apparently, our heroes were unaware that the S31 ships were capable of drone warfare at all. Perhaps they had a vague idea that the ships sported drones, but only for spying purposes. Indeed, it seems more likely for Control to have modified preexisting swarm craft into combat units than for it to have built combat drones out of whole cloth - we see our heroes can sorta-replicate some stuff, but we also learn it's slow and tedious work, and Control probably couldn't do much even if it had a few hundred pairs of helping hands.

So the capacity for drone warfare is actually new. Control can do it with craft only barely bigger than a photon torpedo, but Starfleet is merely experimenting with much larger and clumsier craft. And it turns out neither is any good against the other: the swarms don't manage to hurt each other to any noticeable degree. It takes ages for a pair of good guy units to gang up on a single Control bot...

What the swarms can do is pester the capital ships, although only Control tries that; Pike goes after capital ships with phaser beams from his own ship instead. the Battle still drags on for a full running hour. Not really viable, except as a desperation measure - in the Klingon War, ships deprived each other of shields in a matter of minutes. So basically fighting with drone swarms is like beating the opponent with boiled cauliflowers - you only do that if you don't carry any actual weapons of war, or are cornered by superior numbers and aren't interested in maneuvering and thus don't have anything to lose by adding the cauliflowers.

It does look pretty silly. But it has every plot logic and dialogue excuse for being a one-off and probably also a first.

Curious how the Enterprise fighter-bikes have what looks like big canopies above and below, but not a single shot that would suggest a pilot inside. This in contrast with shuttle close-ups that happen for the very purpose of showing the pilot... So my bet is for optionally crewed drones.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I wouldn't be surprised if the Fighter Bikes were remotely piloted vehicles.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

I wouldn't be surprised if the Fighter Bikes were remotely piloted vehicles.

That's been my preference since the Dominion War, though the Maquis suggest that cockpits are an (optional) extra.

 

[Unicron]

On a non-Trek note, I've always found it interesting that the Empire in Star Wars didn't do more with giving their fighters hyperdrives. They clearly had more resources than the Alliance tended to have, and the Alliance seems to have demonstrated the advantages of not making small craft too dependent on larger capital ships.

I suppose it could be seen more as a matter of tactics, since the Empire designed most TIE models as short range support vessels only and thus didn't see the need to add a lot of expensive systems. The Alliance naturally needed to get the most out of every ship they could acquire. But on the flip side, some of the more advanced models like the TIE Defender and Vader's TIE Advanced showed they could be quite dangerous with an equality against Alliance fighters.

 

[NewHeavensNewEarth]

I'd say Starfleet wanted to make a firm stand on being a non-military organization, so they did away with that to make room for transporting people/things like colonists. Galaxy-class starships are certainly said to have lots of extra room for that very purpose later on. But DS9 didn't hesitate to arm runabouts in the same way as these shuttles in DSC. Shuttles in VOY took part in plenty of combat, too. Small-sized armed craft are nothing new to ST, but the quantities could be explained as Starfleet going back to having purely exploratory vessels.

 

[Ithekro]

On a non-Trek note, I've always found it interesting that the Empire in Star Wars didn't do more with giving their fighters hyperdrives. They clearly had more resources than the Alliance tended to have, and the Alliance seems to have demonstrated the advantages of not making small craft too dependent on larger capital ships.

I suppose it could be seen more as a matter of tactics, since the Empire designed most TIE models as short range support vessels only and thus didn't see the need to add a lot of expensive systems. The Alliance naturally needed to get the most out of every ship they could acquire. But on the flip side, some of the more advanced models like the TIE Defender and Vader's TIE Advanced showed they could be quite dangerous with an equality against Alliance fighters.

This is usually considered to be a mix of Imperial doctrine on use of warships over fighters, making use your possibly disloyal pilots can't just jump away, and because the Empire needed to field a LOT of TIE Fighters across the Galaxy.

Secondary to this is that the Empire had to use a lot of funds to build up their fleets of Imperial-class Star Destroyers, (and the secret side project....the Death Star), so they cheeped out on the starfighters in favor of mass produced, highly maneuverable fighters, rather than long range, hyperspace capable, and rugged, starfighters that had been proposed at the end of the Clone Wars (the A-wing and X-wing were from the end of the war, while the Y-wings had been used by the Republic as bombers for most of the Clone Wars).

The A-wing seems to have been used Galaxy wide as planetary defense force fighters, since they seemed common enough for the Alliance to get them early on. The X-wing seems to have been a scrapped project design that was mothballed, probably manufactured in numbers by friendly worlds. The Y-wings were mostly stolen it seems.. The B-wings were a new design build in secret.

 

[Lakenheath 72]

For myself, I like seeing more drone combat in sci-fi. It is not believable to me that an interstellar naval would fight like their ancestors on the seas of their home worlds. And, for an organization which values life, as Starfleet supposedly does, they would want to minimize loss of life by having machines bear the brunt of the battles.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

For myself, I like seeing more drone combat in sci-fi. It is not believable to me that an interstellar naval would fight like their ancestors on the seas of their home worlds. And, for an organization which values life, as Starfleet supposedly does, they would want to minimize loss of life by having machines bear the brunt of the battles.

*Nods*

I'd see the drone/fighter thing as a partial doctorinal thing, rather than practical. Like the Extreme Deep Invader UCAV (nicknamed "Eddie", callsign "Tinman") from the film Stealth that primarily operates as a drone fighter, but retains a cockpit for hotfix problem solving, testing and even rescue seems like a more logical explanation for what we've seen given Starfleet's "we are not a military" doctorine (very broadly, lacks hardware designed only for combat, lacks massed "combat troops" on a standing basis, primarily defensive posture.)

 

[thribs]

Not really a fan of fighters in Star Trek. The ships aren’t big enough to warrant them.
Plenty of other sci fi franchises have them. No need for Star Trek to have them as well.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Fighters were established in DS9, so its nothing new. With the restraints of shuttlebay space (excluding the Tardis that is Voyager's hangar) then most ships wouldn't be able to carry many, whilst during peacetime the need for such craft on Starfleet ships would probably be deemed non-essential (after all we've seen ships go into battle without them and emerge victorious with just the weapons and defences they have as standard). Fighters would probably be more heavily used by stations, outposts or colonies, all of which would benefit from highly mobile tactical craft to keep as much fighting away from their base as possible.

 

[Timo]

Given the showing so far, especially last week, were I given the choice between embarking a fighter and adding ten photon torpedoes to the preexisting magazines, it would be no choice. A fighter can't fight, not even in swarms, except against weak targets such as other fighters, or soft targets such as the types of surface installations invoved in the Maquis struggle.

But given the choice between adding ten fighters to my frontier outpost, or installing a torpedo launcher or phaser turret there from scratch... The fighters certainly would appeal to me. It's just that we don't see this usage, either: places like Cestus III fight without fighters.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Was anyone else reminded of the Of Gods and Men final battle? Even the fighter designs were similar.

 

[Pauln6]

Given the showing so far, especially last week, were I given the choice between embarking a fighter and adding ten photon torpedoes to the preexisting magazines, it would be no choice. A fighter can't fight, not even in swarms, except against weak targets such as other fighters, or soft targets such as the types of surface installations invoved in the Maquis struggle.

But given the choice between adding ten fighters to my frontier outpost, or installing a torpedo launcher or phaser turret there from scratch... The fighters certainly would appeal to me. It's just that we don't see this usage, either: places like Cestus III fight without fighters.

Timo Saloniemi

Yeah it makes little sense but looks cool?Fighters would lack the firepower to breach shields in their own and would lack the energy reserves to withstand fire from larger ships.

I suppose they could help prevent photon torpedo countermeasures? Not that we have ever seen any that I recall. They could also focus fire on weak spots opened up by the mother ship

The most sensible tactic would be to jam the lead ship's communications. Drones could be programmed with automatic attack and defence plans though I guess but it would be easier to outfox them and they'd be unable to relay information back to Control.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

But given the choice between adding ten fighters to my frontier outpost, or installing a torpedo launcher or phaser turret there from scratch... The fighters certainly would appeal to me. It's just that we don't see this usage, either: places like Cestus III fight without fighters.

IMO, that should be Cestus III lost without fighters or drones.

I think it also depends how you define "fighter". The Jem'hadar attack ship is sometimes refered to as a "fighter" and most players have equivalents - the Hideki-class patrol vessel, the standard Klingon Bird-of-Prey, Saber and Defiant-class starships all of which have their uses (tho in 20th Century terms, they'd be more likely an AC-130 than a conventional fighter. The use of mutli-role auxiliaries like runabouts (and similar vessels like the Delta Flyer) as "gunships" is well attested canonically, and the Maquis raider appears to be a somewhat more combat-orientated spin on the runabout (possibly intended as a civilian commerce escort and anti-piracy platform). However, I've always thought that the "single purpose" single or dual seat fighter model doesn't really work as a force projection/expeditionary model in the space age, but does have some utility as a "back-up option" for colonies, remote bases and as "follow on elements" to the initial rapid reaction force if prolonged surface combat ever occurs during wartime.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

IMO, that should be Cestus III lost without fighters or drones.

I think it also depends how you define "fighter". The Jem'hadar attack ship is sometimes refered to as a "fighter" and most players have equivalents - the Hideki-class patrol vessel, the standard Klingon Bird-of-Prey, Saber and Defiant-class starships all of which have their uses (tho in 20th Century terms, they'd be more likely an AC-130 than a conventional fighter. The use of mutli-role auxiliaries like runabouts (and similar vessels like the Delta Flyer) as "gunships" is well attested canonically, and the Maquis raider appears to be a somewhat more combat-orientated spin on the runabout (possibly intended as a civilian commerce escort and anti-piracy platform). However, I've always thought that the "single purpose" single or dual seat fighter model doesn't really work as a force projection/expeditionary model in the space age, but does have some utility as a "back-up option" for colonies, remote bases and as "follow on elements" to the initial rapid reaction force if prolonged surface combat ever occurs during wartime.

It would work if you put enough "Power" into a tiny package. Think of the engineering principles behind the "Defiant Class" and scale it down to something the size of a F-14. What's the most amount of Phaser / Torpedo / Missile power you can package in that small vehicle/vessel frame.