The battles felt TOO close, like old timey Pirate Ship battles where you "Cross the T" and unload your broadsides!
Fighters, per Discovery
- Thread starter FredH
- Start date
Critical concept - all things being equal - if one ship is twice the length/width/height of another - it's eight times the volume. This means, you have more for anything/everything by eight times. You will need a somewhat stronger frame/hull but, there's still a lot more room to work with.
Larger/stronger shield generators/emitters, larger/stronger phasers or photon torpedo launchers/magazines - still more room for power, crew space, supplies etc...
And again - all things being equal - the larger ship should be able to reach the same speed (probably faster at warp) and can handle well, within the limits of being more massive. No advantage goes to the small fighter types...
The only application for such craft that might make sense (in or out of universe) is for support of invasions of habitable worlds. Close support and air cover for "Marines" or the like.
Have you ever heard of the Square Cube Law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square–cube_law
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SquareCubeLaw
Your Mass also sky rockets along with need for more crew to run said vessel, more energy / resource consumption to power said vessels.
There is a reason why everything in this world tries to go for shrinking everything / minimizing energy consumption / minimizing unnecessary mass.
As you grow bigger, you become a bigger target, slower to manuever, more valuable to cripple.
Otherwise, why didn't the Federation in the 24th Century just be purely built out of Galaxy Classes at that time?
The Galaxy Class was the Ultimate Ship during it's Era / Launch frame. It had every amenity / Capability.
A bigger and easier target.
More manpower costs.
Ponderious in malnuvering.
Eight times the size, but can be only in one place at a time.
Same assets. eight ships in eight places.
There's a slot in the fleet for truely huge ships, but it's a trade-off.
Technically.. they didn't need to battle at all, yes they didn't have the Mushroom drive, but they did have warp, so when the Enterprise caught up, they should have poped it in to gear, and stayed ahead of the borg.. errr.. control fleet untill they were ready for the apple hole ride.. 
You mean the:Technically.. they didn't need to battle at all, yes they didn't have the Mushroom drive, but they did have warp, so when the Enterprise caught up, they should have poped it in to gear, and stayed ahead of the borg.. errr.. control fleet untill they were ready for the apple hole ride..
CONTROL fleet =D
They could've kept running at Warp until they recharged the Spore Drive.
It's only 12 hrs.
I'm sure Discovery can play High Warp Hide & Go Seek with only the Enterprise knowing where it's final destination would be!
Then Spore Drive to some place desolate, and implement the plan!
Sort of. However...
If you have 100 people you can crew:
2-3 Defiants (survivablity, >90% --> potential loss per battle <10 people)
3-4 Birds of Prey (survivablity, 70-85% --> potential loss per battle 15-30 people)
50-100 fighters (survivablity, 0-10% --> potential loss per engagement 90-100 people)
Larger ships have a greater per unit cost to set up the crew, however differential returns mean that they 'earn back' their higher set up cost due to reusability and the fact that their greater range and flexibility means you can do a lot of 'non-combat' things with the starships that you can't with the fighters.
Fighters aren't useless, but to paraphrase the episode itself, they are what you go for when "plans A and B don't work and you're into the 'Hail Mary' part of the operation" or potentially if you don't have any other options (the Bajoran Militia would probably have eagerly taken any fighters offered by Starfleet, at least they're likely to be inter-system FTL-capable and maybe nearby systems which most BM ship weren't).
That also depends on your battle tactics, scenarios, weapons, equipment, technology, training, fore knowledge, intelligence on your mission, and all sorts of situations and other factors.
I don't take your numbers as definitive in any way since you skewed them to fit your scenario.
It seemed to me the Enterprise fleet and section 31 were trying to one-up one another in terms of numbers. Enterprise and Discovery already knew they were outnumbered, even having dinky little secondary ships was better than being outgunned. Once Section 31 engaged their drones it's a matter of attrition.
The biggest effect the fighters had, I think, was suppression. Keep putting pressure on ship shields so they don't recharge in the face of the lesser guns of the S31 ships. With the attrition units engaging attrition units the battle just drags out.
I'm also bothered by the ships being more or less stationary, but I can at least rationalize Discovery and Enterprise diverting all that power to their shields to tank the brunt of S31's attacks.
The biggest effect the fighters had, I think, was suppression. Keep putting pressure on ship shields so they don't recharge in the face of the lesser guns of the S31 ships. With the attrition units engaging attrition units the battle just drags out.
I'm also bothered by the ships being more or less stationary, but I can at least rationalize Discovery and Enterprise diverting all that power to their shields to tank the brunt of S31's attacks.
I'm not the one forgetting about them =D
Which were minimally effective, one-shot-killed as soon as the Dominion locked - which rarely took long - and were never specifically indicated as manned (indeed the SoA takes place within three months of Message in a Bottle, arguably the best arguement for the availability of 'soft AI' drone warfare in Starfleet).
Fighters as drone platforms can do >75% of the stuff that manned fighters can, without the fatalities, and if you need a manned multirole platform that can act as a fighter then runabouts (or laterly the Argo-class in the 'air support and landing' role) aren't a much worse proposition and are logistically and politically more desirable.
I agree that they aren't definative, but put it another way, we know that it takes several fighters (at least six IIRC) to even damage one Cardassian destroyer, none of which survive (loss of 6-12), whereas a Defiant-class or BoP could survive the first attack and potentially go on to kill several more (The Maquis destroyed or disabled three or four Galors before they were force to stand down, to no damage or casualities), thus they are a far more effective "combat focused" platform.
The Maquis are literally proof that Fighters can take on big ships.
They've done it many times at the cost of the Cardassians.
They've done it many times at the cost of the Cardassians.
Of course - the Cardassians were portrayed as being a bit behind the Federation technology-wise for the most part.
Galors seemed to get blasted to bits in almost every battle!
Galors seemed to get blasted to bits in almost every battle!
Whether there's any penalty in maneuvering from mass, we can't readily tell - but a Galaxy or a Sovereign appears about as agile as a fightercraft whenever she stoops down to maneuvering. Presumably bigger ships can simply carry bigger mass-negating machines, the equation then actually going in favor of big ships.
It's just that maneuvering plays virtually no role in Trek battles in the two senses crucial to today's fighter action: dodging of enemy fire, and advantageously positioning of your own guns. Dodging just isn't possible, and is a waste of energy, time and firing opportunities. And while positioning your guns (or, conversely, turning your better shields towards the enemy) is indicated in dialogue to matter every now and then, it's not an issue that would impact much on fightercraft, which tend to swarm from all sides whenever they are seen in action.
So the one good reason to go for many small craft instead of a single big one is distribution of assets for survivability. There's a penalty to doing this, in that each craft needs its own systems X, Y and Z whereas a ship worth fifty such craft only needs one big X, one big Y and one big Z; the square law favors the big ships in this for basically any value of X, Y or Z. But there's a penalty to everything - and survivability is a goal worth paying for.
It's just that most Starfleet stuff involves big ships because it requires big ships. You can't have labs aboard fighters, or cargo holds distributed across a swarm. Which may give some weight to the concept of using carriers for fighting, and fightercraft swarms as mobile ramparts. But as seen in "Sorrow", it's an uncommon way for Starfleet to fight, and not a well-known way for S31 to fight, either.
Timo Saloniemi
It's just that maneuvering plays virtually no role in Trek battles in the two senses crucial to today's fighter action: dodging of enemy fire, and advantageously positioning of your own guns. Dodging just isn't possible, and is a waste of energy, time and firing opportunities. And while positioning your guns (or, conversely, turning your better shields towards the enemy) is indicated in dialogue to matter every now and then, it's not an issue that would impact much on fightercraft, which tend to swarm from all sides whenever they are seen in action.
So the one good reason to go for many small craft instead of a single big one is distribution of assets for survivability. There's a penalty to doing this, in that each craft needs its own systems X, Y and Z whereas a ship worth fifty such craft only needs one big X, one big Y and one big Z; the square law favors the big ships in this for basically any value of X, Y or Z. But there's a penalty to everything - and survivability is a goal worth paying for.
It's just that most Starfleet stuff involves big ships because it requires big ships. You can't have labs aboard fighters, or cargo holds distributed across a swarm. Which may give some weight to the concept of using carriers for fighting, and fightercraft swarms as mobile ramparts. But as seen in "Sorrow", it's an uncommon way for Starfleet to fight, and not a well-known way for S31 to fight, either.
Timo Saloniemi
Dialogue from Suspicions (TNG) suggests that shuttles at least are around an order of magnitude slower than starships at sublight - 'I am one million kilometres from the star's corona. Proceeding at three quarters impulse. I should reach it in approximately three minutes.' That is approximately 12,400,000 miles per hour or 5,543 kilometers per second. ¼ impulse for the shuttle could be estimated at 1,852 km/s. Therefore either 'full impulse' for shuttles is approx 0.025c or they take in region in the region of ten times longer to reach "starship impulse speed", either of which neuters two of the biggest advantages of smallcraft (speed and maneuverability).
It's an especially interesting question in regard of what it might imply about the unseen battles and skirmishes of the Dominion War and the strategies of the Federation in the case of war.
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It implies that Starfleet keeps fighters as a "Hail Mary" strategy, restricted to times when the odds are so against them that any platform - even one with marginal chance of success and even less of survivability/reusablilty - is attempted because it's better than nothing (particularly if they are mostly unmanned - which was explicitly the case with Control's forces, bar one ship, confirming that drones are possible)
Now i just wonder why the Feds didn't use this strategy against the Borg at the battle of Wolf 351 or the one at sector 001 during First Contact. Does someone have a good in-universe explanation?
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