Starfighters in Star Trek ?

[Relayer1]

From the Just Finished Reading The Children of the Storm thread - you might like to read through it to get up to speed, but I think the topic deserves it's own thread anyway.

There is some consternation about the appearance of fighter ships in the novel. The gist of the argument against starfighters is :

http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2007/08/space-fighters-not.html

I've given it some thought -

You have to take into account that technology has moved on in the Trek universe - slipstream drive cannot be the only development. Although there may well have been compelling reasons why fighters would not be viable in the past, things could have changed.

Taking the basic technology of a runabout as a starting point, it would not be unreasonable to assume that building a smaller craft around the runabout impulse / warp / weapons capabilities would produce a more potent combat vehicle. Lower mass would mean higher speed, more maneuverability and less power demands to shields, life support, structural integrity fields and inertial dampers.

The advent of more powerful power plants while keeping the warp core size down could in fact give enough excess to enable formidable shielding and phaser capability. For short periods (i.e. combat) the powerplant could even be run above tolerances usual for prolonged use giving even more 'punch'.

This way a fighters offensive capabilities may be comparable to a single phaser emitter on a capital ship whilst defensively, shield strength (over only a small craft remember) would be excellent and a fast fighter would be difficult to hit at close range.

In a stand off fight they may still be vulnerable, but launched near their target for close space combat, atmospheric use or ground support they could be very useful. A dozen such fighters could bring a lot of firepower to bear, and from multiple vectors. I would think they stood a good chance against a larger vessel with equivalent armament, and with risk limited to one or two crew per vehicle.

I'd like one...

Any comments ? Is there a valid case for starfighters in Trek ?

 

[Lindley]

I haven't read that book yet, but I will point out that DS9 made verbal reference to "Attack Fighters" in at least one battle of the Dominion War.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

There was a thread about this near the beginning of this year, near the time I first joined, but I don't recall exactly which forum. Many of us came to basically the same conclusion, that fighters would work fine in Star Trek. Our discussion included revving up the warp drive while in combat, which was lifted right out of Journey to Babel, as well as the DS9 fighters.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Fighters have appeared in a number of Star Trek computer and video games, including Shattered Mirror, Starfleet Command II, and Invasion.

 

[F. King Daniel]

We saw squadrons of Starfleet fighters during the Dominion war. We also saw the Maquis using them in early DS9 episodes.

As a vaguely interesting side note, the aborted movie Star Trek: The Beginning, set in 2159, was to have featured United Earth Stellar Navy fighter pilots engaging Romulan drone ships in Earth orbit. So we almost (the film was written, green-lit, then cancelled in favour of JJ's reboot when Paramount's Powers-That-Be were replaced) got Enterprise-era starfighters.

 

[TerraUnam]

Fighters haven't been popular because of Star Trek's literary heritage. Star Trek was modelled after the Horatio Hornblower novels in part. So starships are big with big crews because they are literary modernizations of frigates from the age of sail.

 

[Yevetha]

Didnt the Remans had starfighters?

 

[captcalhoun]

yup

 

[JD]

I haven't read that book yet, but I will point out that DS9 made verbal reference to "Attack Fighters" in at least one battle of the Dominion War.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Federation_attack_fighter

 

[Nerroth]

The fighter craft in the Starfleet Command games (well, the first two-and-a-half, at least) are a product of its partial SFB heritage; over in the Star Fleet Universe, a number of empires in known space deploy fighters, with or without dedicated carriers, at some point in time.

Over there, fighters are an outgrowth of shuttle technology. (Modern, i.e. TOS-era, combat in the SFU takes place at low "tactical warp" speeds; standard administrative shuttles can move slowly in tactical warp, while fighters can go somewhat faster, but still not as fast as starships.)

Later on, a half-step unit between fighter and starship emerged, called the gunboat (or fast patrol ship). These PFs were faster and more powerful than fighters (not least since they had shields) but were very fragile and required dedicated tenders to operate at their highest effectiveness. This fragility made the Federation balk at the concept of deploying gunboats (which require a minimum crew to operate); so they went with larger, more powerful two-seat fighters instead.

The presence, or absence, of carriers (and gunboat tenders) can be a contentious issue for some of the Star Fleet Universe games; while SFB has had both for a long time, some of the newer games (like Federation Commander and the upcoming A Call to Arms: Star Fleet) are more divided on whether they would end up being welcome or not.

 

[Caliburn24]

Starfighters are not really suited to the way Trek-technology has been shown to work for the most part. Trying to make a case for there being any sort of tactical advantage for starfighters is really difficult.

Let's look at a few common Trek technologies.

1) Shields.
Immensely powerful defensive fields that protect against the vast majority Trek weapons. You will not really damage a starship until its shields are down. There are no wooden flight decks(WWII) or exhaust ports(Star Wars) for your fighters to exploit. They have to get through those shields before they can really do anything.

2) Inertia Dampeners.
Your starfighters have greater speed and agility? Says who? Inertia Dampeners nullify nearly all the advantages of being a smaller vessel since now that you can accelerate that Galaxy-class hull at the same rate as a Runabout.

3) Targeting.
Weapons travelling at light-speed controlled by advanced computers? You think starfighters can dodge that? From what we have seen onscreen I would estimate 90% or higher of all ship based weapons hit exactly what they are aimed at. Your starfighters are small however, and maybe they have a randomized flight computer program that throws in slight course zigs and zags to evade fire. Fair enough, only now you're caught in a tractor beam and hard killed by a starship phaser array.

4) Sensors.
You're not going to sneak up on a starship(unless the plot demands it).

So now lets add all of that together. You have your elite combat wing of Federation starfighters, thirty-six brave souls chasing down a Romulan class-B warbird. It can see you coming from far away. If it wishes to it can break contact through warp or cloak, or even just kite(gaming term) you at high impulse. It can engage you at(presumably) longer ranges than you can engage it. Every time it hits you lose 1/36th of your combat power. Everytime you hit it, it loses some fraction of shield strength. It is not a winning equation.

As to the high-speed warp passes and what not that have been theorized to make starfighters more effective, we haven't really seen examples of those in canon.

Making overpowered efficient warship hulls(Defiant etc) makes sense, they can engage almost any other starship toe-to-toe. But there is a lower size-limit to that, which starfighters(of the one or two man variety) fall below.

Until the technological environment of Trek(circa DS9/VOY) changes starfighters really make no sense as deep-space combatants.

 

[Relayer1]

All good points, but :

1) Shields.
Assuming a fighters phaser strength is comparable to that of a larger ship, just less of them, the combined effect of multiple fighter strikes would degrade shield strength in exactly the same way as a bombardment by a larger ship would. When shields go down, the ship is vulnerable.

2) Inertial Dampeners.
I don't accept that these allow larger ships to be as maneuverable as small ones. They do limit inertia (i.e. prevent the crew from being squished against the rear wall) but how many times have we seen small ships whizzing around larger ones in the Trek universe ? I don't recall seeing many large starships doing fast changes of direction or 'aerobatics'.

3) Targeting.
The Trek universe is full of 'I can't get a phaser lock', 'all torpedo's have missed Captain' etc. etc. For whatever soloutions are developed, countermeasures will be found.

With multiple fighters presenting multiple targets, it gets harder still, and you can't tractor them all at once.

4) Sensors.
The plot demands that you can sneak...

Seriously though, even though they may have long range FTL capacity, fighters would need to be deployed at fairly close range to be really effective.

They would be a nasty surprise if deployed from a merchantman under attack or carrier. Stealth or cloaked vessels would also be ideal - either hiding the fighters themselves or their mothership.


Atmospheric and ground support capabilities would also be valuable.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

@Caliburn24: Many of your points are contradicted on screen by what happened in the episode Journey to Babel. The Orion ship moved at about warp ten (on the TOS scale), and the Enterprise couldn't get a weapons lock.

As to the high-speed warp passes and what not that have been theorized to make starfighters more effective, we haven't really seen examples of those in canon.

You may not have seen this episode, but I have. I even already mentioned it upthread.

If Kirk hadn't fooled the attacking ship into thinking that it didn't need to stay in the dangerous part of its power curve, the one ship alone could have destroyed the Enterprise. With even just a second attacking ship as backup, the Enterprise should have been toast, as the second ship wouldn't make the same mistake after seeing what happened to the first.

 

[Caliburn24]

I haven't seen Journey to Babel in a decade or more. But I tend to discount the technical/tactical stuff from early TOS because the rules of Trek-tech were so much looser and undefined back then. That we have not seen tactics like that one employed later on in Trek strongly suggests to me that it should for the most part be ignored.

Your mileage may vary of course, put if high warp passes were still effective why were they not employed by say...the three Earth defense ships destroyed by the Borg in Best of Both Worlds?

It is impossible to argue dogmatically of course since Trek is full of inconsistencies regarding ships and technology. And a pro-case for the existence of starfighters could be made from Journey to Babel, that Voyager episode where they awaken that conqueror species, a couple other episodes as well. But the vast majority of episodes and movies and the general way Okuda has laid out how Trek-tech works makes starfighters inefficient at best, suicidal at worst.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I haven't seen Journey to Babel in a decade or more. But I tend to discount the technical/tactical stuff from early TOS because the rules of Trek-tech were so much looser and undefined back then. That we have not seen tactics like that one employed later on in Trek strongly suggests to me that it should for the most part be ignored.

Your mileage may vary of course, put if high warp passes were still effective why were they not employed by say...the three Earth defense ships destroyed by the Borg in Best of Both Worlds?

How do you know these tactics weren't employed then in BoBW?

To get that advantage it is suicidal; that's the point.

The equation for determining how far you can push your engines into the red zone is to that spot that minimizes the expected loss of fighters from any cause, whether it be enemy fire or warp core breaches.

The fighter pilots would be risking self destruct in order to be harder to hit. Understand?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Making overpowered efficient warship hulls(Defiant etc) makes sense, they can engage almost any other starship toe-to-toe. But there is a lower size-limit to that, which starfighters(of the one or two man variety) fall below.

Until the technological environment of Trek(circa DS9/VOY) changes starfighters really make no sense as deep-space combatants.

The problem is tactical, not technological. All four of the technological points can be solved.

Shielding? Individual Borg drones had shields that withstood direct phaser fire, so it's theoretically possible for personal shielding to be effective.

Inertial dampers? In addition to inertial dampers, submerge the pilot within a water chamber.

Targeting & Sensors. These are the same problem, essentially. Human reaction times are slow and human senses are limited. So jack the pilot into his fighter, so his mind directly interfaces with the fighter's systems. (Shades of Timothy Zahn's Conquerors trilogy.) Some in the Federation would shy away from this; it's a vaguely Borg-esque solution to the problem, to make the fighter as a whole an extension of the pilot's mind.

Suffice it to say, I think the technology for all four exists within the Star Trek universe. I think the tactical need for fighters hasn't been achieved yet. It might be interesting to see what would bring Starfleet to the point of that tactical leap.

 

[Caliburn24]

Could you use smallcraft as kamikazes? Sure. Why would you use them in place of a couple quantum torpedoes? I'm not sure, situation dependent perhaps.

Could you engineer an awesome starfighter from all the rarely used technology seen in various episodes and never mentioned again? Absolutely. Ablative armor from the future, check. Interphasic cloak, sure. Borg shielding, hell yes. Interphasic torpedoes with Thalaron warheads, sweet. And in a consistent universe those technologies would be integrated into existing systems and not forgotten. But until you get to the point where your starfighter can get a hard kill on a full size starship with a first strike, the size and superior power and defenses of that starship are going to win.

Remember this is space. It is not an Iowa-class battleship versus a bunch of Japanese Zekes and Kates. Our starships and starfighters travel through the same medium with the same restrictions. It would be like an Iowa-class versus a motor torpedo boat or something.

The only way I can see starfighters working at all in Trek is if they are used exclusively as long-range combatants with stand-off armaments and never enter the kill-box of a starship.

This is already the reality of manned combat aircraft in the present. If any sort of serious air-defenses are around fighters are only good for for launching stand-off weapons. Now carry that into Trek where computers are faster, beam weapons travel at the speed of light, and there are no terrain features or atmosphere to mask your signature.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Caliburn24, there's something else you are overlooking that is pretty important.

A fighter is armed, possibly heavily so. It out-guns any civilian craft, probably almost all merchant craft, most planetary colonies, subspace relays, and basically anything that is unarmed and unprotected.

Therefore, a wing of long-range fighters challenges more points in space simultaneously than a single starship. It forces the opposing side into a strategy where they must choose which among a variety of points to defend and how.

If your reply is that well you can defend everything well enough to fend off one fighter, think again please. Once you do that, the reply will be to attack some points with two or three fighters at once while ignoring others. If you increase defenses again then you enter an arms race spiral. This puts pressure on both sides. At some point, choices between mutually exclusive ways to spend one's economic resources must be made.

By itself it may not be decisive to either side, but strategically the more ways each side puts pressure on the other, the greater the wear, and ultimately one side will suffer from some significant opportunity cost. Fighters may not be where the breakthrough occurs, but the use of fighters in conjunction with other strategies could apply enough pressure to present the opponent with too many things that must be addressed at once to forestall defeat.

 

[Relayer1]

Caliburn24, there's something else you are overlooking that is pretty important.

A fighter is armed, possibly heavily so. It out-guns any civilian craft, probably almost all merchant craft, most planetary colonies, subspace relays, and basically anything that is unarmed and unprotected.

Therefore, a wing of long-range fighters challenges more points in space simultaneously than a single starship. It forces the opposing side into a strategy where they must choose which among a variety of points to defend and how.

If your reply is that well you can defend everything well enough to fend off one fighter, think again please. Once you do that, the reply will be to attack some points with two or three fighters at once while ignoring others. If you increase defenses again then you enter an arms race spiral. This puts pressure on both sides. At some point, choices between mutually exclusive ways to spend one's economic resources must be made.

By itself it may not be decisive to either side, but strategically the more ways each side puts pressure on the other, the greater the wear, and ultimately one side will suffer from some significant opportunity cost. Fighters may not be where the breakthrough occurs, but the use of fighters in conjunction with other strategies could apply enough pressure to present the opponent with too many things that must be addressed at once to forestall defeat.

Even if a fighter is not capable of taking on a capital ship, producing and deploying numbers of smaller armed craft over a large area forces the enemy to commit large numbers of their larger more difficult / expensive to produce capital ships to oppose or contain them. This or produce fighters of their own.

Fighter on fighter combat - dogfights ?

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Even if a fighter is not capable of taking on a capital ship, producing and deploying numbers of smaller armed craft over a large area forces the enemy to commit large numbers of their larger more difficult / expensive to produce capital ships to oppose or contain them. This or produce fighters of their own.

Precisely.