Starfleet Carrier Ship

[Timo]

The attack fighters we see in DS9 don't seem like they'd be easy to store and launch on every ship type. They seem to me to be a bit wide to fit in any but the largest shuttlebays.

...Curiously enough, when the craft were first designed (either for "Preemptive Strike" or "The Maquis"), their wings were given a fairly suggestive fold line or two. In that sense, they really looked the part of a naval aircraft.

See for example here: two possible fold lines, one at the kink of the wing, one further inboard:

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x21/maquis-pt2_343.jpg

If the wing folds up at the kink, then the craft can land on a flat surface, plus it becomes narrow enough to fit inside most shuttlebays with ease.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MatthiasRussell]

I see a place for both battleships and carriers. I think the 2 principle reasons we never saw a carrier are the desire to emphasize that the primary role of starfleet and its ships are exploration and that rendering lots of fighters on a tv budget would have been a problem in the 90s.

I also think the majority of sci fi has shown that small fighters have their place. They diversify resources and minimize loss in a group of smaller, more maneuverable targets. At the same time, I don't think they would have the range of a larger vessel and would need a carrier.

 

[Vance]

The show basically uses larger ships so it's therefor likely that they're more effective, for whatever Treknical purposes. Otherwise, it'd be unrealistic for any of the powers to have ever developed battleships at all. What, Galactica can't do exploration?

Again you're using a logical fallacy. We have both battleships and fighters today. Why would Star Fleet take just one avenue of approach to combat?

 

[Timo]

Because fighters are worthless in that universe?

We don't have flying infantrymen today. Why should our armies neglect this avenue of approach to combat? Because today's tech doesn't allow for flying infantrymen, that's why. In some other reality, or in the future, flying infantry might be a decisive force in warfare, though.

We don't have cavalry today, either. That, too, is for a reason. Fighters may have been evicted from the Trek battlefield for the same reason horses are banned from today's killing grounds. There's no logical fallacy there - what we see is what we get, and it's always for a reason, even if we personally don't know the reason.

We don't have space battleships and space fighters today, so we have no basis for arguing that either of them would ever be a valid concept. Perhaps both are fundamentally unsound, and all future space warfare will be conducted by nanoclouds and gravity pulses. We can't argue otherwise, because the future isn't here yet.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vance]

Because fighters are worthless in that universe?

There's no indication that that's true, which is the entire point. Your preference is for that to be true, but it's hardly a given.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Obviously fighters aren't totally worthless, otherwise Starfleet wouldn't have them to begin with.

 

[Arpy]

We don't use battleships today. We use use cruisers, destroyers, support craft and the like, but with the advent of the guided missile and the airplane, naval combat has drastically changed from that of the 19th century. In Trek, the guided missile that is the photon torpedo tends to act like a cannonball (fans speculate it's due to sensor countermeasures, but I think the CG guys need to quit underestimating our intelligence), and the carrier has never been portrayed.

We've never seen the Akira behave like one either. There were no fighters in FC. In VOY's "Message in a Bottle" when they send an Akira into battle, they flank it with two Defiants. And who needs a committed carrier when all starships carry a fleet of smaller craft? Why don't we ever see the Constitution or Galaxy or Miranda, or D'Deridex or Galor for that matter, go into battle swarmed by a cloud of smaller craft?

I think people like carriers because they think it's more realistic, using the current paradigm rather than a previous one, but I think that they forget that our own fighters one day will be drone AI's alone. It's just as much a fantasy to think that Galactica or Farscape or Star Wars is any more realistic.

Trek has gone the battleship route and I think it's more interesting trying to figure out how and why that works and with the introduction of fighters, how they fit into that paradigm.

 

[Vance]

Arpy, a lot of today's cruisers put the classic battleships to shame. It's the same logic that calls the Galaxy class an 'Exploration Cruiser'.

 

[BK613]

What some fail to remember is that one of the key principles that makes aircraft carriers so potent is the fact that their weapon system (the aircraft) operates in a medium other than water (air) and that medium gives significant advantages in speed and maneuverability over any water-bound opponent.

Since there is no analogous medium in the Trek universe that offers these advantages, at best, what is being proposed by many would not be an Star Fleet equivalent of an aircraft carrier but some sort of PT boat carrier, since the "fighters" would be operating in the same medium as the rest of the combatants.

 

[Arpy]

Vance, how do you mean? Sure, a modern destroyer would have little trouble sinking a old battleship, but we don't use the larger ships these days.

BK, I keep that fact very much in mind. Maybe Trek is entirely fantastical in its use of the old battleship paradigm. Maybe all sci-fi TV shows are for showing warfare engaged with ships, fighters, and perhaps even drones. Who knows what life will be like in the real 24th century. Or, by the time we invent a method of transportation that gets around pesky relativity, the 34th century. But given the form Trek has taken, and that I enjoy it, I want to know how it'd be possible.

Though not to the exclusion of other possibilities. I wish they'd run into aliens more often that had more alien technologies - ones that weren't reverse-engineerable in the time-span of an episode. Star Wars-like hyperdrives, Babylon 5 jumpgates, BSG dimensional jumps, etc. Nations of androids, clones, AI's, augments, benevolent Collectives, etc. And nations that figured out a way to, or were just willing to sacrifice, countless fighters, or used drones, or something else...maybe ships that broke apart in combat into swarms of smaller ones...or a species that had no weapons but instead teleported their enemies' whole ships into suns.

 

[Timo]

There's no indication that that's true, which is the entire point.

There's the indication that the fighters are nowhere to be seen, which is plenty enough.

We can't know the exact characteristics, specifications and facts that make fighters worthless in the Trek future, just like the cavalry pundits of the 19th century could not have guessed which factors would make horses useless in battle eventually. But a descriptive analysis is as good as any, and that analysis reveals that fighters are not used (except once in a situation where their use is said to be against all doctrine). That is as big a part of the "entire point" as any make-believe claims about their worthiness.

Fighters continue to be seen throughout the Dominion War. But only in the low dozens, not in the hundreds. So we know that Starfleet doctrine goes against large formations, and thus against carriers that would haul hundreds of the things. Absence of evidence is always valid evidence of absence, statistically speaking.

One interesting thing about the "battleship doctrine" of Trek is that it isn't the World War I/II one, where dreadnoughts fought each other with long range cannon. It's the preceding one, where cannon came in a menagerie of types, all of which had relatively short (but varying) range, and the side that brought the most barrels to bear (by closing in on the range of the shortest-ranged guns) automatically won the battle. Aircraft today are extremely long range artillery; Trek doctrine would go against using them because long ranges are to be avoided.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MatthiasRussell]

What some fail to remember is that one of the key principles that makes aircraft carriers so potent is the fact that their weapon system (the aircraft) operates in a medium other than water (air) and that medium gives significant advantages in speed and maneuverability over any water-bound opponent.

Since there is no analogous medium in the Trek universe that offers these advantages, at best, what is being proposed by many would not be an Star Fleet equivalent of an aircraft carrier but some sort of PT boat carrier, since the "fighters" would be operating in the same medium as the rest of the combatants.

Very valid point. I agree, the common medium does change the relationship and makes fighters less awesome than they are now. Heck, the role of fighters us even further limited with the invention of smart missiles.

Call them fighters, PT boats or something else, there is value in a swarm of small, maneuverable, intelligent targets. It has worked for bees quite well.

 

[Vance]

There's the indication that the fighters are nowhere to be seen, which is plenty enough.

Factually wrong. A fighter first appeared in "Journey to Babel" and gave the Enterprise a hard time until Kirk tricked the pilot.

So I assert forcefully, there is simply no basis for a supposition that fighter-craft are either nonsensical or ineffective in the Star Trek universe.

 

[blssdwlf]

^ It was a "small scout ship" "constructed for a suicide mission" with a power utilization curve "more powerful than a starship or anything known to us."

No way would that Orion ship considered to be a fighter.

 

[Vance]

^ It was a "small scout ship" "constructed for a suicide mission" with a power utilization curve "more powerful than a starship or anything known to us."

No way would that Orion ship considered to be a fighter.

...

Forget it, I'm done. There's no point in being reasonable in this thread.

 

[Unicron]

We don't have cavalry today, either. That, too, is for a reason. Fighters may have been evicted from the Trek battlefield for the same reason horses are banned from today's killing grounds. There's no logical fallacy there - what we see is what we get, and it's always for a reason, even if we personally don't know the reason.

That's not quite accurate. We no longer use horses for cavalry, which used to be the iconic image, but we use modern technology to still facilitate the same combat role - a fast unit that can outflank an enemy and offer support to the units acting as the thrust. Cavalry is still key, just not the horses we've downsized.

 

[Arpy]

Why is it that being called unreasonable infuriates me more than being cursed at?

Ah well. Look, on the carrier front, the fact of the matter is that in over forty years, six television series, and eleven movies, not once has any commanding officer of any major power said anything like, "Scramble fighters!" What they have done in that time - time and time and time again - is order their massive starships to attack each other very much in the Hornblower tradition.

Now you prefer ships to act like carriers, and I prefer they do a better job of explaining why they don't. And, for that matter, that they not be so uncomfortably anachronistic at times - I'm looking at you Wrath of Khan. ...They were firing at each other broadsides in that one! But I keep getting the impression that you're asking me to disprove a negative.

Finally, I'm sorry you feel so exasperated. I can't tell you how many interesting threads I've given up on because it wasn't, I felt, worth the bother.

 

[sojourner]

I got a chance to scrabble fighters last night. Double word score too!

 

[SicOne]

I don't know if they don't generally use fighters (outside of their onscreen established existence in DS9)(and even then, only in that specific battle) because fighters were a relatively new presentation in the Trek universe, or unused by the producers to avoid comparisons to Star Wars, Babylon 5, what-have-you.

But the mere fact that we only see fighters, once, and in very small numbers, would tend to suggest that capital ships of the Trekverse aren't very concerned about a threat that small craft could pose...and there must be very good reasons for that that we simply aren't aware of.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Considering that the starships themselves tend to operate as fighters during fleet operations, that tends to argue against Starfleet having any major fighter setup, at least as we know it.