Why no starfighters?

[Thespeckledkiwi]

I know that they have Runabouts and Shuttlecrafts but I don't consider them starfighters like X-Wings. They are a little big and they don't look like they have a lot of maneuverability. And I think they could do a ton of damage against bigger ships and give support to infantries on the ground.

So why no starfighters?

 

[Timo]

We saw some in DS9 - and they achieved nothing against capital ships.

Apparently, by the Trek rules of combat, small spacecraft are analogous to small boats while large spacecraft are analogous to large ships, in Hornblowerish terms: small craft do not have access to "missiles" or "torpedoes", but merely to the same type of weapons that the capital ships have, only smaller and weaker. Furthermore, small craft appear slower than large ships at warp, have weaker shields, and do not gain any advantage from their subilght maneuverability because anti-fighter fire from the capital ships is 100% accurate even against wildly maneuvering targets.

That's the tech side. Of course, it is merely the necessary result of the more important side: the dramatic aspect. Trek heroes fly capital ships, so capital ships are better than anything else. And that in turn is originally the result of real-world limitations: effects technology (and other cinematographic realities) at the time of TOS would not have allowed for a fightercraft-based show. Even TNG would have been hard pressed to achieve anything even remotely like Star Wars, and would at best have repeated the crappiness of the original Galactica. Two fighter effects per season, recycled over and over, would grow tedious even faster than the recycled flyby shots of the hero ship.

Okay, so now the effects wizards can do fighters. Should they? The imaginary tech rules can always be bent or broken, e.g. by referring to technological breakthroughs in the Trek universe that suddenly make fighters a viable weapon after all. But there is another kind of inertia there. Trek has always been about a bunch of actors exchanging lines with Shakespearean precision in a cardboard-walled set. To go from there to a setting where solo actors exchange wit between computer-generated cockpits would be a massive dramatic change, and quite possibly the only way to actually do "Trek that is not Trek".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[HRHTheKING]

Agreed.

Starfighters would be welcome in Star Trek.

They would appear visually dramatic.

 

[Thespeckledkiwi]

Timo, I thought those were Peregrines that went up against the Capitol...

 

[Timo]

Umm, what does the name of the craft have to do with anything?

(Besides, I'm pretty convinced these fightercraft we saw in DS9 were not named the Peregrine class. After all, that class was described in "Heart of Stone" as a courier vessel, and the fightercraft we see wouldn't be suited to couriering anything much. They barely accommodate the two pilots, leaving no room for priority cargo or diplomatic packages or whatever. Furthermore, they feature heavy built-in armament, which a courier should not have - why, if you armed a courier, you might incite the pilot to actually fight something with it, and that would be disastrous to the courier mission.)

When the fighters did attack capital ships in DS9, they never seemed to cause any damage. Except, of course, the obligatory consequenceless fireballs against the shields, a trademark of all DS9 battles. And perhaps some minor rattling inside the targeted vessel.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Sisu]

Obviously, because Xur and the Ko-dan Armada used a spy to destroy the main Federation Starfighter base.

Which means, of course, we need ... The Last Starfighter.

 

[doubleohfive]

Sisu said:
Obviously, because Xur and the Ko-dan Armada used a spy to destroy the main Federation Starfighter base.

Which means, of course, we need ... The Last Starfighter.

You beat me to it.

 

[JD]

I've also wondered why they never tried including starfghters into Trek. The main being that it is one of the only major sci-fi franchises that doesn't include some kind of fighter craft. That and I've aways loved the dog-fight sequences in stuff like Star Wars, and (new)BSG.

 

[Anwar]

Isn't it because Starfighter combat really wouldn't be all that effective, and fighters don't really work the way they do in Star Wars, B5 and BSG?

 

[Unicron]

Not necessarily. Fighters in those series behave like modern aircraft do - their role is to destroy enemy fighters, not to engage the warships unless they have their own warships backing them up. And that is how such small craft should be used, IMO. We're rarely seen fighters in Trek, but that seemed to be how they were used on DS9 - extra firepower for the big ships.

Classic BSG is another good example - the Cylons only sent large fighter swarms against the Galactica herself when they were able to decoy her fighter screen away, or if they had a nearby base-ship. Sending even a large swarm against Galactica and her fighters wouldn't be particularly bright, because it wouldn't be a clear advantage.

 

[captcalhoun]

a squadron of fighters equipped with torpedo/missile type weapons may be effective vs a capital ship if they use coordinated mass fire. the Rebel/New Republic starfighters do this in the novels often. particularly in the 'X-Wing' series...

 

[Samurai8472]

doubleohfive said:

Sisu said:
Obviously, because Xur and the Ko-dan Armada used a spy to destroy the main Federation Starfighter base.

Which means, of course, we need ... The Last Starfighter.

You beat me to it.

I was thinking the same thing, but I was going to say "because Jeff East was busy"

 

[Thespeckledkiwi]

Couldn't they like blow up a nacelle or cause some major damage to the warp core if armed with torpedoes?

 

[Anwar]

They'd have to be pretty big to have enough torpedos to do any real damage to the cap ship, I can't see a fighter armed with more than 1 or so torpedos, and for the cost of building that many fighters to take out a CapShip you could just as easily make a CapShip.

 

[Thespeckledkiwi]

Maybe but they would be good ground support...

 

[Unicron]

SW and some other series use dedicated bombers for this role, and other fighters as interceptors and superiority vessels.

 

[Star Wolf]

TheBolianChef said:
Couldn't they like blow up a nacelle or cause some major damage to the warp core if armed with torpedoes?

Its Star Trek, not BattleStar, B5 or Star Wars. There is no lightly protected trench for Luke Skywalker to fly up.

The weak points don't become weak points until the shields are down graded enough to be penetrated. In Star Trek size matters. More size equals more power to keep up the fire to downgrade those shields and to generate your own shields.

Star Trek vessels meanuver at faster than light speeds, they don't jump to hyperspace and are only actually "flown" by the Red Baron at sublight speeds.. Any spacecraft able to navagate at such velocities should have no problem generating a target solution for hitting a fighter if he pulls 9 Gs or 90 Gs. And because the fighter is so small it does not have the engines to generate the shields to survive phaser hits.

Modern surface to air missles are at or beyond the ability of piloted fighter aircraft in meanuverabilty now. In Trek it has not been established that a photon torpedo can only fly hot straight and normal like a WWII sream torpedo or with limited course corrections which would make a torpedo control ship necessary to get the weapon close. So the bigger the ship the more torpedos it can bring to a fight.

Bringing fighters to Star Trek would be like hunting Bismark with biplanes if Bismark had the speed and range of a B1 bomber and modern AAA that did not miss.

 

[Unicron]

Well, I wouldn't exactly call the Death Star trench lightly defended. It is true that a lot of the big ships like Star Destroyers are slow as molasses at sublight, but everything I've ever read about SW ships suggests that a fair number of smaller warships (as well as ships like the Millenium Falcon and Slave I) are fast enough to hold their own against a fighter squadron.

 

[Delta1]

I don't know about "slow as molasses." Star Destroyers easily kept up with the Millennium Falcon until it jumped to lightspeed. They decelerated at several hundred (or thousand, if you prefer the larger DS2) gs when flanking the Rebels in RotJ.

 

[Unicron]

Yeah, but compared to a small ship like the MF they're still far slower when not in hyperspace. That's easily compensated for by their armament, but it seems to me like they're about as fast as some of the Trek ships moving at full impulse. I'll have to go back and watch.