Nerds at War
Via Robert Farley, Raoul Vega comments on starship design and battle tactics:
The Imperial Star Destroyer of the Star Wars universe is a hybrid battleship/aircraft carrier, capable (according to Wikipedia) of carrying 72 TIE fighters plus auxiliaries, but also capable of fighting it out ship-to-ship. I’m not sure that we ever get a really clear sense of which kind of fighting the Imperial Fleet prefers, since the Fleet does nothing during the Battle of Endor. A battlestar in both variants of Battlestar Galactica is also a hybrid. The original Galactica carried 150 fighters, while the ships from the newer series seem to carry about 40 or so (more on Pegasus, less on Galactica. Again, the BSG ships in both series engage in direct combat against Cylon Baseships, which in the second series in particular seem to resemble aircraft carriers much more than battleships.
All of this makes me wonder why the ships in Star Trek are so clearly cruisers and battleships, rather than aircraft carriers. As far as I can tell, no race in the series employs vessels that act as motherships to large numbers of fighters. Indeed, I suspect that the Enterprise (in all of its variants) would run into considerable difficulties if it were attacked by a swarm of small craft. Its phaser and torpedo banks seem designed to fight large ships, rather than to provide close defense against small craft. The same appears to be true of Klingon, Romulan, and other ships.
Clearly this is a question that calls for a made-up answer. So what I would say is that most likely in the Star Trek universe it’s not technologically feasible to equip a craft smaller than a Defiant-class starship with deflector shields. You could attribute that to the physics of the deflector fields themselves, or the need for a large power supply, or what have you. Either way, the upshot is that piloting a small craft in battle would be tantamount to suicide. At the same time, it’s probably also the case that it’s not feasible to build warp engines powerful enough to move a craft large enough to carry Defiant-class starships. Consequently, no aircraft carriers.
UPDATE: Looks like shuttlecraft do have shields but maybe they’re weak shields to protect against little rocks and such and not powerful enough to cope with weapons. Also, that link, which many have sent me, is from an “expanded universe” wiki so I don’t even consider it definitive. Memory Alpha doesn’t say anything about shields on shuttles or even runabouts.
107 Responses to “Nerds at War”
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October 1st, 2008 at 12:26 pm
I <3 Yglesias.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:26 pm
…now gimme your lunch money.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Since I’m working my way through Babylon 5, I’d note that they follow the hybrid battleship/carrier model. The Vorlons, however, did at one point seem to have a pure carrier (actually planet killer) that had to be protected by a fleet, it was never shown fighting on its own.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:29 pm
…the Enterprise (in all of its variants) would run into considerable difficulties if it were attacked by a swarm of small craft.
In its moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances!
October 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
But, they did have small attack fighters in the Star Trek universe.
Thankfully, I am already married, otherwise, I would be concerned for having known this.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
1. Shuttlecraft do have deflector shields, but they may not be powerful enough to go to war in.
2. The Borg seem to have plenty of room to house smaller (Defiant-sized) ships in their cubes, but they don’t choose to do this. But maybe that’s just a Borg thing. In any case, large Warp ships are possible.
My guess is that the hassle of animating lots of little fighters was just too much for Paramount.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Shuttle craft have deflector shields.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:31 pm
the made up answer doesn’t really work b/c
1) remote controlled droids could be your fighters and
2) I could swear that shuttles had shields at one point or another.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Someone should ask Palin.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Using pilots is so 20th century. Galactic Presidential Candidate Barackobama says we should move into the 42nd century instead. The answer: small drones that would serve the same function as piloted space-craft, with the added addition of being completely expandable, and take up much less space on a ship.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:33 pm
This was such a great post and a terrific distraction from all the politics.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Not that this addresses the question in fictional universes, but in the real universe particle weapons and hyperacceleration missiles would decide any space battles at long range, well before any piloted fighters could possibly be relevant.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:39 pm
My guess is that the hassle of animating lots of little fighters was just too much for Paramount.
in the real universe particle weapons and hyperacceleration missiles would decide any space battles at long range, well before any piloted fighters could possibly be relevant.
You guys are just spoilsports.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Ah, but if I’m reading the episode summary correctly, their main purpose was as a distraction to draw the big ships out. Doesn’t sound like much of a threat.
(And yes, I’m also married and have lots of sex. With a woman.)
October 1st, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Federation Ships and all the others have shields. It’s possible that small fighter craft can’t pack enough attack punch to get through shields effectively.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:46 pm
My guess would be that because of the deflector shields, smaller ships wouldn’t be able to do any real damage to larger ships, except for torpedoes or whatever.
But it’s probably because it was cheaper to do it this way or they just didn’t think of it in the original series, and all of the subsequent series have emulated the first one.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:46 pm
What an excellent diversion.
The impression I was always under (from Star Trek) was that the weapons needed to be effective against capital ships simply required too much energy for smaller, swifter “snubfighters” like in Star Wars.
As you’d probably admit, the physics of Star Trek are a little more thought out than Star Wars. But not as much fun.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I assume the converse is a reason too: It would not be possible to equip small fighters with offensive weapons strong enough to break through a starship’s shields.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:51 pm
But on more serious and important issue; could Superman could beat up Batman?
Here’s something to listen to while you ponder these and other of life’s persistent questions:
Starfleet Academy
October 1st, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I was looking for a quote from either Leonard or Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory.” I’m sure they’d know the answer to these questions….
October 1st, 2008 at 12:54 pm
The ships in Star Trek seem incapable of interacting in any way, hostile or friendly, from beyond the range of one of Jack Aubrey’s broadsides. Oddly, they seemed better at long range combat in the earliest episodes of the first series. Over time they’ve become much worse.
Explain the physics of that.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
It’s probably just the fact that they didn’t have the technology to do small ship vs. big ship special effects in the original series, thus they wrote it as big ships vs. big ship and every other Star Trek spinoff didn’t go there. I think the more apt comparison is 16th/17th/18th century ship fighting.
I mean…uh…dilithium…shortages…crystals…too….big…for….small….ship.
http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/
October 1st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
about the Trek universe: in WWII, Gene Roddenberry flew B17s (a.k.a. “Flying Fortresses”). maybe the Trek universe would have turned out differently had he flown Mustangs or P38s.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Oh, come on. Sure, interspace battles at warp speeds are only feasible for ships large enough for warp drives — but planets still need to be invaded. There would be plenty of reasons to need aircraft carriers in the Star Trek universe.
However, you could get around this by designing a ship large enough for warp drive, but primarily with massive replicator storage. The ship could then replicate the necessary small ships needed. If it was small enough, it could participate in a starship’s shield system, providing it with crew for the ship. An plug-in, if you will.
And the peace benefits of this replicator ship would be evident as well. The ships could be used in emergency hunger situations for planets, medical supplies, etc. Then when some petty tyrant takes over a pilot, the replicator ship finds a starship, and whammo — invasion is on.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Read “providing it with crews for the small ships” and “petty tyrant takes over a planet” in the last post, please.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I think it goes back to the mission statement of the Enterprise: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man/one has gone before…
These guys were classic hippies. Make love, not war. Why do you need to carry fighters when you’re just out taking a leisurely stroll about the galaxy checking things out?
October 1st, 2008 at 12:58 pm
That was for only one, specific engagement, where the Federation forces were outnumbered two to one by the Dominion forces. The Federation (or rather, the “Allied”) forces were trying to reach a specific, strategic point hence the use as a decoy. They were trying to get the other forces to break ranks so that some ships could speed through and reach the target point.
The Attack Fighters were also used by a splinter group of Federation citizens for a form of guerilla warfare. And they were quite successful too.
However, there is no real instance (as I recall) of there being some sort of mothership for these. It’s as if they have the long range capabilities of the other ships, or the show makers just never got around to explaining where they came from.
(I love this side debate, makes the tears of the Palin VP pick go away a bit.)
October 1st, 2008 at 12:59 pm
The episode where Riker somehow confused the heck out of Locutus by the simple expedient of separating the Enterprise and zipping the shuttle inside the Borg deflector shields with LaForge, Data and Worf (??) to snatch Locutus would suggest that the tactic of small attack ships was completely unknown in the Star Trek universe.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:00 pm
In “Operation Return,” which takes place over the episodes “Favor the Bold” and “Sacrifice of Angels” in season 6 of DS9, Sisko orders squadron after squadron of attack fighters to go after the Cardassian ships, in an attempt to goad them to chase the fighters and open a hole in their “lines” (don’t ask me how this is supposed to work in 3D). The idea isn’t that the fighters are useless, or don’t exist generally, but that since the Federation fleet is outnumbered 2-1 (at least until the Klingons show up), and since their goal wasn’t to defeat the fleet, but to get to Deep Space Nine in time to stop the Dominion from bringing down the minefield protecting the Wormhole, the fighters were really secondary to the battle. (Seriously, DS9 is awesome.)
The main reason they didn’t come up in Star Trek very often is because, with the exception of DS9 and a little bit of Enterprise, Star Trek has always been about how the future is more peaceful, better, etc. There are fights, occasional battles, but nothing on the level of a real war until you get to the Dominion war (the Borg and Klingon Civil war never lasted more than a 2-parter at a time). With big starships, you can explore planets AND kick ass, but fighters only serve one purpose. It’s basically the difference between Star Trek (dramatic sci-fi), Star Wars (action sci-fi) and new BSG (gritty war sci-fi). All good in their own ways.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:02 pm
There’s also this to think of: what is the main purpose of the ships? It seems to me that, in the three Star Wars prequels, the large cruisers are much more like aircraft carriers, delivering great numbers of smaller ships for battles. They’re not particularly well-equipped against attack from small ships, something that the Imperial cruisers retain. In BSG, especially the second series, the Battlestars are again more like aircraft carriers, but used to go toe-to-toe against Basestars. In the Star Trek universe, though, the major difference is that the ships aren’t designed for war as their primary use. The model is much more like the classic sailing ships of 18th and 19th Century: they’re transports, exploration vessels, even merchant ships and warships all in one. The regions of space are larger and take longer to transverse (as a side-note, both Star Wars and BSG have some form of long-range, nearly instanteous travel, while Star Trek only has a faster speed). The more war-like races, the Klingons and the Romulans both have smaller attack vessels, but there isn’t the same need for a mobile platform to launch attacks.
All of this is the long way of saying…I didn’t get laid in high school. At all.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:02 pm
The Imperial officers on the Star Destroyers are itching to engage the Rebel Fleet and destroy them, but the Emperor only allows them to engage with fighters because he wants to destroy the Rebel ships one by one with the Death Star. The Rebels, likewise, are clearly surprised that the Star Destroyers are beating the hell out of them and only the fighters are attacking. It seems clear to me that Imperial standard operating procedure would be to engage with the battle fleet directly.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:02 pm
@ Edward: It was only Data and Worf that saved Picard from the Borg, mostly cause they’re the only ones that can take on the Borg hand-to-hand once they adapted to the phaser frequencies.
Also, it wasn’t that the Borg couldn’t conceive of being attacked by a small ship, just that they didn’t see that particular ship as a threat, because it didn’t occur to them that Riker would try to save Picard (or that it would work)
“Incorrect strategy….number one.”
October 1st, 2008 at 1:04 pm
in the real universe particle weapons and hyperacceleration missiles would decide any space battles at long range, well before any piloted fighters could possibly be relevant.
Dunno about the real universe (well see when it happens) but this actually seems to be the case in BSG: The Vipers seem to have little or no ability to prevent the Battlestar from having to engage hostile ships directly. In particular, fighters don’t seem to operate significantly beyond the sensor (or even weapons) range of the capital ships. Admittedly, I’m still in the first season, but so far I don’t see what they’re adding at all.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:05 pm
The easiest to explain answer would be that in order to obtain speeds that would be useful in battle, the engines produce way too much heat to vent away in small craft.
But since they actually do exist to some degree but not until the end of known Trek tech, maybe they fixed the heat problem?
October 1st, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Would it be fair to describe Cylon BaseStars as kinda like Nuclear Submarines considering that their offensive weapons are mostly missiles?
October 1st, 2008 at 1:08 pm
The basic problem here is that George Lucas knows jack about military history, so don’t expect him to make sense. On the other hand, Roddenberry was consciously doing “Hornblower in Space” which meant that he was implicitly buying into the romance of the ship. It is ironic though that a former Air Force officer would buy whole-heartedly into naval motifs.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Shields are one variable, warp drive is another. The Trek Universe doesn’t feature large numbers of one-manned (or even car-sized) transport craft, either. Non-warp fighters are vulnerable to someone simply moving away. In the real world, planes are far faster than their carriers and non-fighter targets. There’s no danger that when you get to the other capital ship, they’ll warp out, and zoom around to the other side and attack your now-vulnerable carrier.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I think the primary difficulty isn’t shielding but weapon strength. Runabouts are clearly capable of fighting, but there’s no indication they could do much damage. For the most part, the Federation just doesn’t design ships for war purposes, even though the Maquis have shown that smaller Federation ships can be retrofitted for that purpose.
Now the Romulans had fighter ships in the last movie, but they didn’t play much of a role either. Needless to say, the most important factor, both in the movie and in Trek at large, is the expense of depicting large-scale battles, particularly since they have used models rather than CGI for most of their run.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:12 pm
there’s much less need for them, if you can “transport” people and cargo to and from the ship.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Ooo, a nerd-off.
Anyway, the best analysis of the star wars verses star trek universe is found here. Check out the rest of the site as well. But given how much trouble star trek level ships have hitting other capital ships when they do even simple things like turn in a slow arc, presumably fighters would be able to engage capital ships with impunity.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
The wargame Star Fleet Battles is licensed form the Original, Kirk-centered series. It does use ‘attrition units’ like you describe.
In SFB’s timeline Attack Shuttles were developed about 10 years after Kirk and within a decade became full-fledged fighters. A cruiser could carry a squadron of 12 each and a few support craft; larger dreadnought hulls could hold 2 squadrons. Fighters were small, no shields but often launched long-ranged weaponry to avoid closing in with a big ships guns.
Later there came Fast Patrol (P/F or PF) ships, gunships or PT boats with a crew of 6 or so that had much larger range and independence. Large ships would have several escorts, fighters and PFs.
Eventually the upgrades to technology (about the same as in the movies and new series) had cruisers that could destroy light craft in one salvo. The main benefits of attrition units – cheap and fast to produce – were overcome by the march of technology. Improving them to match the new cruisers would be cost-prohibitive; it was more economical to make frigate and destroyer squadrons than the relatively short-ranged PFs requiring a mothership.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:29 pm
The answer, as known by old players of Starfleet Battles (board-based role-playing game): The races of the Federation did not consider it humane to field small ships that had no hope of withstanding a direct hit from a capitol ship.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:39 pm
This apparent anomaly is due to the probability that actual UFO’s have no engines;
rather, the skins of the ships are composed of meta-materials, which are exposed to forces which can shrink the space-time in front of the ship and expand that which is behind, allowing the vessel to move ‘faster than light’. The pilot(s) FEEL NO TIDAL FORCES BECAUSE OF THE LARGE RADIUS OF THE MASS generated by the ship. This is the idea behind the Alcubierre drive.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:41 pm
If you really want to be nerdy, the Star Trek Universe having transporters and food replicators could have had more lethal weapons that direct sight beam weapons or lobbing anti-matter that someone. See Greg Bear’s Anvil of Stars.
Also, in the book Fall of Hypersion, movie space battles were described as clautraphobic whereas “real battles” would be spreadout over areas larger than solarsystems. You really do not want to be near something that is being hit with anti-matter.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:44 pm
“there’s much less need for them, if you can “transport” people and cargo to and from the ship.”
The story I’d always heard was that the came up with the transporter precisely because Paramount didn’t want to buid an extra “landing craft” set and, presumably, waste time getting to and from the planets.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:49 pm
“Sure, interspace battles at warp speeds are only feasible for ships large enough for warp drives — but planets still need to be invaded. There would be plenty of reasons to need aircraft carriers in the Star Trek universe.”
Star Trek has the teleporter technology, and Star Wars, BSG and Babylon 5 don’t. In Star Trek, the main battle is to secure the outer space around a planet. In battles with technologically advanced opponents, one would presume important planets both have substantial fleets to protect them as well as very large, extremely heavily shielded planetary defenses. (From anecdotal evidence, we know in fact that such planetary defenses are standard for important planets controlled by the major Star Trek powers). The only way (usually) to overcome such defenses is with the battleship.
Once the outer space around the planet has been cleared of defenses and defending fleets by your battleships, the battleships themselves can easily and extremely accurately fire upon any remaining ground targets (ground-based defenses, command centers, fortresses, power stations, atmospheric airports, large concentrations of ground forces, etc). There is no need for a small ship fleet.
A further factor in the Star Trek universe is that the more powerful phaser weapons actually take up a lot of physical space. I believe occasionally a separate phaser bank crew and comparatively large phaser bank physical space are mentioned.
Your ground troops are then delivered to the ground by teleporter (which is safer for them than flying by shuttle) for mop-up operations. Since the Star Wars, BSG and Babylon 5 universes don’t have teleportation, they must have a way of getting ground forces down to the surface safely.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Not to be a spoilsport on this thread (which I’m enjoying), but isn’t the answer to all these questions “Because writers aren’t engineers?” I suspect the choices stem from the pressure of churning out television scripts on tight deadlines more than conscious choices, though I’m glad the new Galactica got the bridge right.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Brian: Of course the answer is ‘because writers aren’t engineers’, but what fun is that? That’d be a short and boring blog post, and a short and boring comment thread.
For my contribution: has anybody else noticed the parallel between the TIE Fighter vs X-Wing and the Zero vs. Wildcat? The heavier, tougher, better armed, and less manuverable ‘good guy’ vs the paper-thin, but insanely manuverable ‘bad guy’? Note that in the Expanded Universe, X-Wings use exactly the same Thatch Weave tactic to allow X-Wings to achieve firing positions on more-manuverable TIEs as F4F pilots did in the Pacific.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Anyone ever read the Culture SF novels by Iain M. Banks? There things are run by super-intelligent AIs, and starship combat ends up being something like 100 days of preparation (to get in position) followed by 100 milliseconds of combat (as super-intelligent machines wield superweapons across super distances).
You basically get one chance, and if you blow it it’s over in the blink of an eye. It’s an interesting take on how things might work if technology really was as advanced as it would kind of have to be in any of these Space Empire scenarios.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:14 pm
@ Brian: Two words – Michael Okuda. As far as I can tell, the entire Star Trek universe, down the the smallest detail, is all laid out in his head. He’s not really an engineer or a writer per se, but he knows more about bridging the two than anyone I’ve seen in sci-fi (at least in the TV/Film realm). When Ron Moore went off to do BSG, he made a conscious choice to not dwell on all the technical issues the way Star Trek did, partly because he didn’t want to get caught up in them and just wants to tell stories, but also because he probably knew that he could never find someone like Okuda to keep it all together.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:15 pm
The most “realistic” representations of fighter-sized spacecraft I’ve seen (and maybe ever encountered, period) are the Starfury from Babylon 5 and the Vipers from the revamped Battlestar, which actually take advantage (rather than either ignoring or passively acknowledging) the physical realities of spaceflight and “zero-g”. (For all his [and the show's] flaws, Straczynski in particular always seemed like he put a lot of thought into the technical aspects of his show’s world, including a particular take on combat-in-space.)
In reality, though, I presume that actual human beings aren’t physically or cognitively up to the task of usefully sitting inside a fighter-sized spacecraft and engaging in anything like the combat we see in these shows (or a more realistic version thereof). So I presume they’d be remote piloted (or somewhere on a continuum between remote piloted and AI-controlled).
October 1st, 2008 at 2:15 pm
all of this makes me appreciate the job Josh Whedon did on the Firefly universe even more – it’s all small craft bumming around, hiding, running out of gas, pirating, scavenging. good stuff.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I think this is coming down to a Man vs Fly/Bee argument.
basically, the weapons are the limiting factor, and the small ships just can’t generate enough power to keep weapons/shields up to the power of the larger battle ships.
because of this, you’d need quite a lot of ships to inflict major damage on a larger vessel, so the arms race is to house the most powerful weapons and defenses.
If I remember correctly, the defiant was a fast stealth ship with considerable firepower, but that it tended to flee when up against bigger battle ships (or have some convoluted plot device on how to beat them). She was a boarder runner.
Galatica is funny in how they don’t use shields per say, but are dependent on good old artillery to take out missiles & fighters. They lack the long range energy weapons needed to strike down ships, thus the need for conventional craft to break barriers.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I seem to remember some episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation wherein the Enterprise essentially brushed aside three small attack craft (i.e. fighters). But I’m not enough of a fan to know what episode that was.
At the end of the day, it boils down to how you envision space battles. If you have a universe in which fighters can out-accelerate capital ships and can carry the sci-fi equivalent of an Exocet missile that might kill or disable a ship in one hit, then the carrier/fighter model makes sense. If, on the other hand, small craft cannot out-accelerate larger ships (and in space, there is no particular reason why this would be the case), and if a weapon’s ability to do damage is directly related to its power plant output, then you would be left with a situation where fighters have little, if any, reason to exist. Think naval cruisers vs. armed speedboats.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:17 pm
This is the kind of first-rate analysis I’ve come to expect from Yglesias.
As a footnote, Voyager did introduce a prototype of a Prometheus-class warship, which had the ability to enter into “multi-vector assault mode”. The ship would separate into three independent units, each with its own warp nacelles and weapons platforms. Not fighters, exactly, but tactically similar.
(or is it strategically similar? gosh, I just don’t understands me the difference.)
October 1st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
The difference between Star Trek and these other series is the existence of shields that make large ships with high power output extremely resilient to the weapons available. Smaller ships are almost always depicted as having much weaker shields.
On the other hand, in series like Babylon 5 or Star Wars without shields, small, fast craft seem to be able to cause considerable damage to less mobile ships (the classic example of that being the Death Star), so there is a need for fighters both from an offensive and defensive point of view. Of course, it’s unclear why they have to be manned, outside of dramatic considerations.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Federation tactics ae horrendous.
Picard says fire…Worf presses the touchscreen…Worf announces “we have damaged their shields by 10%…Captain says to fire again…Enterprise takes a hit…Captain calls for damage assesment…
Why not link the pahsers/torpedos to a computer battle management system?
October 1st, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Matt,
Thanks for touching on the main reason I always went for Star Wars and not Star Trek. From what I recall the physical size of a photon torpedo was not that big (cruise missile size roughly). A bomber sized craft or slightly larger as not constrained by gravity could easily carry 2- enough to do substantial damage to a capital ship all by its lonesome. After these craft were developed, smaller, more nimble fighter craft would be developed with the sole mission of neutralizing bomber craft.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Star Wars really doesn’t make sense. Proton torpedos really can break capital ship-class shields, and X-Wings A) carry proton torpedos, and B) have their own FTL drive. The only thing the Rebellion should ever do is ambush lone Star Destroyers with packs of X-Wings dropping out of FTL on top of them. The B-Wing, in particular, seems entirely designed to do this.
The Cylon Raider in BSG 2.0 seems similar, in that they have a very good, very long-range FTL jump drive. I’m not sure why we ever see a BaseStar engaging a BattleStar; in theory, BaseStars should be like modern missile submarines; stealthy deployment platforms, rather than direct combatants.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I think if beam weapons were sufficiently powerful, they would be able to destroy any number of smaller spacecraft, thus rendering them obsolete.
With computer control of strong phasers the Enterprise could wipe out all the “fighters” of Battlestar Galactica and all the human pilots as well.
“fighter” strategy is SO early 21st century.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Warning, serious nerd response:
One reason they use fighters in Star Wars and not Star Trek is that in Star Trek they have much more advanced targeting computers. There is a particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the Enterprise is attacked by a wing of fighters and they destroy them all in an instant, because they are able to target them instantly. In Star Wars, they don’t seem to have that targeting capability. That being said, there is one race that uses fighters in Star Trek; the Dominion, who use clone soldiers to fight wars. so I think the overall answer is that because of the better computers in Star Trek, fighters have an even lower survival rate than in Star Wars. the only empire evil enough to use fighters are the ones who use clone soldiers, the dominion. The Klingons and Romulans are bad, but not THAT bad
October 1st, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Nerdtastic answer, Matthew!
October 1st, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Star Trek doesn’t have small fighters because Captain Kirk is supposed to be making brilliant command decisions to outsmart his foes, not just being a super-awesome pilot with mad skillz tapping into some vague “force” that allows him to shoot the eye out of a bumblebee at 200 yards.
It’s basically about the transition from the classic liberal/New Left internationalist intellectualism of the early ’60s to the post-hippie “if it feels good, it is good” proto-Reaganite California ethos of the mid-’70s.
Everything that happened after the initial Star Trek series and the initial Star Wars movie is just derivative.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:39 pm
“if a weapon’s ability to do damage is directly related to its power plant output, then you would be left with a situation where fighters have little, if any, reason to exist.”
Yep, that’s the most succinct version of what everybody’s been saying. In Star Trek, ships are flying power plants. Everything is a function of the power plant (the shields, phasers, teleportation abilities and speed are directly correlated to the size of the power plant). That’s why the Chief Engineer (essentially, the person who is overseeing the power plant) is a main character in Star Trek, while I’m not sure the Chief Engineer even exists (at least, we very rarely see them at all) in the Star Wars and Babylon 5 universes. The Chief Engineer analogue in BSG is the Viper deck chief Tyrol. Warhammer 40,000 takes the Star Trek side and ends up with battleships in the 5-10km size.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:51 pm
“A bomber sized craft or slightly larger as not constrained by gravity could easily carry 2- enough to do substantial damage to a capital ship all by its lonesome.”
Nope – because the capital ship has massive shields. Assuming the capital ship’s power plant is not otherwise damaged, it usually takes 3-6 photon torpedoes fired within a very short time to do substantial damage to even the shields. The shields rebuild strength if there are periods in between the photon torpedo hits. (And then the bombers would need to fire at least two more photon torpedoes to actually destroy the ship). Once the first two torpedoes are launched, the capital ship immediately destroys the bomber – since, of course, the bomber has only the weakest shields. Also, the physical space for the photon torpedoes (at least in the original Star Trek) is actually quite large and requires at minimum a separate three-person crew.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:54 pm
If I remember correctly, the defiant was a fast stealth ship with considerable firepower, but that it tended to flee when up against bigger battle ships (or have some convoluted plot device on how to beat them). She was a boarder runner.
Wasn’t the Defiant made in response to Wolf 359, i.e. to be used in future conflicts against a Borg-level opponent? I seem to remember it being intended as a highly offensive Borg-killer.
(as a side-note, both Star Wars and BSG have some form of long-range, nearly instanteous travel, while Star Trek only has a faster speed)
Ah, but if the Federation ever perfected Traveler- or Wes Crusher-assisted Warp 10 technology, their ships could be in all parts of space at once! (And no, when Riker told the future Ent-D to go to Warp 13, it was only possible because Starfleet recalibrated the Warp scale, not because they’d broken the Warp 10 maximum.)
October 1st, 2008 at 2:56 pm
The poster that mentioned Jack Aubrey nailed it. Star Trek is, to all intents and purposes, a 19th century naval drama that is set in space and features noses of the week. In the age of sail, small craft (like a skiff or a sloop) move slower, pack less of a punch (and at shorter range), and are much more fragile than frigates or capital ships. Under restrictive conditions, a swarm of small craft can pose a danger to a frigate—for instance, when the combatants are stuck near a coastline for whatever reason. Once we get out into blue water, the small craft don’t even stand a chance.
In this analogy, the Enterprise basically serves the role of a frigate (operates independently of other ships, and carries a small number of “shuttles/launches”). One feature of 19th century naval warfare that doesn’t really pop up in Star Trek is the idea of a “ship of the line”, a Really Big Capital Ship that is surrounded by fleets of frigates and serves mainly to attack other ships of the line.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Star Wars is (probably intentionally) like WW2. The TIE fighters are Zeros (lightly armored, low firepower, but very maneuverable), the X-Wings and other Rebel fighters are Hellcats, Mustangs, etc. The Empire, like the Imperial Japanese Navy, flies little CAP (and offers insufficient air support to its ground forces). The Rebels, like the U.S., have excellent anti-aircraft guns.
Star Trek may not have fighters because the power plants they use might be really big (like coal-fired plants before the oil age). Or it may be because fighters can’t dodge computer-guided weapons that propagate at the speed of light; the only thing you can do is block them with shields. It becomes an energy-intensive slugging match, like the Battle of Jutland.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Star Trek couldn’t afford the competition between Captain and CAG that arises on a hybrid battleship/carrier. There’s only room for one Big Swinging Dick on Kirk’s Enterprise, so no fighter group.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Big Geeky Matt is correct. It’s all about shield technology. Here’s some 20th century thoughts on the subject from the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics:
You need big stuff to generate big juice (I don’t want to get too technical). Look at the colliders at CERN. They are bigger than a hula hoop for a reason. Hence, you can’t scale down the good shields to shuttles and fighters. Hence, no carriers in the future. Res Ipso Nerdo.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Wasn’t the Defiant made in response to Wolf 359, i.e. to be used in future conflicts against a Borg-level opponent? I seem to remember it being intended as a highly offensive Borg-killer.
Yup, but as we saw in first contact, the little ship “could take a hell of a beating”, but it was just as tactically useless. Worf and the ship almost didn’t make it.
I never understood the plot point that the tiny little ship was meant as a counter to a large borg cube. The phasers had a rotating frequency to offset the borg adapting, and the ship a strong hull, but it seems like it was a trail and failure. (especially when the sovereign class enterprise can show up and fire a few quantum torpedoes to effectively mop up the situation)
October 1st, 2008 at 3:13 pm
IIRC prior to next generation, shuttles were not warp capable. So trying to fight with a shuttle in TOS would be suicidal.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Ok…I just reread all the comments.
I just want to add that any system that takes Worf OUT of the process instead of adding MORE Worf is seriously flawed. Seriously. Word to the wise…keep talking smack about the House of Mogh and you’ll wind up with a bat’leth in your chest.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:19 pm
To the best of my recollection, pretty much every ship in the old ST universe had shields. When reading this I immediately thought of Mudd’s Women – where a ship with only 4 people on board fell apart (only after Spock said “their shields are failing”) and the crew had to be beamed aboard.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Shuttle craft do have shields, but deflector shields are not the same thing as regular shields. The deflector array is used during warp travel to keep small bits of space debris from coming into contact with and destroying the ship. Normal shields are used during combat to stop incoming attacks.
This doesn’t help much since shuttles can also go faster than light, or at least the runabouts from DS9 can.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Additionally, the reason there are no aircraft carriers is because Kirk was explicitly modeled in part on James Cook, the English Captain who discovered the eastern Coast of Australia.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:42 pm
ok, I’m a huge nerd.
The other thing to remember is that the Enterprise doesn’t have to worry about a bunch of small craft at close quarters precisely because it has shields. The small craft cannot by themselves penetrate the shields. They have to take the shields out first. Effectively, Star Trek vessels have a bubble around them that other ships cannot enter.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:44 pm
“Star Trek may not have fighters because the power plants they use might be really big (like coal-fired plants before the oil age).”
We’re shown the power plants fairly frequently. The original ST Enterprise engine room is two stories high and at least 50 feet in length, overlooking the actual engines which seem several hundred feet long. TNG Enterprise power plant is three stories tall and surrounded by many different control rooms and areas. Both power plants seem to usually require 10+ crew members minimum staffing them at all times.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Yup, but as we saw in first contact, the little ship “could take a hell of a beating”, but it was just as tactically useless. Worf and the ship almost didn’t make it.
Allow me to fanwank: Wolf 359 occurred in 2367, and the Defiant was designed to deal with the Borg circa 2367. The Borg incursion shown in First Contact occurred in 2373, which gave the Collective an additional 6 years to assimilate new technologies that eventually mooted the Defiant’s advances.
I just want to add that any system that takes Worf OUT of the process instead of adding MORE Worf is seriously flawed. Seriously. Word to the wise…keep talking smack about the House of Mogh and you’ll wind up with a bat’leth in your chest.
If you want a real Klingon, give me Martok any day. Instead of spending his childhood with puny humans, he was a prisoner of the mofo’ing Dominion.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:02 pm
“Either way, the upshot is that piloting a small craft in battle would be tantamount to suicide.”
But…TIE fighters lack deflector shields, unlike X-Wings.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Yes, but would that really be worth the hassle of having the ships’ entire crews turn into lizard-like creatures, then having a bunch of baby lizard creatures and leaving them in space, before finally turning back into humans, every time they hit Warp 10?
October 1st, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Perhaps fighters weren’t used due to inadequate tactics. With Star Trek technology one could imagine a carrier craft actually being MORE usefull. Since energy is converted directly into both offensive weaponry and defensive shielding, a larger vessel could carry most of its fighters on external racks (ala cylon base stars) and either use their weapons/shields directly or tap into their power plants. Then, in response to changing tactical situations, the craft could detatch and rapidly meet new threats. One could even imagine a ship which is mostly or completely detatchable mini ships. If these ships were unmanned they could also be used as missiles.
-Alex
October 1st, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Mario @ 38 hits the nail on the head, I think. Filming scenes featuring lots of models was prohibitively expensive all the way through a large chunk of DS9, which started to reap the rewards that the CGI revolution that Babylon 5 (and Foundation Imagining) ushered into genre television. There are some gigantic battles in the latter half of DS9, thanks to the switch to CGI.
I know for sure that the runabouts have shields, and that they have been used in a military capacity. Less sure about regular shuttles. The Jem’hadar destroyed a Galaxy-class vessel by swarming it with small fighter-like attack craft (and then doing a bit of kamikaze to finish it off).
Wikipedia also discusses the regular shuttlecraft, including an alternate future shuttlecraft Janeway commandeers to go back in time to cut Voyager’s journey short — that one’s armed and armored to the gills, anyways.
Some details about the Federation’s own attack fighters can be found here, which notes that they were basically used as civilian couriers until the Marquis started arming them to fight Cardassians. This gave the Federation the idea to do the same, I guess, to fight the Jem’hadar, as described up thread.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Can’t believe I’m weighing in on this, but given the fact that I spent an hour today posting on whether World of Warcraft is a hideout for terrorists, I shouldn’t be surprised at myself.
I’m afraid I don’t remember the name of the episode, perhaps part two of the original appearance of the Borg, but in the one I’m thinking of, as the Borg cube approaches earth, several smaller fighters attack the cube and quickly get wiped out.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Really nerdy! Everyone is forgetting the fighters that attacked the borg ship as it nearered earth in part II of “The Best of both worlds” episode. I think a couple of the movies also mention defensive ships (ST:TMP and ST:TVH)when earth is attacked.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:50 pm
yeah, but could a triceratops take a saber-toothed tiger in a fight? well? well?
October 1st, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I don’t have much time before I’m leaving work, so I didn’t have time to read the whole thread. YOu can be sure that I’ll come back when I’ve got more time because I can’t pass up an excuse to let my uber nerdiness out every once in a while.
Anyway, I think the right answer was point out above. Star Fleet ships aren’t designed for long term war (that is, wars long enough that you’d design ships specifically to fight them) because Star Fleet really hasn’t been in such a war, at least not during any of the series. There’s not much use for an aircraft carrier unless you need to use fighters and in space there’s not much use for fighters unless you’re attacking a planet or fighting a super prolonged space conflict.
In the relative peacetime of the Trek Universe they have much greater need for ships with explorative and diplomatic capacities with some weapons thrown on in case things get hairy. What ships they do have designed for battle, like the Defiant, were designed to combat specific threats like the Borg.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:53 pm
It seems to me that the basic idea of the defiant is that it’s a dedicated warship. No holodecks for taking your romantic stroll with your boyfriend in cleaned-up fantasy version of fin-de-siècle Paris. No science labs. No conference rooms. A defiant is much smaller than, say, a galaxy, but in a fight, I don’t know which would come out on top.
However, there are ships which have the same general idea as a galaxy-class (luxurious holodecks, extensive science labs, conference rooms, etc) while being roughly defiant-sized, such as the intrepid. (the class of the Voyager) Now, in a straight up fight between an intrepid and a defiant, the defiant would win without breaking a sweat, but an intrepid, as seen in Voyager, is far from helpless.
So my thought is, if we guess that a galaxy and defiant are approximately evenly matched in combat, and we think of the defiant as a result of concentrating all of the combat ability of the generalized explorer-type galaxy into a smaller, austerely provisioned dedicated warship, then what if we aimed for something with the general combat ability of the considerably weaker intrepid, and concetrated that into a small, austerely provisioned warship? We’d get something like the defiant, but smaller.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:26 pm
ROMULANS
It is worth noting that the big-baddie ship in Star Trek Nemesis, the Romulans’ Scimitar, was a carrier type ship. (Remember the something-or-other class “Attack Flyers” that filled the bay?)
October 1st, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Obviously, the physics in these universes exist to support the desired stories. The Trek universe is about capital ships, so Trek physics makes them the key element. Star Wars is about fighter pilots, so fighters are important there. I believe the setup in Bablyon 5 was that fighters could damage systems on capital ships, but did not carry weapons capable of destroying the ship outright, so you would still have to engage with your capital ships as well. BSG seems to work the same way unless you’re using nukes, and plenty of them. (Note that the Cylon basestar design seems to be a failure; as long as you can engage at long range you’re fine, but battlestars have a pronounced advantage in short-range combat)
October 1st, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Wolf 359 was a classic example of what happens when comparatively small vessels attempt to “swarm” a larger ship in the Star Trek universe; all that remained after that confrontation was an unscathed Borg ship speeding toward Earth, and scattered debris with Federation markings.
October 1st, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Late to the discussion, I see, but you’ll never see an aircraft-carrier type vessel in space. Small ships have no advantage over large ships. This can be seen in pre-carrier navies, where large dreadnoughts swept the seas of smaller craft. The advantage of the airplane is speed and visibility, but all vessels are on the same level in space. Large vessels will continue to have the traditional advantages of longer range and more accurate targeting.
October 1st, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Runabouts definitely have fairly capable shields, since more than once in DS9 they stood up to direct fire from Dominion warships. It was fairly clear that the amount of damage they could take was much less, but they can definitely at least survive battles given evasive maneuvers and guile.
If I were to give a non-”the writers didn’t think of it” answer, I’ve never seen any ship, even shuttles/runabouts, in Trek have the relative maneuverability of a TIE fighter or a Raptor, so it could be that small impulse engine designs were not perfected to the point where a ship could attack with enough agility to compensate for the decreased protection.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Scott says:
This isn’t the case in Star Trek, or BSG for that matter. I don’t know about Star Wars. What you have to remember is that the screen in Trek isn’t a big window into space, nor is it simply a camera. It’s a sensor device with it’s own capabilities:
This is part of how Picard got the Captaincy of the Enterprise. In battle against the Ferengi, he knew that their sensors were not fast-than-light capable. He made a warp jump at close range, which caused his ship to appear twice on their sensors. This gave Picard an apparent advantage of numbers and allowed him to destroy the Ferengi ship before it could retarget on the real Federation ship.
Now, on some shuttlecraft and runabouts, they do just have windows, and that would put them at a distinct disadvantage against warp capable ships. At least, then, there can be visibility differences between small and large ships, and that may in fact be a limiting factor on small ships.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Of course, in Babylon 5 we found that fighters could help to break through shields even if they needed most of the White Star fleet and B5 itself as well.
In Babylon 5, there was shielding, but only for interdimensional gateway alien artifacts. (See Thirdspace).
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:10 am
Oh for god’s sake!
1. Fighter spacecraft are unphysical. Any space battle would be over before a human can react (and this leaves aside the fact that neither Star Wars nor Battlestar fighters can fly the way they do in absence of an atmosphere). Things that can’t happen don’t need to be carried into battle. Babylon 5 got spaceflight right and, of course, B5 is itself a carrier.
2. The bulk of the cost in manned spacecraft is in hauling the people around. So fighters wouldn’t be so very much cheaper than battleships. You couldn’t make all that many of them anyway so what would be the point of a carrier? Weedy little fighters are only useful if they are cheap relative to battleships. None of this applies to Cylons, who can themselves be spacecraft. Which raises another question — what’s up with anthropomorphic machines flying another machine as if they were people?
3. Gene Roddenberry designed Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” not as “Victory at Sea to the Stars.” The Enterprise is therefore more Conestoga than battleship.
October 2nd, 2008 at 4:13 am
I despised Enterprise.. but (ugh why do I remember this) the ‘Suliban’ or whatever the hell they were did seem to employ a swarm of very small ships. Obviously, this was pre-deflector shield era; there must have been a transition associated with into the 23rd/24th century. Obviously.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:08 am
The original Star Trek series never featured fighters because they didnt have the money to show them onscreen. This was then carried into the subsequent series because this is what the fans had come to expect.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:50 am
I’d say the Enterprise is neither a battleship nor a carrier. It’s more like an American DDG guided missile destroyer.
Enterprise doesn’t need fighters because it’s loaded down with photon torpedoes. It’s got highly maneuverable cruise missiles for long range attack plus UAV drones for scouting, so it’s not clear how adding fighters would help. The original series shuttlecraft looks like a dump truck because that’s the only niche left for a manned vehicle.
So you see, if you think hard enough about the object of your obsession, it all makes sense!
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:49 am
Matt — I so needed this today. Thanks!
P.S. No love for SG-1? The large capital ships of the Prometheus variety seemed to be akin to a Constitution or Galaxy class ship, yet they mimicked battlestars by carrying squadrons of X-302s — unshielded, highly maneuverable and armed with pretty decent particle beam weapons.
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