The Federation Attack Fighter
Some followup points related to yesterday’s discussion of the lack of small fighter craft or “aircraft carrier” analogues (along the lines of a Star Destroyer or a Battlestar) in the Star Trek franchise. For one thing, yes, there’s an obvious real world practical answer — before the advent of cheap CGI it wouldn’t have been practical to stage large fighter battles. And, again, there’s a thematic answer — the Star Trek shows are mostly conceived of as futuristic versions of 18th century seafaring expeditions. But the issue is what’s the rational inside the fiction.
It seems to me that the thread was moving toward a solid consensus based on fictional technologies. On the one hand, small craft can’t generate enough power to seriously damage the shields of a large vessel. And on the other hand, the advanced targeting technology available in Trek-dom means that agility doesn’t have a ton of combat value. Under the circumstances, a peacetime Federation has no particular need for large quantities of fighters. But as several readers have pointed out, there is such a thing as the Federation Attack Fighter that gets used in large numbers during the Dominion War once the Federation put itself on a war footing.
48 Responses to “The Federation Attack Fighter”
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October 2nd, 2008 at 8:40 am
But the issue is what’s the rational inside the fiction.
Seriously, Matt, these sorts of errors are becoming more and more inexcusable.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:56 am
Of course, the real purpose of all of this is to figure out who would win in a fight, Galactica or Enterprise.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:59 am
I understood your explanation from yesterday, but what I don’t think can be easily explained, even within the absurd made-up “physics” of Star Trek is why contending battleships don’t simply launch thousands of unmanned computer-driven fighting drones. Who cares if 90% of them are destroyed? But if you follow that logic, the question then becomes, why do they carry so many people on their ships in the first place. If they have enough computing power to create food out of thin air, or disassemble a person atom by atom and reassemble him somewhere else, why not just let the computers run most of the ship in the first place?
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:00 am
So long as it’s built with good ol’ ‘Merkin labor, I’m all for it.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:00 am
First of all, Matt’s grammatical creativity is a constant in the universe— it ain’t going nowhere. So get used to it or pick another blog.
From the little I read about these fighters, they still seem pretty weak. Their one major success was in ambushing a Cardassian warship in the badlands, and they were completely driven off by the arrival of the Enterprise-D. They’re armed with something called “type 8 phasers” which are the same weapons used by the 100-year old Excelsior-class USS Enterprise. (And yes of course, this is probably all coincidence and bad continuity, but you work with what you’ve got.)
Maybe the best analogy is to ships at sea: yes, we’re used to seeing fighter airplanes, but there’s nothing comparable in surface ships. We certainly don’t have the equivalent of an aircraft carrier for small, lightly armed boats.
Anyway, I think what I really mean to say is: I wish there was still some Trek on TV. Jeez, with this fan base you’d think someone could take another run at it.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:05 am
In science fiction, the future is always the present day with dorkier clothes, cooler toys, and more & stranger minorities.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:09 am
Let’s not get too married to the ships-at-sea metaphor. Roddenberry conceived the show as “Wagon Train to the stars”, or so they say.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:10 am
That really only covers their early use by the Maquis faction. By the time of the Dominion War, they were mounted with quantum torpedos and forward phaser banks. The equivalent I would make, as you sort of state later, is a small, armed boat, like a PT boat almost.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:12 am
It might be true that phasers require the power of a large starship to do damage, buy photon torpedos definitely don’t.
Of course this raises the larger issue of why the citizens of the Federation of Planets would militarize their fleet to such an extent. Surely all the science and cultural exchange could be accomplished without heavily armed starships. Presumably one would want military starship to defend shipping lanes but in THAT case I don’t see why those ships shouldn’t be equipped with Federation Attack Fighters wouldn’t be helpful. And why, if they is trying to protect shipping lanes would Starfleet send their flagship off to all manner of backwater planets? For the press back home maybe?
The most likely explanation is that the Federation economy is dependent upon a military industrial complex- the science and cultural exchange are just some of the ways Starfleet justifies itself during peacetime. Or the Federation was subject to a military coup sometime in the past and the perspective we get from life aboard the military starships is overly rosy or propaganda.
Can ANYONE speak to what oversight the UFP has over Starfleet?
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:19 am
RWB:
My understanding was that it was somewhat existential. I remember some episode where someone explained why Starfleet doesn’t use Van Neuman bots (which spread out a reproduce themselves) to explore the universe. This method would be a couple orders of magnitude faster. I guess the reason was that it was more special or significant for humanity when people were there.
Though I think it makes way more sense to imagine the Enterprise as one of only a very few Starfleet ships dedicated to exploration- and that this is done mostly as a public relation ploy.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:23 am
well heck, why not toss in an imperial crusier too. or the deathstar?
I think we all know why there are no drones … robots!! and we don’t know if old glory insurance is there.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:25 am
Wait – is DS9 canon now? I was willing to give you ST:TNG but this is too far for me. I say good day sir!
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:29 am
Eh, you can’t look for logic in the death throes of an unpopular franchise, at best tangentially related to the prior and succeeding series. Deep Space Nine, whatever merit it had, was basically adrift by the time this whole Dominion thing started. I don’t think they had a well formulated fantasy physics explanation, but rather saw that people liked smallish ships like the Defiant and that other series had used fighters to good effect.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:46 am
@jack: For the UFP-Starfleet relations, see “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost” in Season 4 of DS9. A terrorist attack makes the Federation believe that the Dominion is using Changelings (Founders) to subvert the government. When another attack knocks out all the power on Earth for a period of time, the commander given charge of planetary defense declares martial law and prepares to overthrow the government. Sisko and Odo (and the rest of the crew on the Defiant) expose the fact that the everything after the initial attack was planned by the commander, in order to scare the people into allowing the coup.
The way it’s explained in that episode makes it seem roughly analogous to what we have in the US: Starfleet reports to the Federation President as CiC (I forget if they use the term or not), and has some oversight by the Federation Council (elected by the member planets). That’s the best explanation I can remember (post TOS where half the time they made stuff up on the fly and contradicted it later)
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
On a totally awesome random side note, if you pay attention during “Paradise Lost,” when Sisko and Odo are reviewing the records on officers reassigned in preparation for the coup attempt, you’ll notice that all of the name are characters from “Catch 22.” I’d never seen this noted in any nerd reference guides on DS9, but one of my former girlfriends picked it up the first time we watched it together.
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:08 am
Doofman – that’s one girl you should have held on to! Catch 22 and willing to watch ST?
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:17 am
If you keep up posts like this, they’re gonna stick you down here with us tech folks
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:28 am
One might also note Species 8472, which seems to use nothing but swarms of one-pilot fighters.
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:40 am
While the Federation does indeed have Fighters, they are completely obsolete, and only exist due to sweetheart deals betwween lobbyists and Starfleet old-boys.
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:41 am
I think it’s because the federation has a no warship policy.
Also, it’s probably a waste of some of the only truly rare resources they have in starfleet to try to put a warp 7-9 capable engine or power core on a little dinky ship.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:10 am
I’m sure this was tongue in cheek, but: from what I remember, the Enterprise was the only ship that could handle itself in a fight. Every other ship always looked kind of lame and dinky, like it was designed to run away if someone hassled it in the schoolyard. The Enterprise explored, but was also the number one warship of the fleet. I remember even Voyager was also underarmed when it got stuck in the Delta quadrant, and it had been designed (I think) to fight Maquis.
It wasn’t until the end of DS9 that you started to see the Federation developing ships exclusively designed for warfare (Defiant, etc.), and I think they only churned out a couple of them before the Dominion war.
(Wow, I’m a big fat nerd.)
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:10 pm
What, did none of you people remember the episode of ST:TNG where Westley was at the Starfleet Academy and on trial for an accident involving training for a secret mission using… fighter planes?!
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Let’s not get too married to the ships-at-sea metaphor. Roddenberry conceived the show as “Wagon Train to the stars”, or so they say.
Roddenberry was pitching at the level of sophistication common to network execs who knew “Wagon Train” was a hit series but probably never heard of Horatio Hornblower.
Oddly enough, the “Wagon Train to the stars” concept got realized with “Battlestar Ga;actica.”
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
THe Jem-Hadar use attack fighters. Remember in DS9 when they lured the combined forces of the Tal-SHiar and Obsidian Order into the Delta Quadrant and then ambushed them? THe chief Romulan dude said there were ‘150′ fighters and they decimated that massive fleet. Fighters can kick ass in Star Trek.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Weren’t the Starfleet Academy fighters little more than futuristic Cessnas?
Also, I remeber the Jem-Hadar fighters being thougher and nastier than your regular fighter.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Wait – is DS9 canon now?
Why wouldn’t it be canon? It was on TV, so it “really” happened.
Of course, the real purpose of all of this is to figure out who would win in a fight, Galactica or Enterprise.
well heck, why not toss in an imperial crusier too. or the deathstar?
Borg cube pwnz all.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:34 pm
To respond to the sub-question of a fully automated Enterprise, the original show addressed this in an episode with the “M5″ thinking computer. The effort failed because the computer was only able to operate on a logical level and was killing people or performing some other “bad” actions. Kirk eventually had to trick it to get it to shut itself down so they could remove it. It is reasonable to assume that Starfleet decided to never again pursue that line of action.
In addition, given the ability to transport onto a ship, if there were no crew members to deefnd it, a starship would probably become very vulnerable to enemy borders. You cannot anticipate every possible attack sequence and program that into a computer. Borders could figure out a way around whatever built in defenses an automated ship had on the fly. BUt if it were manned, then the crew could counter-attack and/or defend against the borders.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Kirk had to trick lots and lots of computers into destroying themselves. It was a constant theme of the series that computers who got too smart, or became self-aware, would turn into monsters. It was not an Asimovian, much less cyperpunkish, universe. When they brought in cyperpunkish stuff, the Borg were the villians. (Wasn’t the M5 the one who could run the ship with only a tiny crew, and that made Kirk et al. very nervous? And wasn’t that the computer that mistook war games for a real war, and destroyed several starships with their crews?)
To take the Trek universe seriously for a moment, the Federation is all about peace, and they’d rather get to know new beings face to face, and they are willing to risk losing an exploration ship rather than militarize their relationships.
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:06 pm
On the use of swarms of small fighters against seemingly impregnable larger vessels:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36079
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:43 pm
“On the one hand, small craft can’t generate enough power to seriously damage the shields of a large vessel.”
That’s not true. In battlestar they can drop nukes. In Star Wars the B Wings are heavy artillery ships with bombs and weaponry of all sizes. Playing X Wing and Tie Fighter on the computer, they even had simulations where you could destroy a capital ship with the one bomb in the payload.
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:00 pm
They can do it in Star Wars, sure. It can’t be done in Trek. Photon torpedoes need to be energized from the launching ship’s warp reactor. Small ship = small torpedo warhead. Within the assumptions of the Trek universe, fighters aren’t very powerful.
And even if fighters sort of work in Trek, not every technology works with every nation’s doctrine and missions. The US Navy has never gone in for small missile boats in a big way, for instance.
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:09 pm
I think the claim that the Federation was dominated by “big-gun” admirals and this froze weapon design until the pressures of the Borg and the Dominion makes some sense. Also, I would imagine that the development of quantum torpedos and Defiant type phasers probably played a role.
But the thing that never made sense to me was why the Federation didn’t just turn weapons into photon torpedo platforms.
If you read the Tech manual (which I have, sigh), you will notice that torpedos and probes were capable of WARP SPEED. In order to overwhelm an opponent, all you had to do was put hundreds of torpedoes in the air at once (or pretty close at once). Yet, instead we get fights that focus in the relatively slow, cumbersome, and short-ranged phasers. It boggles the mind.
This is especially true because, unlike BSG or Babylon 5, there doesn’t seem to be anything like meaningful point defense in Star Trek (and how could there be with warp capable torpedos?)
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Exactly. That’s how we know that fighter-sized ships don’t have the power to energize a photon torpedo.
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I should also point out that while photon torpedoes do travel at warp speed if the launching ship was at warp, their flight time is not anything like instantaneous from the perception of either the launcher or the target, and never has been. Either battles are really at much longer ranges than the post-TOS shows indicate, or time is slowed up for our combatants somehow.
At some point, of course, we have to realize that it isn’t possible to rationalize all the on-screen evidence, and never will be.
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:51 pm
That involved the Starfleet equivalent of the Blue Angels, not a ‘real’ training to fight fighter squadron.
Weapons on the Enterprise are always fired manually, but I’d be surprised if there isn’t an emergency button that just starts blowing the hell out of anything that doesn’t have the right IFF.
Even BSG and B5 have shield like technologies. B5 has its defense grid, which tracks and destroys incoming weapon fire (which is technojargoned as blobs of plasma, not CPBs or lasers, which is why the Shadows, Vorlons, and Minbari are so dangerous) and BSG has the flak screen it can throw up. Without those things, battles in both series would come down to who fires first.
October 2nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
You know, it bothered me yesterday, but I think people here (and the folks at Memory Alpha) are using “deflector” improperly here. The deflector on a ship is a beam emitted from the ship in order to clear stellar debris from the ship’s path. This allows ships to travel through space without their shields up. It seems reasonable that main shields eat up so much energy that it would be wasteful to use them while simply attempting to travel, so the ship uses the much narrow and energy efficient deflector.
Also, it’s important to keep in mind that there is a distinction between Starfleet and the Federation of Planets. The Federation is like the UN, a diplomatic body for resolving disputes between members and a means for collective action. Starfleet is the military arm of the Federation, just as (I believe!) the UN maintains UN troops even when there aren’t active peacekeeping missions. And the amount of new species they run into in Trek more than justifies both the military and diplomatic missions of Starfleet ships.
As to the “Who would win in a fight” question, it’s really no contest. Capital ships in Star Wars are miles long, with thousands of guns, troops, and fighters. It’s not that I like Star Wars more than Trek or Galactica (though man, would that be a tough choice), but Lucas really designed his ships huge and powerful. As to Trek or Galactica, it’s tough because we don’t really know how their technologies match up. I’m tempted to say that a photon torpedo probably has a greater yield than a nuke, but they really don’t address that as far as I know.
If I’m not mistaken, I think Voyager’s Intrepid Class was a science vessel, hence why it was relatively underpowered. But no, none of the (main) ships in Trek other than the Defiant were war vessels. Galaxy class ships were evidently hampered by all the extra mass of the saucer section, which is why they could detach the saucer (leaving it to find some kind of safety at impulse speeds) and return to the fight leaner and meaner. But it’s clearly stated that the ship is designed for exploration with weapons added for whatever they might come across (which they did quite often indeed).
I think the answer to why they don’t launch a million photon torpedoes has to come down to targeting. Indeed, we’ve seen lots of photon torpedos miss their mark and just sail off into space (hopefully there’s some timer on there that deactivated the warhead if it misses!), so launching all your torpedoes wouldn’t necessarily guarantee you a hit and would leave you rather exposed to a counter attack. And even if you hit and even if it destroys the ship, what if you’re being attacked by *two* ships? Better to conserve your most powerful weapons for when you’re confident of a hit. Plus, we never get to see it, but presumably the Enterprise and other Trek ships have to go get restocked with torpedos all the time, and you’d hate to have to leave a battle site and go all the distance to a base without any torpedos to defend you.
Wow, this is one fucking nerdy comment.
October 2nd, 2008 at 4:43 pm
In case it’s not clear, each paragraph in my other post responds to other people’s posts.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Starfleet is the military arm of the Federation, just as (I believe!) the UN maintains UN troops even when there aren’t active peacekeeping missions.
Actually, no, the UN does not have UN troops and there is no standing UN army. UN peacekeeping missions are always composed of soldiers “loaned” from member countries’ militaries who then act under the UN banner (i.e., a UN peacekeeping force may be composed of, say, Dutch, Kenyan and Pakistani forces, all wearing their own individual nation’s uniforms and using their equipment and command structure). However, at the end of the day these forces are answerable to their home country high command, not the UN.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Another consideration is from the standpoint of overarching political strategy for the Federation: being the good liberal internationalist regime that it is, the Federation abides by tons of treaties and agreements that restrict its military capabilities. E.g., the Federation is prohibited from developing or using cloaking technology because of treaty obligations.
Since the Federation fleet is not optimized for war in the first place, we can’t really derive from it what an ideal battle fleet would be like in the Star Trek universe. However, from the fact that the Federation tends to go smaller when on a “war footing” (the fighter mentioned above, but also let’s not forget the Defiant when Starfleet had to get serious about the Borg) and that other factions tend to have smaller, more weaponized ships, we can imagine that a more battle-ready fleet in Star Trek would look somewhat more similar to the Star Wars/BSG model.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Setting aside McCain’s stupidity
Treasury borrowing
Week ending 9/20 $78Billion
9/27 $198B
10/4 $143B
I’m sure nobody has paid attention to my rants here so didn’t have a chance to shake their heads at my prediction of trillion dollar deficits. In three weeks the deficit rose by about $425B. Call me crazy but a trillion seems pretty doable.
Luckily for the Treasury the panic has sent most of the worlds money into ’safe’ Treasuries so rates have remained low despite the gigantic supply. It hasn’t been so lucky for the rest of the credit markets however. Looking at the other side of the coin the Treasury borrowing has been crowding out other borrowers, making the credit crisis worse.
All of that is before the bailout, if it comes. In a bit of hilarity today it was reported that the Senate bailout package was meeting resistance from the usual suspects because it includes some number of billions in new spending, outside the $700B which doesn’t count evidently. Rome burns and these idiots fiddle the same old tune.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:23 pm
The bailout is now the most bearish thing going. It’s a joke. Every ’serious’ politician and pundit and business person in America thinks the plan is a big step forward in solving the problem. They think that because they keep telling each other it’s true.
This might be their final delusion. It doesn’t make any difference for the economy and the capital markets if the bailout passes or doesn’t pass. However everything is framed as if everything depended on it.
If I were Paulson I would now be fighting for the bills defeat for then when things go to hell he cam blame congress. If it passes then when things go to hell he better have a good comfy place to hide for the rest of his life. So to the rest of the cheerleaders.
The events unfolding now are the biggest events that most here have ever experienced. Everyone thinks ’something’ will be done to save us, to keep the world pretty much as it is now.
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