I** feel there is a sci-fi fighter and setting that feels kinda overlooked and has "turreted" weapons capabilities. And that is the hammer head starfighters from "Space: Above and Beyond" It had a ventral main weapon, dorsal secondary and seeking missiles like sidewinders. There's several times in the series, where they are shown flying/drifting in a different direction, to the point of view for the cockpit. It is even a main move used in one of the main dogfights in one episode, where fighter craft on both sides are shown turning to look behind their direction of travel. It may be a series worth you looking into?
I wonder how a spacecraft carrier would work, if it were to have any realistic function in space. I imagine there wouldn't be much need for a carrier in space for orbital or air superiority, and a carrier would more likely be used for a logistical role for the transport of small vessels that would be incapable of interplanetary or interstellar distances, it could also be used to shuttle troops and orbital insertion vehicles if it is a more combat oriented vessel. The structure of a carrier would be primarily a thick hollow frame that would contain utilities such as water, air, and electricity, along with elevators for crew and spacecraft. The frame would function as the spine of the vessel, running from the engines in the back, to the equivalent of a bow in the front, a truss structure would connect the spine to the hull of the vessel, along with diagonal supports going from the hull towards back and spine of the vessel to prevent structural failure under acceleration of 1g or greater. Vertically the decks would be aligned perpendicular to the spine, along the axis of thrust. The vessel would use a dual hull design, a crew hull, and an external hull. Only the crew hull is pressurized, while the external hull is intended as armor. Both hulls are usually built to the same thickness. Between the hulls is where ammunition is stored, oxygen, fuel, and water tanks, reactor and pellet storage, airlocks, and launchpads are located. The launchpads, hangars, and craft guideways are standard designs, along with docking ports. There are identical ventral and dorsal hangars, along with two guideways to assist incoming craft. Usually the dorsal flight deck is used for incoming aircraft while the ventral flight deck is used for orbital, or planetary operations. The ventral flight deck can function parallel to the dorsal flight deck during high traffic operations or an emergency. Small craft intending to land/dock in the carrier would use either guideway to prevent collisions with launching craft. All hangars and launchpads have lift systems that align a craft to the flight deck or the internal flight bay, and can rotate a craft 90 degrees when a craft is launching. There would be various weapon systems on the vessel, including a few missiles, but the majority of weapons are defensive systems like CIWS. There are several sections on the ship that can be sealed automatically in the event of The vehicle elevator would be used to transfer small craft to and from the flight bay and launchpads, there could be an airlock for aircraft entering the vessel, and each launchpad is an airlock that quickly depressurizes before opening.
Yeah more like fictional WWII in space because if you look at how WWII was fought you find out how the way WWII movies show combat is not right like the range they fought in are bigger and how to get at an aircraft carrier you have to get past destroyer, cruiser, and battleships that make a protective umbrella around it and make you think why aren't the Corvette and frigate firing like hell at tie fighters or y-wing and just standing there looking not menacingly and harmless 😂
@@USSAnimeNCC- More WW1 then WW2 with out missles as they don't really use small craft etheir plane nore PT boats or even straight modern day/cold war style combat with out planes and mayby with frigites and smaller craft.
WWII in space refers to broadside style combat, massive fleets and fighter wings, and the like It’s hardly ever portrayed otherwise in a proper fashion in a 3D environment. That’s a leading factor into why combat in The Expanse is praised as such
For certain sci-fi, like Star Wars it is some weird combination of WW2 combined with Cold War Era Tech. Like I feel Sensors act more like Cold War Radar. And some definitely require better tech, otherwise some craft like the X-Wing be absolute garbage due to the parallax issue it has with its guns. Though you ask me, Wedge in all reality should have died in his head on attack on that TIE and even fly through its debris. Either you die from a head in collision, or your craft gets damaged from the debris you flew through that you have to return to base.
I think that, by far, the most realistic space combat scenes are those those where you never see 2 ships in the same shot, unless they are basically docked next to each other. WW2 battleships would usually be something like 10-20 miles away from their targets. To give you an idea of scale, naval wargaming uses sports courts as boards with the ships being an inch or so long.
And, yet again, thats ww2. Modern anti-ship missiles have ranges measuring up to 350 miles. In this case ships would only be a 15th of an inch long on the sports court. Imagine how much larger ranges are in space.
@@TheBananamonger lasers ain't that expensive. But yeah, modern militaries cannot uphold a 350mile standard across the boars, nontheless, quite a few vessels are outfitted with such missiles. Modern day naval warfare doesn't occur on that scale anymore, so one or two missiles are enough to sink an enemy.
the problem with that is that its hard to execute in a story without it becoming visually bland. realism and accuracy often have to be somewhat compromised or handwaved to keep the pacing reasonable.
Worth noting that WW2 fighter tactics aren't used anymore IRL, either. So honestly your average SF fighter battle is more retro than a real world fighter battle. Exceptions being b5 and to a lesser extent the new BSG, of course, as you noted. But I think I differ with you on one point: you said that the preponderance of WW2 analogues prevent people from being able to understand a more realistic vision. I think it's people's inability to understand a more realistic vision that CAUSED the retro-WW2 thing to catch on in the first place. Space combat is counterintuitive, which, I think, is why it's so rarely portrayed realistically
It's probably a mix of the two to be honest. It's hard to conceptualise, so it gets simplified or recontextualised, which makes it harder to conceptualise... - hoojiwana from Spacedock
The expanse and to a lesser extent B5 and new BSG do a decent job of showcasing how "realistic" space battles might look in space, while also making them look cool. Granted, B5 and new BSG do suffer from the WW2 in Space syndrome, but they began to portray real physics into their shows to great visual and entertaining effect, without making the viewer feel stupid.
Think its because WW 2 air combat looks so visual good, naval combat was way outside of interesting visual range.for capital ships. even at WW 1. Yes it was exceptions but most fighter action looked good. In fact then I starting watching WW 2 documentaries my first reaction was, wow this looks like star wars :o) Spielberg said it himself he was inspired by the WW 2 news reals. Now it works for star wars who don't pretend to be realistic, but even pure fantasy has to be make sense in universe or hyperspace ramming :)
WW2-in-space is at least partially so ubiquitous because it lends itself to filmmaking. The stakes are always clear (good guy needs to shoot down bad guy while not getting shot down), the emphasis on fighter craft means the heroes can assume a critical role in the battle (instead of sitting them in front of a tactical readout), and audiences at large will understand what's going on (instead of having to spend time explaining the nuances of detection, heat buildup, or whatever else is important to the setting).
Yep, the same reason medieval battles rarely are portrait realistic. Like battles at castles walls, in real life there would be several rolls of ditch to stop wall climbing apparatus to be bough close to the walls (and give ample opportunity to wall guard to attack anyone trying to fill the ditch) and the invading arm would just be stationed for days or months waiting for the people inside to use all their supplies. And the people inside waiting to the enemy arm succumbs to disease and shit that comes with large number of people camping in a area without proper sanitation.
Yah, even modern air combat would be pretty boring to film because it would be all beyond-visual-range missiles so shot of enemy firing missile, shot of good guy turning, don't see anything, don't see anything, then whoosh-bang what was that oh he got hit. Realistic and frustrating to watch.
I quite enjoy how the author David Weber dealt with "fighters" in his Honor Harrington universe, the "fighters" (which he calls Light Attack Craft or LACs) are portrayed as small ships in their own right instead of true fighter aircraft that are just too small to mount FTL engines (and thus need carriers to move them around). I think at one point a frigate is described as being significantly larger and more expensive than an LAC but not actually all that much more capable simply due to the inclusion of the FTL engines. In that sense they seem to be more akin to the torpedo boats mentioned in the video
The same goes for frigates and gunships in the Expanse. They aren’t very big, and often get hauled across system by larger ships. Most of their size is from the thruster, after all
LAC are basically hyper-specialized stealth torpedo destroyers. They basically work in 2 ways. Hyper stealth hit and run or point defense screen, but nothing beyond that. Without sufficient stealth capabilities LAC's become easy targets for any half decent gunnery crew. Thus, after the first few initial engagement they where relegated primarily to PD screen, to allow the Missile Carriers time to deploy their pods and launch, while surviving the insane Haven barrages of the second war. But by that point they rarely went into hunting range, because their casualty rate has gone up astronomicaly
Came here to say this. I'll add that Weber did a good job showing the evolution, book 2 is when I think we're introduced to the LACs as a concept and 2/3rd to 3/4th of the way through the book we're shown the first iteration of the concept. Book 5 sees the first deployment of dedicated carriers in the form of q ships. Book 6 touches on it briefly with 7 showing the first of the first generation of dedicated carriers with following books developed tactics and counter tactics. To be fair they aren't meant to go after the main ships in the wall of battle and by the end they are mostly relegated to the missile defense role.
Fun fact, navies in real life did try to make Torpedo Boat Carriers. They were found to be too expensive and not that effective. Of course a sci-fi setting could easily have differences that make it viable and worth it.
Classic star trek was actually really good at treating all spaceships as part of the same medium. Fighters were very rare, and when they were used - like in the DS9 episode in the video - they were used like torpedo boat squadrons, not like aircraft launched from a carrier. The Defiant was specifically designed as a fast, nible vessel, and she had alien equivalents, like the Jem-Hadar attack ship, the Hideki-class, or the Klingon BoP.
I think the other factor that gets overlooked is the limitations of the special effects. You have shields because you can have the drama of a ship taking hits without having to add damage to the model. You don't have starfighters because that's more models to film and it's a TV budget. You saw those things added to Trek when computers made them affordable.
Oddly enough when I think of a more realistic alternative to WWII in Space I think of the Predreadnought era. Capital ships equipped with a small number of heavy guns for long range bombardment and large numbers of medium and small calibre guns for medium and close range combat. Cruisers that are divided between primarily battle fleet or trade protection roles. And various smaller craft like destroyers and torpedo boats that, regardless of role, are still fair sized vessels and mostly capable of open sea operations (if only just in the case of torpedo boats). Single seat fighters are just too small and fragile in a realistic setting but something akin to an 1890s torpedo boat fits quite well, a small, multi-crew craft with a small number of defensive weapons that's designed around the delivery of a much larger weapon makes sense as a planetary or in system defensive craft and it scales up from there.
I think even more realistic is just taking Today's ship-to-ship battle and apply to space. The primary fighting weapon would be missiles, to engage enemies at hundred of thousands kilometers away, as it is easier to detect things in Space, without the curvature of Earth and interference ot its atmosphere. The main defense agaisnt that, just like irl, would be eletronic countermeasures, interceptor missiles, evasive manouvers and point-defense cannons. For closer ranges, ships would bring rail guns, firing kinetic projectiles at an incredible velocity. Those you cant really defend against, just like naval guns, so then it becomes who can hit eachother first. But I would find very uncommon to them be used in ship-to-ship battle, as most of those would be resolved with the missiles exchange. Instead, like they modern navy counterparts, they could be used to orbital bombardment, engage small unidentified crafs, finish abandoned ships etc. You dont see ships today entering naval-gun range when fighting peer enemies, so I dont think we will see it in space either.
@@rodrigopaim82 that is pretty much what they do in the expanse books, missiles first then if absolutely needed you could use railguns or even your anti missile weapons to fight. Hell one manoeuvre the main characters did was just tricking the enemy ship into moving into the direction they fired a ton of rounds into.
@@hoojiwana Interestingly eonough youtube naval historian Drachinifel compared Star Trek ships to ships types cca 1890s. On the topic of late 19th century: torpedo boat evolution, was a bit diferent. TBs evolved into Destroyer Torpedo boats - torpedo boats with guns, while Torpedo Boat Destroyers are a completely separate design lineage, that started with guns and no torpedeos - only later did Destroyers get torpedoes.
I actually like Age of Sail, for fighting in Space. Massive long distances, long voyages and possibly near impossible resupply. Fits space battles better.
Treasure Planet, literally just age of sail IN SPACE! Shame we never got to see ship to ship combat outside of the game Battle at Procyon, though its still pretty fun in that.
As does Space Battleship Yamato 2199. Unfortunately Yamato got delivered to the west a lot slower than it should have aside from those who were prepared to import the Japanese Blu-Rays a decade ago).
yea that show (more so for the original one from the 80s imo) has the best depiction of massive space naval battles I have ever seen. ffs an entire asteroid belt was used as a cover system.
@@revolverswitch Really gotta second that recommendation for the OG one, there. There's something about how it shows space combat that I've literally never seen nowhere else. It really gets the scale of the whole thing, y'know? it really feels like each battle's got thousands of ships in it
I LOVE that you've shown Legend of the Galactic Heroes as a clip for space combat! I wish you'd explore the ships in that universe more esp the old OVAs which were amazing
This is part of the reason why the carriers in my universe carry atmospheric fighters to be deployed and retrieved from high orbit. It puts an interest twist on the trope. And if watching Star Gate has taught me anything, giving your characters limited ways to get off a hostile planet is an easy but effective way to raise the stakes.
I agree with your concept! Carriers in space should be more Like huge troop transports and Equipment For landing and invasions than "space fighter" . Also orbital supremecy would need to be acchieved First in any Engagement, so wasting lifes in ships with multirole perpose ist just dumb.
@@selectthedead it's why the Phoenix class from halo is such a cool ship, they are armed with the standard unsc cocktail of MAC, assorted coil and auto guns for closer engagement, and missiles of course, but its all meant mostly for defense and ground bombardment. The weapons make up a very small part of the ship everything else is dedicated to assaulting and sustaining attacks on planetary targets. Way cooler to see in action than a do everything cruiser
Just wanna first say thank you for being one of the few sci-fi TH-cam channels out there to acknowledge that Legend of the Galactic Heroes exists. I know there isn't a ton of info on a lot of the technology vehicles, but I would love to see them covered, if possible. And second, it's funny to see those clips because the LotGH anime (both the original OVA and current remake, Die Neue These) are based off books written back in the 80s that were literally based on the early 20th century Europe wars, so spot on.
yeah, I'd love to see Spacedock cover LoGH. I haven't watched much of Die Neue These, as I'm not a fan of the redesigns (characters AND ships), as well as the pacing (pacing for the show feels...off; the pace/speed of the battles also feel comically fast...but it is kinda cool to finally see a LOT more ships thanks to 3D CGI), so I hope that if it's not coverage based on the original series/OVA, then at least a mix of that and Die Neue These.
@@GottHammer only redesigns I like in the reboot are the imperial fighters walkures iirc and the imperial grenadier power armor(Looks like a more elegant version of ma.k power armor) and uniforms but thats about it. The retro style super detailed blocky ships of the original looks better IMO.
Yeah, I need to see more sci-fi channels covering this show. It's fairly notorious in anime circles but doesn't seem to have quite gotten the popularity it deserves in sci-fi circles, given it's (imo) one of the best sci-fi shows ever made.
Hey I don't care if WW2 in space is overdone, as lone as it's well-done! That said, B5 and The Expanse are well-received. I'd love to see more Balance of Terror-style space combat, portrayed as tense, blind, claustrophobic submarine-warfare.
@@kanaric 2 words: Newtonian physics. If Starfuries had been flying the Death Star trench run, Vader wouldn't have had such an easy time picking them off. Furies would swivel about and return fire, while coasting on forward momentum.
I really thought The Expanse showed how a more realistic take on space combat combat (it's not completely realistic, but it's closer than most) could also be very compelling to watch. Personally I hope as a result we'll see a lot more sci-fi shows that take a hard sci-fi stance to their combat.
it should be the absolute opposite, lol. You should know where absolutely everyone is at all times, and it's a dance of extreme range attacks and many, many, many types of countermeasures attempting to counteract different attack methods at various ranges. Thanks to heat being impossible to properly radiate invisibly, and the incredible cheapness of cameras, there should be almost no chance of going unseen unless your entire setting is based on a myriad of justifications that cause stealth to be viable.
World War 2 is obviously inspiration from Star Wars and such. But a lot of space combat doesn't actually base itself on WW2... it bases itself on being visible and watchable and easily understandable. People being at long ranges, just looking at monitors and pressing a button to launch a missile or choose when to turn on active sensors and stuff is confusing and often much less flashy and intense. At this point one side has complete tech advantage means they always win from detecting and engaging from longer ranges outside of very limited situations. That's not tense or nail biting and a series that has war almost always aims for some tense or nailbiting uncertain moments and stuff for the viewer. If it's visually stimulating and adrenaline pumping all the better. As a result combat is simplified, and the scope brought down. Nothing way too long range normally, you need to see both parties in a single shot so you can tell where they are and what they are doing relative to each other. Next if it's just shields banging back and forth with weapons fire... all fights are pure numbers/bigger shoes kicking games. So manueverability is often mixed in, and helps pilots look tense or stuff as they zip around feeling the Gs. Also manuever warfare and shorter ranged direct fire weapons allows for something very important. Operator skill. You can have one pilot that's more skilled that can outmaunever and outshoot enemies. This lets you really feel for one pilot as being that elite or skilled or special protagonist person. Just look at Gundam series combat. It doesn't matter if the machine should easily predict basic movements and projectile flight paths at the level a modern tank or now even rifle scope can... if an unskilled person is in one they can't shoot for shit, while a skilled operator can nail all the shots. And yes if you have engines that can rocket a giant mech around that fast to dodge bullets, you can probably build guns or missiles that accelerate proportionally even faster or use lasers... that aren't somehow slower than light like they tend to be oddly in the show... But no... it's not realistic, it's about telling the story of the pilots rather than the equipment, or maybe both combined. Now, you can have more realistic settings including longer range battles and tactics and equipment and actual operator skill requirements and effects on a battle... But these tend to be a LOT harder and more time consuming for a writer or world builder to figure out and then make. And the more detailed rules and tech you have... the harder it becomes to shoehorn in the given plot twists or events without one side having obviously had a method to counter or handle some situation that shows up. Overall it's a lot harder to write this way, it's also harder to make it still interesting to the viewer. This is why I love the expanse. It's a proper breath of fresh air, and while there are a number of those areas I can ask why they didn't do this or that or question other issues or point out problems in the distances involved or the odd inability of computers to target accurately at such short distances.... It's still a damn good show better than most and I can forgive it enough for still at least trying to be better than the others, and for that having succeeded in my opinion. I mean, that one fight at Spin Station is a great example. Why did neither sides PDCs have the ability to accurately aim at such large targets so close, let alone cut specific subsystems quickly when these things are able to intercept missiles and torpedoes, automated accuracy and the ability to track fast moving targets is easy for those things. There was no excuse for that battle going like it did... or nearly any other such close range battle honestly. Still, overall a great and enjoyable show much better than just more star wars with fighter sounds in space. Not to dis on some good star wars or battlestar either though... I do enjoy both of those media in their own ways and for their own reasons... or did... new Star Wars.... ya, no.
The Expanse oddly has "spray and pray" machine guns trying to "shoot down" missiles. Don't know why they don't just have smaller countermeasure missiles that can change course and intercept a ship-killer. There's an old and unfinished comic called Erma Felna of the EDF, which has interesting space combat with automated "fighters". Ships have days or weeks to deploy their fighters like chess pieces, the actual battle lasts seconds when they finally clash. The actual battle is pretty much fully automated, too. It allows for operator skill in the setup, but survival in the fight is also down to pure maths.
@@worldcomicsreview354 I can see the logic in putting up a wall of lead that a missile has to fly through, essentially the same way CIWS systems on modern warships are intended to be used - counter-missile missiles are more for medium to long range interceptions.
and Space Battleship Yamato, which the main ship is the Yamato-class battleship in space and depending on the series/movie a modified Yamato-class battleship in space
Happy to see LoGH and Yamato getting air time! How about Banner of the Stars in a future video? They showcase a wide variety of vessels, each with their strengths and weaknesses, better than most space sci-fi anime.
love Legend of the Galactic Heroes, wish they would do a space dock on any of the ships or the space combat in general. the books were incredible, the OAV was great (if janky) and the new thesis is an amazing adaptation so far. the scale of the space combat is what I crave, and don't get anywhere else. when 6400 ships is considered an "undersized fleet" you know you're in for some cool space battles (Seventh Battle of Iserlohn).
You need to watch 'Space: Above and Beyond' if you haven't. Its a mix of WWII Pacific Theater as the story with a Vietnam like aesthetic of missile armed fighters and air mobile infantry against an enemy you never really see or understand (till the last few episodes anyways).
The Expanse does an excellent job at portraying what space combat between ships would look like in the future, with a realistic grounding in actual physics.
I would agree and it looks absolutely awsome. At first I wondered why the enguagement range of the railgun was listed as being so short, but it got demonstrated why in season 6. Maximum range of a rail-gun is esentially infinate, but against a target that can dodge, and knows its comming, the effective range is much shorter than the maximum range, even shorter than targeting range unless you can catch the target by supprise. Could see rail-guns being nice sniper weapons too with the right munition. But like snipers, only works so long as the targe tis unawares thier being shot at and so isn't looking.
@@Krahazik railgun-boosted self-guiding missiles is where i see space combat ultimately ending up. imagine a quarter-c Fox 3 shot with a missile that has delta-v capacity adequate for turning that line of engagement into a cone.
@@Krahazik, I could also see railguns being used in groups, one shoot at the target and others shoot around it. It could increase the effective range, because the target would have to move more to avoid. It could be done either with one ship with many guns or multiple ships in coordination.
@@ShuRugal No real point in guidance there. In such situation the system's outpot couldn't compare to the initial speed boost so it would be like dropping a bus from space and guiding it would mean changing the impact location by like 1 mm. Guidance systems only work on bombs and the like irl because the drag is correlated to the speed so you can alter the trajectory. In space you could only do such a thing if you could act upon velocity itself. In games it is frequent that instead of calculating forces we just change the velocity vector. IRL you can't do that so far but I imagine inertia dampening from more fantastic sci-fi could be like that? I mean anti-gravity and artifical-gravity might very well affect force/velocity directly so what if we had a way of getting an initial speed boost from said railgun and then instead of trying to further boost in other directions (and failing, I mean if you can do a comparable boost with a different system on the missile itself it means you should use that instead of the railgun as it is apparently much more efficient) we "simply" redirected the velocity... that would be one hell of a thing.
@@Kokuyous3ki "In such situation the system's outpot [sic] couldn't compare to the initial speed boost" it doesn't need to for guidance to be effective. Consider a projectile with an initial speed of 100km/s and no ability to maneuver. The target you are shooting at is 10,000 km away, the missile will take 100 seconds to arrive. The target is a 1km diameter sphere. to dodge your shot, it needs to move 500 meters (or less) in 100 seconds. It only needs to be capable of accelerating at one G to dodge your shot. now, give the projectile a rocket motor give it enough fuel for 10 km/sec of delta-v and enough thrust for an average acceleration of 10 Gs. (this will result in about 100 seconds of burn time available as well) the 1km target at 10,000 km range now needs to be capable of sustaining greater than 11-12 Gs to dodge the shot. "Guidance" doesn't need to be able to make the missile fly a right-angle turn to be effective. even though the missile in this hypothetical can only alter its velocity by 10% of the initial velocity, that gives it more than enough to require that the target by vastly more capable to evade it.
A great examples of "fighter craft" that more resemble a torpedo boat is a light attack craft from Honor Harrington series. A 10 man vessel that fit the fighter/ torpedo boat role. Designed to trade with ships of the wall (think WW1 armored dreadnoughts) and coming out ahead not in units lost but on tonnage and personal lost. LACs did not even have a FTL drive and needed carriers to bring them into star systems for combat. Later they would even diversify into scouting, screening and ship killing roles.
I really love the idea of small torpedo boat style ships fighting alongside big battleships. With neutonian physics you get a lot of the same challenges as in water, just even more impactful. Moving is hard and changing direction even more so. Turn off the engines on a starship it will just keep going. Turn it around, as painfully slow as its thrusters allow it, it will keep going. Having small, nimble ships, designed to intercept the larger ships and pummel them with effectively torpedos gives a really interesting setting
You should check out Space Above and Beyond. A wonderful forgotten gem that has fighters, the hammerheads that are exactly a mix like mentioned. With a turreted underslung cannon like a helicopter but also a payload of missiles. Also the APC they use is a great example of such a craft in space as well. Sad these ships and this show rarely get mentioned.
And they also had a double gun turret on the back with a theoretical 360° firing arc (although it was never shown). The only problem would be that both the chin and dorsal turret needed seperate sticks to control, adding to the double horn flight control of the fighter.
@@hoojiwana it's definitely worth a look, however to temper your expectations it was early to mid 90s, so would now look a bit dated, and it only ran for 2 years, I don't recall it getting a proper ending.
I've been asking Stardock to do stuff on the Gunstar for so long, and now I have TWO videos praising it! Love it. Part of the issue with the WWII style combat is the relative close scale things took place in. It is hard to convey the sense of action in the longer range conflict that space would probably have, and the Expanse does this quite well.
My favorite reason to use fighters in a Sci-fi setting is the tech has advanced to the point where going old school is the best way. For example sensor can pick something from faraway but countermeasures to those sensors are good enough that you can't tell what you are looking at. So you have to get eyes on to see if your are dealing with destroy or a battle ship. So the small profile of fighter is perfect for that role.
Space combat would evolve around a continuous technological struggle. At longer ranges, sensors would be able to detect incoming fire and correctly plot evasion courses or engage point-defence weapons to take it out. As happens in real life, so you try to get closer before firing to cut down on the response time; both human and computer. More powerful point-defence weapons would still be able to compensate so you would fire more missiles knowing some would get through, which again is the basis of many current missile weapons; throw enough at the enemy and one will do the job. So you would be trying to develop better stealth craft that can close the range and hit before they're spotted, better point-defence weapons that can react fast against anything thrown at them and better missiles that travel too fast to be tracked and shot down; like the much discussed hypersonic missiles in the news these days. Battleships became obsolete when a single torpedo from a submarine or aircraft could sink them. Obviously only naval vessels sink, something spacecraft don't have to worry about, the principle remains the same; a single cheap weapons platforms firing a highly destructive weapon that makes building big vessels a waste of resources. Which was why they messed up big time with the hyperspace ramming in the Last Jedi and tried to talk it away in the next one. Why build moon and planet sized weapons to destroy planets when you can just fire projectiles at light-speed at them? Which would then render all large vessels obsolete and have wars fought with strikecraft because anything larger would just be rammed at lightspeed. Bringing us back to the old school.
@@DomWeasel There's a bit more nuance into how and why battleships became obsolete. Just because it was possible for battleships to be sunk by torpedoes didn't mean they became obsolete. We've seen the same discussion with tanks multiple times with the advent of anti-tank missiles, with events in Ukraine only renewing those discussions. But just because a weapons platform is vulnerable doesn't mean it's automatically obsolete. So long as there's a doctrinal role for a tank or battleship, militaries would continue to use them even if they had vulnerabilities. There's still a doctrinal role for a tank, but what really put the nail in the coffin of the battleship was a lack of any role for them to fill. The US Navy reactivated the Iowa-class battleships during the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Gulf War because there was a shore bombardment role for them to fill but for much of the Cold War there wasn't really anything for them to do. Aircraft carriers are just as vulnerable as battleships to submarines (and have been "sunk" several times by submarines in war games) but they're still in use because they can project power much further inland than battleships.
Why send a fighter instead of a recon drone? If the fighter has to get close enough to see with eyes, then a drone can just use a telescope to get the same effect and transmit the results to friendly ships. If the opponent destroys the fighter you have lost a person, while if the enemy ship destroys the drone you don't really care. Since the drone only needs to go one-way and doesn't need life-support for the person, it can be smaller and cheaper.
Just wanted to say kudos for including footage from 'Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These'! One of my all-time favorite space opera series that uses three dimensional combat and subverts many cliche space combat tropes throughout the series.
@@rommdan2716 Oye compa acabo de ver tu canal y que recuerdos yo tambien veia los videos tha agumonlyoko me da mucha nostalgia jajaja. Te recomiendo mucho ver Legend of The Galactic Heroes si eres fan de las guerras espaciales, es larga pero vale mucho la pena y puedes encontrar un fansub facil.
@@anthonyking5563 yes and the that depresses me... not so much because the setting is bleak, it's gone far down that road it's coming back from the other side, but because GW is trash
instead of fighter craft, ships launch a cavalry charge of horses in old school diver style spacesuits. And communications are light signals and spacesuited messenger pigeons strapped to a janky spluttering engines.
I’m personally writing a homebrew space rpg for my friends, and I’m hoping to keep ships at closer ranges by saying shields are prevalent and only bolts of plasma contained by magnetic fields will be able to penetrate both armor and shields, meaning ships would need to close to that range in order to impact one another. Also makes strike craft useful since they can expand the range from which attack is possible. I’m still working at the kinks but I’m happy with how it’s Coming along.
I think my favorite use of fighters in space combat remains Mass Effect, as they're not really used to kill anything, but instead serve to overwhelm mass effect barriers on capital ships and help to overheat their systems. Heat management is one of the core parts of ME combat, and I love seeing how fighters fit neatly into that idea.
For a Sci-Fi setting I'm mulling over in my head and slowly getting around to write, fighters will be used as mainly just point-defence turrets/expendable scouts. Basically, they'll be crewed by drones and used to cheaply expand your screen far further away, without putting crewed corvettes in danger. I'll also have it that sensors aren't good enough to easily see everything in the system. Combined with abundant stealth equipment, and "going dark", there'll be a general Fleet in Being doctrine where capital ship fleets will be extremely hesitant to ever commit to a decisive engagement that they can't pull out of easily. They'll mostly just shadow each other, trade shots at extreme range that might kill off a few corvettes or frigates, and try to maneuver for favourable position to force the other fleet to fuck off. The other variant of starfighters; bombers, will be used as long range stealth drones that carry really nasty payloads and will go dark, slowly moving across the system for weeks while being undetectable. The point of them is to maneuver your enemy into somewhere where the bombers will run across them without having to activate their engines. That way, they can sneak past most screens, and get really close before busting out enough ordnance to cripple the enemy fleet, and allow for an easy victory for the capital ships.
Space engineers taught me one thing… as good as having forward mounted turrets are in bringing a lot of firepower to bear, it’s a hell of a lot easier to use auto turrets so you can focus on dodging the incoming return fire. And at least one turret can always fire as opposed to turning a ship with forward guns and not firing when you aren’t orientated with the nose to target.
Always think it’s funny when space battles seem to take on a single plane with larger ships not seeming to take advantage of the fact they are in space with no limitations on where they can manoeuvre
The thing I always enjoyed about the Homeworld games was having to react to attacks from above and below. And that like tanks, ships strongest armour was at the front so attacking from the top, bottom, flanks or rear was more damaging.
@@simon2493 LOGH nominally has 3D formations but the tactics are still very much 2D and not only that a lot of them are based on Napoleonic land warfare, with a lot of focus on encirclements and breakthroughs. Napoleon himself was a big inspiration both in character as well as tactics and strategy. The very first battle in series was modeled on the campaigns where he was able to march on enemy forces and defeat them in detail before they could assemble. As he'd say "I have defeated the Austrian army by simply marching". Although it does pay lip service to matters like electronic warfare and the like, by and large it's mostly infantry formations and cavalry charges supported by artillery, but in space. Even the logistics are in some ways inspired by historic land warfare as the question of whether to loot "villages" to feed the soldiers comes up. If Star Wars is WW2 in space with a dose of Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, LoGH is 19th century land warfare (Napoleonic Wars through the Crimean War) in space with a dose of Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And Death Star analogues just for good measure.
I always love it whenever pre-dreadnaught naval design gets mentioned in a video. There's just something so wonderful about a ship that carries that many guns.
Might be worth it on a fleet-killer dreadnought that's got a jump drive to close into the middle of an enemy fleet, and each gun is good enough to cripple a cruiser-equivalent. That way you can jump in, blast at everything in every direction and kill almost everything very quickly. The trade off, is that Post-Dreadnoughts have a few massive guns that will utterly wreck your shit. You could see a combination of both being used, one to kill fleets, the other to kill Dreadnoughts.
@@aregulargamer1 the entire reason pre-dreadnaughts had so many guns was lack of accuracy and slow loading. Once you have accurate quick loading main guns there's no reason to have all those secondary and tertiary guns.
@@retrograde98xp7 Maybe. I'd say that assuming you can use jump drives to appear inside their formation, many guns allow you to fire at a massive number of ships simultaneously. A bit rule of cool, but there's at least some logic to it.
Space fighters with human pilots only function if the enemy is also limited to the same constraints, as soon as drones are introduced the human and its multitude of limitations is at a crippling disadvantage.
One of the main issues I always see with settings that are all "WW2 but in space" is how people try to apply real life or modern technological solutions to the setting. "Why don't they just automate it all!?" Because that kills the point of the whole thing.
BSG did an excellent job at portraying this concept with Scar. Not only can your enemy resurrect, but they also learn and adapt from its previous incarnations.
By drone you mean autonomous AI? A drone still has an operator. Trying to maneuver dynamically in real time at distance is a hard thing to do unless your enemy is doing the same.
I'd actually argue that the lack of hiding means and massive range would be a huge disadvantage for missiles in space. One of the challenges to missile interception on earth right now is the distance we can normally detect them and the speed they move at would only give ~2-3 seconds to intercept (modern ship to ship missiles). Where as in space as soon as a missile gets launched they defending ship could begin countermeasures. So depending on range the missile was launched at and velocity it is moving of the missile hard and soft defense measures should have plenty of time to deal with incoming ordinance. I don't think missiles will be obsolete by this but would fall into more of a niche roll I'd also argue that with the vastness of space, ships would need to maintain larger stockpiles of ordinance to last long periods of time without resupply (depending on setting logistics systems) so when you take into account both factors, starships will likely have very few missiles as the logistical costs and limited use would outweigh the benefits when compared to kinetic or energy based weapons.
That is kinda where stuff like stealth tech and such comes in. So missiles are more autonomous and can take stuff like movement into account while trying to avoid detection. Now stuff like lasers and such might have a purpose, but it all depends on how far you can have the effective range be. Still if you know where someone will be, you could always just shoot a ton of bullets to that area and just rain hell on a target.
How could you do counter measures from thousands of kilometers away? Realistically the location of a spaceship is very precisely known, since it has to have hot radiators to prevent the ship from melting (if it has a nuclear reactor). The ship can be spotted easily with a (IR) telescope.
The massive range would be an even bigger disadvantage for unguided weapons. One thing that science-fiction has been really bad at depicting is uncertainty and tolerances, two things that are really important in science and engineering. Sci-fi technology always has exact measurements and perfect tolerances which leaves audiences with a bit of an unrealistic expectation of how technology is supposed to work. The longest range confirmed hit by a battleship gun was at less than 24km and the longest range straddle was at less than 33km. Even though calculating a firing solution may be simpler in space without factors like wind and air resistance to factor in, the greater distances involved means that you'd have to have a ridiculously tiny CEP to actually land a hit in a reasonable number of shots even if your firing solution was dead on.
Please do more coverage of Legend of the Galactic Heroes! I’m really interested to hear your take on the way the series handles it’s various space and planet based combat.
Well here are a few things you might want to consider. First, fixed guns are lighter, more reliable than turreted guns since they don't have a rotating mount with lots of moving parts. That means you can have more or bigger guns for the same weight or have a lighter craft for the same firepower. If your craft is nimble enough, you don't need turreted guns, fixed or gimbaled guns are good enough, which reduces the overall maintenance time and the logistics required to field a fighter. Next, guns have a significant advantage to missiles. Endurance. Generally speaking, you can engage more targets with a gun than with the equivalent weight in missiles. Ammunition for guns is also much cheaper than missiles are. Lastly, let me introduce you to the Motor Torpedo Boats. No not the Torpedo Boats from the 1890s. The MTBs and E-boats of WW2. These craft would carry fixed torpedo tubes and a gun or two and duke it out in the channel on a daily basis. They were fast, nimble and heavily armed enough to be a threat for other small craft and even some small warships like destroyers.
I remember in Honour Harrington the nearest thing they have to fighters are Light attack craft, one hyperspace capable ships 1/5 the size of a destroyer which carry either a load of light missiles or one big energy weapon. They’re more like torpedo boats
The torpedo boat comparison is deliberate, according to Weber. And the long range fighter analogs are the completely automated multi-stage missiles they start using later on.
Agreed. And the introduction of the LAC carrier later on was to mimic the introduction of carrier warfare. One interesting thing about the evolution of LAC tactics in the HH universe, though: They end up primarily being anti-missile defense units, used to thicken the anti-missile screens of the main fleet in the face of the massive salvos fired later on in the series. The warfare in HH always reminded me more of age-of-sail combat, however. Then morphing later on into more modern missile combat.
@@michaelpfister1283 That's actually a pretty consistent thing in Weber's works, with the question of defense in large battle groups. See the gradual development of command/escort battleships in Starfire. In this case, the LACs also free up lighter ships to be of use elsewhere, instead of in walls with ships many times their size...
Hear me out on this one. In the English Civil War (seriously, hear me out) there were essentially three types of troops; Cavalry, pikemen and musketeers. Musketeers were great against pikemen because of the longer range of their guns than the pikes. Cavalry were great against musketeers because they could charge them down while the muskets were reloading. Pikemen were great against cavalry because nothing stops a horse moving forward like an 18 foot spike. So there was a real rock-paper-scissors feel to the tactics. I think it would be interesting to see something like that in space combat. Obviously not with infantry and cavalry, but long range, vulnerable ships (muskets) vs fast short range destroyers (cavalry) vs mid range, possibly EMP field popping, defensive craft (pikemen). And then on top of that there was artillery, which could be represented by some sort of fixed-point bombardment craft or installation. It might not be "realistic" in terms of how space combat is LIKELY to happen, but it would be more interesting than the hammered out WW2 trope, and even to some extent subverts the "space is an ocean" trope.
Here is how I see your idea playing out. You have fast strike craft (heavy fighter/bomber or frigates or destroyers) [cavalry]. The pikemen equivalent is basically just the later WW2 cruisers that expanded the anti-aircraft radius of a battlegroup, so you have small-ish ships with lots of light weapons that fill the space with shots that will take down the strike craft but aren't as useful against larger ships. And the muskets are something like monitors/artillery. Large, kind of unwieldy ships using very long-range weapons that will just miss the faster ships but are a major threat to other capital ships and probably even the anti-strike craft ships, since those have to stay close to their larger companions, and are thus more vulnerable to long range fire.
The first two "Homeworld" games were roughly like this. Fighters will needle capital ships to death, by being too fast for their main weapon systems to target (actual bombers are specialist fighters that make it faster), with the obvious exception of the flak frigate (which loses a duel to any other capital ship except an empty carrier). Corvettes shred fighters, because they have 3/4 the speed and 2-3X the armament, but are very vulnerable to capital ship weapons except the ion cannon. Capital ships (cruiser > destroyer > frigate) brawl with each other or besiege planets/motherships/space stations. It's a rock-paper-scissors system that there are ways to break, sheer numbers being only the most obvious.
@@milamberarial Sins of a Solar Empire does this very well. Strike craft are great against long range missile boats, but lose to flak gunships hard. flak ships are easily destroyed by missile ships, and there's your triangle.
The 80's anime Legend of the Galactic Heroes has it's battles set up like 18th century formation battles, but in 3D. Fleets have to try and flank or envelop each other. Of course, being all hand-drawn animation, you see most of these tactics on very simplified holographic projections, rather than as thousands of ships clashing.
This is how practically all RTS games have played out for the last 20-30 years, including the space ones... Strengths and weakness, rock paper scissors style specialisms. How is this in any way new?
We need late Cold War in space. Toss in some Tom Clancy-esque tech wank and some old dreadnought scaring the crap out of an enemy who _should_ be able to blow it up with their scary advanced torpedoes or whatever. Oh, and experimental stealth creaft.
Alien race that somehow never invented BVR weapons wondering why all their fighters and starships keep exploding when they get too close to human worlds...
expanse is like that (ive only watched the show). Earth and Mars have a cold war because open war just means mutually assured destruction. New super weapon (protomolecule) endangers everyone. terrorists get wmds etc etc
Reminds me of someone who ran a CMANO scenario of a Cold War surface-action group engagement involving an Iowa going up against a Kirov. Long story short, one of the Soviets was packing a nuclear missile that devastated the US group, but Iowa came tearing out of the mushroom cloud at close to 30 knots, all of the advanced radars and such more or less melted, but with her 16-inch guns and their fire control intact. The Soviets had run out of missiles, so it came down to a purely gun-based engagement, and though Iowa was very, VERY much on fire by the end of it, they couldn't do shit to her armored citadel or her main battery, and 16-inch HE absolutely obliterates anything that doesn't have actual armor.
I honestly like the idea that stealth actually IS impossible in space, and 'stealth' attacks require spy vs spy intrigue and hacking and infiltration of enemy data and detection systems and saboteurs and such ahead of time!
The original anime is worth a watch if you manage to find it. It is more story and character focused and ofc so far longer and more in-depth if I remember correctly. But man is it good.
@@aximili113 I haven't seen much of Die Neue These, but I liked the original's pacing (both for the overall pacing of the show, as well as for its battles) and designs way more. Die Neue These supposedly expands more on the character stories, so maybe that's why it feels a bit...slower? But, again, I haven't seen much of it. It is pretty cool to see so many individual ships moving on screen, tho'....I just wish they'd stuck w/ the original ship designs. I too would definitely recommend watching the original, tho'. It's my favourite space opera. :) (tied with Farscape :P )
Wouldnt necessarily be plainly for the aesthetics. The new age of discovery and a colony/privateer war in these huge, unhealthy for the crew, and complicated to maneuver ships absolutely works as a setting.
3:01, I disagree there is an "underwater" field that has been used even on one of the shows that you clipped, in space battleship Yamato. the Yamato came under attack by a submarine, however instead of a cloak like other SI-FI the submarine was literally in another dimension, the one the FTL travel happens, firing its torpedos, and the Yamato has to do ASW to defeat it. I think ww2 fighters can be used like that in SI-FI where "lighter" one-man ships fight each other in a "higher" dimensional plane than heavier warships that then attack lower-level ships by exiting the higher dimension.
I would argue that's an example of writing the submarine domain _back_ into space combat rather than it inherently being there. And while the "lower" dimension is useful for stealth, you'd need an entirely new explanation for why anyone would bother with the "higher dimension.
My usual excuse for star fighters is combat taking close enough to a planet that the planet itself acts as a horizon, meaning you want smaller, faster ships to sight for the missileboats and fire torpedoes. This DOES mean that gunstar/helo configurations are better at the job then small fighters...
i Really dont get all the hate for fighters and the lesson of WW2 was clearly the time of big battleships are over ,no Matter how many guns you put on a Battleship like the Bismarck its going to die and it will always cost you more than the enemy launching fighters. if you really want to make fighters useless you have to have insane accuracy and tracking and quick firing in addition to big guns and weapons because fighters will not come alone. for example Enterprise D Trekkies swear up and down how superior starfleet tech is and no fighters can Challenge them , except Galaxy classes get destroyed by century old bird of preys and jem hadar fighters.even the instances were the Enterprise D destroy very quickly 4 lone fighters it uses its main weapons, so when an enemy ship comes and launches fighters the Enterprise D has to choose between locking on swarms of fighters or focusing on the enemy ship. the only really successfull anti fighter weapon without risk of danger are interceptors. any other sci fi anti fighter weapon would take up space for other things and it would be worse than a dedicated warship
@@laisphinto6372 Babylon 5 made a good point about consequences of treating certain truths as dogma. Earth-Minbari War showed humans engaging Minbari cruisers with their fighter-carrying ships and getting absolutely slaughtered, because Minbari had bigger and longer range guns. There is no atmosphere to degrade the power of the shot, no wind or gravity curving it away from the target and a stream of accelerated subatomic particles reaches its target way before any fighter will.
One thing I really like is the Fighter/bombers in the "Blood on the Stars" novel series. The craft can be outfitted as fighters or bombers, with the fighters being a support role for just the bombers, not the larger capital ships. Additionally, the books try to be based more in real physics, and so the missiles are limited by fuel and have a detriment to maneuverability (because thrusters have to move more mass when the missiles are still attached) They do have lasers and they do 'dog fight' but at energy based weapons range and no X-wing vs tie fighter range. Though in some instances they get close. Anyway just a refreshing break the typical close quarters space battles like are pointed out in this video.
Everyone has a sci fi pet peeves. Mine is when in sci fi wars, the combatants’ ships have one main color but the laser color is the main color on the enemy ships while those enemy ships’ lasers are the same color as its opponents main ship color
@@Halo_Legend Star Wars has that problem the CIS ships shoots red which is the republic color and the republic ships shoots blue which is the CIS color
I like how you put it, that space is like only having ocean surface style ships. It's almost too perfect to think of it that way. If you were able to stay in hyperspace with out moving too far it could be somewhat analogous to a submarine, of course it will heavily depend on how 'hyperspace' works. Funny enough, Stargate not only got the "Cold War" era dogfights in with missiles and such, the Ancients' weapons of choice were drones and drones seem to be quite integral to modern combat.
Something I love about the 302 is its both space and atmosphere capable. Since the SGC relied on small strike teams, having a small fighter craft capable of ground support and air interception probably made huge sense to them.
Give the Star Wars prequels some credit, particularly the opening battle of Revenge of the Sith: one side is fielding mostly autonomous drones. And one type of drone launches missiles which then launch drones. It's hard to imagine any sci-fi LESS like World War 2 than that.
The drones are the most stupid thing to do though. If you have small unmanned crafts reaching point blank of the enemy ship, use drones that explode (aka missiles). Far more effective.
@@steemlenn8797 Sure, I'm not suggesting it's practical, not against small targets anyway, but at least it's original and not taken from the WW2 paradigm.
There are literal carrier ships that unleash swarms of small nimble fighters who defy newtonian physics by acting as if there is an atmosphere. They also all get into close range, passing eachother in straffing runs. They have fighters and bombers. Even the vulture drones act exactly the way manned aircraft did in WWII. I find it hard to imagine any sci-fi MORE like WWII
@@Ramschat And was I pointing to those elements of the battle? No. I drew attention to a novel element. That's what's under discussion in this subthread.
@@mattp1337 So we just ignore any and all evidence to the contrary here? Specifically, when you say "It's hard to imagine any sci-fi LESS like World War 2 than that."
was really scratching my head over that one. Seriously what resistance faction needs strategic bombing aircraft? It would be like VC buying a bunch of B52s or TU95s. They are utterly useless for the roll they would want them for.
My best guess at an in-universe explanation could be that they "acquired" or were given them from the New Republic, which was the major body in the galaxy at the time, and any Y-Wings they would have had were either in use elsewhere or stationed too far away. Leaving those bombers as their only option that could carry a large enough payload. But hey I'm just making excuses for the fun of it.
I think there was some argument that the reactor was too armored and it needed a lot of ordinance to crack through it (a flaw in the movie was that they never really explained that to the audience). However, the Resistance Bombers could have still done a form of dive bombing anyways since its open space and they would carry a much larger payload than Y-Wings used, instead of "let's fly over and hope every ship and starfighter doesn't gun us down" sort of thing.
@@cmedtheuniverseofcmed8775 Yeah but you can just write the movie so they can penetrate the reactor. I don't buy expanded universe explanations to cover shitty writing in these movies.
I actually made a "Gunstar", using the Aerotech rules of Battletech. I used the aerodyne dropship template and it worked out fairly well. Very balanced in play and my players enjoyed the interaction with an iconic spaceframe that they could visualize from the film.
In the Expanse, the Morgan class patrol destroyer has the size for it to be considered a fighter. Maybe Mars could build battlecarriers loaded with patrol destroyers or Corvette class frigates and send that out.
Wasn't the Donager loaded up with several Rocinante types? I think to be used in instances where they anticipate such engagements and not getting ambushed by unknown stealth attackers usually.
I believe in the book version of The Expanse, there is an even smaller Martian warship called the Asp that would be the closes to a fighter. Its like 23 meters in length which is 10 meters smaller then the Morgan class, armed with two PDC and two torpedo tubes and was highly nimble and maneuverable.
@@ionfreak83 Wonder when we will get an image of it TV series style? To me, the Expanse is a good thought experiment about how combat will take place in the void of space, where the concepts of direction is alien to the evolve perspective on a planet. How ships will fight and what systems support and defend them.
I wrote a coldwar in space. It's on drive thru fiction as "realm adrift". It's my first book so it's a bit rough. I focused more on the aftermath of my story's ww2, mistrust in the shadows, secrets and spies fighting over who's faction is better equipped for the coming proxy wars.
Have always agreed that the physics in space don't allow for small fighter craft. I would expect battles in space to be more akin to ships in the ages of sail where they lined up to release a broadside as they passed by, and then took a long time to turn around before they could make another pass.
Instead of turning around, space ships might just complete a full orbit around the planetary body they are close by. The video game Children of a Dead Earth depicts this very accurately.
I kinda liked the idea of it being a little like a submarine fight, where both are moving around and the first one to reveal they proper position and heading would mean they will get hit.
@@_furydance8890 Making a planetary orbit would be a good way to come around without having to burn fuel but such a maneuver would make your position far easier to predict.
Regarding there being no "below water" in space, one could in theory use subspace or hyperspace (or even a parallel universe) as an analogy for "below water" in a sci-fi setting. Cloaking works too, but being cloaked doesn't make you immune to indirect fire, whereas if the ship is in another dimension, you can't really attack it unless you're able to enter that other dimension. Though if you had missiles that could dimension-hop, or you had interdimensional windows in front of your guns, that'd allow you to attack an "otherspace" craft without "submerging" or "resurfacing".
Starblazers/ Space Battleship Yamato has something that does exactly that in one episode the Yamato gets harassed by what is essentially a subspace/hyperspace submarine.
That was an interesting point. I had thought the "below Water" parts of space would be inside giant gas clouds and nebulas as we see in ST The Wrath of Khan. In fact an episode of BSG 2003 also has this cloud of "something" that must be flown through to reach somewhere else. The point nbeing that the crafts sensors were blinded to a fair degree while in this cloud and that would be the same as being underwater.
@@kellysmith1144 this use of nebulae as stealth opportunities is a common trope, and I even wrote it into a tabletop game I'm designing so I shouldn't complain, but nebulae are another thing where sci-fi canon has really confused our expectations. Most nebulae are typically large, regional features, tens to thousands of light years across. You don't just happen upon them, or discover that there is one "within" a solar system. Nebulae are also incredibly diffuse. The densest nebulae are less dense than the most rarefied vacuum that can be produced in a lab on Earth. The only reason they look opaque is because (see above) their thickness is measured in light years. So the reduced visibility within a typical nebula would mean you could "only" see things within a light year or two. Space simply does not produce clouds of stuff thick enough to conceal a ship from another ship within weapons range, unless those clouds are within a gravity well, in which case it's just a planetary atmosphere, and you're limited to ships that can operate in a gravity well.
I think the closest comparison I can think of is occasional weaponisation of the Warp in 40K, but it isn't the best comparison as most uses involve dragging ships into the Warp and not much else. Unless I'm mistaken you aren't having Chaos ships firing at targets in Realspace from the Warp or vice versa. Perhaps someone should.
@@TheSpearkan Speaking of the Warp, IIRC the Eldar have what are basically "submarine infantry". Warp Spiders are outfitted with a Jump Generator that basically sends them into the Warp for a short jaunt. Granted, they don't attack from inside the Warp, but they do pop out into realspace to shred you with their Death Spinners, and can just as easily hop back into the Warp when things get hairy.
Well, I’d argue that Star Trek uses cloaking devices in a similar way to the way submarines dive to escape/sneak up on an enemy, so there is at least a second element analogous to naval warfare. And B5 uses hyperspace as a realm ships can hide in as well.
I agree; the Star Trek original series episode "Balance of Terror", (s1ep14) was clearly a submarine-versus-destroyer story. The Star Trek cast and writers had experienced WWII a little over 20 years before, so that cat-and-mouse naval battle type story was not unfamiliar.
Honorverse uses hyperspace like that too. Tho they can't use radio for coms, gotta use a messenger boat to jump up into hyper to let a force in wait know when to drop down.
It's nice to see more space battleship Yamato (star blazers) being put out there if even in fast image sequences or cool shots of the opening battle. All around this is a good series and i would like to see some sort of aircraft carrier video that showcases how poorly designed and nonsensical some sci fi carriers are or how some good ones ended up coming out (bsg).
A great deconstruction of this trope is in the Dark Forest, where the human fleet is completely obliterated when it prepares to fight in a traditional naval like battle.
The other issue with WWII fighter tropes is how close WWII fighters had to get to use guns. In space there is no where to hide. Missiles will be the key because if the guided capabilities and lack of squishy meat sacks. The closest analogy I can think of to what actual space combat will be closer to submarine warfare. Lots of stealth and see who can shoot first. As for fighters, they will all have to have turrets because the distances will be far to great for precision flying to do anything but waste ammo. It may be more pretty but WWII fighting doesn’t even work in air combat anymore. It will never work in space.
I agree, except with the stealth part. As Isaac Arthur often explains, there is no stealth in space. I suspect it will mostly consist of long-range skirmishes with missiles and beam weapons and sometimes siege battles against fortified asteroid bunkers.
There is *no* stealth in space. And guns will pretty much always be relevant because they will always be cheaper than missiles. Obviously, missiles are great, but we still have tanks, don't we?
@@afriendofafriend5766 Tanks work because they are on Earth. The horizon, atmosphere and terrain break line of sight and make close quarters weapons effective, thus vehicles can get close to eachother and use guns. In space, there's no terrain to hide behind, and conventional bullets travel too slow to be useful - unless you use railgun slugs which travel at relativistic velocities, the enemy can dodge your shots very easily at space-distances. missiles made to work in space should usually have much bigger range than guns, and guidance systems can make it really hard to dodge one.
thats a star wars imperial mindset and they paid badly for it. fighters additional for capital ships is great since you force the enemy zo pick their targets and shelling a big target is way easier than multiple small targets not to mention that they usually dont have anti fighter guns
Love any reference to Stargate, especially once such as this! A Great and pretty unique show with some issues with CG consistency but good attention to making humanity follow naturally, hence the jet fighter influence.
When people talk about how Newtonian movement in three dimensions on a large scale renders the modern idea of fighter/bombers ineffective, they often miss an important factor: Newtonian movement in three dimensions on a large scale. "Capital" ships are big, and, because space causes people to scale things up by a factor of 10,000 for some reason, space capital ships are _really_ big. All that mass makes accelerating very slow and expensive, and a larger frame means you're putting a more stress on your structure during maneuvers. And, at the ranges you would expect to encounter enemies in space, their weapons are going to be of questionable effectiveness. At the distances seen in some settings, even lasers could take 5-50 seconds to reach the target point, and precision targeting is pretty much out of the question. This could easily result in theoretically powerful ship that's never in a position to do anything. A more fighter-like craft, on the other hand, would be able to maneuver a lot more efficiently, and would actually have some control over how it deployed its weapons. A lighter craft that could follow a target, move into effective weapons range, attack, and then relocate before counterfire reached their position would seem a much better focus for tactical engagements. I think, in the end, people spend a lot of time focusing on distance and momentum, but neglect how important a factor _time_ is to the effectiveness of a tactic or weapon system. To me, a long range railgun volley from a battleship would be far more useful for restricting enemy movement and shielding other craft than actually trying to deal damage to anything. So, I would expect a "realistic" space battle to, at least on a overview level, resemble Classic Galactica or even the old New Republic, with captial ships controlling an area and providing support for smaller, more flexible craft. ...so, basically, a lot of the same considerations that real-world navies deal with. Also, about guns being included in attack craft design being "regressive" .... no. Dogfighting gets declared dead every few years, and it's yet to stick. Missiles are and will continue to be an attack craft's primary weapon, but guns are more responsive on defense and have longer combat lifetimes.
Guns returned to fighter aircraft for a few reasons: Theyre more reliable than (early) missiles They are cheaper to use against surface targets Carrying a gun doesn't add too much mass to a craft. That said, even in vietnam dogfighting f4's didnt score many air to air gun kills. Pilots just opted to fire two missiles instead of one. Especially in space combat, a short range missile akin to an SRAAM is going to be more effective than guns, since far off boresight locking exists and any missile is going to be more maneuverable than a spacecraft with a squishy human inside.
Yeah there’s an interesting argument to be made that when it comes down to it space combat is actually one dimensional. With distances and no stealth any actual maneuvers you make other than closer and further away are irrelevant. Also I think that if the F4 had a gun to begin with the F22 and maybe the F35 would not have had a gun.
There is a problem with fighter like craft though, and its simply size. Consider the distances involved, and the distances these craft will have to traverse. Even at very high speeds the time scales are going to be long. That means Fighters are going to need almost as much endurance as large craft. But how do you GET that endurance? Square cube law is a bitch. You simply do not have the volume you require for everything you need. Think about it. Assuming you have a single pilot, but that pilot is going to be in the cockpit for say 24 hours. That means you need life support for 24 hours. Then you need to carry the fuel for those engines. You need to power your electrical systems otherwise you are never even going to find your target let alone shoot it. And the list goes on. Then to top all that off you still need to find the room to carry your weapon load, plus any countermeasures that you may need. A one man fighter in Space would need to be a pretty damned substantial craft because of all those things. Which means it is not that much more difficult to hit than a dreadnaught. Especially if you are assuming the use of very high velocity weapons like rail or gauss guns firing projectiles at significant percentages of Light Speed, or perhaps energy type weaponry that IS light speed. As for dogfighting being declared dead, take a look at all the air to air kills since the first Gulf War. Show me how many are gun kills. Here is a hint, NONE of them. They are all missile kills and almost ALL of them are BVR.
"All that mass makes accelerating very slow and expensive, and a larger frame means you're putting a more stress on your structure during maneuvers." This is not automatically true. The only reason we intuitively think this is true is because of how air combat typically works on earth: space combat is not air combat. Bigger ships have more mass to move, sure, but they also can have bigger thrusters, bigger fuel tanks and stronger structures. Indeed, given armour penetration is about thickness this tends to favour larger craft: smaller surface area to armour relative to total volume inside. It is true that larger craft tend to be able to produce less acceleration, thruster power is proportional to surface area. However, on the flip side any kind of realistic space combat tends to not end up being about maximum thrust as much as it is about delta-v: how much propellant you have available to make those manoeuvres. Once again the cube rule favours larger craft: they can carry proportionally more propellant. In short the relationship between size and manoeuvrability is complex and non-obvious.
The Honor Harrington novels have a very good example of what you are talking about. The Light Attack Craft (LAC) is a small, non-FTL capable ship primarily used in the system defense roll. They are missile heavy ships, but do have powerfull beam weapon "guns", and have 7-10 crewmembers. There are LAC carriers in-universe and in those situations the LACs augment the anti-missile point defense of their capital ship brethren and rundown crippled and hulked enemy ships. They are often referred to in the books as "eggs armed with sledge hammers".
I wonder if a WWI inspired Space fighter could work? Fighter planes were not only brand new experimental vehicles but also unreachable to everyone not using another fighter plane due to lack of anti aircraft weapons, which could translate well into space combat. Of course that would mean that you couldn't have large capital ships but rather just small fighters fighting eachother.
Well, there’s always the space-zeppelin then: a giant, unmaneuverable ship that’s less dangerous to the fighters as to its intended bombing target but which is difficult for fighters to defeat from sheer mass. Either way, I like the analogy of First World War fighters, fragile, unreliable craft nearly as dangerous to its own pilot as to the opponent and reliant on unexpected maneuvers for defence.
@@Vespuchian That could work! I also like how back then Fighter pilots were often called the last "gallantly soldiers" because they could only fight eachother one on one without the heavy material or technological tricks employed in the trenches leading to them to have almost knightly status across the board and an almost sportsman like relationship with their enemies. Which would work great for a Space opera aswell.
IMO, this is the most Realistic (tm) space combat scenario for the foreseeable future. Heavy industry is _heavy,_ which means it is going to be a long time before anyone has the industrial depth (mines, steel mills, factories for components and chips) to build a heavily-armored space battleship. Until then, "capital ships" will be something akin to the International Space Station, but with high-performance engines (VASIMR, nuclear-thermal, etc.) and a rotating section for crew. These ships will be too expensive and fragile to just throw into combat. Currently, it takes the resources of a superpower nation or very wealthy person or corporation (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Lockheed) to build even one space construct of that size. What's needed is something small that can be built (mostly) with the resources of a space outpost (local raw materials plus 3D printers, with still-expensive components like computers, reactors, and weapons being shipped up from Earth). These craft are still expensive, so there won't be huge fleets of them, but they're cheap enough to use in combat. With a pilot/AI team or small crew, these are the space fighters/gunships. Tactics: capital ships carry a few gunships most of the way to combat, then launch them and keep their distance. The gunship forces engage one another. When one side prevails, it is in the interest of the losing capital ship to light its engines and try to escape. The victors may seek to recover their gunships and pursue (providing they have an advantage in Delta-V that would let them catch up), or capture any surviving defeated gunships and their crews. Apart from a fanatical do-or-die attitude, it would make sense for defeated gunships to drop their weapon pods, extend their heat radiators, and surrender. For the price of some reaction mass, the victors can score some new gunships. Trained fighter pilots are also very, very expensive, so it is in the interests of both sides to capture and exchange P.O.W.'s, or try to poach enemy pilots with hefty recruiting bonuses. Thus, you get the kind of "chivalrous combat in fragile, dangerous craft" we saw in World War I. In an extended conflict, pilots on opposite sides might even get to know each other, have forbidden romances, etc.. Since the most valuable and rare thing in outer space is human-habitable volume, it makes sense to capture capital ships and space outposts intact or nearly-intact whenever possible. Weapons designed to do less damage can also be lighter, so they don't eat up so much of a capital ship's range and/or cargo capacity, and they're cheaper to ship out to space outposts than heavy weapons. So, a Realistic (tm) space war could be almost chess-like, with gunships and drones as the more expendable pieces, capital ships as queens, and outposts as the king. There might even be boarding parties with swords and maces (because spraying machine-gun fire in a tin-can space hab would likely destroy what you're trying to capture), kung fu fighting in low-g or weightless environments.
Saw the Gunstar in the thumbnail and immediately knew what my plans are for the next couple of hours: watching this video, and then re-watching The Last Starfighter! You keep making Gunstar videos and I'll keep watching.
nice but unfortunaly more fighters will overwhelm such a vessel because it uses its main weapons so it can be distracted long enough for either anti ship hits from the fighters or the enemy capital ship chilling and blasting the Enterprise D to hell without any danger of returning fighters. thats why in the dominion jem hadar beat the crap out of galaxy classes and d'deridex classes because they have absolutely zero anti fighter weapons that arent their main guns ,its similar how in the battle of yavin 4 the turbolaser perform yea they get a couple fighters down but they need interceptors for true protection. the reason why star trek fighters are terrible till the maquis and then the dominion became the fighters were quite primitive. t its like the Galactic Empire who swear on their big meaty thick star destroyers until the x wings arrived and absolutely cleaned house
@@laisphinto6372 well yes and no with an array type of emitter the directed weapons beam/bolts can be scaled to fire multiple bolts at once to a multiple targets If the Enterprise EM weapons can fire 18 gigthings of pew pew form each array and the fighters can only take 2 Gigthings of pew pew to destroy, its main pew pew weapons much more often, you would need a saturation attack to get through to attack range, In WW2 The Wisconsin shot down Kate Medium bomber Kamikaze with its main guns, it can happen and did. The main resion would be the power and number of sensors and Computers the Enterprise carries tied to the fire control system and how many targets it can track and fire on. The X wings had a lot of plot armor.
@@laisphinto6372 Star wars is a different setting that pays be different rules, what works for star wars does not work for other settings. Besides the main reason fighters work so well in star wars is because they have an ungodly amount of plot armor on their side and imperial ships have inexplicably bad fire control systems. Those same rules dont apply to trek, Trek plays a different game. First off, Jem hadar bugships arent fighters, they are well over 20,000 tons, and have a crew size of 42, they are small warships. Second, the main reason they where so successful early on was their phased polaron weapons bypassed the shields of Alpha quadrant powers which gave them an overwhelming advantage. once the AQ powers adapted their shields, Jem hadar bugships became far less successful and far more cannon foddery. Phasers are multipurpose weapons, due to their array like configuration their operation is not like conventional guns. Phaser arrays can easily split their fire into dozens of pinpoint accurate beams simultaneously to attack numerous targets at once. Its also worth noting that both the galaxy and D'Deridex are hilariously undergunned for their size. The Galaxy is primarily an explorer, not a warship. its worth noting that the Sovereign class is less than half the tonnage of a Galaxy yet easily possesses more than double the fighting power, so the Galaxy class is undergunned by at least a factor of four, but more like a factor of five to eight. Meaning that if you tore out all the exploration equipment and added additional weapons shield generators and the power plant to supply them, the Galaxy can easily become at least five times as powerful, if not more. The D'Deridex is even more inefficient than the galaxy as a fighting ship, likely because of less efficient weapons placement, and its almost certainly built as a planetary occupation ship, leading it to carry a lot of ground troops and supporting equipment to occupy conquered planets.
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 i really dont buy the criticsm of plot armor in star wars then star trek has the same thing it just not the fighters but the cruisers. and despite techno babble the showcased accuracy and range of phasers is really flunky , we dismiss stated star wars ranges and accuracy from scource books but in star trek they are insanely accurate in one time and other types they cannot hit a 100 meter long ship. this is what i really dont like applying critic points on one thing but not keeping the same energy on the other side. also despite the supposed inferiority of fighters the maquis are quite successfull against not only cardassian but also starfleet vessels which is that star Trek fighters arent useless they are just underdeveloped and primitive before the maquis and funally the dominion war makes them more and more advanced
I've always liked Gundam's depiction of space combat involving mobile suits instead of fighter craft (most of the time). It kind of makes sense in the setting, since humanity lives in giant O'Neill Cylinder style space stations. Having a mech that can operate in the emptiness of space as a starfighter/gunship equivalent and then transfer to the gravity environment of a space station or the moon and serve as heavy armor equivalent is incredibly versatile. Not to mention the psychological effect against ground forces inside space colonies where you want to end the fighting ASAP before the space colony is too heavily damaged. In the setting Mobile Suits also dominate land based combat on Earth, though I think that is mostly due to Minovsky particles (magic space particles).
Tomino was ahead of his time, he even depicted the death of large spaceship combat and depicted the conversion from gunships to carriers that carried mobile suits primarily, mobile suits can also carry any weapon which made them the most versatile weapon systems, and they are modular. A mecha is any military wet dreams right now, because of this, imagine a light tank, that can walk on any terrain, carry any heavy weapon, yeah, if you were a general right now, you be having a toilet break just by the thought of it.
Actually, from what I've read, while mobile suits dominated in space combat when they were first introduced as the Minovsky jamming severely hampered the Federations use of fighters and battleships, the same can't be said when those same mobile suits made landfall. While Zeon claimed many early victories, the Earth Federations tanks and fighters proved to be far tougher opponents when under gravity as the mobile suits became much slower and more lumbering, losing one of their key advantages. Not helping matters was that there already were doctrines for line of sight combat on Earth. This mixed with the fact that even common troops could take down mobile suits armed with just wire guided anti-MS missiles, and all of a sudden they became far less formidable foes. And when you thrown in how how overextended the Zeon troops were thanks to their early victories and the constant Zeon infighting, things just went south for Zeon. While things such as the Gelgoog and Dom tried to even the playing field, it was too little too late. I believe it wasn't until the Gryphs conflict that mobile suits started catching up to tanks and fighters in terrestrial combat. All those transformable mobile suits you see around that time was an attempt to try and improve mobile suit speed and handling while in the atmosphere as all attempts to fly before this had just been to brute-force it. However, fighters and tanks remained a major part of the Earth machinery all the way until around the Laplace incident. The gamechanger was the use of the miniaturized Minovsky Craft System which finally allowed mobile suits to deal with their main disadvantage on Earth. After that point, fighters and tanks pretty much all but disappear.
LOGH Die Neue These actually has semirealistic starfighter you can most easily see this in Valkyrie starfighters witch engines witch can rotate 360 because in space it's only way to turn and spartanins can rotate main hull around this central bulb, with this wings like structure having smaller engines Spartaninas can move 360 as well.
On the note of no other planes of combat in space, aside from the option of planetary or other bodies possessing installments that can attack targets in space and just like that, spacecraft bombing planes surface being the easiest but still very rare thing to add, there is one more I've really liked: In Kiddy Grade anime, the clone versions of the protagonists return to help to win the day all with their own ships. One of them is using a weird type of stealth/protection, shifting phase of existence basically. Looks like they sink into the waves below, pretty amazing stuff. I imagine the Nekrons would have a few things to say about this. Ep23, around 17:40 or so btw.
I would actually like too see your take on Space Mecha which is often a Japanese Trope. It does kinda make even less sense than space fighters but it is different and it can be fun too see large robots have melee fights in Zero G. Would like too see more Videos about Japanese Sc-Fi
I have a massive blindspot towards anime! Pretty much all of the cool anime footage you see in our videos is courtesy of our editor, Charles. I do think Japanese mecha is, to some extent, more acceptable at times because it doesn't take itself quite so seriously. Or maybe it does and I just don't know enough about them to realise that lol. - hoojiwana from Spacedock
There are two schools of that, at least in my mind. The Gundam school, where the dci/tech of the setting encourages such stuff, or the Macross school, where the mech part is part of a combined use (mobile turret, boarding actions, etc).
Oh I just bonk that down to its stupid but fun. Like who does not love giant robots during it out. Been watching the old gundam movies and it was a little interesting that most of the mechs is often supported in a multi role unit, with the mechs being more the high tech vehicle being supported by tanks, planes, and spaceships when in combat. Since what the mech brings to a fight is versatility, since if it runs out of ammo it can if needed go into melee, but that is not preferably usually
The purpose of the orginal mechs in Gundam was for a single craft to be able to fight in space, inside and on a space colony and to work on a planets surface. They also had to deal with a made up Minovsky particle that messed up sensors so visual sight was needed for combat
There is the small craft role that can be filled with slots like the ships boats and landing craft becoming shuttles, and gunboats and torpedo boats becoming strikecraft, patrol craft and picket vessels. They go where bigger ships cannot go and perform the task too costly for the big ships to do like scouting out hazardous zones and clearing mines.
I think that as of right now, the Expanse and Honor Harrington have probably the best take on what Space Combat "may" look like in the future and no, single seat craft do not exist in either universe. In the Exapnse, the smallest combatant is either the Corvette, like the Rocinante or the Frigate, but nothing smaller than that. The reason being, they cannot carry the necessary thruster capacity for the kind of high-G maneuvering that would be necessary and also cannot carry enough ECM and ECCM to even attempt to get past sensors, while the Corvette and Frigate do. Also, space is a terrible place to get stuck in, without a craft of some sort, as your Space Suit is for emergencies and short durations. Honor Harrington goes into even greater detail, and the concept they arrive at is a small, light-corvette analogue, with a small crew of 3, armed with the absolute essentials and meant for only 2 roles, covert stealth heavy hit and run or as point-defense, but never as direct attack like modern fighters. Honor Harrington's point-defense capability means that anything that can be reasonably targeted will be shot with anti-ship heavy grasers. Anything that cannot project a screen at least cruiser level will be automatically annihilated by said anti-ship heavy grasers. Thus the LAC is one of the most capable stealth ships in the setting and when needed can project dreadnought level screens. But it relies primarily on stealth to avoid PD fire, while the screens are to attempt some survivability, but realistically they are meant to be expendable. On the flip side, they carry a single Dreadnought level Graser and up to 16 cruiser level missiles, giving them a way over-powered punch, while being relatively expendable. They where the first attempt in centuries to try and create something similar to WW2 era carriers, but at the same time couldn't be more different if they tried.
While Warhammer 40k is usually far from realistic, their smallest attack craft, Fury Interceptor, is between 40-70 metres in length (depending on source or in-universe pattern), which makes them about the same size as Expanse's Corvette class (or bigger). They have 4-man crew, and are armed with a mix of anti-ship missiles and lasers, both turreted and fixed. It's designed to defend against torpedoes and other attack crafts.
One of the things I think Honor Harrington does well. It has LACs (light attack craft) which are analogous to both shore patrol/torpedo boats and (eventually) carrier-based aircraft (LACs can't enter FTL on their own, so without a carrier or other large hyper-capable ship to tow them, they're basically limited to system defense). Of course, Honor Harrington's space combat starts out as kind of a mashup of Napoleonic-era naval combat and submarine warfare.
To be honest: Manned fighters in space, fighting in visual range, is absurdly unrealistic. Try drones, rockets and subrockets. Slug-shots, producing a multi km² debrit field of mm particle flying 10.000s m/s. Firing hours before 'meeting' eachother ...
The Enders Game movie had a good version of the drone fighter, they would launch hundreads of drones that could speed up and slow down on a whim in complex formations that no human pilot could ever hope to perform. ^^
The Gundam universe solved the distance thing with some mumbo jumbo about jamming long distance scanning, so you had to get close range (ie: visual range) in order to destroy your enemy. Kinda works.
1) information/electronic warfare. If you can hack the other guys drones, or just prevent new instruction from being uploaded during the mission, drones are great[ly] reduced in effectiveness, if not nullified. 2) Rocket/Missiles, this includes "subrockets" (not sure what that means), are basically dumb drones and are just as or more vulnerable to countermeasures and Electronic warfare. 3) Firing Slugs from beyond visual range is a BAD idea unless you can reach better than 0.5C. and this would still be at relatively short ranges, a few light seconds at best. 4) Beyond Visual Range combat, in space this would be any distance under about one light second, is likely the only real way to fight in space unless you are actively assailing a planet, or stationary infrastructure, a station or built out asteroid, with effective countermeasures and defenders such that drones, missiles, and the like are not very likely to make the target. If the target can see the incoming projectile, they at least have a chance to defend against it. 5) Manned fighters retain being the best choice [for] active combat missions, where direct decision making and action is still required. 6) Finally, this is fiction so you need to greatly consider what the audience, readers, game players, will find compelling.
The Star Carrier books have fighters that utilize a mix of AI-guided nuclear-tipped missiles, railguns, and particle beam projections. They can also accelerate to near-c in 10 minutes thanks to their gravitic acceleration. They can use it to launch an opening missile volley at relativistic speeds, provided the enemy ships are in predictable orbits
Every domain needs numerous types of craft. You will always need fast attack, medium attack, and heavy attack. Whether the attack vector is unmanned, drone, aircraft, ships, missiles, or bullets. It has zero to do with “looks”, or size. Only engineered capabilities needed to employ military strategies. To date, there’s no one vehicle in land/sea/air that can do all the tactical tasks needed. The same military strategies will need to be employed in space, to achieve victories. Even when we - unfortunately - militarize space, you’re going to need the same types of armament, and craft. Regardless of vector. Even if it’s all drones - you’re going to need various types in the same 3 categories.
I think this also might be done this often as it was the last really big really world changing conflict so influential we‘re still not really over it and work Ober it again and again in movies and Series and even abstractly in other genres like Sci-fi Additionaly Star Trek and Star Wars (and Mandy others of course) really left an imprint in sci fi (star trek more in a submarineish way and star wars very obviously took big inspiration from all aspects of ww2) like lord of the rings did in fantasy so much of the stuff that came after it orients on them or its an hommage or certain patterns. Sometimes better like battlestar galactica sometimes worse like galactica 1980 xD but yeah some fresh ideas could be nice but I also kinda like the tropes.
I think that what makes the Expanse so refreshing to is that their aren't any fighters and it's a more modern take on ship to ship combat if it was taken place in space. A quick sidenote. Fighters in general should always have some type of cannon. The last time I know of a fighter that didn't have any was the American F4 phantom; when it ran out of missiles it was an absolute sitting duck and can easy get shot down by vietnamese fighters during a dogfight.
I am unaware of any cases of the phantom being shot down by cannon fire, let alone that it was common. Regardless, even if it was common that was 50 years ago, in the modern age fighters engage by firing all of their missiles at extreme range then turning around and running away as fast as possible. A situation where a modern fighter might enter cannon range is essentially inconceivable, and extraordinarily unlikely to ever occur
@UCVq-jaFc5IorgXjh5QUMFiA they have cannons because fighters have always had cannons so they always will, regardless of the fact that they are worse then useless, especially on a craft which relies on stealth like the f-35
@@jackwalters5506 I found the article that the air force put out describing why the F35 and it's variants need a machine gun. "That comes from lessons learned in Vietnam when the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II was initially designed without an internal cannon. The thinking at the time was that longer-range air-to-air missiles such as the AIM-7 Sparrow would make close-in aerial dogfights a thing of the past. However, when U.S. aviators came up against MiG-19 and MiG-21 they found they wished they had some guns for the close-in fighting, and later models of the Phantom II were armed accordingly."
@@soontir_fel1816 I'm aware of that reasoning, it's stupid. Vietnam was 20 years removed from WW2, we are 50 years removed from Vietnam. Since Vietnam missiles have become far more reliable, far more accurate, and far longer ranged. With modern technology the expectation is that in a standard engagement neither side will ever even see each other except on radar/IR.
Honestly, pike and shot warfare in space would probably be dope A warfare entirely designed on using small cavalry charges meanwhile you have shoulders slowly encroaching on your musketeers who fire devastating shots but take long time to reload Like imagine a stupid amount of mini ships armed with torpedoes and one shot lasers charging down a large musketeer like ship
I refer to the typical WWII-style space combat is "lucasian" because George Lucas' depiction of it in Star Wars is what cemented it in the audiences' perception. It's eminently filmable because it's so "romantic" - a plucky hero or a band of plucky heroes in tiny ships taking on either swarms of bad guys or Goliaph-like enemy dreadnoughts, all at point blank range. And it also makes it easy to create a very "busy" picture of the space battle - capital ships move slowly and belch fire at each other to little effect while plucky heroes in fighters zip around and win the day but hitting just the right spot at just the right time.
Torpedo boats became the very thing they swore to destroy. TBD→DD escort→DD leader→literally just a slightly light cruiser with the express purpose of sinking larger ships.
Real space combat probably won’t be like anything we’ve see. I imagine that using projectile weapons in space would likely be considered a war crime as eventually, given enough time, they will hit something. Most likely all space combat will be far beyond visual range using turret lasers and missiles. There will probably be either small fighters or drones though as it’s cheaper to loose those than a capital ship. For example: an enemy vessel takes cover in the rings of Saturn (which have “particles” the size of mountains IRL). The attacking ship would like take an overwatch position safely away and deploy drones to locate and terminate the enemy ship. There is one other possibility: some sort of advanced EMP/stealth tech that renders tracking and most computers unusable. Then you would have to fight basically Dune style.
Honestly I'm more of a fan how Gundam (and similar mecha series) handle it. Almost going the opposite direction and having your space 'fighter' craft being large humanoid things with the associated versatility Now yes, Gundam does have fighter craft and small space craft, but the fighter craft were mostly seen in the air, and the Mobile Ball doesn't behave like a plane in space at all
I feel like one of the better uses of a fighter sized craft would be as a torpedo boat that uses speed and surprise to zoom into a position, fire off a torp at a ship engaged in a shooting match with another capital vessel, and then zip off again before it can be targeted. Basically reduce the fighter craft to a piloted launch tube that will hit the enemy ship from odd angles.
Do we really need a follow-up video just to say "no, really, I'm right"? You have a decent subject matter here, and science fiction shedding the WWII dogfighting paradigm would certainly be a good thing, but working in your Gunstar arguments doesn't support that, it just muddies the waters.
not really the whole fighters useless stick sounds like a lesson from a snobbish imperial officer ten minutes away getting wrecked by said fighters. there is a reason why big boy battleships dont exist anymore
@@laisphinto6372 I imagine the scifi community discussing "realistic" space combat like the scifi of the early 20th century. It was stimulating and entertaining but, as time showed, no more accurate to reality than napoleonic tactics applied to WWII. I have no doubt that many of the creators and fans are brilliant and much more interested in the underlying science than I am. But I feel it's worth remembering that clever predictions of unrealized possibilities based on present understanding of science is no less fantastical than the romantic art that many of them decry.
Love your videos!!!- and very fair in respects to “too much emphasis on WWII style combat” and the talk about gunships/defiant/naval warfare domains! When speaking of single and two seat fighters… (sorry if it has been mentioned) have y’all ever thought about Hammerheads from Space Above and Beyond??? Freakin LOVED those fighters in a Marine tactical sense! Will admit I am bias and freakin will forever LOVE B5’s Starfury’s…and in that world/technological age I do think they do make a huge impact with destroyers/carriers and as space based defense. Anyways, thanks again for such a great channel and intriguing topics and concepts. Keep it up, Cheers!
I've always viewed fighters as existing in Space Combat, but for in atmosphere strikes, where a larger space fairing vessel would be unable to travel. A ship would dip into the upper atmosphere, spit out a small number of fighters to precision strike enemy installations planetside, and then hit afterburner to be picked up again by their parent vessels. Bombardment from space would be both destructive and inaccurate, so in any limited conflict this would allow space fairing militaries to attack each other's facilities more effectively.
I do love the kind of Beyond Visual Range combat of The Expanse and I wish we had a more accessible and popular game that resembled it. Something between Children of Dead Earth and Into The Black.
Children of a Dead Earth convinced me space fighters will happen. In that game, a fleet can approach an enemy fleet either with a prograde or retrograde orbit. The retrograde orbit is an incredibly high speed pass with only minutes to fire missiles and seconds to fire weapons, the danger is extremely high as it can be very difficult to evade or counter enemy weapons. It is more or less a suicide run. The prograde "chase" style of orbit allows the combatants to control their engagement distance much better, and affords several volleys of missiles before closing to laser or railgun range. Evasive maneuvers are easier but so is missile guidance. What you end up with is volleys of missiles and counter-missiles trying to hit each other and the enemy fleet. In other words you have missiles fighting other missiles in a relatively low speed pass. More intelligent missiles, perhaps with short range weapons of their own, would be more effective in a fleet defense role and more effective in punching through enemy point defences. Sounds an awful lot like a space fighter to me. Now give both sides these small independtly armed "smart missiles" aka fighters and what do you have? Now you have a dogfight.
Keep in mind that the CoaDE space fighters, notably, *aren't manned*, they're simple cheap robo-fighters, which makes it even MORE realistic! And there are also things like missile busses and similar which work perfectly well!
You know what I wish to see? More space movies that resemble modern dogfighting. High Bore-Sight Dogfight Missiles, super maneuverability and one / two circle fights. (Do this with a bunch of maneuver thrusters, it'll look super cool). BVR is probably more realistic but I don't think audiences will appreciate the main character shooting missiles into nothingness and staring at a radar screen for 2 minutes.
While i agree that "when making something for yourself, think outside the box" is a great point, movies are not done for oneself. They are supposed to be watched, and understood, but as many people as possible to regain the invested money in their creation. And given that even today planes fly and even fight like in WWII (just look at what the US is looking for as a cheaper alternative for the A-10), having WWII as the basis is tremendously helpful. Yet i agree i would like to see more new ideas on how space combat could be done. I for my part like the idea of drones controlled like fighters by humans in their carrier with quantum entanglement communication that allows for perfect control even lightyears away if necessary. Just imagine the carrier hiding in an asteroid field while the drones attack.
I think there are other narrative reasons to use one-seated fighter types as well; for example, one pilot means that you can focus on one hero and make their actions more impactful.
Yeah world war 2 on space is overrated, we need more Napoleonic era wars on space like Legend of the Galactic Heroes anime, with fleets upon fleets firing on each other in a line battle where the officers, admirals, battle positions, tactics and strategy matters more than gun armaments and technology.
With the modern day use of drones, I would love to see human controlled drones used more in space fights. Without the need for a cockpit you could make radically different designs. If the battlefield is too large you would have issues of lag, but for near ship combat, they would be perfect.
Just one more reason space battles in The Expanse are superior to all other mainstream franchises. Big and small fast ships with skilled crews, electronic countermeasures and exceptionally deadly weapons. The only way to survive is not to get hit even once.
@@timothymiller4475 By PDWs and sometimes railguns yeah. But not the nuclear torpedoes that are the main ship killer weapons. Refer back to when Stupid Sexy Inaros only survived the battle with the Roci because Holden deactivated the nuke before it hit.
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Spacedock, can you please do the Jem'Hadar fighter from DS9?
The real question is just how large is a huge Ewana?
@@TheInselaffen Approximately one (1) hoojiwana in scale.
I** feel there is a sci-fi fighter and setting that feels kinda overlooked and has "turreted" weapons capabilities. And that is the hammer head starfighters from "Space: Above and Beyond" It had a ventral main weapon, dorsal secondary and seeking missiles like sidewinders. There's several times in the series, where they are shown flying/drifting in a different direction, to the point of view for the cockpit. It is even a main move used in one of the main dogfights in one episode, where fighter craft on both sides are shown turning to look behind their direction of travel. It may be a series worth you looking into?
I wonder how a spacecraft carrier would work, if it were to have any realistic function in space.
I imagine there wouldn't be much need for a carrier in space for orbital or air superiority, and a carrier would more likely be used for a logistical role for the transport of small vessels that would be incapable of interplanetary or interstellar distances, it could also be used to shuttle troops and orbital insertion vehicles if it is a more combat oriented vessel.
The structure of a carrier would be primarily a thick hollow frame that would contain utilities such as water, air, and electricity, along with elevators for crew and spacecraft.
The frame would function as the spine of the vessel, running from the engines in the back, to the equivalent of a bow in the front, a truss structure would connect the spine to the hull of the vessel, along with diagonal supports going from the hull towards back and spine of the vessel to prevent structural failure under acceleration of 1g or greater. Vertically the decks would be aligned perpendicular to the spine, along the axis of thrust.
The vessel would use a dual hull design, a crew hull, and an external hull.
Only the crew hull is pressurized, while the external hull is intended as armor. Both hulls are usually built to the same thickness.
Between the hulls is where ammunition is stored, oxygen, fuel, and water tanks, reactor and pellet storage, airlocks, and launchpads are located.
The launchpads, hangars, and craft guideways are standard designs, along with docking ports.
There are identical ventral and dorsal hangars, along with two guideways to assist incoming craft.
Usually the dorsal flight deck is used for incoming aircraft while the ventral flight deck is used for orbital, or planetary operations. The ventral flight deck can function parallel to the dorsal flight deck during high traffic operations or an emergency.
Small craft intending to land/dock in the carrier would use either guideway to prevent collisions with launching craft.
All hangars and launchpads have lift systems that align a craft to the flight deck or the internal flight bay, and can rotate a craft 90 degrees when a craft is launching.
There would be various weapon systems on the vessel, including a few missiles, but the majority of weapons are defensive systems like CIWS.
There are several sections on the ship that can be sealed automatically in the event of
The vehicle elevator would be used to transfer small craft to and from the flight bay and launchpads, there could be an airlock for aircraft entering the vessel, and each launchpad is an airlock that quickly depressurizes before opening.
To be fair, world war 2 in space also never remotly looks anything like how world war 2 played out and is always over simplified.
Yeah more like fictional WWII in space because if you look at how WWII was fought you find out how the way WWII movies show combat is not right like the range they fought in are bigger and how to get at an aircraft carrier you have to get past destroyer, cruiser, and battleships that make a protective umbrella around it and make you think why aren't the Corvette and frigate firing like hell at tie fighters or y-wing and just standing there looking not menacingly and harmless 😂
Only the expanse show how getting through an protective umbrella would be like just get rid of missile and their you got WWII space combat
@@USSAnimeNCC- More WW1 then WW2 with out missles as they don't really use small craft etheir plane nore PT boats or even straight modern day/cold war style combat with out planes and mayby with frigites and smaller craft.
WWII in space refers to broadside style combat, massive fleets and fighter wings, and the like
It’s hardly ever portrayed otherwise in a proper fashion in a 3D environment. That’s a leading factor into why combat in The Expanse is praised as such
For certain sci-fi, like Star Wars it is some weird combination of WW2 combined with Cold War Era Tech. Like I feel Sensors act more like Cold War Radar. And some definitely require better tech, otherwise some craft like the X-Wing be absolute garbage due to the parallax issue it has with its guns.
Though you ask me, Wedge in all reality should have died in his head on attack on that TIE and even fly through its debris. Either you die from a head in collision, or your craft gets damaged from the debris you flew through that you have to return to base.
I think that, by far, the most realistic space combat scenes are those those where you never see 2 ships in the same shot, unless they are basically docked next to each other. WW2 battleships would usually be something like 10-20 miles away from their targets. To give you an idea of scale, naval wargaming uses sports courts as boards with the ships being an inch or so long.
And, yet again, thats ww2. Modern anti-ship missiles have ranges measuring up to 350 miles. In this case ships would only be a 15th of an inch long on the sports court. Imagine how much larger ranges are in space.
@@TheBananamonger lasers ain't that expensive. But yeah, modern militaries cannot uphold a 350mile standard across the boars, nontheless, quite a few vessels are outfitted with such missiles. Modern day naval warfare doesn't occur on that scale anymore, so one or two missiles are enough to sink an enemy.
the problem with that is that its hard to execute in a story without it becoming visually bland. realism and accuracy often have to be somewhat compromised or handwaved to keep the pacing reasonable.
Worth noting that WW2 fighter tactics aren't used anymore IRL, either. So honestly your average SF fighter battle is more retro than a real world fighter battle.
Exceptions being b5 and to a lesser extent the new BSG, of course, as you noted.
But I think I differ with you on one point: you said that the preponderance of WW2 analogues prevent people from being able to understand a more realistic vision. I think it's people's inability to understand a more realistic vision that CAUSED the retro-WW2 thing to catch on in the first place.
Space combat is counterintuitive, which, I think, is why it's so rarely portrayed realistically
It's probably a mix of the two to be honest. It's hard to conceptualise, so it gets simplified or recontextualised, which makes it harder to conceptualise...
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
The expanse and to a lesser extent B5 and new BSG do a decent job of showcasing how "realistic" space battles might look in space, while also making them look cool.
Granted, B5 and new BSG do suffer from the WW2 in Space syndrome, but they began to portray real physics into their shows to great visual and entertaining effect, without making the viewer feel stupid.
The issue is that is difficult to make the fight between two rockets at high speed look interesting.
Think its because WW 2 air combat looks so visual good, naval combat was way outside of interesting visual range.for capital ships. even at WW 1.
Yes it was exceptions but most fighter action looked good.
In fact then I starting watching WW 2 documentaries my first reaction was, wow this looks like star wars :o)
Spielberg said it himself he was inspired by the WW 2 news reals.
Now it works for star wars who don't pretend to be realistic, but even pure fantasy has to be make sense in universe or hyperspace ramming :)
Uh, your first sentence is completely wrong. BFM (Basic Fighter Maneuvers) hails back to WW1. So that statement of yours makes absolutely ZERO sense.
WW2-in-space is at least partially so ubiquitous because it lends itself to filmmaking. The stakes are always clear (good guy needs to shoot down bad guy while not getting shot down), the emphasis on fighter craft means the heroes can assume a critical role in the battle (instead of sitting them in front of a tactical readout), and audiences at large will understand what's going on (instead of having to spend time explaining the nuances of detection, heat buildup, or whatever else is important to the setting).
Agreed it's in no way realistic, but it makes for good movies and is a reference people can easily understand.
Yep, the same reason medieval battles rarely are portrait realistic. Like battles at castles walls, in real life there would be several rolls of ditch to stop wall climbing apparatus to be bough close to the walls (and give ample opportunity to wall guard to attack anyone trying to fill the ditch) and the invading arm would just be stationed for days or months waiting for the people inside to use all their supplies. And the people inside waiting to the enemy arm succumbs to disease and shit that comes with large number of people camping in a area without proper sanitation.
@@VitorHugoOliveiraSousa Tbf it'd be a lot easier to portray medieval battles realistically than modern air combat.
Yah, even modern air combat would be pretty boring to film because it would be all beyond-visual-range missiles so shot of enemy firing missile, shot of good guy turning, don't see anything, don't see anything, then whoosh-bang what was that oh he got hit. Realistic and frustrating to watch.
@@gregorymuir1985 I don't think it would necessarily be boring. It would just take some real writing and directing talent to make it work.
I quite enjoy how the author David Weber dealt with "fighters" in his Honor Harrington universe, the "fighters" (which he calls Light Attack Craft or LACs) are portrayed as small ships in their own right instead of true fighter aircraft that are just too small to mount FTL engines (and thus need carriers to move them around). I think at one point a frigate is described as being significantly larger and more expensive than an LAC but not actually all that much more capable simply due to the inclusion of the FTL engines. In that sense they seem to be more akin to the torpedo boats mentioned in the video
The same goes for frigates and gunships in the Expanse. They aren’t very big, and often get hauled across system by larger ships. Most of their size is from the thruster, after all
LAC are basically hyper-specialized stealth torpedo destroyers.
They basically work in 2 ways.
Hyper stealth hit and run or point defense screen, but nothing beyond that.
Without sufficient stealth capabilities LAC's become easy targets for any half decent gunnery crew.
Thus, after the first few initial engagement they where relegated primarily to PD screen, to allow the Missile Carriers time to deploy their pods and launch, while surviving the insane Haven barrages of the second war.
But by that point they rarely went into hunting range, because their casualty rate has gone up astronomicaly
Came here to say this. I'll add that Weber did a good job showing the evolution, book 2 is when I think we're introduced to the LACs as a concept and 2/3rd to 3/4th of the way through the book we're shown the first iteration of the concept. Book 5 sees the first deployment of dedicated carriers in the form of q ships. Book 6 touches on it briefly with 7 showing the first of the first generation of dedicated carriers with following books developed tactics and counter tactics. To be fair they aren't meant to go after the main ships in the wall of battle and by the end they are mostly relegated to the missile defense role.
Was coming in to mention this as well, and you nailed it better than I could.
Fun fact, navies in real life did try to make Torpedo Boat Carriers. They were found to be too expensive and not that effective. Of course a sci-fi setting could easily have differences that make it viable and worth it.
Classic star trek was actually really good at treating all spaceships as part of the same medium. Fighters were very rare, and when they were used - like in the DS9 episode in the video - they were used like torpedo boat squadrons, not like aircraft launched from a carrier.
The Defiant was specifically designed as a fast, nible vessel, and she had alien equivalents, like the Jem-Hadar attack ship, the Hideki-class, or the Klingon BoP.
I think the other factor that gets overlooked is the limitations of the special effects. You have shields because you can have the drama of a ship taking hits without having to add damage to the model. You don't have starfighters because that's more models to film and it's a TV budget. You saw those things added to Trek when computers made them affordable.
Oddly enough when I think of a more realistic alternative to WWII in Space I think of the Predreadnought era. Capital ships equipped with a small number of heavy guns for long range bombardment and large numbers of medium and small calibre guns for medium and close range combat. Cruisers that are divided between primarily battle fleet or trade protection roles. And various smaller craft like destroyers and torpedo boats that, regardless of role, are still fair sized vessels and mostly capable of open sea operations (if only just in the case of torpedo boats).
Single seat fighters are just too small and fragile in a realistic setting but something akin to an 1890s torpedo boat fits quite well, a small, multi-crew craft with a small number of defensive weapons that's designed around the delivery of a much larger weapon makes sense as a planetary or in system defensive craft and it scales up from there.
That sounds great!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
I think even more realistic is just taking Today's ship-to-ship battle and apply to space.
The primary fighting weapon would be missiles, to engage enemies at hundred of thousands kilometers away, as it is easier to detect things in Space, without the curvature of Earth and interference ot its atmosphere.
The main defense agaisnt that, just like irl, would be eletronic countermeasures, interceptor missiles, evasive manouvers and point-defense cannons.
For closer ranges, ships would bring rail guns, firing kinetic projectiles at an incredible velocity. Those you cant really defend against, just like naval guns, so then it becomes who can hit eachother first. But I would find very uncommon to them be used in ship-to-ship battle, as most of those would be resolved with the missiles exchange.
Instead, like they modern navy counterparts, they could be used to orbital bombardment, engage small unidentified crafs, finish abandoned ships etc.
You dont see ships today entering naval-gun range when fighting peer enemies, so I dont think we will see it in space either.
@@rodrigopaim82 that is pretty much what they do in the expanse books, missiles first then if absolutely needed you could use railguns or even your anti missile weapons to fight. Hell one manoeuvre the main characters did was just tricking the enemy ship into moving into the direction they fired a ton of rounds into.
@@hoojiwana Interestingly eonough youtube naval historian Drachinifel compared Star Trek ships to ships types cca 1890s.
On the topic of late 19th century: torpedo boat evolution, was a bit diferent. TBs evolved into Destroyer Torpedo boats - torpedo boats with guns, while Torpedo Boat Destroyers are a completely separate design lineage, that started with guns and no torpedeos - only later did Destroyers get torpedoes.
@@luclin92 Yeah, I love The Expanse and sure is what I had in mind.
I actually like Age of Sail, for fighting in Space. Massive long distances, long voyages and possibly near impossible resupply. Fits space battles better.
Have you read the Honor Harrington series? It starts as Horatio Hornblower in space.
Treasure Planet, literally just age of sail IN SPACE! Shame we never got to see ship to ship combat outside of the game Battle at Procyon, though its still pretty fun in that.
With the exception of the bow-mounted weapons and attack craft, Battlefleet Gothic tends to be like that too. Age of Sail tactics tend to dominate.
I appreciate all the shots from _Legend of the Galactic Heroes._ It's a good show that deserves more attention.
As does Space Battleship Yamato 2199. Unfortunately Yamato got delivered to the west a lot slower than it should have aside from those who were prepared to import the Japanese Blu-Rays a decade ago).
yea that show (more so for the original one from the 80s imo) has the best depiction of massive space naval battles I have ever seen. ffs an entire asteroid belt was used as a cover system.
i live in the town ansbach so i am pretty thanfull it got not that big attentcion but its a damm good show yes
@@revolverswitch Really gotta second that recommendation for the OG one, there. There's something about how it shows space combat that I've literally never seen nowhere else. It really gets the scale of the whole thing, y'know? it really feels like each battle's got thousands of ships in it
Banner of the Stars/ Crest of the Stars is good too.
I LOVE that you've shown Legend of the Galactic Heroes as a clip for space combat! I wish you'd explore the ships in that universe more esp the old OVAs which were amazing
Man, I'd pay good money for that.
LoGH: Yo dawg, I heard you like characters, so I gave you characters in your characters so you could char while you act.
Yessir!
This is part of the reason why the carriers in my universe carry atmospheric fighters to be deployed and retrieved from high orbit. It puts an interest twist on the trope.
And if watching Star Gate has taught me anything, giving your characters limited ways to get off a hostile planet is an easy but effective way to raise the stakes.
I agree with your concept!
Carriers in space should be more Like huge troop transports and Equipment For landing and invasions than "space fighter" .
Also orbital supremecy would need to be acchieved First in any Engagement, so wasting lifes in ships with multirole perpose ist just dumb.
@@selectthedead it's why the Phoenix class from halo is such a cool ship, they are armed with the standard unsc cocktail of MAC, assorted coil and auto guns for closer engagement, and missiles of course, but its all meant mostly for defense and ground bombardment. The weapons make up a very small part of the ship everything else is dedicated to assaulting and sustaining attacks on planetary targets. Way cooler to see in action than a do everything cruiser
I've thought of something similar myself, and even had the fighter craft be referred to as "Drop Fighters".
@@collins.4380 Exactly. I forgot to mention ODST.
And you don't need your teleporter breaking every other episode either.
Just wanna first say thank you for being one of the few sci-fi TH-cam channels out there to acknowledge that Legend of the Galactic Heroes exists. I know there isn't a ton of info on a lot of the technology vehicles, but I would love to see them covered, if possible. And second, it's funny to see those clips because the LotGH anime (both the original OVA and current remake, Die Neue These) are based off books written back in the 80s that were literally based on the early 20th century Europe wars, so spot on.
yeah, I'd love to see Spacedock cover LoGH.
I haven't watched much of Die Neue These, as I'm not a fan of the redesigns (characters AND ships), as well as the pacing (pacing for the show feels...off; the pace/speed of the battles also feel comically fast...but it is kinda cool to finally see a LOT more ships thanks to 3D CGI), so I hope that if it's not coverage based on the original series/OVA, then at least a mix of that and Die Neue These.
@@GottHammer only redesigns I like in the reboot are the imperial fighters walkures iirc and the imperial grenadier power armor(Looks like a more elegant version of ma.k power armor) and uniforms but thats about it. The retro style super detailed blocky ships of the original looks better IMO.
Yeah, I need to see more sci-fi channels covering this show. It's fairly notorious in anime circles but doesn't seem to have quite gotten the popularity it deserves in sci-fi circles, given it's (imo) one of the best sci-fi shows ever made.
Hey I don't care if WW2 in space is overdone, as lone as it's well-done!
That said, B5 and The Expanse are well-received. I'd love to see more Balance of Terror-style space combat, portrayed as tense, blind, claustrophobic submarine-warfare.
I never saw any difference between B5 and classic Star Wars
Reliant vs Enterprise fight on Wrath of Khan is very much like submarine warfare
@@kanaric 2 words: Newtonian physics. If Starfuries had been flying the Death Star trench run, Vader wouldn't have had such an easy time picking them off. Furies would swivel about and return fire, while coasting on forward momentum.
I really thought The Expanse showed how a more realistic take on space combat combat (it's not completely realistic, but it's closer than most) could also be very compelling to watch. Personally I hope as a result we'll see a lot more sci-fi shows that take a hard sci-fi stance to their combat.
it should be the absolute opposite, lol. You should know where absolutely everyone is at all times, and it's a dance of extreme range attacks and many, many, many types of countermeasures attempting to counteract different attack methods at various ranges. Thanks to heat being impossible to properly radiate invisibly, and the incredible cheapness of cameras, there should be almost no chance of going unseen unless your entire setting is based on a myriad of justifications that cause stealth to be viable.
World War 2 is obviously inspiration from Star Wars and such. But a lot of space combat doesn't actually base itself on WW2... it bases itself on being visible and watchable and easily understandable. People being at long ranges, just looking at monitors and pressing a button to launch a missile or choose when to turn on active sensors and stuff is confusing and often much less flashy and intense. At this point one side has complete tech advantage means they always win from detecting and engaging from longer ranges outside of very limited situations. That's not tense or nail biting and a series that has war almost always aims for some tense or nailbiting uncertain moments and stuff for the viewer. If it's visually stimulating and adrenaline pumping all the better.
As a result combat is simplified, and the scope brought down. Nothing way too long range normally, you need to see both parties in a single shot so you can tell where they are and what they are doing relative to each other. Next if it's just shields banging back and forth with weapons fire... all fights are pure numbers/bigger shoes kicking games. So manueverability is often mixed in, and helps pilots look tense or stuff as they zip around feeling the Gs. Also manuever warfare and shorter ranged direct fire weapons allows for something very important. Operator skill. You can have one pilot that's more skilled that can outmaunever and outshoot enemies. This lets you really feel for one pilot as being that elite or skilled or special protagonist person. Just look at Gundam series combat. It doesn't matter if the machine should easily predict basic movements and projectile flight paths at the level a modern tank or now even rifle scope can... if an unskilled person is in one they can't shoot for shit, while a skilled operator can nail all the shots. And yes if you have engines that can rocket a giant mech around that fast to dodge bullets, you can probably build guns or missiles that accelerate proportionally even faster or use lasers... that aren't somehow slower than light like they tend to be oddly in the show... But no... it's not realistic, it's about telling the story of the pilots rather than the equipment, or maybe both combined.
Now, you can have more realistic settings including longer range battles and tactics and equipment and actual operator skill requirements and effects on a battle... But these tend to be a LOT harder and more time consuming for a writer or world builder to figure out and then make. And the more detailed rules and tech you have... the harder it becomes to shoehorn in the given plot twists or events without one side having obviously had a method to counter or handle some situation that shows up. Overall it's a lot harder to write this way, it's also harder to make it still interesting to the viewer. This is why I love the expanse. It's a proper breath of fresh air, and while there are a number of those areas I can ask why they didn't do this or that or question other issues or point out problems in the distances involved or the odd inability of computers to target accurately at such short distances.... It's still a damn good show better than most and I can forgive it enough for still at least trying to be better than the others, and for that having succeeded in my opinion. I mean, that one fight at Spin Station is a great example. Why did neither sides PDCs have the ability to accurately aim at such large targets so close, let alone cut specific subsystems quickly when these things are able to intercept missiles and torpedoes, automated accuracy and the ability to track fast moving targets is easy for those things. There was no excuse for that battle going like it did... or nearly any other such close range battle honestly. Still, overall a great and enjoyable show much better than just more star wars with fighter sounds in space. Not to dis on some good star wars or battlestar either though... I do enjoy both of those media in their own ways and for their own reasons... or did... new Star Wars.... ya, no.
Star Wars combat scenes were ALL about WWII style fighter ACM. That's how Lucas storyboarded it.
@@BlokeOnAMotorbike bro lets watch expanse. I want to listen your critics
@@timanaky9473 I'm about due for a rewatch of that show soon anyway 😁
The Expanse oddly has "spray and pray" machine guns trying to "shoot down" missiles. Don't know why they don't just have smaller countermeasure missiles that can change course and intercept a ship-killer.
There's an old and unfinished comic called Erma Felna of the EDF, which has interesting space combat with automated "fighters". Ships have days or weeks to deploy their fighters like chess pieces, the actual battle lasts seconds when they finally clash. The actual battle is pretty much fully automated, too. It allows for operator skill in the setup, but survival in the fight is also down to pure maths.
@@worldcomicsreview354 I can see the logic in putting up a wall of lead that a missile has to fly through, essentially the same way CIWS systems on modern warships are intended to be used - counter-missile missiles are more for medium to long range interceptions.
Agreed but not for Star Wars. That is literally where the appeal comes from
and Space Battleship Yamato, which the main ship is the Yamato-class battleship in space and depending on the series/movie a modified Yamato-class battleship in space
I think the thing he's talking about is that many sci-fi tend to take after star wars rather than star wars alone using ww2 fighting methods.
Happy to see LoGH and Yamato getting air time! How about Banner of the Stars in a future video? They showcase a wide variety of vessels, each with their strengths and weaknesses, better than most space sci-fi anime.
love Legend of the Galactic Heroes, wish they would do a space dock on any of the ships or the space combat in general. the books were incredible, the OAV was great (if janky) and the new thesis is an amazing adaptation so far. the scale of the space combat is what I crave, and don't get anywhere else. when 6400 ships is considered an "undersized fleet" you know you're in for some cool space battles (Seventh Battle of Iserlohn).
Banner of the Stars had such cool and unique feeling space combat
I'd like a few more Vietnam In SPACE~ settings, honestly.
Rogue Trooper was the bomb as a kid. Disturbing as heck, but in a cool way.
You need to watch 'Space: Above and Beyond' if you haven't. Its a mix of WWII Pacific Theater as the story with a Vietnam like aesthetic of missile armed fighters and air mobile infantry against an enemy you never really see or understand (till the last few episodes anyways).
Avatar captured that vibe pretty well.
aliens maybe? I mean, the colonial marines are basically just futuristic USMC grunts from Vietnam.
The Expanse does an excellent job at portraying what space combat between ships would look like in the future, with a realistic grounding in actual physics.
I would agree and it looks absolutely awsome. At first I wondered why the enguagement range of the railgun was listed as being so short, but it got demonstrated why in season 6. Maximum range of a rail-gun is esentially infinate, but against a target that can dodge, and knows its comming, the effective range is much shorter than the maximum range, even shorter than targeting range unless you can catch the target by supprise.
Could see rail-guns being nice sniper weapons too with the right munition. But like snipers, only works so long as the targe tis unawares thier being shot at and so isn't looking.
@@Krahazik railgun-boosted self-guiding missiles is where i see space combat ultimately ending up. imagine a quarter-c Fox 3 shot with a missile that has delta-v capacity adequate for turning that line of engagement into a cone.
@@Krahazik, I could also see railguns being used in groups, one shoot at the target and others shoot around it.
It could increase the effective range, because the target would have to move more to avoid.
It could be done either with one ship with many guns or multiple ships in coordination.
@@ShuRugal No real point in guidance there. In such situation the system's outpot couldn't compare to the initial speed boost so it would be like dropping a bus from space and guiding it would mean changing the impact location by like 1 mm.
Guidance systems only work on bombs and the like irl because the drag is correlated to the speed so you can alter the trajectory. In space you could only do such a thing if you could act upon velocity itself.
In games it is frequent that instead of calculating forces we just change the velocity vector. IRL you can't do that so far but I imagine inertia dampening from more fantastic sci-fi could be like that? I mean anti-gravity and artifical-gravity might very well affect force/velocity directly so what if we had a way of getting an initial speed boost from said railgun and then instead of trying to further boost in other directions (and failing, I mean if you can do a comparable boost with a different system on the missile itself it means you should use that instead of the railgun as it is apparently much more efficient) we "simply" redirected the velocity... that would be one hell of a thing.
@@Kokuyous3ki "In such situation the system's outpot [sic] couldn't compare to the initial speed boost"
it doesn't need to for guidance to be effective.
Consider a projectile with an initial speed of 100km/s and no ability to maneuver.
The target you are shooting at is 10,000 km away, the missile will take 100 seconds to arrive.
The target is a 1km diameter sphere. to dodge your shot, it needs to move 500 meters (or less) in 100 seconds. It only needs to be capable of accelerating at one G to dodge your shot.
now, give the projectile a rocket motor give it enough fuel for 10 km/sec of delta-v and enough thrust for an average acceleration of 10 Gs. (this will result in about 100 seconds of burn time available as well)
the 1km target at 10,000 km range now needs to be capable of sustaining greater than 11-12 Gs to dodge the shot.
"Guidance" doesn't need to be able to make the missile fly a right-angle turn to be effective. even though the missile in this hypothetical can only alter its velocity by 10% of the initial velocity, that gives it more than enough to require that the target by vastly more capable to evade it.
A great examples of "fighter craft" that more resemble a torpedo boat is a light attack craft from Honor Harrington series. A 10 man vessel that fit the fighter/ torpedo boat role. Designed to trade with ships of the wall (think WW1 armored dreadnoughts) and coming out ahead not in units lost but on tonnage and personal lost. LACs did not even have a FTL drive and needed carriers to bring them into star systems for combat. Later they would even diversify into scouting, screening and ship killing roles.
Gundam had the Public Class that carried 2 torpedos each the size of the ship itself.
The other thing they were good at was being so small (and fast) that they were hard to detect before they engaged
This is also one of the roles the Rocinante was built for in The Expanse.
I really love the idea of small torpedo boat style ships fighting alongside big battleships. With neutonian physics you get a lot of the same challenges as in water, just even more impactful. Moving is hard and changing direction even more so. Turn off the engines on a starship it will just keep going. Turn it around, as painfully slow as its thrusters allow it, it will keep going. Having small, nimble ships, designed to intercept the larger ships and pummel them with effectively torpedos gives a really interesting setting
You should check out Space Above and Beyond. A wonderful forgotten gem that has fighters, the hammerheads that are exactly a mix like mentioned. With a turreted underslung cannon like a helicopter but also a payload of missiles. Also the APC they use is a great example of such a craft in space as well. Sad these ships and this show rarely get mentioned.
And they also had a double gun turret on the back with a theoretical 360° firing arc (although it was never shown).
The only problem would be that both the chin and dorsal turret needed seperate sticks to control, adding to the double horn flight control of the fighter.
Such an awesome show
A lot of people keep recommending this to me, maybe I should go watch it lol.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana it's definitely worth a look, however to temper your expectations it was early to mid 90s, so would now look a bit dated, and it only ran for 2 years, I don't recall it getting a proper ending.
I was bummed when it was cancelled. It was the forerunner for the BSG reboot in some ways.
I've been asking Stardock to do stuff on the Gunstar for so long, and now I have TWO videos praising it! Love it. Part of the issue with the WWII style combat is the relative close scale things took place in. It is hard to convey the sense of action in the longer range conflict that space would probably have, and the Expanse does this quite well.
My favorite reason to use fighters in a Sci-fi setting is the tech has advanced to the point where going old school is the best way. For example sensor can pick something from faraway but countermeasures to those sensors are good enough that you can't tell what you are looking at. So you have to get eyes on to see if your are dealing with destroy or a battle ship. So the small profile of fighter is perfect for that role.
So they have more of a scouting role than a dogfighting role then.
@@luclin92 Yes with occasional launching of anti ship missile
Space combat would evolve around a continuous technological struggle. At longer ranges, sensors would be able to detect incoming fire and correctly plot evasion courses or engage point-defence weapons to take it out. As happens in real life, so you try to get closer before firing to cut down on the response time; both human and computer. More powerful point-defence weapons would still be able to compensate so you would fire more missiles knowing some would get through, which again is the basis of many current missile weapons; throw enough at the enemy and one will do the job.
So you would be trying to develop better stealth craft that can close the range and hit before they're spotted, better point-defence weapons that can react fast against anything thrown at them and better missiles that travel too fast to be tracked and shot down; like the much discussed hypersonic missiles in the news these days.
Battleships became obsolete when a single torpedo from a submarine or aircraft could sink them. Obviously only naval vessels sink, something spacecraft don't have to worry about, the principle remains the same; a single cheap weapons platforms firing a highly destructive weapon that makes building big vessels a waste of resources.
Which was why they messed up big time with the hyperspace ramming in the Last Jedi and tried to talk it away in the next one. Why build moon and planet sized weapons to destroy planets when you can just fire projectiles at light-speed at them?
Which would then render all large vessels obsolete and have wars fought with strikecraft because anything larger would just be rammed at lightspeed. Bringing us back to the old school.
@@DomWeasel There's a bit more nuance into how and why battleships became obsolete. Just because it was possible for battleships to be sunk by torpedoes didn't mean they became obsolete. We've seen the same discussion with tanks multiple times with the advent of anti-tank missiles, with events in Ukraine only renewing those discussions. But just because a weapons platform is vulnerable doesn't mean it's automatically obsolete. So long as there's a doctrinal role for a tank or battleship, militaries would continue to use them even if they had vulnerabilities. There's still a doctrinal role for a tank, but what really put the nail in the coffin of the battleship was a lack of any role for them to fill. The US Navy reactivated the Iowa-class battleships during the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Gulf War because there was a shore bombardment role for them to fill but for much of the Cold War there wasn't really anything for them to do. Aircraft carriers are just as vulnerable as battleships to submarines (and have been "sunk" several times by submarines in war games) but they're still in use because they can project power much further inland than battleships.
Why send a fighter instead of a recon drone? If the fighter has to get close enough to see with eyes, then a drone can just use a telescope to get the same effect and transmit the results to friendly ships. If the opponent destroys the fighter you have lost a person, while if the enemy ship destroys the drone you don't really care. Since the drone only needs to go one-way and doesn't need life-support for the person, it can be smaller and cheaper.
Just wanted to say kudos for including footage from 'Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These'! One of my all-time favorite space opera series that uses three dimensional combat and subverts many cliche space combat tropes throughout the series.
And how are the aliens?
@@rommdan2716 😹😹😹
@@ozy_mode5072 I only see a Sci fi series for their aliens, humans are usually boring
@@rommdan2716 like irl theres no aliens in logh, which makes it a way more compelling conflict than just bad aliens vs good humans
@@rommdan2716 Oye compa acabo de ver tu canal y que recuerdos yo tambien veia los videos tha agumonlyoko me da mucha nostalgia jajaja. Te recomiendo mucho ver Legend of The Galactic Heroes si eres fan de las guerras espaciales, es larga pero vale mucho la pena y puedes encontrar un fansub facil.
Yes but World War 1 in space is depressing
We have Warhammer 40k
@@anthonyking5563 yes and the that depresses me... not so much because the setting is bleak, it's gone far down that road it's coming back from the other side, but because GW is trash
instead of fighter craft, ships launch a cavalry charge of horses in old school diver style spacesuits. And communications are light signals and spacesuited messenger pigeons strapped to a janky spluttering engines.
@@alexandercross9081 But I like the space trenches.
It would be interesting to see.
I’m personally writing a homebrew space rpg for my friends, and I’m hoping to keep ships at closer ranges by saying shields are prevalent and only bolts of plasma contained by magnetic fields will be able to penetrate both armor and shields, meaning ships would need to close to that range in order to impact one another. Also makes strike craft useful since they can expand the range from which attack is possible. I’m still working at the kinks but I’m happy with how it’s Coming along.
What's the game system you are using?
@@DaDitka 5e with a couple of twists and different classes
I think my favorite use of fighters in space combat remains Mass Effect, as they're not really used to kill anything, but instead serve to overwhelm mass effect barriers on capital ships and help to overheat their systems. Heat management is one of the core parts of ME combat, and I love seeing how fighters fit neatly into that idea.
Yep! In the codex they are literally just torpedo boats, which is great.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
For a Sci-Fi setting I'm mulling over in my head and slowly getting around to write, fighters will be used as mainly just point-defence turrets/expendable scouts. Basically, they'll be crewed by drones and used to cheaply expand your screen far further away, without putting crewed corvettes in danger.
I'll also have it that sensors aren't good enough to easily see everything in the system. Combined with abundant stealth equipment, and "going dark", there'll be a general Fleet in Being doctrine where capital ship fleets will be extremely hesitant to ever commit to a decisive engagement that they can't pull out of easily. They'll mostly just shadow each other, trade shots at extreme range that might kill off a few corvettes or frigates, and try to maneuver for favourable position to force the other fleet to fuck off.
The other variant of starfighters; bombers, will be used as long range stealth drones that carry really nasty payloads and will go dark, slowly moving across the system for weeks while being undetectable. The point of them is to maneuver your enemy into somewhere where the bombers will run across them without having to activate their engines. That way, they can sneak past most screens, and get really close before busting out enough ordnance to cripple the enemy fleet, and allow for an easy victory for the capital ships.
Space engineers taught me one thing… as good as having forward mounted turrets are in bringing a lot of firepower to bear, it’s a hell of a lot easier to use auto turrets so you can focus on dodging the incoming return fire. And at least one turret can always fire as opposed to turning a ship with forward guns and not firing when you aren’t orientated with the nose to target.
Always think it’s funny when space battles seem to take on a single plane with larger ships not seeming to take advantage of the fact they are in space with no limitations on where they can manoeuvre
The battle of Coruscant, as impressive as it is visually, would really need an above and below lol
In die neue these ship are deployed in 3D formations
It's LOGH remake and all in all it's quite realistic take assuming quite serious technologia developed
The thing I always enjoyed about the Homeworld games was having to react to attacks from above and below. And that like tanks, ships strongest armour was at the front so attacking from the top, bottom, flanks or rear was more damaging.
@@simon2493 LOGH nominally has 3D formations but the tactics are still very much 2D and not only that a lot of them are based on Napoleonic land warfare, with a lot of focus on encirclements and breakthroughs. Napoleon himself was a big inspiration both in character as well as tactics and strategy. The very first battle in series was modeled on the campaigns where he was able to march on enemy forces and defeat them in detail before they could assemble. As he'd say "I have defeated the Austrian army by simply marching".
Although it does pay lip service to matters like electronic warfare and the like, by and large it's mostly infantry formations and cavalry charges supported by artillery, but in space. Even the logistics are in some ways inspired by historic land warfare as the question of whether to loot "villages" to feed the soldiers comes up.
If Star Wars is WW2 in space with a dose of Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, LoGH is 19th century land warfare (Napoleonic Wars through the Crimean War) in space with a dose of Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And Death Star analogues just for good measure.
I always love it whenever pre-dreadnaught naval design gets mentioned in a video. There's just something so wonderful about a ship that carries that many guns.
Might be worth it on a fleet-killer dreadnought that's got a jump drive to close into the middle of an enemy fleet, and each gun is good enough to cripple a cruiser-equivalent. That way you can jump in, blast at everything in every direction and kill almost everything very quickly.
The trade off, is that Post-Dreadnoughts have a few massive guns that will utterly wreck your shit. You could see a combination of both being used, one to kill fleets, the other to kill Dreadnoughts.
@@aregulargamer1 the entire reason pre-dreadnaughts had so many guns was lack of accuracy and slow loading. Once you have accurate quick loading main guns there's no reason to have all those secondary and tertiary guns.
@@retrograde98xp7 Maybe. I'd say that assuming you can use jump drives to appear inside their formation, many guns allow you to fire at a massive number of ships simultaneously.
A bit rule of cool, but there's at least some logic to it.
“Alexa, play Thunder Child by Jeff Wayne”
Space fighters with human pilots only function if the enemy is also limited to the same constraints, as soon as drones are introduced the human and its multitude of limitations is at a crippling disadvantage.
One of the main issues I always see with settings that are all "WW2 but in space" is how people try to apply real life or modern technological solutions to the setting. "Why don't they just automate it all!?" Because that kills the point of the whole thing.
BSG did an excellent job at portraying this concept with Scar. Not only can your enemy resurrect, but they also learn and adapt from its previous incarnations.
By drone you mean autonomous AI? A drone still has an operator. Trying to maneuver dynamically in real time at distance is a hard thing to do unless your enemy is doing the same.
@@dclangst i think its a given that he means AI controlled ones.
This is precisely why space combat in the Expanse has no fighters going after ships and ultra long range torpedos are the main weapon.
It's not just space combat. People still think modern fighters dogfight within visible range.
I'd actually argue that the lack of hiding means and massive range would be a huge disadvantage for missiles in space. One of the challenges to missile interception on earth right now is the distance we can normally detect them and the speed they move at would only give ~2-3 seconds to intercept (modern ship to ship missiles). Where as in space as soon as a missile gets launched they defending ship could begin countermeasures. So depending on range the missile was launched at and velocity it is moving of the missile hard and soft defense measures should have plenty of time to deal with incoming ordinance.
I don't think missiles will be obsolete by this but would fall into more of a niche roll
I'd also argue that with the vastness of space, ships would need to maintain larger stockpiles of ordinance to last long periods of time without resupply (depending on setting logistics systems) so when you take into account both factors, starships will likely have very few missiles as the logistical costs and limited use would outweigh the benefits when compared to kinetic or energy based weapons.
That is kinda where stuff like stealth tech and such comes in. So missiles are more autonomous and can take stuff like movement into account while trying to avoid detection.
Now stuff like lasers and such might have a purpose, but it all depends on how far you can have the effective range be. Still if you know where someone will be, you could always just shoot a ton of bullets to that area and just rain hell on a target.
How could you do counter measures from thousands of kilometers away?
Realistically the location of a spaceship is very precisely known, since it has to have hot radiators to prevent the ship from melting (if it has a nuclear reactor). The ship can be spotted easily with a (IR) telescope.
The massive range would be an even bigger disadvantage for unguided weapons. One thing that science-fiction has been really bad at depicting is uncertainty and tolerances, two things that are really important in science and engineering. Sci-fi technology always has exact measurements and perfect tolerances which leaves audiences with a bit of an unrealistic expectation of how technology is supposed to work.
The longest range confirmed hit by a battleship gun was at less than 24km and the longest range straddle was at less than 33km. Even though calculating a firing solution may be simpler in space without factors like wind and air resistance to factor in, the greater distances involved means that you'd have to have a ridiculously tiny CEP to actually land a hit in a reasonable number of shots even if your firing solution was dead on.
so lasers then?
@@kedrednael interceptor missiles and evasive maneuvers (your ship will carry more fuel than the missiles)
Please do more coverage of Legend of the Galactic Heroes! I’m really interested to hear your take on the way the series handles it’s various space and planet based combat.
Legends of the Galactic Heroes - some of the most bug crap crazy/awesome fleet actions
Well here are a few things you might want to consider. First, fixed guns are lighter, more reliable than turreted guns since they don't have a rotating mount with lots of moving parts. That means you can have more or bigger guns for the same weight or have a lighter craft for the same firepower. If your craft is nimble enough, you don't need turreted guns, fixed or gimbaled guns are good enough, which reduces the overall maintenance time and the logistics required to field a fighter.
Next, guns have a significant advantage to missiles. Endurance. Generally speaking, you can engage more targets with a gun than with the equivalent weight in missiles. Ammunition for guns is also much cheaper than missiles are.
Lastly, let me introduce you to the Motor Torpedo Boats. No not the Torpedo Boats from the 1890s. The MTBs and E-boats of WW2. These craft would carry fixed torpedo tubes and a gun or two and duke it out in the channel on a daily basis. They were fast, nimble and heavily armed enough to be a threat for other small craft and even some small warships like destroyers.
I remember in Honour Harrington the nearest thing they have to fighters are Light attack craft, one hyperspace capable ships 1/5 the size of a destroyer which carry either a load of light missiles or one big energy weapon. They’re more like torpedo boats
The torpedo boat comparison is deliberate, according to Weber. And the long range fighter analogs are the completely automated multi-stage missiles they start using later on.
Agreed. And the introduction of the LAC carrier later on was to mimic the introduction of carrier warfare. One interesting thing about the evolution of LAC tactics in the HH universe, though: They end up primarily being anti-missile defense units, used to thicken the anti-missile screens of the main fleet in the face of the massive salvos fired later on in the series. The warfare in HH always reminded me more of age-of-sail combat, however. Then morphing later on into more modern missile combat.
@@michaelpfister1283 That's actually a pretty consistent thing in Weber's works, with the question of defense in large battle groups. See the gradual development of command/escort battleships in Starfire. In this case, the LACs also free up lighter ships to be of use elsewhere, instead of in walls with ships many times their size...
Hear me out on this one. In the English Civil War (seriously, hear me out) there were essentially three types of troops; Cavalry, pikemen and musketeers. Musketeers were great against pikemen because of the longer range of their guns than the pikes. Cavalry were great against musketeers because they could charge them down while the muskets were reloading. Pikemen were great against cavalry because nothing stops a horse moving forward like an 18 foot spike. So there was a real rock-paper-scissors feel to the tactics. I think it would be interesting to see something like that in space combat. Obviously not with infantry and cavalry, but long range, vulnerable ships (muskets) vs fast short range destroyers (cavalry) vs mid range, possibly EMP field popping, defensive craft (pikemen). And then on top of that there was artillery, which could be represented by some sort of fixed-point bombardment craft or installation.
It might not be "realistic" in terms of how space combat is LIKELY to happen, but it would be more interesting than the hammered out WW2 trope, and even to some extent subverts the "space is an ocean" trope.
Here is how I see your idea playing out. You have fast strike craft (heavy fighter/bomber or frigates or destroyers) [cavalry]. The pikemen equivalent is basically just the later WW2 cruisers that expanded the anti-aircraft radius of a battlegroup, so you have small-ish ships with lots of light weapons that fill the space with shots that will take down the strike craft but aren't as useful against larger ships. And the muskets are something like monitors/artillery. Large, kind of unwieldy ships using very long-range weapons that will just miss the faster ships but are a major threat to other capital ships and probably even the anti-strike craft ships, since those have to stay close to their larger companions, and are thus more vulnerable to long range fire.
The first two "Homeworld" games were roughly like this.
Fighters will needle capital ships to death, by being too fast for their main weapon systems to target (actual bombers are specialist fighters that make it faster), with the obvious exception of the flak frigate (which loses a duel to any other capital ship except an empty carrier). Corvettes shred fighters, because they have 3/4 the speed and 2-3X the armament, but are very vulnerable to capital ship weapons except the ion cannon. Capital ships (cruiser > destroyer > frigate) brawl with each other or besiege planets/motherships/space stations.
It's a rock-paper-scissors system that there are ways to break, sheer numbers being only the most obvious.
@@milamberarial Sins of a Solar Empire does this very well.
Strike craft are great against long range missile boats, but lose to flak gunships hard. flak ships are easily destroyed by missile ships, and there's your triangle.
The 80's anime Legend of the Galactic Heroes has it's battles set up like 18th century formation battles, but in 3D. Fleets have to try and flank or envelop each other. Of course, being all hand-drawn animation, you see most of these tactics on very simplified holographic projections, rather than as thousands of ships clashing.
This is how practically all RTS games have played out for the last 20-30 years, including the space ones... Strengths and weakness, rock paper scissors style specialisms. How is this in any way new?
We need late Cold War in space. Toss in some Tom Clancy-esque tech wank and some old dreadnought scaring the crap out of an enemy who _should_ be able to blow it up with their scary advanced torpedoes or whatever. Oh, and experimental stealth creaft.
Alien race that somehow never invented BVR weapons wondering why all their fighters and starships keep exploding when they get too close to human worlds...
Honor Harrington has all of this and more
expanse is like that (ive only watched the show). Earth and Mars have a cold war because open war just means mutually assured destruction. New super weapon (protomolecule) endangers everyone. terrorists get wmds etc etc
Reminds me of someone who ran a CMANO scenario of a Cold War surface-action group engagement involving an Iowa going up against a Kirov. Long story short, one of the Soviets was packing a nuclear missile that devastated the US group, but Iowa came tearing out of the mushroom cloud at close to 30 knots, all of the advanced radars and such more or less melted, but with her 16-inch guns and their fire control intact. The Soviets had run out of missiles, so it came down to a purely gun-based engagement, and though Iowa was very, VERY much on fire by the end of it, they couldn't do shit to her armored citadel or her main battery, and 16-inch HE absolutely obliterates anything that doesn't have actual armor.
I honestly like the idea that stealth actually IS impossible in space, and 'stealth' attacks require spy vs spy intrigue and hacking and infiltration of enemy data and detection systems and saboteurs and such ahead of time!
I'm so glad to see Legend of the Galactic Heroes footage included! Definitely among the best sci-fi anime, though I can't say I've seen the old one.
The original anime is worth a watch if you manage to find it. It is more story and character focused and ofc so far longer and more in-depth if I remember correctly. But man is it good.
@@aximili113 I haven't seen much of Die Neue These, but I liked the original's pacing (both for the overall pacing of the show, as well as for its battles) and designs way more.
Die Neue These supposedly expands more on the character stories, so maybe that's why it feels a bit...slower? But, again, I haven't seen much of it.
It is pretty cool to see so many individual ships moving on screen, tho'....I just wish they'd stuck w/ the original ship designs.
I too would definitely recommend watching the original, tho'. It's my favourite space opera. :)
(tied with Farscape :P )
Personally, I want more treasure planet style stuff. age of sail in space? yes please
Wouldnt necessarily be plainly for the aesthetics. The new age of discovery and a colony/privateer war in these huge, unhealthy for the crew, and complicated to maneuver ships absolutely works as a setting.
@@sanghelian *cough* www.thesojournaudiodrama.com/
@@Spacedock ...Hahahahaha
3:01, I disagree there is an "underwater" field that has been used even on one of the shows that you clipped, in space battleship Yamato. the Yamato came under attack by a submarine, however instead of a cloak like other SI-FI the submarine was literally in another dimension, the one the FTL travel happens, firing its torpedos, and the Yamato has to do ASW to defeat it. I think ww2 fighters can be used like that in SI-FI where "lighter" one-man ships fight each other in a "higher" dimensional plane than heavier warships that then attack lower-level ships by exiting the higher dimension.
I would argue that's an example of writing the submarine domain _back_ into space combat rather than it inherently being there. And while the "lower" dimension is useful for stealth, you'd need an entirely new explanation for why anyone would bother with the "higher dimension.
@@justinthompson6364 Speed. If your fighters can zip in and put of hyperspace dropping ordinance that's your reason.
@@eps200 I guess, but that feels like a pretty ungainly solution considering smaller craft will inevitably be more maneuverable in realspace too.
My usual excuse for star fighters is combat taking close enough to a planet that the planet itself acts as a horizon, meaning you want smaller, faster ships to sight for the missileboats and fire torpedoes. This DOES mean that gunstar/helo configurations are better at the job then small fighters...
i Really dont get all the hate for fighters and the lesson of WW2 was clearly the time of big battleships are over ,no Matter how many guns you put on a Battleship like the Bismarck its going to die and it will always cost you more than the enemy launching fighters. if you really want to make fighters useless you have to have insane accuracy and tracking and quick firing in addition to big guns and weapons because fighters will not come alone. for example Enterprise D Trekkies swear up and down how superior starfleet tech is and no fighters can Challenge them , except Galaxy classes get destroyed by century old bird of preys and jem hadar fighters.even the instances were the Enterprise D destroy very quickly 4 lone fighters it uses its main weapons, so when an enemy ship comes and launches fighters the Enterprise D has to choose between locking on swarms of fighters or focusing on the enemy ship. the only really successfull anti fighter weapon without risk of danger are interceptors. any other sci fi anti fighter weapon would take up space for other things and it would be worse than a dedicated warship
@@laisphinto6372 Babylon 5 made a good point about consequences of treating certain truths as dogma. Earth-Minbari War showed humans engaging Minbari cruisers with their fighter-carrying ships and getting absolutely slaughtered, because Minbari had bigger and longer range guns. There is no atmosphere to degrade the power of the shot, no wind or gravity curving it away from the target and a stream of accelerated subatomic particles reaches its target way before any fighter will.
One thing I really like is the Fighter/bombers in the "Blood on the Stars" novel series. The craft can be outfitted as fighters or bombers, with the fighters being a support role for just the bombers, not the larger capital ships. Additionally, the books try to be based more in real physics, and so the missiles are limited by fuel and have a detriment to maneuverability (because thrusters have to move more mass when the missiles are still attached) They do have lasers and they do 'dog fight' but at energy based weapons range and no X-wing vs tie fighter range. Though in some instances they get close. Anyway just a refreshing break the typical close quarters space battles like are pointed out in this video.
Everyone has a sci fi pet peeves. Mine is when in sci fi wars, the combatants’ ships have one main color but the laser color is the main color on the enemy ships while those enemy ships’ lasers are the same color as its opponents main ship color
That's the idea for a video: what energy weapon colours actually mean? Do blue colour bolts mean a plasma gun? Does green beam mean neutron ?
Eh we do that in real life with tracers and camo it's more for easy idetfcation then anything.
On the other end you get Star Trek races that with their purple or green flavored glowies and weapons.
Never seen that in anything. Care to explain/elaborate?
@@Halo_Legend Star Wars has that problem the CIS ships shoots red which is the republic color and the republic ships shoots blue which is the CIS color
I like how you put it, that space is like only having ocean surface style ships. It's almost too perfect to think of it that way. If you were able to stay in hyperspace with out moving too far it could be somewhat analogous to a submarine, of course it will heavily depend on how 'hyperspace' works.
Funny enough, Stargate not only got the "Cold War" era dogfights in with missiles and such, the Ancients' weapons of choice were drones and drones seem to be quite integral to modern combat.
Something I love about the 302 is its both space and atmosphere capable. Since the SGC relied on small strike teams, having a small fighter craft capable of ground support and air interception probably made huge sense to them.
Give the Star Wars prequels some credit, particularly the opening battle of Revenge of the Sith: one side is fielding mostly autonomous drones. And one type of drone launches missiles which then launch drones. It's hard to imagine any sci-fi LESS like World War 2 than that.
The drones are the most stupid thing to do though. If you have small unmanned crafts reaching point blank of the enemy ship, use drones that explode (aka missiles). Far more effective.
@@steemlenn8797 Sure, I'm not suggesting it's practical, not against small targets anyway, but at least it's original and not taken from the WW2 paradigm.
There are literal carrier ships that unleash swarms of small nimble fighters who defy newtonian physics by acting as if there is an atmosphere. They also all get into close range, passing eachother in straffing runs. They have fighters and bombers. Even the vulture drones act exactly the way manned aircraft did in WWII. I find it hard to imagine any sci-fi MORE like WWII
@@Ramschat And was I pointing to those elements of the battle? No. I drew attention to a novel element. That's what's under discussion in this subthread.
@@mattp1337 So we just ignore any and all evidence to the contrary here? Specifically, when you say "It's hard to imagine any sci-fi LESS like World War 2 than that."
I still think that bomber segment in Last Jedi should have been a midway style divebomb attack with Y-Wings.
was really scratching my head over that one. Seriously what resistance faction needs strategic bombing aircraft? It would be like VC buying a bunch of B52s or TU95s. They are utterly useless for the roll they would want them for.
My best guess at an in-universe explanation could be that they "acquired" or were given them from the New Republic, which was the major body in the galaxy at the time, and any Y-Wings they would have had were either in use elsewhere or stationed too far away. Leaving those bombers as their only option that could carry a large enough payload. But hey I'm just making excuses for the fun of it.
@@XepherTim Newer models of Y-Wing, didn't include ordinance, so couldn't be used as a bomber anyway.
I think there was some argument that the reactor was too armored and it needed a lot of ordinance to crack through it (a flaw in the movie was that they never really explained that to the audience). However, the Resistance Bombers could have still done a form of dive bombing anyways since its open space and they would carry a much larger payload than Y-Wings used, instead of "let's fly over and hope every ship and starfighter doesn't gun us down" sort of thing.
@@cmedtheuniverseofcmed8775 Yeah but you can just write the movie so they can penetrate the reactor.
I don't buy expanded universe explanations to cover shitty writing in these movies.
I actually made a "Gunstar", using the Aerotech rules of Battletech. I used the aerodyne dropship template and it worked out fairly well. Very balanced in play and my players enjoyed the interaction with an iconic spaceframe that they could visualize from the film.
In the Expanse, the Morgan class patrol destroyer has the size for it to be considered a fighter. Maybe Mars could build battlecarriers loaded with patrol destroyers or Corvette class frigates and send that out.
Wasn't the Donager loaded up with several Rocinante types? I think to be used in instances where they anticipate such engagements and not getting ambushed by unknown stealth attackers usually.
@@samronin1141 The Donnager class can hold up to six Corvette class or up to 12 patrol destroyers.
I believe in the book version of The Expanse, there is an even smaller Martian warship called the Asp that would be the closes to a fighter. Its like 23 meters in length which is 10 meters smaller then the Morgan class, armed with two PDC and two torpedo tubes and was highly nimble and maneuverable.
@@ionfreak83 Wonder when we will get an image of it TV series style? To me, the Expanse is a good thought experiment about how combat will take place in the void of space, where the concepts of direction is alien to the evolve perspective on a planet. How ships will fight and what systems support and defend them.
I wrote a coldwar in space. It's on drive thru fiction as "realm adrift". It's my first book so it's a bit rough. I focused more on the aftermath of my story's ww2, mistrust in the shadows, secrets and spies fighting over who's faction is better equipped for the coming proxy wars.
Have always agreed that the physics in space don't allow for small fighter craft. I would expect battles in space to be more akin to ships in the ages of sail where they lined up to release a broadside as they passed by, and then took a long time to turn around before they could make another pass.
Instead of turning around, space ships might just complete a full orbit around the planetary body they are close by. The video game Children of a Dead Earth depicts this very accurately.
I kinda liked the idea of it being a little like a submarine fight, where both are moving around and the first one to reveal they proper position and heading would mean they will get hit.
@@_furydance8890 Making a planetary orbit would be a good way to come around without having to burn fuel but such a maneuver would make your position far easier to predict.
Regarding there being no "below water" in space, one could in theory use subspace or hyperspace (or even a parallel universe) as an analogy for "below water" in a sci-fi setting. Cloaking works too, but being cloaked doesn't make you immune to indirect fire, whereas if the ship is in another dimension, you can't really attack it unless you're able to enter that other dimension. Though if you had missiles that could dimension-hop, or you had interdimensional windows in front of your guns, that'd allow you to attack an "otherspace" craft without "submerging" or "resurfacing".
Starblazers/ Space Battleship Yamato has something that does exactly that in one episode the Yamato gets harassed by what is essentially a subspace/hyperspace submarine.
That was an interesting point. I had thought the "below Water" parts of space would be inside giant gas clouds and nebulas as we see in ST The Wrath of Khan. In fact an episode of BSG 2003 also has this cloud of "something" that must be flown through to reach somewhere else. The point nbeing that the crafts sensors were blinded to a fair degree while in this cloud and that would be the same as being underwater.
@@kellysmith1144 this use of nebulae as stealth opportunities is a common trope, and I even wrote it into a tabletop game I'm designing so I shouldn't complain, but nebulae are another thing where sci-fi canon has really confused our expectations.
Most nebulae are typically large, regional features, tens to thousands of light years across. You don't just happen upon them, or discover that there is one "within" a solar system.
Nebulae are also incredibly diffuse. The densest nebulae are less dense than the most rarefied vacuum that can be produced in a lab on Earth. The only reason they look opaque is because (see above) their thickness is measured in light years. So the reduced visibility within a typical nebula would mean you could "only" see things within a light year or two.
Space simply does not produce clouds of stuff thick enough to conceal a ship from another ship within weapons range, unless those clouds are within a gravity well, in which case it's just a planetary atmosphere, and you're limited to ships that can operate in a gravity well.
I think the closest comparison I can think of is occasional weaponisation of the Warp in 40K, but it isn't the best comparison as most uses involve dragging ships into the Warp and not much else. Unless I'm mistaken you aren't having Chaos ships firing at targets in Realspace from the Warp or vice versa. Perhaps someone should.
@@TheSpearkan Speaking of the Warp, IIRC the Eldar have what are basically "submarine infantry".
Warp Spiders are outfitted with a Jump Generator that basically sends them into the Warp for a short jaunt. Granted, they don't attack from inside the Warp, but they do pop out into realspace to shred you with their Death Spinners, and can just as easily hop back into the Warp when things get hairy.
Other idea: Take "Fighter" more literally, put boxing gloves on the wings
I can get behind that.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Well, I’d argue that Star Trek uses cloaking devices in a similar way to the way submarines dive to escape/sneak up on an enemy, so there is at least a second element analogous to naval warfare. And B5 uses hyperspace as a realm ships can hide in as well.
I agree; the Star Trek original series episode "Balance of Terror", (s1ep14) was clearly a submarine-versus-destroyer story. The Star Trek cast and writers had experienced WWII a little over 20 years before, so that cat-and-mouse naval battle type story was not unfamiliar.
Honorverse uses hyperspace like that too. Tho they can't use radio for coms, gotta use a messenger boat to jump up into hyper to let a force in wait know when to drop down.
It's nice to see more space battleship Yamato (star blazers) being put out there if even in fast image sequences or cool shots of the opening battle. All around this is a good series and i would like to see some sort of aircraft carrier video that showcases how poorly designed and nonsensical some sci fi carriers are or how some good ones ended up coming out (bsg).
It is soo WW2 it is doesn't apply to the video :)
A great deconstruction of this trope is in the Dark Forest, where the human fleet is completely obliterated when it prepares to fight in a traditional naval like battle.
The other issue with WWII fighter tropes is how close WWII fighters had to get to use guns. In space there is no where to hide. Missiles will be the key because if the guided capabilities and lack of squishy meat sacks. The closest analogy I can think of to what actual space combat will be closer to submarine warfare. Lots of stealth and see who can shoot first. As for fighters, they will all have to have turrets because the distances will be far to great for precision flying to do anything but waste ammo. It may be more pretty but WWII fighting doesn’t even work in air combat anymore. It will never work in space.
I agree, except with the stealth part. As Isaac Arthur often explains, there is no stealth in space.
I suspect it will mostly consist of long-range skirmishes with missiles and beam weapons and sometimes siege battles against fortified asteroid bunkers.
There is *no* stealth in space. And guns will pretty much always be relevant because they will always be cheaper than missiles. Obviously, missiles are great, but we still have tanks, don't we?
@@afriendofafriend5766 Tanks work because they are on Earth. The horizon, atmosphere and terrain break line of sight and make close quarters weapons effective, thus vehicles can get close to eachother and use guns. In space, there's no terrain to hide behind, and conventional bullets travel too slow to be useful - unless you use railgun slugs which travel at relativistic velocities, the enemy can dodge your shots very easily at space-distances. missiles made to work in space should usually have much bigger range than guns, and guidance systems can make it really hard to dodge one.
"In space there is no where to hide"
"Lots of stealth"
Pick one.
thats a star wars imperial mindset and they paid badly for it.
fighters additional for capital ships is great since you force the enemy zo pick their targets and shelling a big target is way easier than multiple small targets not to mention that they usually dont have anti fighter guns
Love any reference to Stargate, especially once such as this! A Great and pretty unique show with some issues with CG consistency but good attention to making humanity follow naturally, hence the jet fighter influence.
When people talk about how Newtonian movement in three dimensions on a large scale renders the modern idea of fighter/bombers ineffective, they often miss an important factor: Newtonian movement in three dimensions on a large scale. "Capital" ships are big, and, because space causes people to scale things up by a factor of 10,000 for some reason, space capital ships are _really_ big. All that mass makes accelerating very slow and expensive, and a larger frame means you're putting a more stress on your structure during maneuvers. And, at the ranges you would expect to encounter enemies in space, their weapons are going to be of questionable effectiveness. At the distances seen in some settings, even lasers could take 5-50 seconds to reach the target point, and precision targeting is pretty much out of the question. This could easily result in theoretically powerful ship that's never in a position to do anything.
A more fighter-like craft, on the other hand, would be able to maneuver a lot more efficiently, and would actually have some control over how it deployed its weapons. A lighter craft that could follow a target, move into effective weapons range, attack, and then relocate before counterfire reached their position would seem a much better focus for tactical engagements. I think, in the end, people spend a lot of time focusing on distance and momentum, but neglect how important a factor _time_ is to the effectiveness of a tactic or weapon system. To me, a long range railgun volley from a battleship would be far more useful for restricting enemy movement and shielding other craft than actually trying to deal damage to anything.
So, I would expect a "realistic" space battle to, at least on a overview level, resemble Classic Galactica or even the old New Republic, with captial ships controlling an area and providing support for smaller, more flexible craft. ...so, basically, a lot of the same considerations that real-world navies deal with.
Also, about guns being included in attack craft design being "regressive" .... no. Dogfighting gets declared dead every few years, and it's yet to stick. Missiles are and will continue to be an attack craft's primary weapon, but guns are more responsive on defense and have longer combat lifetimes.
Guns returned to fighter aircraft for a few reasons:
Theyre more reliable than (early) missiles
They are cheaper to use against surface targets
Carrying a gun doesn't add too much mass to a craft.
That said, even in vietnam dogfighting f4's didnt score many air to air gun kills. Pilots just opted to fire two missiles instead of one.
Especially in space combat, a short range missile akin to an SRAAM is going to be more effective than guns, since far off boresight locking exists and any missile is going to be more maneuverable than a spacecraft with a squishy human inside.
Yeah there’s an interesting argument to be made that when it comes down to it space combat is actually one dimensional. With distances and no stealth any actual maneuvers you make other than closer and further away are irrelevant.
Also I think that if the F4 had a gun to begin with the F22 and maybe the F35 would not have had a gun.
There is a problem with fighter like craft though, and its simply size.
Consider the distances involved, and the distances these craft will have to traverse. Even at very high speeds the time scales are going to be long. That means Fighters are going to need almost as much endurance as large craft. But how do you GET that endurance? Square cube law is a bitch. You simply do not have the volume you require for everything you need.
Think about it. Assuming you have a single pilot, but that pilot is going to be in the cockpit for say 24 hours. That means you need life support for 24 hours. Then you need to carry the fuel for those engines. You need to power your electrical systems otherwise you are never even going to find your target let alone shoot it. And the list goes on. Then to top all that off you still need to find the room to carry your weapon load, plus any countermeasures that you may need.
A one man fighter in Space would need to be a pretty damned substantial craft because of all those things. Which means it is not that much more difficult to hit than a dreadnaught. Especially if you are assuming the use of very high velocity weapons like rail or gauss guns firing projectiles at significant percentages of Light Speed, or perhaps energy type weaponry that IS light speed.
As for dogfighting being declared dead, take a look at all the air to air kills since the first Gulf War. Show me how many are gun kills. Here is a hint, NONE of them. They are all missile kills and almost ALL of them are BVR.
"All that mass makes accelerating very slow and expensive, and a larger frame means you're putting a more stress on your structure during maneuvers."
This is not automatically true. The only reason we intuitively think this is true is because of how air combat typically works on earth: space combat is not air combat. Bigger ships have more mass to move, sure, but they also can have bigger thrusters, bigger fuel tanks and stronger structures. Indeed, given armour penetration is about thickness this tends to favour larger craft: smaller surface area to armour relative to total volume inside.
It is true that larger craft tend to be able to produce less acceleration, thruster power is proportional to surface area. However, on the flip side any kind of realistic space combat tends to not end up being about maximum thrust as much as it is about delta-v: how much propellant you have available to make those manoeuvres. Once again the cube rule favours larger craft: they can carry proportionally more propellant. In short the relationship between size and manoeuvrability is complex and non-obvious.
@@Mike5Brown until obstacles are considered
The Honor Harrington novels have a very good example of what you are talking about. The Light Attack Craft (LAC) is a small, non-FTL capable ship primarily used in the system defense roll. They are missile heavy ships, but do have powerfull beam weapon "guns", and have 7-10 crewmembers. There are LAC carriers in-universe and in those situations the LACs augment the anti-missile point defense of their capital ship brethren and rundown crippled and hulked enemy ships. They are often referred to in the books as "eggs armed with sledge hammers".
I wonder if a WWI inspired Space fighter could work?
Fighter planes were not only brand new experimental vehicles but also unreachable to everyone not using another fighter plane due to lack of anti aircraft weapons, which could translate well into space combat.
Of course that would mean that you couldn't have large capital ships but rather just small fighters fighting eachother.
*due (not "do") to lack of antiaircraft weapons.
Well, there’s always the space-zeppelin then: a giant, unmaneuverable ship that’s less dangerous to the fighters as to its intended bombing target but which is difficult for fighters to defeat from sheer mass.
Either way, I like the analogy of First World War fighters, fragile, unreliable craft nearly as dangerous to its own pilot as to the opponent and reliant on unexpected maneuvers for defence.
@@Vespuchian That could work!
I also like how back then Fighter pilots were often called the last "gallantly soldiers" because they could only fight eachother one on one without the heavy material or technological tricks employed in the trenches leading to them to have almost knightly status across the board and an almost sportsman like relationship with their enemies.
Which would work great for a Space opera aswell.
@@shinyagumon7015 then make the fighters into 4 armed mechs and all of a sudden we have Gundam.
IMO, this is the most Realistic (tm) space combat scenario for the foreseeable future. Heavy industry is _heavy,_ which means it is going to be a long time before anyone has the industrial depth (mines, steel mills, factories for components and chips) to build a heavily-armored space battleship. Until then, "capital ships" will be something akin to the International Space Station, but with high-performance engines (VASIMR, nuclear-thermal, etc.) and a rotating section for crew. These ships will be too expensive and fragile to just throw into combat. Currently, it takes the resources of a superpower nation or very wealthy person or corporation (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Lockheed) to build even one space construct of that size.
What's needed is something small that can be built (mostly) with the resources of a space outpost (local raw materials plus 3D printers, with still-expensive components like computers, reactors, and weapons being shipped up from Earth). These craft are still expensive, so there won't be huge fleets of them, but they're cheap enough to use in combat. With a pilot/AI team or small crew, these are the space fighters/gunships.
Tactics: capital ships carry a few gunships most of the way to combat, then launch them and keep their distance. The gunship forces engage one another. When one side prevails, it is in the interest of the losing capital ship to light its engines and try to escape. The victors may seek to recover their gunships and pursue (providing they have an advantage in Delta-V that would let them catch up), or capture any surviving defeated gunships and their crews.
Apart from a fanatical do-or-die attitude, it would make sense for defeated gunships to drop their weapon pods, extend their heat radiators, and surrender. For the price of some reaction mass, the victors can score some new gunships. Trained fighter pilots are also very, very expensive, so it is in the interests of both sides to capture and exchange P.O.W.'s, or try to poach enemy pilots with hefty recruiting bonuses. Thus, you get the kind of "chivalrous combat in fragile, dangerous craft" we saw in World War I. In an extended conflict, pilots on opposite sides might even get to know each other, have forbidden romances, etc..
Since the most valuable and rare thing in outer space is human-habitable volume, it makes sense to capture capital ships and space outposts intact or nearly-intact whenever possible. Weapons designed to do less damage can also be lighter, so they don't eat up so much of a capital ship's range and/or cargo capacity, and they're cheaper to ship out to space outposts than heavy weapons. So, a Realistic (tm) space war could be almost chess-like, with gunships and drones as the more expendable pieces, capital ships as queens, and outposts as the king. There might even be boarding parties with swords and maces (because spraying machine-gun fire in a tin-can space hab would likely destroy what you're trying to capture), kung fu fighting in low-g or weightless environments.
Saw the Gunstar in the thumbnail and immediately knew what my plans are for the next couple of hours: watching this video, and then re-watching The Last Starfighter!
You keep making Gunstar videos and I'll keep watching.
Love that shot of the Enterprise D blowing away fighters with ease
nice but unfortunaly more fighters will overwhelm such a vessel because it uses its main weapons so it can be distracted long enough for either anti ship hits from the fighters or the enemy capital ship chilling and blasting the Enterprise D to hell without any danger of returning fighters. thats why in the dominion jem hadar beat the crap out of galaxy classes and d'deridex classes because they have absolutely zero anti fighter weapons that arent their main guns ,its similar how in the battle of yavin 4 the turbolaser perform yea they get a couple fighters down but they need interceptors for true protection. the reason why star trek fighters are terrible till the maquis and then the dominion became the fighters were quite primitive. t
its like the Galactic Empire who swear on their big meaty thick star destroyers until the x wings arrived and absolutely cleaned house
@@laisphinto6372 well yes and no with an array type of emitter the directed weapons beam/bolts can be scaled to fire multiple bolts at once to a multiple targets If the Enterprise EM weapons can fire 18 gigthings of pew pew form each array and the fighters can only take 2 Gigthings of pew pew to destroy, its main pew pew weapons much more often, you would need a saturation attack to get through to attack range, In WW2 The Wisconsin shot down Kate Medium bomber Kamikaze with its main guns, it can happen and did.
The main resion would be the power and number of sensors and Computers the Enterprise carries tied to the fire control system and how many targets it can track and fire on.
The X wings had a lot of plot armor.
@@Delgen1951 Agree with your general idea, there is one issue, the Federation does not use "EM" weapons, Phasers are particle weapons
@@laisphinto6372 Star wars is a different setting that pays be different rules, what works for star wars does not work for other settings. Besides the main reason fighters work so well in star wars is because they have an ungodly amount of plot armor on their side and imperial ships have inexplicably bad fire control systems.
Those same rules dont apply to trek, Trek plays a different game. First off, Jem hadar bugships arent fighters, they are well over 20,000 tons, and have a crew size of 42, they are small warships. Second, the main reason they where so successful early on was their phased polaron weapons bypassed the shields of Alpha quadrant powers which gave them an overwhelming advantage. once the AQ powers adapted their shields, Jem hadar bugships became far less successful and far more cannon foddery. Phasers are multipurpose weapons, due to their array like configuration their operation is not like conventional guns. Phaser arrays can easily split their fire into dozens of pinpoint accurate beams simultaneously to attack numerous targets at once.
Its also worth noting that both the galaxy and D'Deridex are hilariously undergunned for their size. The Galaxy is primarily an explorer, not a warship. its worth noting that the Sovereign class is less than half the tonnage of a Galaxy yet easily possesses more than double the fighting power, so the Galaxy class is undergunned by at least a factor of four, but more like a factor of five to eight. Meaning that if you tore out all the exploration equipment and added additional weapons shield generators and the power plant to supply them, the Galaxy can easily become at least five times as powerful, if not more. The D'Deridex is even more inefficient than the galaxy as a fighting ship, likely because of less efficient weapons placement, and its almost certainly built as a planetary occupation ship, leading it to carry a lot of ground troops and supporting equipment to occupy conquered planets.
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 i really dont buy the criticsm of plot armor in star wars then star trek has the same thing it just not the fighters but the cruisers. and despite techno babble the showcased accuracy and range of phasers is really flunky , we dismiss stated star wars ranges and accuracy from scource books but in star trek they are insanely accurate in one time and other types they cannot hit a 100 meter long ship. this is what i really dont like applying critic points on one thing but not keeping the same energy on the other side. also despite the supposed inferiority of fighters the maquis are quite successfull against not only cardassian but also starfleet vessels which is that star Trek fighters arent useless they are just underdeveloped and primitive before the maquis and funally the dominion war makes them more and more advanced
I've always liked Gundam's depiction of space combat involving mobile suits instead of fighter craft (most of the time). It kind of makes sense in the setting, since humanity lives in giant O'Neill Cylinder style space stations. Having a mech that can operate in the emptiness of space as a starfighter/gunship equivalent and then transfer to the gravity environment of a space station or the moon and serve as heavy armor equivalent is incredibly versatile. Not to mention the psychological effect against ground forces inside space colonies where you want to end the fighting ASAP before the space colony is too heavily damaged.
In the setting Mobile Suits also dominate land based combat on Earth, though I think that is mostly due to Minovsky particles (magic space particles).
forget it and have a greenie you love em don't you yes you do🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Tomino was ahead of his time, he even depicted the death of large spaceship combat and depicted the conversion from gunships to carriers that carried mobile suits primarily, mobile suits can also carry any weapon which made them the most versatile weapon systems, and they are modular.
A mecha is any military wet dreams right now, because of this, imagine a light tank, that can walk on any terrain, carry any heavy weapon, yeah, if you were a general right now, you be having a toilet break just by the thought of it.
Actually, from what I've read, while mobile suits dominated in space combat when they were first introduced as the Minovsky jamming severely hampered the Federations use of fighters and battleships, the same can't be said when those same mobile suits made landfall.
While Zeon claimed many early victories, the Earth Federations tanks and fighters proved to be far tougher opponents when under gravity as the mobile suits became much slower and more lumbering, losing one of their key advantages. Not helping matters was that there already were doctrines for line of sight combat on Earth. This mixed with the fact that even common troops could take down mobile suits armed with just wire guided anti-MS missiles, and all of a sudden they became far less formidable foes.
And when you thrown in how how overextended the Zeon troops were thanks to their early victories and the constant Zeon infighting, things just went south for Zeon. While things such as the Gelgoog and Dom tried to even the playing field, it was too little too late.
I believe it wasn't until the Gryphs conflict that mobile suits started catching up to tanks and fighters in terrestrial combat. All those transformable mobile suits you see around that time was an attempt to try and improve mobile suit speed and handling while in the atmosphere as all attempts to fly before this had just been to brute-force it.
However, fighters and tanks remained a major part of the Earth machinery all the way until around the Laplace incident. The gamechanger was the use of the miniaturized Minovsky Craft System which finally allowed mobile suits to deal with their main disadvantage on Earth. After that point, fighters and tanks pretty much all but disappear.
@@matteste NERD!!!!!!!!
LOGH Die Neue These actually has semirealistic starfighter you can most easily see this in Valkyrie starfighters witch engines witch can rotate 360 because in space it's only way to turn and spartanins can rotate main hull around this central bulb, with this wings like structure having smaller engines Spartaninas can move 360 as well.
On the note of no other planes of combat in space, aside from the option of planetary or other bodies possessing installments that can attack targets in space and just like that, spacecraft bombing planes surface being the easiest but still very rare thing to add, there is one more I've really liked:
In Kiddy Grade anime, the clone versions of the protagonists return to help to win the day all with their own ships. One of them is using a weird type of stealth/protection, shifting phase of existence basically. Looks like they sink into the waves below, pretty amazing stuff. I imagine the Nekrons would have a few things to say about this.
Ep23, around 17:40 or so btw.
I would actually like too see your take on Space Mecha which is often a Japanese Trope. It does kinda make even less sense than space fighters but it is different and it can be fun too see large robots have melee fights in Zero G. Would like too see more Videos about Japanese Sc-Fi
I have a massive blindspot towards anime! Pretty much all of the cool anime footage you see in our videos is courtesy of our editor, Charles.
I do think Japanese mecha is, to some extent, more acceptable at times because it doesn't take itself quite so seriously. Or maybe it does and I just don't know enough about them to realise that lol.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
There are two schools of that, at least in my mind. The Gundam school, where the dci/tech of the setting encourages such stuff, or the Macross school, where the mech part is part of a combined use (mobile turret, boarding actions, etc).
@@templarw20
Good breakdown of mecha space battles.
Oh I just bonk that down to its stupid but fun. Like who does not love giant robots during it out. Been watching the old gundam movies and it was a little interesting that most of the mechs is often supported in a multi role unit, with the mechs being more the high tech vehicle being supported by tanks, planes, and spaceships when in combat. Since what the mech brings to a fight is versatility, since if it runs out of ammo it can if needed go into melee, but that is not preferably usually
The purpose of the orginal mechs in Gundam was for a single craft to be able to fight in space, inside and on a space colony and to work on a planets surface.
They also had to deal with a made up Minovsky particle that messed up sensors so visual sight was needed for combat
There is the small craft role that can be filled with slots like the ships boats and landing craft becoming shuttles, and gunboats and torpedo boats becoming strikecraft, patrol craft and picket vessels. They go where bigger ships cannot go and perform the task too costly for the big ships to do like scouting out hazardous zones and clearing mines.
I think that as of right now, the Expanse and Honor Harrington have probably the best take on what Space Combat "may" look like in the future and no, single seat craft do not exist in either universe.
In the Exapnse, the smallest combatant is either the Corvette, like the Rocinante or the Frigate, but nothing smaller than that. The reason being, they cannot carry the necessary thruster capacity for the kind of high-G maneuvering that would be necessary and also cannot carry enough ECM and ECCM to even attempt to get past sensors, while the Corvette and Frigate do.
Also, space is a terrible place to get stuck in, without a craft of some sort, as your Space Suit is for emergencies and short durations.
Honor Harrington goes into even greater detail, and the concept they arrive at is a small, light-corvette analogue, with a small crew of 3, armed with the absolute essentials and meant for only 2 roles, covert stealth heavy hit and run or as point-defense, but never as direct attack like modern fighters.
Honor Harrington's point-defense capability means that anything that can be reasonably targeted will be shot with anti-ship heavy grasers. Anything that cannot project a screen at least cruiser level will be automatically annihilated by said anti-ship heavy grasers.
Thus the LAC is one of the most capable stealth ships in the setting and when needed can project dreadnought level screens. But it relies primarily on stealth to avoid PD fire, while the screens are to attempt some survivability, but realistically they are meant to be expendable.
On the flip side, they carry a single Dreadnought level Graser and up to 16 cruiser level missiles, giving them a way over-powered punch, while being relatively expendable.
They where the first attempt in centuries to try and create something similar to WW2 era carriers, but at the same time couldn't be more different if they tried.
While Warhammer 40k is usually far from realistic, their smallest attack craft, Fury Interceptor, is between 40-70 metres in length (depending on source or in-universe pattern), which makes them about the same size as Expanse's Corvette class (or bigger). They have 4-man crew, and are armed with a mix of anti-ship missiles and lasers, both turreted and fixed. It's designed to defend against torpedoes and other attack crafts.
One of the things I think Honor Harrington does well. It has LACs (light attack craft) which are analogous to both shore patrol/torpedo boats and (eventually) carrier-based aircraft (LACs can't enter FTL on their own, so without a carrier or other large hyper-capable ship to tow them, they're basically limited to system defense). Of course, Honor Harrington's space combat starts out as kind of a mashup of Napoleonic-era naval combat and submarine warfare.
To be honest:
Manned fighters in space, fighting in visual range, is absurdly unrealistic.
Try drones, rockets and subrockets. Slug-shots, producing a multi km² debrit field of mm particle flying 10.000s m/s.
Firing hours before 'meeting' eachother
...
The Enders Game movie had a good version of the drone fighter, they would launch hundreads of drones that could speed up and slow down on a whim in complex formations that no human pilot could ever hope to perform. ^^
Dude that would be boring af tho not everything has to be grounded and realistic especially if it’s fiction
The Expanse does this magnificently, even the multi-hour shot as you described in one of the most tense and coolest scenes in modern sci-fi.
The Gundam universe solved the distance thing with some mumbo jumbo about jamming long distance scanning, so you had to get close range (ie: visual range) in order to destroy your enemy. Kinda works.
1) information/electronic warfare. If you can hack the other guys drones, or just prevent new instruction from being uploaded during the mission, drones are great[ly] reduced in effectiveness, if not nullified.
2) Rocket/Missiles, this includes "subrockets" (not sure what that means), are basically dumb drones and are just as or more vulnerable to countermeasures and Electronic warfare.
3) Firing Slugs from beyond visual range is a BAD idea unless you can reach better than 0.5C. and this would still be at relatively short ranges, a few light seconds at best.
4) Beyond Visual Range combat, in space this would be any distance under about one light second, is likely the only real way to fight in space unless you are actively assailing a planet, or stationary infrastructure, a station or built out asteroid, with effective countermeasures and defenders such that drones, missiles, and the like are not very likely to make the target. If the target can see the incoming projectile, they at least have a chance to defend against it.
5) Manned fighters retain being the best choice [for] active combat missions, where direct decision making and action is still required.
6) Finally, this is fiction so you need to greatly consider what the audience, readers, game players, will find compelling.
The Star Carrier books have fighters that utilize a mix of AI-guided nuclear-tipped missiles, railguns, and particle beam projections. They can also accelerate to near-c in 10 minutes thanks to their gravitic acceleration. They can use it to launch an opening missile volley at relativistic speeds, provided the enemy ships are in predictable orbits
Personally I want more WW2 in space, but that's because it's a very flexible template. But it's all about execution.
Every domain needs numerous types of craft. You will always need fast attack, medium attack, and heavy attack. Whether the attack vector is unmanned, drone, aircraft, ships, missiles, or bullets. It has zero to do with “looks”, or size. Only engineered capabilities needed to employ military strategies. To date, there’s no one vehicle in land/sea/air that can do all the tactical tasks needed. The same military strategies will need to be employed in space, to achieve victories.
Even when we - unfortunately - militarize space, you’re going to need the same types of armament, and craft. Regardless of vector. Even if it’s all drones - you’re going to need various types in the same 3 categories.
I think this also might be done this often as it was the last really big really world changing conflict so influential we‘re still not really over it and work Ober it again and again in movies and Series and even abstractly in other genres like Sci-fi
Additionaly Star Trek and Star Wars (and Mandy others of course) really left an imprint in sci fi (star trek more in a submarineish way and star wars very obviously took big inspiration from all aspects of ww2) like lord of the rings did in fantasy so much of the stuff that came after it orients on them or its an hommage or certain patterns. Sometimes better like battlestar galactica sometimes worse like galactica 1980 xD but yeah some fresh ideas could be nice but I also kinda like the tropes.
Okay okay, hear me out, World War I in space.
I think that what makes the Expanse so refreshing to is that their aren't any fighters and it's a more modern take on ship to ship combat if it was taken place in space.
A quick sidenote. Fighters in general should always have some type of cannon. The last time I know of a fighter that didn't have any was the American F4 phantom; when it ran out of missiles it was an absolute sitting duck and can easy get shot down by vietnamese fighters during a dogfight.
I am unaware of any cases of the phantom being shot down by cannon fire, let alone that it was common. Regardless, even if it was common that was 50 years ago, in the modern age fighters engage by firing all of their missiles at extreme range then turning around and running away as fast as possible.
A situation where a modern fighter might enter cannon range is essentially inconceivable, and extraordinarily unlikely to ever occur
@UCVq-jaFc5IorgXjh5QUMFiA they have cannons because fighters have always had cannons so they always will, regardless of the fact that they are worse then useless, especially on a craft which relies on stealth like the f-35
@@jackwalters5506 I found the article that the air force put out describing why the F35 and it's variants need a machine gun.
"That comes from lessons learned in Vietnam when the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II was initially designed without an internal cannon. The thinking at the time was that longer-range air-to-air missiles such as the AIM-7 Sparrow would make close-in aerial dogfights a thing of the past.
However, when U.S. aviators came up against MiG-19 and MiG-21 they found they wished they had some guns for the close-in fighting, and later models of the Phantom II were armed accordingly."
@@soontir_fel1816 I'm aware of that reasoning, it's stupid. Vietnam was 20 years removed from WW2, we are 50 years removed from Vietnam. Since Vietnam missiles have become far more reliable, far more accurate, and far longer ranged. With modern technology the expectation is that in a standard engagement neither side will ever even see each other except on radar/IR.
@@jackwalters5506 even so, it's better for you to have one than not to.
I totally understand what you mean though.
Honestly, pike and shot warfare in space would probably be dope
A warfare entirely designed on using small cavalry charges meanwhile you have shoulders slowly encroaching on your musketeers who fire devastating shots but take long time to reload
Like imagine a stupid amount of mini ships armed with torpedoes and one shot lasers charging down a large musketeer like ship
I refer to the typical WWII-style space combat is "lucasian" because George Lucas' depiction of it in Star Wars is what cemented it in the audiences' perception.
It's eminently filmable because it's so "romantic" - a plucky hero or a band of plucky heroes in tiny ships taking on either swarms of bad guys or Goliaph-like enemy dreadnoughts, all at point blank range.
And it also makes it easy to create a very "busy" picture of the space battle - capital ships move slowly and belch fire at each other to little effect while plucky heroes in fighters zip around and win the day but hitting just the right spot at just the right time.
Torpedo boats became the very thing they swore to destroy.
TBD→DD escort→DD leader→literally just a slightly light cruiser with the express purpose of sinking larger ships.
Real space combat probably won’t be like anything we’ve see. I imagine that using projectile weapons in space would likely be considered a war crime as eventually, given enough time, they will hit something. Most likely all space combat will be far beyond visual range using turret lasers and missiles. There will probably be either small fighters or drones though as it’s cheaper to loose those than a capital ship. For example: an enemy vessel takes cover in the rings of Saturn (which have “particles” the size of mountains IRL). The attacking ship would like take an overwatch position safely away and deploy drones to locate and terminate the enemy ship.
There is one other possibility: some sort of advanced EMP/stealth tech that renders tracking and most computers unusable. Then you would have to fight basically Dune style.
Seeing those old black-and-white photos of pre-dreadnought warships made me yearn for a Drachinifel x Stardock collab...
Honestly I'm more of a fan how Gundam (and similar mecha series) handle it.
Almost going the opposite direction and having your space 'fighter' craft being large humanoid things with the associated versatility
Now yes, Gundam does have fighter craft and small space craft, but the fighter craft were mostly seen in the air, and the Mobile Ball doesn't behave like a plane in space at all
I feel like one of the better uses of a fighter sized craft would be as a torpedo boat that uses speed and surprise to zoom into a position, fire off a torp at a ship engaged in a shooting match with another capital vessel, and then zip off again before it can be targeted. Basically reduce the fighter craft to a piloted launch tube that will hit the enemy ship from odd angles.
Do we really need a follow-up video just to say "no, really, I'm right"?
You have a decent subject matter here, and science fiction shedding the WWII dogfighting paradigm would certainly be a good thing, but working in your Gunstar arguments doesn't support that, it just muddies the waters.
not really the whole fighters useless stick sounds like a lesson from a snobbish imperial officer ten minutes away getting wrecked by said fighters. there is a reason why big boy battleships dont exist anymore
@@laisphinto6372 I imagine the scifi community discussing "realistic" space combat like the scifi of the early 20th century. It was stimulating and entertaining but, as time showed, no more accurate to reality than napoleonic tactics applied to WWII. I have no doubt that many of the creators and fans are brilliant and much more interested in the underlying science than I am. But I feel it's worth remembering that clever predictions of unrealized possibilities based on present understanding of science is no less fantastical than the romantic art that many of them decry.
@@MalfosRanger yeah like the Bismarck had one of the most advanced anti air guns but gotten beaten by WW1 fighters
@@laisphinto6372 How dare you call the swordfish a ww1 aircraft or a fighter, it is neither of those things.
@@scottpaech7141 it was an old ass aircraft at that time that crippled the bug shiny super star trek technobabble ship of the time
Love your videos!!!- and very fair in respects to “too much emphasis on WWII style combat” and the talk about gunships/defiant/naval warfare domains!
When speaking of single and two seat fighters… (sorry if it has been mentioned) have y’all ever thought about Hammerheads from Space Above and Beyond??? Freakin LOVED those fighters in a Marine tactical sense!
Will admit I am bias and freakin will forever LOVE B5’s Starfury’s…and in that world/technological age I do think they do make a huge impact with destroyers/carriers and as space based defense.
Anyways, thanks again for such a great channel and intriguing topics and concepts. Keep it up, Cheers!
I've always viewed fighters as existing in Space Combat, but for in atmosphere strikes, where a larger space fairing vessel would be unable to travel.
A ship would dip into the upper atmosphere, spit out a small number of fighters to precision strike enemy installations planetside, and then hit afterburner to be picked up again by their parent vessels.
Bombardment from space would be both destructive and inaccurate, so in any limited conflict this would allow space fairing militaries to attack each other's facilities more effectively.
Good to see footage about LoGH/Gineiden. This series deserves some highlights from Space dock tbh.
Have any of you guys read the Lost Fleet series? Very different take on space combat combat that definitely feels more realistic.
The politics and characters are often quite dodgy, but the battles are exceptional, yes.
I do love the kind of Beyond Visual Range combat of The Expanse and I wish we had a more accessible and popular game that resembled it. Something between Children of Dead Earth and Into The Black.
Children of a Dead Earth convinced me space fighters will happen. In that game, a fleet can approach an enemy fleet either with a prograde or retrograde orbit. The retrograde orbit is an incredibly high speed pass with only minutes to fire missiles and seconds to fire weapons, the danger is extremely high as it can be very difficult to evade or counter enemy weapons. It is more or less a suicide run. The prograde "chase" style of orbit allows the combatants to control their engagement distance much better, and affords several volleys of missiles before closing to laser or railgun range. Evasive maneuvers are easier but so is missile guidance. What you end up with is volleys of missiles and counter-missiles trying to hit each other and the enemy fleet. In other words you have missiles fighting other missiles in a relatively low speed pass. More intelligent missiles, perhaps with short range weapons of their own, would be more effective in a fleet defense role and more effective in punching through enemy point defences. Sounds an awful lot like a space fighter to me. Now give both sides these small independtly armed "smart missiles" aka fighters and what do you have? Now you have a dogfight.
Keep in mind that the CoaDE space fighters, notably, *aren't manned*, they're simple cheap robo-fighters, which makes it even MORE realistic! And there are also things like missile busses and similar which work perfectly well!
You know what I wish to see? More space movies that resemble modern dogfighting. High Bore-Sight Dogfight Missiles, super maneuverability and one / two circle fights. (Do this with a bunch of maneuver thrusters, it'll look super cool). BVR is probably more realistic but I don't think audiences will appreciate the main character shooting missiles into nothingness and staring at a radar screen for 2 minutes.
While i agree that "when making something for yourself, think outside the box" is a great point, movies are not done for oneself.
They are supposed to be watched, and understood, but as many people as possible to regain the invested money in their creation.
And given that even today planes fly and even fight like in WWII (just look at what the US is looking for as a cheaper alternative for the A-10), having WWII as the basis is tremendously helpful.
Yet i agree i would like to see more new ideas on how space combat could be done. I for my part like the idea of drones controlled like fighters by humans in their carrier with quantum entanglement communication that allows for perfect control even lightyears away if necessary. Just imagine the carrier hiding in an asteroid field while the drones attack.
I think there are other narrative reasons to use one-seated fighter types as well; for example, one pilot means that you can focus on one hero and make their actions more impactful.
Yeah world war 2 on space is overrated, we need more Napoleonic era wars on space like Legend of the Galactic Heroes anime, with fleets upon fleets firing on each other in a line battle where the officers, admirals, battle positions, tactics and strategy matters more than gun armaments and technology.
With the modern day use of drones, I would love to see human controlled drones used more in space fights. Without the need for a cockpit you could make radically different designs. If the battlefield is too large you would have issues of lag, but for near ship combat, they would be perfect.
Just one more reason space battles in The Expanse are superior to all other mainstream franchises. Big and small fast ships with skilled crews, electronic countermeasures and exceptionally deadly weapons. The only way to survive is not to get hit even once.
We see ships take dozens if not hundreds of hits.
@@timothymiller4475 By PDWs and sometimes railguns yeah. But not the nuclear torpedoes that are the main ship killer weapons. Refer back to when Stupid Sexy Inaros only survived the battle with the Roci because Holden deactivated the nuke before it hit.
@@lucycarr6065
Okay. I'm stealing "Stupid Sexy Inaros." It's so spot on. LOL