Another example are the fighter starship of William H. Keith's Star Carrier series. At a rough guess, you'll need 9,700 m/s delta V to boost the patrol ship into orbit (7,900 m/s orbital velocity plus gravity and aerodynamic drag losses). Â. However, there is an easy way to find your position within the vastness of outer space so allow me to After all, unless we can take out the adversary's reconnaissance satellites, the entire US Navy surface fleet will be readily visible and therefore extremely vulnerable to attack by enemy ICBMs, submarines, and other means. The Blood Angels are one of the 20 First Founding Legions of the Space Marines and were originally the IX th Legion before the Second Founding broke the Legiones Astartes up into separate Chapters of 1000 Space Marines.. Attack Vector: Tactical is probably akin to saying that jet fighters behave like World War I biplanes, only faster. On a typical mission it was expected the total mass (glider+transtage) orbited would be 12,700 kg, leaving the transtage with 5700 kg of propellants, enough for a single maneuver of over 2 km/sec.  Velocities achievable are likely to be limited to less than 100 km/s.  A manned inspection pod is likely to be somewhere above 10 tons, which is quite large for a typical lancer payload. In the US and UK, attack aircraft were generally based on light bombers, sometimes carrying heavier forward-firing weapons.  Beams, which include both EM and particle beams, travel at close to the speed of light, but fall off with distance. The This is an important... View Article More modern lightweight fighters have competitive air-to-air capability (supersonic aircraft with afterburning engines and modern missile armament). Unresolved: Release in which this issue/RFE will be addressed. The State seems to have died out, replaced by two genetically engineered factions called the Boys and the Girls.). This article points out that that’s not how things would play out if ever there were a real space battle.  Second, how does the fighter in question actually kill its target? A maritime patrol aircraft (MPA), also known as a patrol aircraft, maritime reconnaissance aircraft, or by the older American term patrol bomber, is a fixed-wing aircraft designed to operate for long durations over water in maritime patrol roles — in particular anti-submarine warfare (ASW), anti-ship warfare (AShW), and search and rescue (SAR). Officially cancelled in 1962, it apparently is still undergoing some top-secret development as late as 2018. Has sci-fi affected the way that our navies conduct warfare? The larger telescope is fed by the laser from the mothership, the smaller transmits the laser to fry the hapless target. Because they'd be easier than fluids to recover in space after battle damage to the fuel tanks. For one thing, we think a real battle cruiser will In phase two they switched to the use of the Atlas-Centaur booster, instead of an Atlas-Agena B booster. The United States is not about to engage in nuclear war to defend any foreign country. Note that the control surfaces are on the upper edge of the wing, not the lower. An instant after the warheads were launched she was executing another random vector variation and dropping salvos of micro-decoys, seeking to evade a possible counter-attack from the enemy interceptors. In most languages a fighter aircraft is known as a hunter, or hunting aircraft (avion de chasse, Jagdflugzeuge, avión de caza etc.). So when people were looking for ways to think about, there was a tendency to use models they already understood. Large crews hold costs beyond the obvious. After this the Agena would be used as fuel to put the SAINT in a co-orbit with its target, and then the SAINT would locate the target using its long range radar, and jettison its Agena once it had acquired the target. The Redding DARPA spaceplane is almost a technological reality today. Strategic Air Command Colonel James "Jimmy" Stewart had appeared in a movie called Bell Book and Candle where the Greenwich Village Witch (played by Kim Novak) had a feline familiar named Pye Wacket. If information moves at the speed of light, and one side has a tactically useful FTL [faster-than-light] drive to make very small jumps, then there is no reason why the Cylons couldn’t jump close enough and go, "Oh, there the Colonials are three light minutes away, I can see where they are, but they won’t see me for three minutes?" A tragedy of misunderstood physics.  Patrol missions are where parasites are likely to come into their own. 3 x Bright Shadow EC-780 information furnace data systems orbit. A six thousand kilogram interceptor had plenty of room.  For those occasions when repairs are necessary aboard a drone, a crew from the tender can transfer over and conduct them.  The added vulnerability of the fighter returning to orbit is another significant problem. The only situation where this would be a generally viable tactic is if, for some reason, the missile cannot use a drive that is within the same ISP range as the lancer’s, probably for cost reasons. The jump tender transports itself and all of its child battle riders into a hostile solar system.  However, this consensus is continually challenged, and the purpose of this section is to collect most of the rebuttals to those objections. Fighters are capable of carrying a variety of weapons, including machine guns, cannons, rockets, guided missiles, and bombs. The Redding space cruiser is delightfully simple and brings out the machismo in hot fighter pilots. Each missile carried multiple stand-off warheads, anti-ship and anti-interceptor, giving it substantial tactical flexibility.  A single overseer would be effective at stopping hacking, but he also has the power to take control of the drone on a whim. The Wild Weasel concept was developed by the United States Air Force in 1965, after the introduction of Soviet SAM missiles and their downing of U.S. strike aircraft over the skies of North Vietnam. with laser boost, we could do it every hour on the In space battles, you’re talking about tremendous velocities, where maneuvers would slam the pilots with huge g forces. The entrepreneurial space launch revolution offers the free world the chance to obtain these critical advantages. 0.4m diameter, with a mass of 500kg, the inertia is about 600 kg-m^2. It's anybody's guess how the mother ship will be laid out, so let's make a guess for the critics to lambaste. The fighters can neutralize any anti-Ithacus weapons, and provide air cover for the Ithacus during and after landing, until slower conventional fighters can arrive. the fighter and the ship have to pivot (like the B5 starfuries), to radians/s^2, and a torque of about 10,000 N-m. I think there is a synergistic effect. artillery spotting), border patrol and fishery protection. It looks cool, and the split-second reversal of advantage is suitably dramatic. automated, while their Level 3 functions are performed by operators in Basically a mobile fighter base, containing launch and recovery facilities and all the logistics needed for fighter resupply. big assumption, because we will need humongous Reconnaissance aircraft are primarily used to gather intelligence. Main article: Electronic-warfare aircraft. The United States needs a new national security policy. Fighters do make sense in an orbital reference frame context, where, well, curvature of the earth matters, and where going into atmosphere matters. and interceptors. It was added to the curriculum in the mid-1970s because the Vietnam War was too close, so they couldn’t talk about it, except by going back to 400 BC. New threats, new countermeasures However, there’s a pretty big snag, in that the effects are not linear, but quadratic.  The amount required depends on the duration, ranging from somewhere around a ton per man for a few hours, to an estimated five tons per man for a long-term mission. In No Man’s Sky you can essentially become a space pirate and we’re going to tell you how to make Units (money) by stealing from freighters. Fidelity also needs to be increased, which will come in the form of even more realistic aerodynamic and sensor models. Remember, they’re described as operating within the point-defense envelope, which is to say, inside its inner boundary, which is defined by the minimum effective range of the PD – set by a variety of factors, such as the range at which firing the PD will seriously damage your own ship, but of which probably the most important is the ability of the PD to track the target and slew to fire on it. Phase two was to create a satellite capable of making multiple inspections, with a vertical range up to 7,400 kilometers (4,600 mi) high. No Man's Sky. He’s been swarmed. During the research for that article, I gathered a great many proposals and memos generated by NASA, Congress and the main programme contractors, McDonnell who built the Gemini capsule and Martin (later Martin Marietta) who built the Gemini Launch Vehicle (GLV) – the Titan II. But I really get the impression that sci-fi doesn’t really understand this stuff. Nothing like the nightmare of replacing Space Shuttle tiles. (This is not to say that damage control crews never fix anything. commercial air transportation network we have today. Unfortunately, there's no horizon for targets to hide behind in space. efficient transport—necessitating the least power plant redundancy in The cargo ship has heavy weaponry, but is slow and cumbersome. Scott also says he'd be delighted if anybody has further information on this concept, and I'd like to see it as well. It should have suitable aerodynamic characteristics—primarily a high ratio between lift and drag—so that it can maneuver in the upper atmosphere of the Earth by means of aerodynamic controls, primarily stubby delta wings. Missiles make sense. reflectivity. In one of the documents I obtained, there was a curious addition on the final page. This can still take a few hours repeating the same space battle but at least my time hunting has been greatly reduced. When you’re zooming through space in No Man’s Sky, sometimes you’ll hear what sounds like a clap of thunder.That’s a freighter warping in. One of my all-time favorite TV shows is Star Trek, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation. Because of advances in aircraft design and engineering — especially in powerplants and aerodynamics — the size of payloads carried by heavy bombers have increased at rates greater than increases in the size of their airframes. The Monocle Fighter is a beam rider energized by a mothership, much like a Hegemony Interceptor. The report examines a number of options, from extended missions using the existing Gemini capsule and GLV (deemed unattractive due to small potential gains and possible delays and schedule disruption to NASA’s Gemini flights), through the use of a modified single-seat Gemini on the existing GLV (seen as a questionable option due to development costs and limited payloads) and onto more advanced vehicles utilising the Titan IIIC launch vehicle. The system is used offensively to direct fighters to their target locations, and defensively in order to counterattacks by enemy forces, both air and ground.  All in all, it appears that either a probe or an arm system would be the most effective. However, those designed with an emphasis on aerial combat are usually regarded as air superiority fighters and usually deployed solely in that role, even though they are theoretically capable of ground attack.  Many of these proposals for “fighters” suffer problems which render them marginally effective or ineffective, and those that don’t are the ones that bear the least resemblance to the visions of Hollywood. Knock out the enemy's reconnaissance satellites, and they are effectively blind. When an airplane turns, it banks. Submarines operate in the water. After the 1950s intercontinental ballistic missiles and ballistic missile submarines began to supersede heavy bombers in the strategic nuclear role. With high-powered lasers capable of doing damage at one light second, how do AKVs survive the 300,000km journey into single kilometer range? In military tactics, close air support (CAS) is defined as air action such as air strikes by fixed or rotary-winged aircraft against hostile targets that are in close proximity to friendly forces and which requires detailed integration of each air mission with fire and movement of these forces and attacks with missiles, aircraft cannons, machine guns, and even directed-energy weapons such as lasers. aboard a small craft. In United States Navy vocabulary, the alternative designation for the same activity is a strike mission.  These are not terribly common during battle, but occur more frequently on patrol missions. is beamed (downlinked) to Mobile Field Generator (MFG) shuttlecraft either a) direct from mammoth interplanetary The idea is that the interstellar propulsion, if present in every single warship, will consume an unwelcome portion of the ship's mass budget. From the vague hints I've found it was apparently intended to deliver repair crews to expensive satellites for fixing malfunctions and maintenance. Hydrazine + Nitrogen Tetroxide is storable, and hypergolic (you don't need an igniter). In this "open cockpit" space vehicle, the pilot "owns space" around him. Beyond high orbit of a moon, for example, the speed of light lag is too great for combat. Â. Some of the most expensive fighters such as the US Grumman F-14 Tomcat, McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and Russian Sukhoi Su-27 were employed as all-weather interceptors as well as air superiority fighter aircraft, while commonly developing air-to-ground roles late in their careers. Available remaining propulsion would depend on the mission initial orbit and glider mass. Both toxic and it dissolves pretty much every single material a spacecraft is built out of.  At the same time, the reduction in the total number of people in harm’s way, and centralization of said people in a few ships, could reduce the human cost of war significantly. At a distance he could pass for a gentlemen. Enemy targets in the front line ("Forward Edge of the Battle Area" in US terminology) are often close to friendly forces and therefore friendly forces are at risk of friendly fire through proximity during air attack. An ASAT, as generally conceived, only performs the first. She ran a hand along the cluster of recessed launch tubes for her sensor drones. Her closing vector towards the enemy ship was up to almost 680 kilometers per second now, and the enemy interceptors were doing about 370 kps reciprocal. onboard expert-system AI. The battlecruiser carries a combat wing of monocle fighters. A bomber is a combat aircraft designed to attack ground and naval targets by dropping air-to-ground weaponry (such as bombs), firing torpedoes and bullets or deploying air-launched cruise missiles. At a rough guess, Rick figures that if the ship is capsule shaped it will be about 12 meters high by 14 meters in diameter. (Presuming that space yachts tactical value is unclear, since the are really just small spacecraft themselves.  It is possible that multiple sizes would be used, but that reduces the logistical advantages. Along with the emergence of more accurate precision-guided munitions ("smart bombs") and nuclear-armed missiles, which could be carried and delivered by smaller aircraft, these technological advancements eclipsed the heavy bomber's once-central role in strategic warfare by the late 20th century. But Star Wars wrecked the popular perception of how space fighters would move in space for a long time. “So far, however, the technology to project volleys of low-cost, reusable systems over great distances and retrieve them in mid-air has remained out of reach.”. Curiously, I discovered after all of this poking around that famed astronaut and astronaut-wrangler Deke Slayton may have quietly let the Astronaut-SAINT-cat out of the bag in his 1994 autobiography when he opined that the Air Force may have developed the AMU because, “they thought they might have the chance to inspect somebody else’s satellites.”. After the Kennedy Administration entered power in 1961, many defence programmes were reevaluated by the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. The first stage burned each (3.6 gigawatts total). Naval analyst Christopher Weuve talks to Foreign Policy about what Battlestar Galactica gets right about space warfare. probably ply the void with nuclear power plants. The technical term is "spaceplane". According to the current U.S. designation system, an attack aircraft (A) is designed primarily for air-to-surface (Attack: Aircraft designed to find, attack, and destroy land or sea targets) missions (also known as "attack missions"), while a fighter category F incorporates not only aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat, but additionally multipurpose aircraft designed also for ground-attack missions. On the other hand, other classes of problems are best solved with intelligence and creativity. Henry Cobb on SFConsim-l came up with the term lancer for this tactic and the ships used to execute it.  While they might cost more than a fighter’s payload, they are expendable and do not face the design constraints of having to return to orbit.  While this may sound like a reversion to normal manning, there are several important distinctions. That's the scale I want out of a space battle. Figuring that if he didn’t know, maybe nobody would, I was prepared to accept this as one of those concepts that occasionally surfaces with no obvious provenance, but soon after another member, Brian Matney, responded with a document apparently relating to MOL which included our mystery vehicle. Additionally, it needs to be able to very carefully and precisely control minidrones to repair and maintain a spacecraft. 🖤 Dark grey / sand needle nose fighter ship with Tie-wings. Many fighters also possess a degree of ground attack capability, allowing them to perform surface attack and close air support missions. He can be found on the SciFi Meshes forum under the handle Mikey-B. It’s a little difficult to translate to a four minute video. No Man's Sky close Games videogame_asset My games When logged in, you can choose up to 12 games that will be displayed as favourites in this menu. Therefore, for the defense to be effective, the ability to rapidly launch replacements must also be an essential part of the system architecture. The trope also applies to more dramatic depictions where the character's vehicle seems to literally "brake" in mid-air without fancy maneuvering. After the war, medium bombers were replaced in world air forces by more advanced and capable aircraft. One of these was to have the satellite carry out a kamikaze attack on the target, while another was to coat it with black paint, blocking its ability to see or transmit, rendering it inoperable. However, SAINT is clearly described as a satellite (i.e., robotic) research and development program. First off, it creates a ship type called a System Defense Boat. A typical mission is shown in Figure IV.F-1. A radiation detector was to be installed to determine if a satellite was carrying either a nuclear weapon or something whose power source involved a radioactive substance.