Another thing, since there is no horizon in space, hiding would actually be easier. An attack can come from any direction and sensors would have to cover a MUCH wider area, so it would be easier to sneak in.

Space combat would very demoralising and stressful, maybe in more so in a fighter. Knowing that a lethal vacuum is at outside and knowing that if your ship is destroyed, you might die very far from home would be scary. it would be like being on a submarine but far worse. Likelihood of rescue would be remote.

I did NOT say they will detect things with their eyes. Covering a ship in cameras is stupid. I said that sensors all around a ship or defense platform would work but there is a  much wider area to search so things CAN get past.

I did NOT say they will detect things with their eyes. Covering a ship in cameras is stupid. I said that sensors all around a ship or defense platform would work but there is a  much wider area to search so things CAN get past.

Space is far from empty. chuaked full of metors the size of peas to ones as big as moons. Small Stirke carft would very hard to indentify expect it's pattern of movement and do you think so one would watching to seem if some of the astoirds the are acting correctly it the middle of a battle. and yes there would be a battle going on fighters problay won't be able to jump through hyperspace on there own nor would they need to active they attack an agrossor if they are defending a system

 

Yes, there is a great destructive potential to be had, that no known material can withstand. But there is also a great deal more dead weight to soak it all up. Unlike military weapons on our planet, weight allowances are FAR FAR more lenient in space.

No one said that you had to guard your ship with fully hardened armor with the latest in defense. You can just as easily stop weapons like lasers and missiles with a big chunk of spinning space rock. If you can lug around a mightly war ship then you can sure as hell lug around a massive piece of sacrificial space junk. Put a few weapons on it, and it simply can't be ignored. Heck, point it at a planet while you're at it. It's now a siege weapon to boot.

Sorry but this just sounded absurd to me. Take your word for it? If you have worked with nuclear weapons as you claim then you would know that if the combined nuclear arsenal of US and Russia would be used the nuclear fallout from using those arsenals would contaminate every part of Earths food chain so that nothing would survive, not even bacteria.

It is not the just destructive power of nuclear weapons that are a threat to mankind but rather the mentioned nuclear contamination which would slowly destroy all life and contaminate Earth for centuries. But again, if you worked intimately with nuclear weapons you would know that right?

When you design a game, you want it to be FUN, ENTERTAINING and DEEP. I said what I believe interstellar combat will be about: propelling things at speeds near the speed of light towards enemy planets, obliterating them (if Einstein was right, and every experiment done proved that he indeed was, a 10-kilogram rock hitting a planet at 95% lightspeed would evaporate a large city). If anything else, the combat would be about launching high-speed one megaton tactical warheads from millions of kilometers away at anything the enemy might have been preparing for a fight.

In the past, people had to face and cut each other personally to win a fight.
Since late XIXth Century, people can kill one another without really knowing they're there (howitzers), from kilometers away.
Since 1940s, those ranges increased to 50 kilometers (dreadnaughts battleships had cannons of up to 410mm caliber(!) which could send a one-ton shell over up to 50 kilometers).
Today, an American leutenant can fly a 6,25 meter long BGM-109 Tomahawk missile through an open (or closed) window in your house up to 2,500 kilometers away. Moreover, aircraft combat changed from WWI/II dogfights to blasting enemy fighters from 100 kilometers away with a single fire-and-forget AIM-120 AMRAAM.

But nobody would want to play a game like that, would he?
And so space RTS games are made to be fun, not to try and prophet the future of space warfare.

 

Oh and as to the above poster's assumption, that a single torpedo wouldn't sink a battleship... that assumption is based on the fact that modern torpedos haven't really been used in larger scales over the past 30+ years. Today, a single torpedo impact could throw the biggest American aircraft carrier 5 meters up and blow it in half EASILY. And I'm not even talking about what those pesky gadgets like ASROC, SUBROCK or Tactical nuke warheaded tomahawks would do to such a carrier. All these things exist, work and could evaporate a carrier, not just sink it. They simply aren't kept in action due to lack of demand.

To accurately assess the utility of of smaller craft in space combat, you have to understand their value in modern combat. Modern aircraft carriers permit naval forces to project power at a distance from their own operational range, at far greater speed than the carrier itself can operate. That's because the amount of firepower you can pack on a single F-14 or F-18 is enough to sink a fleet of ships.

So, the question goes, why not simply fire the missiles and rockets from the ship itself, and use the greater displacement of warship to protect itself from return fire. Well, congratulations, you've walked back in time in naval history to the battleship era, when huge guns were mounted on highly armored craft and they would engage in titanic artillery slugfests, like the battle of Jutland.

In real warfare, the destructive power of weapons far exceeds our current technology to withstand that destruction. Put another way, the only defense is not being there. With aircraft, you can send smaller, faster, more agile and expendable units into the fray, without exposing your gigantic slow moving target to the enemy's counterbattery.

As others have pointed out in this thread, while in a zero-gravity environment, objects do not have weight, they still have mass, which means that larger vessels have more momentum to overcome, and thus must be much harder to maneuver in combat. While a small attack craft can be composed of little other than engines, weapons and control systems, a larger ship will have to devote considerable tonnage to berths, galleys, storage and long range propulsion. It's not difficult to imagine the utility of a ship whose sole purpose is to be flown into combat, whose long-term deployment is contingent on a carrier or tender.

People "developed" fighters/bombers because a huge battleship was unable to project its power accurately and effectively over more than a few dozen kilometers, while a bomber could bring doom a lot further away and more accurately. But understand, if you please, that this happened when the only weapon was a dumb BOMB - either dropped from an aircraft or fired of a warship's cannon. All in all, an old bomb and an arty shell is the same: it's a dumb "boom box" that will go poof when it hits something.
So, back in those days, when a cannon could not project a shell accurately over miles and miles of land, a bomber could go there and drop it. Also, the ship could not see its target, because Earth is a] a globe and b] it has a variety of crap on its surface, while space is mostly empty - as soon as the light reflected from a ship near SyriusB star reaches Earth, our telescopes WILL notice it if they glance there.
There is a new era right now - we have MISSILES. This is no longer a "throw it there" or "go and drop it there" choice to make, right now a missile can "go by itself and drop itself right where you want".

Also, if someone invented an inertialless drive (kek lol), then fighters would NOT be more effective - anti fighter missiles would in fact become sure-shots (they would be undodgeable) and anti-fighter laser turrets could turn without fear of breaking apart, meaning an even more accurate fire and quicker reactions.

As for the radiation, go back to school for a few classes in Physics. Radiation in space IS killer. We do not feel it on Earth or on the orbit because Earth is surrounded in a thingy called Magnetosphere, which is shielding us from most of the Sun's radiation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoshpere
Without it, anything on the sunny side of Earth would be toast in seconds.
However, yes, shields. You are talking about shields as if they were something as standard as microwave ovens. Well, for you information, such shields do not exists and nobody has any idea how one could project a well shaped cocoon of energy to stop lasers and crap. We could project a powerful magnetic field like Earth projects its, this can be done (just place a big damn electromagnet on the ship), but then the whole ship would have to be made of things that are NOT affected by magnetic forces or otherwise it'll fall apart. A fully alluminium/carbon fibre ship. Well, there is a problem - magnetic sensitivity is required for microchips and other electronic systems to function, because magnetism and electricity are closely related forces in terms of physics. So this gets a little tricky - have a huge field to protect yourself from radiation and then another to protect yourself from it... and another for another..?

We have to concentrate on what CAN be done, what MIGHT be done, but let's not take things that are still fully science fiction for granted.
Otherwise, any bullshlt is plausible.

Well, if the battleships' enemies are in space, you know you've won when there isn't anything vaguely recognizable as a ship. If your enemy is on land, you just drop 5 or 6 or 60 large asteroids on top of them; then you don't need to check.

Good point there, but it wouldn't be of much utility to the people who launched the nukes, as radiation poisoning doesn't take effect anywhere near immediately.

Which is being worked on. I forget the details, but one company is trying to design a computer that functions on the same principals as the human brain. But that isn't really necessary, as all you need to protect your ship from radiation is a lot of crap covering its exterior. We sent people to the Moon and back; obviously solar radiation isn't as much of a problem as you think.

Not "inertialess", "reactionless". A reactionless drive is something that pushes the ship without expending mass. Those are the only thing I can see making a spcae fighter viable.

Oh, wait, mja5000's thing...No, anti-fighter missiles would not be undodgeable, as the fighters would have the same engines. But yes, the guns turning would be a killer.

Yes, I do. Have the computer watch them or something; it's got an ungodly amount of RAM, and can probably handle watching to see if any rocks decide to disobey Newton's First Law of Motion. If it turns, accelerates, or simply has too much metal on it, then it is a fighter and can be shot down.

As of now, yes, so if nothing changes then the most observant wins. However, it is not too terribly unlikely that the next age will bring greater advances in defensive technologies than in offensive; such a switch has happened twice in the last two centuries (machine guns + trench warfare gave defenders a notable advantage around the mid-to-late 1800's, then guided missiles and jets gave the advantage back to the attacker; who's to say we won't get the hang of shielding tech or other defensive things faster than our weapons will advance?).

edit: that is mirror-like, which reflects the correct spectrum of light to counter a laser. So not the typical mirror in your house

what I find funny is I'm sure people were saying the samething with airplanes and how they will be used. Space fighters WILL have a use, it's a given. Also this debate shouldn't even exist in the first place. We do not know how space combat will be in the future or what tech we will have.  Depending on the tech space fighters could be useless, or one of the most effective fighting forces out there.

we can debate about fast or slow a ship goes in space all day, but the fact is who cares (and the odds of humans going interstellar are pretty much nil)

N3rull is just proving my point. This debate is useless. Do you really think in the future we wouldn't have  countered that effect? They already working on ways to shield the astronauts mission to mars.

Again, this debate is useless. We have no clue what tech will be when humans leave the earth to explore the galaxy. And saying the odds of humans exploring the galaxy is nil is extremely foolish. The only reason you say that is because we have a destructive tendecy. Who's to say that will end us or is even unqiue to human nature?

I mean you must obviously have visited the galaxy, you seem to know that no other race has gone through the same issuses the human race has. Oh wait you don't.