Author notes

178 - Hopeless Nostalgic

El Cid

on Aug. 3, 2017

Meanwhile, in the captain's quarters, there's a completely different sort of drilling going on.

It's interesting (at least to me) to consider how the generational divide between the Captain and her crew affects their attitudes toward sexuality. The much older captain would have come up in an earlier time when space was less developed and space travel more hazardous. A healthy dose of fatalism, bred by the dangers and uncertainty of their occupation, would have bred more of a carpe diem mentality. Free love among crews may have been encouraged, and you would be expected to share partners. But for the younger crew, growing up in a more civilized and developed era, this is all alien to them. Space travel is routine. You hibernate through the long, boring stretches, everything's automated, and there is no hardship. You never run out of anything, and no one expects to die, ever. Sex still factors heavily into their entertainment, and their virtual games and fantasies, but they're often too risk averse to pursue physical contact with others over safer alternatives. So, that may explain why the Captain is so cavalier about shagging Ula's boyfriend, and why the Captain's casual attitude toward being the meat in a love sandwich is surprising to Avram. Well, like I said, it's interesting to me, at least. I apologize if that bored you!

Speaking of apologies, I should also apologize because I meant to post a warning on the last update that this page would be NSFW. The next couple of pages will be raunchy filler for the sake of meeting my obligatory raunchy filler quota, so be advised! You may still want to drop in though, because there may be another install of the animated series next week, or possibly an interesting blurb. Like this one…



Fighter planes in space are cool. They've been a staple of space opera since the first Star Wars movie came out, and they've made appearances in sci fi even well before that. When most of us think about big epic space battles, we automatically envision massive swarms of funky sci fi fighter planes dogfighting Red Baron style, and daring pilots making strafing and bombing runs against gigantic carrier ships. Our collective vision of space combat is basically WWII naval battles, transported into outer space. But does that make any sense? Will “starfighter pilot” ever be an actual job description?

I think it's generally understood that the whole purpose of the spacefighter pilot trope in sci fi is to keep the reader invested, because more plausible scenarios with millions of cheap expendable drones slugging it out just isn't nearly as exciting. Even on today's modern battlefield, fighter pilots are gradually being supplanted by unmanned drones, and that trend will likely continue. So is there a plausible role for fighter pilots in the romanticized space opera tradition? I thought it'd be fun to explore some of the “For” and “Against” arguments…



1. It's A Waste Of Resources
Assuming that neither side has an appreciable technological advantage, space battles are ultimately wars of attrition. Trajectories and fire algorithms are all calculated by supercomputers, and the outcome is remorselessly probabilistic. Jockeying for an edge, each side must make the absolute most efficient use of all their resources, fuel being perhaps among the most important. And there's no getting around the fact that spacefighters are a tremendous waste of fuel. In order to be effective, a fighter craft needs enough delta-v to reach the target, enough delta-v to slow down to engage the target (which is generally equal to the amount needed to get there), and then enough for the combat maneuvers, and lastly enough delta-v to return to base. At a bare minimum, that's four times the delta-v you'd need for an equal mass of one-way AI-guided torpedoes, and that doesn't even factor in fuel and materials for life support systems. In a war of attrition, would you rather have a squadron of fighter planes, or four times their weight in autonomous torpedoes? Personally, I'll take the torpedoes.



2. Fighter Tactics Are Anachronistic In Outer Space
The whole concept of space fighter planes launching off of big carrier ships to engage the enemy, makes no sense in outer space. In present day combat, the aircraft carrier is a sea vessel that launches aircraft which are (duh) air vehicles capable of operating where the carrier cannot operate (over land, for example). With the spacecraft version, you're basically launching spacecraft from another spacecraft. It's sort of like having a giant airplane that deploys lots of little airplanes, or a big battleship that drops off little speedboats. Tactically, it doesn't make much sense. If you're going to send a swarm, just send a swarm. Putting them all in a carrier is just putting all your eggs in one basket, which makes them easier to pick off with one lucky hit. Of course, you couldn't send thousands of pilots in cramped one-seaters over those vast distances, but it would be easy to launch a perpetual onslaught of smart torpedoes from a factory deep inside a fortified moon base.

3. There's No Need For A Pilot
This one's pretty obvious, and it's a lesson we're already learning today. Unmanned drones don't need to eat or sleep. They have no fear. They can process complex trajectories and countermeasures much faster than a human brain (though, in fairness, this is less true for a computer-assisted cyborg brain). Drones can survive accelerations that would turn a human body into pink squishy goo, which means they can perform maneuvers a manned craft cannot perform, and they can outrun any manned spacecraft. In short, they're cheaper and more effective. So this is basically the same as the first argument: If you can have more of them, and they do the job better, then the decision makes itself. Go drone or go extinct.





1. Drones Can Be Hijacked
Automated drones are cheaper than human-piloted spacecraft, but sometimes you get what you pay for. You can rest assured that the other side has a whole slew of information warfare specialists coming up with exciting new ways to turn your own kill bots against you. All it takes is some intrepid hacker to figure out how to reprogram your drones to think you're the enemy and not them, and now you've got two swarms of drones to contend with: yours and theirs! If info warfare reaches a level of sophistication where it's just not possible to rely on automated drones to get the job done, then their role will need to be fulfilled by manned vehicles, or at the very least you'll need manned “shepherd craft” to accompany them and make sure they're behaving themselves.

2. Big Battleships Are Just Big Targets
There are currently no plausible pathways to building a cloaking device or force fields. Assuming these things, like faster-than-light travel, turn out to be scientifically impossible (or at least impractical), then we're left with two unescapable realities: (1) It's impossible to hide in outer space, and (2) anything you can see, you can destroy. Offensive capabilities tend to outpace defense on the battlefield, and it's something of a truism in modern warfare that if you can see something, you can destroy it. A tank, a bunker, a sci fi battlecruiser. Aside from force fields, there's no realistic armor that's going to stop a kinetic javelin traveling at relativistic speeds. Building these gigantic carrier ships is a monumental waste, because they're basically just giant targets that won't survive the first few minutes of contact with the enemy. It's like a line of British redcoats marching against an entrenched machine gun position. Size is a liability, not an advantage. In space combat, every offensive vehicle you build needs to be cheap and disposable. So if drones are unreliable, and big battle cruisers make no economic sense, then arguably the only military spacecraft you can count on will be relatively small manned fighter craft. They'd still be more or less defenseless, but if you send enough of them, maybe a few will make it through to deliver their payload.



3. Them's First World Problems, Bruh!
The going assumption for this whole spiel was that you're basically dealing with superpowers using state-of-the-art offensive and defensive technologies. Sort of like if Space America and Space China were to duke it out sci fi style. But what if you're dealing with a relatively low intensity conflict between minor powers who can't afford to build giant Death Stars and battleships and such? In that case, it's at least arguable that a lot of the fighting would fall on individual pilots and small crews using civilian craft appropriated for military purposes. Even then, I'd still argue it's more economical to build lots of drones and use those instead, but maybe at least in the initial stages no one has the time or infrastructure to do that?

Okay, those are my thoughts on the subject, at least. Definitely not an “expert” opinion, by any means, so feel free to shoot holes in my logic or lack thereof in the comments below.