I am glad you pointed out something htat has bothered me about space carriers for a while. Using them as front line ships. I always thought you'd keep the carrier away from the point of contact with any long range sniper ships and supply vessels and just let it disgorge hundreds or even thousands of fighters to do the fighting for the carrier. Not saying you can't have a front line combat carrier but doing so reduces its fighter complement as you now have to have space and resources for heavy guns.
I don’t really know how you would classify this or if it would even be possible. But if you haven’t already, I think you guys should try and do a video similar to this. But maybe with craft that could almost be seen like the outer space equivalent of a submarine.I don’t know if that’s even possible but you know just a dumb idea.
Here’s a few questions: (1) How realistically viable are most “super-weapons” in Sci-Fi, (2) are there any good hard sci-fi super-weapons, and (3) what Is your favorite “super weapon” (and why is it the Death Star?)
Raiders are piloted by robots, so they don't have to worry about g-forces. They can zoom in do a flip and park it. They're computers, so calculating the landing solution isn't a problem. I'm sure there's a repair bay that the ships get auto-piloted to for repairs once the cylons have exited.
@@MrAkaacer considering Cylons can just be downloaded into a new body, they don't even need to return. And as we see with Scar, an immortal enemy fighter pilot is dangerous, even if you shoot it down.
@@MrAkaacer Robots? Pretty sure those ships were like half-organic... like animals basicly with intestines, Starbuck stole one and flew it if i remember... i literally jusst started rewatching battlestar galactica... blood & chrome was good.. now to season1, already hate the pilot... baltar and that actor who cant keep her clothes on... pff... ruined it imho... if this nonsense wouldnt be there, the series would have been way way better... The question of practically of carriers in space combat.... well look at naval carriesrs... Nimitz class... what arsenal it has and can carry over 100 F18's... pretty insane specs actually... not a easy task to bring down those carriers, and US has like i think 11 of them? China has only 1 or 2.. :D tho China generally has now larger naval fleet than america, a lot of destroyers and their destroyer F5 is like cruiser size, 350~ of those... no wonder US wants to focus on China, rather of thinking of supporting EU in ukraine war....
The Starcarrier series of books by Ian Douglas bring up early-on a rather great point about magnetic-acceleration launch tubes. Once the flight wing is away, there's nothing stopping the carrier from just loading a giant car-sized slug into the tubes and turning them into perfectly functional giant coil guns. Just as long as you have the capability of (literally) amping up the power output.
@@CaptainBlueTech Not necessarily in space. Depends on the scale and faculties of the ship. On Earth there are two main things that limit our ability to deliver destructive energy to a target. 1) Propulsion. With the exception of the wildly expensive and cumbersome US Navy Rail Gun which isn't actually used except for research, we use chemical propellents which transform stored chemical energy into kinetic energy in a projectile. Bullets, missiles, cruise missiles, ICBMs, all of them. The amount of energy that can be transferred to the projectile is limited by the rate at which the chemical reaction of the propellent happens to release its energy. Rockets and missiles are less restricted by this because they burn their propellant as they travel to the target, but, for the same reason, it takes a long time to burn that propellant and that may be time you don't have (I'll explain that later), and the more energy you try to add with more fuel, the more mass it must accelerate and therefore the slower the acceleration. 2) Our atmosphere limits the amount of energy we can efficiently deliver to a target as kinetic energy in the form of a solid projectile due to drag. We get around this by using chemical explosives and incendiaries because they store large amounts of chemical energy to be released into the target on or shortly after impact. The torpedo is the perfect example because they deliver essentially no kinetic energy to the target. They can't. The drag from being immersed in water is way too high. Real ones used in water don't hit at all typically, they blow up underneath using magnetic detonators. All the destructive energy is from the explosives. The transfer of energy from the torpedo to the target is not that efficient necessarily, but it's better than in air because water is incompressible and fairly dense. The advantage of being in the water is that it's easy to load torpedoes with very large amounts of explosives due to buoyancy, so it's still effectively delivers a lot of destructive energy to the target and it does so under the waterline, so damage causes flooding. Space, meanwhile, is a vacuum so no drag and it has no horizon or major gravity well to limit its line of sight and weapon range either. Projectiles will travel in straight lines without slowing down forever essentially, unless they hit something. This brings us back to the US Navy Rail Gun. It is big and expensive, but spaceships are even bigger and more expensive so that is less of a concern. The advantage is that a rail gun can dump as much energy into a projectile as it has electrical energy available. Electric currents turn the coils into powerful electromagnets that fling the projectiles with an extraordinary amount of force, meaning acceleration and top speed are essentially uncapped. You could potentially fire projectiles at significant fractions of the speed of light. The type of ammunition is also really simple. It just needs to be magnetic and fit within the coils. You could shoot big or small projectiles no problem and the ammo will never misfire or explode on the ship because it contains no chemical energy in the form of propellent or explosives. Fictional large space warships also typically contain some form of serious electrical energy production like nuclear reactors. A ship could run the reactor for day, filling every battery and capacitor on the ship full energy, and then release it at the speed of light into a projectile that will hit its target with all that kinetic energy focused at the point of impact. The time-to-target would be much shorter than that of a missile and it'd cause deep penetrations rather than surface explosions (particularly dangerous because the most dangerous thing in space is being exposed to space itself as water boils right out of your 70% water body when you depressurize, causing you and ALL your cells to explode). Your ship could be getting ripped to shreds before you get your missiles out of their tubes and a suit perforation from solid or molten spalling could mean your end at any moment, if the shockwave from the iron ball bearing coming through the wall with enough energy to melt titanium to like butter alone doesn't kill you. The only caveat might be a nuclear missile. Yes it has all the issues of missiles, but boy does it deliver a lot of energy.
@@AsheramK I most definitely agree with you, in regards to the problem with aiming. I can think of some good uses for it, still. Depending on where they're located. Planetary bombardment is the first thing that comes into my mind. If they're side mounted, facing outward, it would be exactly like cannons were placed, in the old naval ships. When the Broadside Technique was the most common form of warfare. Taking it just a step or two further, if you were launching pods capable of releasing multiple projectiles after launch, they could make for a fantastic "Grapeshot" launcher for use against incoming missiles. Or against enemy fighters, for that matter. I suppose that if you wanted to turn the power WAY down, you could also use them to eject a minefield, or debris field into the path of a pursuing vessel.
I think the hybrid carrier-combat vessels make sense in most settings where they are present. A real world dedicated naval carrier can be operated without fear of a battleship jumping, warping or dropping out of hyperspace right next to it without any warning. In an universe where FTL requires no gates or other fixed locations, every capital vessel is at risk of direct combat with another capital vessel. That means every sensible capital vessel should have decent protection and if you are going to make it protected, you might as well arm it to fend for itself against smaller threats so you don't need to dedicate escort ships (which the FTL renders less important in screening role) or half of your fighters and bombers (since just fighters isn't enough when bombers aren't the only thing that can realistically jump you) to protect the carrier. In real life naval carriers, the whole top surface and lengths of the ship needs to be dedicated for that role. In most sci-fi settings, carrying and operating fighters/bombers only requires a relatively compact and enclosed space on the vessel. That being said, even real life non-carrier combat ships often had or have catapult launched spotting aircraft or helicopters respectively, which similarly only require relatively little space but offer a lot of flexibility.
Fighters make no sense in an environment with no horizon to obstruct line of sight. Nothing beats covering the space vehicle in missile tubes and CIWSs. Besides maneuvering being pointless with infinite line of sight and no cover, you don't even need to change attitude much, just let the missiles do it themselves, plus overlapping fields of fire. Bombers are especially useless and specialized bombers, rather than multirole fighters that can deliver bombs, are becoming obsolete even today. The only story I know of that has logical explanations for carriers and bombers is George Lucas' Star Wars saga (Episodes 1-VI).
@@everfaithful9272There is a potential use, depending on ranges and weapon types. You could use fighters as a sort of remote point defense system, intercepting incoming anti-ship missiles before they build up so much speed that interception becomes effectively impossible. The other use, off the top of my head, would be to create an additional attack vector for the enemy to worry about, which depending on whether or not ships are armored could dramatically complicate an otherwise simple ship-to-ship engagement. A Star Destroyer-style ship, for example, has excellent line-of-sight armor thickness against attacks from the front and sides, but would have significant difficulty dealing with fire from above or below.
Right On. Also Carriers on Earth only have to worry about up, down & horizontal attacks ...Space Carriers have to deal with possible 360 Degrees attack. Even Earth Carriers have to carry some amount of CIWS & Mid-Range Defence Systems. Space Carrier needs CIWS to deal with Fighter, Fighter Bombers, a Mid-Range Defence against Mid-Size/Mid-Distance Enemy Ships ...Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers and against heavy hitter stand off beasts like Battleships & Dreadnoughts.
Whether dedicated carriers are desirable or not actually depends more on the role of the craft that you are intending on deploying from the capital ships. In a sci-fi setting, embarked craft would range from snub fighters to small transports (cods); patrol craft, like a pt boat, could operate independently for long enough that they're not really embarked as attached. Some roles: Fighter/interceptor Bomber/attack Electronic warfare Early warning (active scout) Supply Search/rescue Reconisence While point defence should be effective, engaging enemy attack craft before they can reach your fleet us prefered, which requires interceptors. Interceptors would also be better suited to engaging pt boats. Warfare evolves, a piece of equipment or tactic is developed to take advantage of a weakness; a defense is developed; something else is developed; and so on. While microjumps may be possible to close range, it may leave the attacker open to counter attack; it is so dependent on the setting, there is no one-size-fits-all, it needs to be evaluated by the rules of the setting, and by the thoughts of the culture deploying the fleet. I could easily see a culture that views lauched craft as a form of cavalry, even employing cavalry formation tactics; even if they're ineffective.
@@robertpopa2628 I can see his point though. If rather than a single ship, you jump a small squadron to shooting range, it's no longer a suicide mission but an assault.
Lest we forget, the Wing Commander game series was literally about pilots on a space carrier. The franchise was very much inspired by WW2 in space, so the carriers (Tiger's Claw, Victory, Lexington, etc.) were vulnerable to capital ship and fighter/bomber attacks, later entries were also through-deck carriers to boot. :)
Came in here to say the TCS Concordia from Wing Commander. Loved these games as a kid. I probably have hundreds of hours of flight sortie time and who knows how many dead Kilrathi were left in my wake.
Honestly space Carriers make more sense as mobile patrol craft bases. They’re big and slow and not meant to actually fight anyone, but they are really useful for setting up quick garrisons or anti-piracy operations
In BSG we don't see a dedicated Carrier or other ships is because they were all destroyed. A Battle Star was supposed to be part of a battle group like our Aircraft Carriers
@@LostSanityAgain and I both love and hate that ship. Shockingly tough but insanely slow compared to most others. Which wouldn’t be that big a deal except that for some reason, despite being a dedicated carrier, it has fewer aircraft slots than some battlestars, making it not feel as much like a carrier as it should be. If a frigate can have its own fighter squadron, a dedicated carrier should exceed most others’ fighter complements, and yet in-game this isn’t the case.
I would recommend checking out Deadlock. It's a pretty fun game. It actually has a cool concept of having a lot of Colonial ships that lead up to the Battlestar and give sort of a reason why it was better to have a Battlestar, as the older Colonial carriers didn't really carry effective firepower to take down a Basestar.
@@John-fk2ky I think the reason why they did it (besides balancing) was that the Atlas was a really old ship design, like Colonial Imperial design. It was (at least speculated by some), to be replaced by the Artemis Battlestar, since it was just simply better. I really wish they offered modding support for Deadlock as it would have allowed modders to come up with such cool ideas for the game.
I think part of the reason for the carrier/battleship trope (besides simplicity) is that a) space carriers don't have to make themselves as cripplingly weak in gun battles as real ones, since runways don't work the same way and b) space fighters and bombers are not usually depicted as having vastly longer ranges than gunnery. The entire point of the WWII carrier is that the planes can attack things hundreds of miles further away than guns can, so carriers can be extremely weak at short range but capable of extremely long-distance attacks. Space fighters, on the other hand, are rarely shown deploying far from their base on their own. This might be because of the nature of the extreme environment (large ships can hold much more life support and walking-around room) but also because with hyperdrives and big engines, large spacecraft are often depicted as being faster over long distances than fighters. If the fighters cannot go very far from the base, relatively speaking, it makes sense for the carriers to be more prepared for close-range battle.
But if that's the case, what's the point of the fighters? Might as well seal up those holes in your big ship's hull and give it more or bigger guns. Or both.
@@nigeldepledge3790 There are non-combat roles that aircraft serve in modern navies, like reconnaissance, patrols, and of course, shuttling people to and from the ship. In a spaceship, all of these are even more valuable - especially since many large ships in scifi simply can't land at all, or at least won't have a good time if they do. So a large capital ship would need at least one hangar bay for shuttles, which is how the original Imperial Star Destroyer was mostly seen using its belly hangar and how Star Trek ship almost exclusively use theirs. Using fighters in a battle can have some specific strengths depending on the setting. In Star Wars, fighters are capable of things like "snubbing" by strafing enemy capital ships at close range with missiles, moving too fast for defensive guns. In Battlestar Galactica they serve primarily as a defense screen, but examples like the Stealth Viper and the Raptor with missile pods being able to strike vulnerable targets away from the battlestar. Basically, depending on the setting, fighters have varying levels of utility in and outside of combat, which justifies having them in most scifi settings. The specifics of the setting's space combat determines how valuable they are and if the tradeoff is worthwhile. In a setting where point-defense lasers are very strong against small craft, you'd probably want to have only a small number of multi-role ships like BSG's Raptors and Trek's shuttles which can serve non-combat roles as well as occasionally do heavy combat, while in Star Wars where point-defense is mostly big cannons you can have a dedicated carrier which swarms the enemy, especially with Droid fighters.
@@nigeldepledge3790depends on the setting. Usually a fighter is more space efficient than a bigger ship when it comes to attack capability, since there's no long term life support or hyperdrive involved. Further if the setting has powerful anti-cap ship weapons or shields, fighters can avoid or bypass those. If heat dissipation is an issue, a large number of fighters will be able to radiate more heat than a single big ship, so they will be able to manage much higher firepower. Specialized anti-fighter weapons won't be good Vs heavily armoured or shielded capital ships too, and anti capital ship weapons can't track fighters, so if you have both, you would be able to exploit any such weaknesses the enemy might have.
@@nigeldepledge3790 simply put fighters can engage smaller crafter more efficiently i.e trying to hit that shuttle so you can disable and then capture it with the main weaponry and even the secondary weaponry may be overkill. Where a fighter with it's smaller weapons may be just right. This is of course before you factor in you can use the carrier as a mobile base for planet side operations as well. I.E you won't be taking the carrier into atmo but you can probably send it's fighters into atmo.
If I may put up another example is that it allows you to slim down fighters even more. The Star Wars TIE fighter lacks any hyperdrive capability and, instead of onboard life support, it relies on a pilot suit and onboard oxygen tanks. This makes them _very_ cheap to produce and to use in numbers. Of course, this means that they're solely used around carriers and stations that can support them.
I think the Gamillon Carriers in Space Battleship Yamato 2199 are a good example of semi-well thought out sci-fi carriers. Carriers in the show in general are shown to be able to launch fighters nearly instantaneously in a vacuum because, well, there's no gravity, but they retain the catapults for atmospheric launches (such as the Battle of the Rainbow Cluster)
In the live-action movie they did a great atmospheric fighter drop on Iscandar, where they warped the Yamato in, launched the fighters (in free-fall, to avoid the point defenses that would have locked onto their engines), and then immediately warped the Yamato out to draw the Gamillon's attention elsewhere.
@@InLoveWithCities It's similar. It's not a new idea to be sure -- I've seen it in several anime over the years long before anyone considered using it in live-action, and they even used something similar in a TNG episode (with phasers instead of fighters). But it sure does look good when the Yamato does it! ^_^
I think the Yamato and other EFCF Andromeda and Dreadnaught-class ships (especially the Hyuga) are better than the Gamillas Gaiperon-class Multideck Astro Carrier because the former are hybrid warships that can defend themselves as well as engage in battle, where the latter have almost nothing but defensive armament.
About halfway through the series, the Honorverse novels introduce the CLAC - Carrier, Light Attack Craft. LACs aren't typical space fighters but rather small warships that save volume and mass by not mounting an FTL drive. CLACs carry them into the target system where they deploy, coordinate and maintain their LAC wings well away from the main combatants (at least until FTL-guided MDMs become the standard, after which "well away" ceases to exist).
Not totally. IIRC around that point CLACs started to duck back into Hyper and either maintain a stable position in Hyperspace since it was impossible to attack through the Alpha Wall, or a predetermined point well outside the System in question and wait for a messenger (usually a destroyer) to come back and tell them it was safe to return.
And lest we forget, each ship in the Honorverse usually has shuttles to ferry Marines or provide CAS, or any other of a number of roles we usually forget about.
They're also meant to operate as part of the fleet - so their LAC wings in a number of later books are more used for fleet missile defense to increase the engagement envelope against inbound missiles than for offensive punch.
Adding some additional context - in the Honorverse LACs are very much not "fighters" in the way we think of the term today. These are craft in the 10-20k ton range with around a dozen crew. For context, modern navy cruisers and destroyers are in the 10k ton range. The CLACs are 6+ million tons, compared to a modern super carrier at around 100k tons. These are MASSIVE ships. People should think of LACs like WW1/2 era torpedo boats designed to swarm capital ships. As mentioned, they also can be used defensively as anti-missile pickets for the fleet.
"Carrier has arrived." My favorite is Starcraft's Protoss Carriers. They're JUST flying mobile factories for interceptor drones without any weapons of their own, but they still feel epic in presence. Automatic fire from enemy forces will end up locking onto the interceptors instead of the carriers, and even manual targeting can end up accidentally locking onto the drones instead of the intended target underneath. One argument that can be made for a lot of sci-fi carriers doubling as battleships could be that a lot of these settings also tend to have some sort of FTL movement. In real life, carriers are usually protected by the distance they can keep from the actual battle, acting like the mobile airstrips that they are. In a lot of sci-fi settings, that doesn't work as well when enemy forces can just triangulate where fighters are coming from and then speed over to a carrier's location, so it could make more sense to just park the carrier on the front lines with heavy weaponry and shielding rather than leaving it relatively undefended at a back line.
Even I feel like Automatic-Replenishing Drone Ships are cheating. Probably why they are the backbone of any good space based navy! Why have a ship, when you can have a whole factory!
Star Wars has a healthy number of essentially pure carriers, too, but they don't get the same attention that the combination craft like Star Destroyers do. There is a point to be made for the "combinations are bad" argument, too. An ImpStar Deuce is a mile stem to stern and only carries a fighter complement on par with a WW2 era carrier; 72 TIEs of various types. Proportionately speaking that's much closer to the space a cruiser would dedicate to helicopter or seaplane functionality than a carrier's "this is my one job" flight deck and hangar. Likewise the complement, usually 4 squads of superiority fighters/interceptors, 1 squad of bombers/strike craft, and 1 squad of recon craft/auxiliaries, is more what you'd see on an old escort carrier than a fleet carrier, which should have a lot more strike craft on board. The Star Destroyer isn't trying to be a battleship AND a carrier, it's a battleship that carries its own escorts in a tiny portion of her volume.
In the full lore-canon size, Protoss carriers have point defense weapons and an orbital bombardment laser, but in the game units, neither are particularly balanced or terribly useful with how the unit as a game piece is designed. Another thing a LOT of sci-fi settings do is _try to make humans useful_ . If point defense are all manned by humans, then human-manned fighters can be effective. If they're all controlled by AI or droids or what-have-you, then you'll need several more humans in fighters, or AI-controlled fighters, or just AI-controlled missiles and ECM/ECCM to avoid the point defense. And if point defense is strong enough, eventually the only actually effective weapons will be stealth or immense long range KKV penetrators, or extremely high power laser bursts, because anything slower will just be dodged or intercepted.
@@thelonelyrogue3727, That’s the neat part, they don’t. Kamikaze in space! If you had tractor beams in the setting they might be able to do it or maybe the ships themselves are capable of getting out of orbit but need a carrier to go FTL.
@@thelonelyrogue3727The carrier can get as low as the upper atmosphere, the kind of altitude where real planes like the Blackbird fly. But, if the planet is lost, or their carrier destroyed, the pilots may be on their own.
I remember a scifi show back in the 90s that had atmospheric fighters like that. They would drop from carriers in orbit and as they entered into the atmosphere they would unfold into fighters already moving at hypersonic speeds.
In Stars Without Number (a TTRPG), ships need a special drive (called a spike drive) to go into what's basically hyperspace, to travel to other star systems. This drive costs more money than a regular system drive (to fly around a system with), and takes up more of the ship's available energy and mass, limiting other ship fittings. By equipping a carrier with a spike drive, the ships it carries no longer need to be outfitted with a spike drive. TL;DR - in a setting where you need a special drive to travel interstellar distances, carriers could just have that drive, alleviating the need of having such a drive for the ships it carries.
@@Novenae_CCG Kinda the same think in Battletech. You have Jumpships and they are like 95% Jump Drive, but they can be made to attach other ships to them and jump with those ships. They have a Warship version with what is known as a Compact Drive, which takes up about 48% of the ship' mass. And attached ships are limited to 100,000 tons in mass each. But not in number that can theoretically be jumped with. IIRC the Star Lord is the largest Jumpship and can jump with 9 50,000 ton or less ships attached. But the big boy is the Potemptkin Class Troop cruiser built as a warship that can jump with 25 50,000 ton or less ships attached. Any ship above 50,000 tons up to 100,000 tons takes two attachment points.
I like Honor Harringtons LAC's instead of "fighters." They're tiny corvettes basically. More like torpedo boats. Great stuff when they surprise the enemy with their battlecruiser being converted to LAC carriers.
I think ALL ships would have small hangars. Something you didnt mention is that almost all modern naval ships have some limited carrying capacity for helicopters, as well as carry small outboard craft and inflatables. Such requirements would be similarly fulfilled by a shuttle bay, for landing on planets, shuttling crew (way way way safer and smarter than docking two massive warships), transfering supplies, assisting in docking maneuvers, performing maintenance, and serving as an emergency life boat. There is almost no concievable way for a warship of any considerable size to operate without at least one of these, unless the warship never ever operates outside of the reach of friendly carriers. Even for dedicated escort vessels, such dependence is rare.
One advantage to carrying fighters, drones, or other support craft on external mounts is it allows a ship to carry support craft without spending much or any internal volume on it. This is particularly useful in settings that have FTL that only works on large craft or fuel constraints on small ships, even modest sized capital ships could carry something like a fighter wing or picket ship. The result could be similar to how modern destroyers like the Arleigh Burke-class have a pad and small hanger for two helicopters. In settings like Traveller where FTL drives are expensive and take up huge fractions of a ships mass and volume this can be taken to the extreme, with squadrons of large combat ships lacking FTL drives (Traveller calls them Riders, and in that setting they are much cheaper and more capable than FTL equipped ships of the same tonnage) towed to the combat zone by dedicated transport ships.
As long as your setting doesn't involve ships trying to engage in high-G burn maneuvers. In such cases, anything that isn't very thoroughly bolted down is going to get ripped off the ship. Of course, this is also true of ships inside, but at least those could be secured in a fully enclosed bracing structure, rather than having to somehow be strongly bound to the side of the ship.
@@ZlothZlothChad SotS player! Was wondering if this gem of a game will be mentioned. And I agree, I like how the game handles carriers. The strikecraft/battleriders are attached on the hull of the ships. I still remember the Morrigi (Space Crows) being so focus on strikecraft that even their tanker/supply/colony ships has the ability to carry them.
@@Jesse_359I suspect the idea is to jump in and almost immediately deploy the docked craft, both letting them get on with their business and freeing up precious thrust/weight margins for the carrier to nope the hell out of weapons range so the other craft have a ride home.
@@griffinfaulkner3514 Yes. I'd have to assume that any carrier designed to carry craft externally will have to be spinning them off almost immediately as it enters the battlespace. If it is a battle-carrier, this essentially means those craft are entirely on their own until the fight is over - there's no realistic way for them to return to their ship while it remains engaged in combat. If it's a dedicated carrier they could return, though servicing a craft attached to your exterior hull seems likely to be a much more time consuming process than one that returns to some kind of enclosed bay. The 'external' mount carrier is probably essentially restricted to a single battle sortie in most circumstances, which might not be feasible. In WW2 carriers would launch many separate sorties, with wings returning to land, refuel, re-arm, or even returning to swap loadouts in order to engage different potential targets in the battlespace.
One interesting thing in some settings is carriers for ships larger than fighters. If an FTL drive is so big and heavy that a ship built without one can be more effective in combat, or is rare and expensive, or requires the navigator to take a bunch of weird space drugs and turn into a caterpillar, then it makes sense to have even large ships rely on carriers to cross interstellar distances. For example: Tarka Hunter carriers in Sword of the Stars, CLACs in the Honorverse, Guild heighliners in Dune.
there are also great examples of ship carriers being the main infrastructure for warfleets in the excellent book series Expedition force. here the carriers main duty is to transport heavy battleships, battlecruisers and other combat specialised ships closer to the engagement as they have massively better jump drives and also allows for maintainance on some of the carriers. Essentially they are what train transportation was for WW2 tanks, but in this case, instead of having a bunch of tanks on the traincars, they have a bunch of heavely armored and armed battleboats.
With No FTL it is Cheaper and the Space can be used better in Main Worlds you would have Defence Fleets only for the System to Come Out that would increase the Power much more than Ships with FTL.
These are all great examples. The UNSC infinity also does this to lend escort vessels its advanced FTL drive, even if the ship is guilty of many many issues.
This actually has a real-world comparison in the earliest carrier craft - Torpedo Boat Carriers. Which may actually be a better comparison than aircraft carriers anyway, since all Voidcraft from fighters to battleships travel in the same medium (space); unlike blue water navies which have to draw practical distinctions between craft that travel through the air vs those that traverse the waves (and again vs submarines under the water).
Homeworld has some really cool examples of sci fi carriers done right. Both the Mothership (effectively a massive carrier and fabricator) and actual carriers are not intended for actual combat whatsoever, they are intended as..well, carriers. They're for having a staging point for strikecraft to repair and resupply, and rarely are ever in direct combat.
The sequel did give the battleships a hanger for strike craft but if I remember right they were pretty limited in capacity and I got the feeling they were there more to support the fighters launched from other vessels by providing an additional place to repair and rearm that was closer to the battle (or just being able to get more serviced at once). Or that it housed a fighter contingent that was just meant as more point defence in case enemy bombers got close enough to be a threat.
I remember playing Homeword Multiplayer and mastering loading fighters and corvetts on Support Frigates for a tactical jump. Even the Resource Controller had docking slots for up to 6 fighters and a resource collector.
@@procrastinatinggamer That, and the ability to carry fighters through hyperspace jumps. Being able to bring fighter cover with you when jumping into close-range fights was pretty handy.
@@procrastinatinggamer And I feel like the setting really supports this and makes it realistic. Fighters and corvettes that don't have hyperdrive always felt awkward to use in HW1 unless you were prepared to risk your carries for close support. Launch bays also allow rapid deployment of the fighter screen after a jump.
Love Homeworld’s approach to ship design. The Mothership being a colony ship and a mobile factory and refinery made to adapt to any situation the expedition may run into during its journey. Then it found itself as the center of the strongest military resistance against the Taiidan empire. Love how in one part of the journey they set a hyperspace trap for Captain Ellison’s destroyer only to pull out the entirety of the Exile fleet. The mothership in Homeworld’s ship designs also reflect that they have common design language among chassis so you could see that fighters, corvettes, frigates and capital ships are from the same line but adapted to their roles. It also makes it easier at a distance for the player to identify ship types. Unfortunately HW3’s ships aren’t quite as distinctive. Battleships in that game with NLIPS on makes a battleship look like a stretched frigate
@@uss_04 Just imagine the Taiidan commander's reaction. "Oh, Grav wells have captured the Rebels and... why are there so many hyperspace signatures... and why is one the size of the Flagship...?" Proceeds to then be taken prisoner by the way too insane Salvage Corps of the Kushan Navy
To be fair (and speaking of WW2), "battleship-carriers" did exist: the Ise-class battleships (IJN Ise and IJN Hyuga) were retrofitted with a flight deck with 22 airplanes on board, while still packing 14 inch guns.
there was also the two US Aircraft carriers USS Lexington (CV-2) and USS Saratoga (CV-3) which carried 8x 8inch guns because when they were built (the 1920s) the Navy thought the vessels might need them for self-defense.
@@caelestigladii True, but space makes the calculus different. They sucked because they didnt have the surface area to do either job properly, in space the carrier part of the role is INSIDE the ship, so you might as well put the guns on the unused exterior surfaces.
@@joewelch4933 While I agree, the spacecraft would have to be significantly larger than current carriers. Because guns actually don't take only the exterior part of the ship. Unless it's an energy weapon, of course. You'd also need a citadel somewhere in the ship.
One of the big disadvantages of hybrid carriers is the fact that enemy gun fire will likely damage the flight deck, making it impossible for returning fighters to land after a battle. This might be less of an issue in space though; since the fighters would just need to match speed and dock slowly.
From what I remember, and it was a long time ago, I got the impression that (at least in the show) the Galactica in the original show was more of an armored carrier than a battlestar. The guns it had were mostly used for point defense against enemy fighters and the fighters were the heavy damage dealers.
More the fact that apart from two episodes, the second of the admiral cain/Pegasus double episode and the very last episode where they take on a single bay star then you never see galactica vs other ships, is galactica and vipers defending against Ceylon fighter swarms. As such not practical to get the heavy firepower out. Even in the reboot then mainly the flak battery and rare that saw the main battery out and use.
The original Galactica was also a ragtag fleet of civilians and military that escaped the cylon destruction. They were forced to use carrier/command ships as battleships due to circumstances.
The original series, Battlestar Galactica, has the answer right in the title. The Galactica was a Battlestar, a battle starship, not an armoured carrier.
@@MrGrumblier exactly. The handful of fighters it carried were support craft. The ship itself tried to stay out of combat because of the fact that it was acting as a lifeboat. The fighters were used as scouts and to take out enemies before they could get close enough to do damage to the ship.
Props to Space: Above and Beyond for not only giving us a carrier that is just a carrier, but putting it in a battlegroup escort. That didn't come into play much in the only season of the show, and it was a little hamfisted with our one cast of highly skilled fighter pilots being reduced to every grunt job in the military so they could recreate that one iconic scenario from WWII, but this was a detail they did well. And they got that right in 1995.
Protected launch systems - Check Recovery that is not via a landing strip - Check Separated maintenance and launch facilities - Check Heavy emphasis on point defense, not offense - Check All craft have attitude thrusters at key wide areas - Check Ships are portrayed in more than 2D space - Check Space A&B was and is one of the best depictions of a proper space carrier. Love that series, have the DVDs of it (and before then, bootleg VHS)
That "our one cast of highly skilled fighter pilots being reduced to every grunt job in the military" was what broke my willing suspension of disbelief for the series.
In the Expeditionary Force series of books, a star carrier is basically a space truck. Used to transport all manner of other vessels including battleships, etc. In order to reduce wear and tear on components and means every ship doesn't need a long-range ftl jump drive ability
The Protoss Carrier in Starcraft is the best example of a future carrier. Shield protected launch bays. Robotic fighter interceptors that could be manufactured and repaired internally. No armament on the main ship aside from orbital bombardment weapons that weren’t used in the game.
@@anvos658 They did delete that terran wrecker ship in that one cutscene with that planet killing beam, I think they just didn't want to ever have to balance around a carrier that can also do that.
7:30 In defense of Stargate: Both the Wraith and the Goa'uld focus on "motherships" designed for planetary assaults. Their fighters are designed to attack ground targets without advanced weapons. Fights against an equal enemy are a secondary concern.
That is true it fighter where used more for attack other fighters or planet assault. But outside of tauri vessels we do see ships vulnerable to fighters
One thing I feel is important to note is that even if your battleship or cruiser or whatever DOESN'T carry fighters, you may still want to have a hanger anyway. This lets it carry things like shuttles, utility craft, or small scouts. See Star Trek's shuttlecraft for example. This is useful not only for the fact you can't exactly tie down a small boat to the deck of a spaceship like you can a real-life battleship or cruiser for use in things like personal transfers, moving small amounts of supply or mail, or any number of other useful duties a small boat could be used for (beyond that of a lifeboat). But it also plays into the WWII inspirations of many Sci-Fi settings. Battleships and cruisers nearly universally carried a floatplane or 5 for things ranging from recognizance to spotting fall of shot, to search and rescue, and even anti-submarine warfare. These were by no means fighters, and could generally only carry light strike munitions for the aforementioned anti-submarine duties, but they were invaluable. The US even experimented with putting some on a destroyer! Even in the modern day helicopter facilities are common on many warships for the utility they provide in a way quite similar to how such things work in sci-fi. Shuttling supplies and personnel, performing search-and-rescue, and anti-submarine warfare duties. And even if a ship may not carry any of its own, it may have a clear spot on the rear deck where one could land to drop things off, or if it lost its mothership the helicopter's crew can safely disembark onto another ship. In a Sci-fi thing I partake in, the battleship I designed for it features a small hangar tucked away near the stern, protected by a sliding armored door that required the rearmost dorsal turret to traverse so that its barrels weren't blocking the way for craft to enter and exit. It is suited for only utility craft and shuttles, but on one occasion it was used to land fighters whose carrier was destroyed, since unlike with an ocean-going navy, you can't exactly ditch alongside in space. The empty fighters were then shoved back into space to make room for the next set of pilots to land, with the last set being carried back to base and taken off there. On the topic of armed carriers though, that isn't entirely unwarranted. Vessels like the United States's Lexington Class were originally armed with fairly chonky guns for a carrier without sacrificing their ability to conduct carrier operations. What is notable, is that, even though they were heavily armed for a carrier, the key term is "for a carrier". They were armed like a heavy cruiser, more than capable of fending off stray destroyers or light cruisers that managed to catch them, but no match for anything approaching their weight class. (And this design was done back when airplanes were slow, light, and short-ranged, with the heavy guns later replaced for heavy-AA dual-purpose guns). So slapping a heavy gun or two on your sci-fi carrier to give it some basic close-range firepower is reasonable, but there is a reason the only "battle carriers" ever built were done so by the Japanese out of desperation and a lack of time for full-conversions.
Mobile Suit Gundam is once again is on my main favorites with this, using the Universal Century as an example, during the One Year War you had in the Federation's case separation between Carriers, Battleships and Cruisers but with the introduction of Mobile Suits into warfare you start to notice less dedicated battleships and cruisers and more carriers with battleship grade weaponry, by Unicorn era you have alot of dedicated warships that would have a MS Hangar and a MS Catapult System like the Clop-Class, Nahel Argama, Ra Cailum, Musaka, Rewloola, etc. Lastly when talking about the dual sided runways Unicorn also had the double-sided MS Catapults with the Nahel Argama or the General Revil.
Victory also had a couple of pure carriers as well as some that took advantage of the whole "no up in space" with three hangars in different orientations. Of, and the Ptolemios from Gundam 00 is another pure carrier as is the Feeden from Gundam X.
Oh yes. The Federation's stubborness in having big-gun battleships bites them in the proverbial rear-end until Operation Stardust, and some pragmatic people got put in charge of the navy. The Pegasus class was also the Federation's first experimental carrier ship. The rest of them during the one year war appear to be repurposed carho haulers.
Hybrid carrier/battleships do make since in certain settings, such as situations where the ships have to operate without little to no support on or behind combat lines. Several sci-fi series that feature hybrid carriers usually end up taking place at some point where the ship has to fight in a situation where there is no support and they have to bring every weapon available to the fight. Also all modern day carriers are still equipped with defensive weapons and a space carrier would require at least some weapons to deal with a potential enemy ambush that can often be found in sci-fi settings that have them.
with regards to carriers getting caught up in ship-to-ship engagements, I can see some circumstances under which this might happen in SF- particularly in settings where warships can drop out of hyperspace (or equivalent) at close range to a carrier, particularly if the carrier is parked in orbit or otherwise constrained from manoeuvring
It also depends on WHAT they're carrying. I've seen a couple settings where the carriers are the only means of FTL so they're carrying......destroyers, cruisers, battleships, etc
That's actually one of the things that I do in my stories as well, such as atmospheric assault carriers that deploy planetary fighter craft. Space, on the other hand, is more problematic.
@@borttorbbq2556 that really depends on your setting and the method of FTL. Space is MASSIVE and you can build some really massive things in it if they're never supposed to get closer to a planet than high orbit.
At least with the "rotating the ship to launch the fighters out of sight" made sense in the Thrawn books where the move originated from, not the bastardization we see Ahsoka come up with. It isn't meant to be a surprise attack, it's using the ship's heavy armor to screen the fighters as they launch in a vulnerable condition when in close combat scenarios instead of launching at a distance ideally. It was to provide a safe zone for the fighters to quickly launch, form up and head out to fight rather than being exposed to incoming enemy fire instantly
That is also wrong. Thrawn used the unstructured attack pattern of the Marg Sabl maneuver to crash the Elomin task force's commander's excessively structured thinking. He could not handle the messed up attack profile, so the task force's coordination broke up into pieces. Elomins calculate excessively so with nothing to calculate, the commander became a mess. It had nothing to do with "screen the fighters" but everything to do with causing unstructured chaos.
Irl carriers have escorts typically so they can specialize, but space scifi typically has each ship able to defend itself to a degree because they might be sent alone
It’s actually because if space warfare is anything like modern naval warfare, it’s going to be done at distances beyond visual range. There will be dozens if not, possibly even hundreds of miles between each ship, so if one manages to slip undetected, every shift needs to have capacity to defend itself somewhat.
One thing I think is definitely worth discussing is: where does the line between 'fighter' and 'ship' lie? Does the GP03 Dendrobium (Gundam 0083) count as a fighter? It certainly behaves like a monstrously oversized fighter the size of smaller battleships. I propose that the dividing line would be 'is routine maintenance performed internally or externally?' to answer a decent amount, and it would vary highly depending on the weapons of choice. After that's decided, we need to figure out if reactor output is a major factor for weapons and similar. In Glynn Stewart's Castle Federation series, the weapons vastly out perform armor, and the shields and energy weapons interact at range resulting in one or two hits being more than enough to mission kill a full sized ship, however fighter weapons and ship weapons are two totally different beasts with ship weapons having significantly better effective range. The fighters serve a number of purposes, both long range attack systems, missile screening, sensor sweeps and such, but the raw reactor output of the big ships means that the ship still counts as a significant chunk of firepower. I don't think I can understate how much I enjoy the way Stewart comes up with variations on FTL/weapon systems that create interesting interactions that govern which combat doctrine works best.
I agree with this segment. It's all about the drama and the utilization of tropes. The fighter personalizes the story. Capital ship carriers is all about the magnitude of the risk. Also, when a fighter meets its end, it goes "pop" in the vastness of space. When a capital ship carrier goes down, that goes KA-BOOM!
I have to say, i love the Chimera from Eve online. The original i mean. Forget about how well carriers work in eve today and what the Chimera looks now, what i love about the chimera is its lore which says it was based upon the Kairiola, which was a water freighter converted into a fighter carrier during the orbital bombardment of Caldari Prime in the first Gallente-Caldari war. The Kairiol was the flag ship of Admiral Yakia Tovil-Toba who decided to take every ship he commanded and jumped to Gallente prime forcing the Gallente to recall vessels from the orbital bombardment to protect their homeworld. Eventually only the Kairiola remained and in a final sacrifice, was flown into Gallente prime. The attack allowed millions more Caldari to flee Caldari prime and because of his sacrifice Yakia Tovil-Toba is the first name every Caldari child learns.
And out of all four extant carrier hulls, the Chimaera has the best protected hangar bay, even though that means nothing in-game, especially since it’s the least used.
Sci-fi carriers usually have the dual-purpose gunship/carrier theme, because seriously... it's sci-fi and FTL drives are a thing. A well-prepared enemy can and WILL use that tactically to surprise your carriers at point-blank range. Case in point, Star Wars Legends version of Thrawn, used HIS OWN Interdictors tactically to force incoming reinforcements to drop out of hyperspace in the perfect locations to prevent hostile Rebels from escaping. He would LITERALLY drop his Star Destroyers, Lancer Frigates and other craft directly in your face, at the same moment that you are busy laughing thinking you successfully escaped and now you're caught with enemies effectively 5 feet in front of you and 20 feet behind you. Any carrier that isn't capable of direct gunnery and armored to withstand same is now a dead carrier, because you thought you could keep away from the fight. This is also a semi-frequent thing of the Battlestar Galactica series, both original and remake; the Battlestars would send off their Raptors and Vipers for a long-range strike, and then SUDDENLY Cylons have shown up and they're forced into a gunfight because they can't immediately flee. While the Battlestars are calculating coordinates and spooling up their drive... they still gotta fight. And if you go full-hog carriers, with little to no armor and no direct fire capabilities, you're highly vulnerable to being destroyed. Same things with the Stargate BC-304's, they had many similar conditions where they were forced to fight with no way to escape immediately. The only reason they could survive is because they were gunship/carrier hybrids, they had the firepower and shields/armor to survive, but also fighters for a force multiplier. And the Goa'uld pyramid ships were the same, heavily armored and gunned, while the fighters are force multipliers. I can't think of many sci-fi's where a carrier can truly afford to be built like modern sea-going carriers, and focus 100% on being a fighter/bomber launchpad and effectively being a glass cannon with little to no armor/shields, and nearly non-existent main battery.
In the defense of the Marg Sabl maneuver, it was originally introduced as just a way to get fighters out safely while engaged in combat. Thrawn only used it as a winning move once where it fit a specific psychological blind spot of the enemy commander - he never implied that it was anything more than that.
I think a major difference between conventional seafaring warships and their space counterparts is that there is more or a need to have some form of hanger or significant docking system for all larger ships. Not all space-oriented sci-fi has access to things like teleporters for troop transport, and the need for support craft often means that battleships often require significantly more utility than a naval fleet. Unlike naval vessels, which can use their decks as loading zones for all manner of equipment, space ships are often resupplying in space, and need to have a safe way of exchanging fuel, ammo, and personnel in large quantities that a docking hatch will not normally be sufficient for, almost necessitating at least one hanger to begin with. In a lot of cases, space battleships are required to be more flexible because they aren't always going to be run as part of a carrier group. I think a lot of the reason you see the hybrid-style ships is due to needing more flexibility than a traditional navy.
As SFIA always says: "There's no such thing as an unarmed spaceship." You might just find that "Be all, do all" battleships ARE the way of military spacecraft, with giant space-station/ships capable of firing lasers at distances of multiple astronomical units, and small fighter drones being nothing more than peacekeeping enforcement officers over smaller distances in between spacecraft.
Speaking of legend of the Galactic Heroes, carriers are there because most of their energy shields only covers the ship on the front so the fighters are meant to bypass that by attacking from other vectors like from the side. Carriers in Scifi might have some difficulty in some settings though. If your Scifi settings have most navy fighting at extreme BVR range, carrier might have a hard time fitting in since it would take ages for the carrier based craft to reach enemy (unless they have their own FTL).
If a SciFi setting has 'extreme range combat' (not BVR because visual range in space is... quite significant), then you probably either don't have carriers or the strikecraft a carrier launches are meant to be more 'mobile sensor and point defence emplacements' which allow your combat ships to better target their weapons and more easily defend against an enemy focusing fire because the strikecraft can relocate to 'concentrate' point defence fire on the ships that are focused on. With the exception of course coming when strikecraft are able to use a form of 'tactical' FTL which 'full size' warships can't for whatever reason. If the warships can use tactical FTL, then it's unlikely extreme range combat will be how things are fought and instead it would either be the slugging match or a bunch of 'pounce and dodge' where one side tries to 'pounce' on a target and take it out with an alpha strike so it can't fire back whilst the target attempts to 'dodge' out of the way and use it's own alpha strike to take out the Pouncer. The latter usually coming from settings where offensive capabilities greatly outweight defensive ones (at least when talking about ship durability under fire).
If you're doing extreme range, trading fire at multiple light seconds or more, the transit time of ordnance and/or strikecraft doesn't really matter. Everything that isn't an at or near lightspeed directed energy weapon, which have their own issues, is going to need guidance and a good reserve of delta V to have anything approaching a reasonable chance to hit. Which also means that the only difference between a fighter carrier and a missile carrier is what makes up the majority of its current loadout, assuming there's even a distinction drawn between fighter and missile. The only difference between a missile with submunitions and attack drone with guns is the latter's expectation of recovery, but if the drone can't swing back around to its carrier to be rearmed in a tactically useful interval of time then any provisions for recovery are wasted. A one way drone can be smaller, cheaper, and packed into your carriers in greater numbers, at which point its basically just a missile with a fancier warhead.
Thank you guys for the idea, I have a very hard time figuring out how to fit a carrier into my settings. My settings are that both sides would trade missiles and railgun at very extreme range so far that it took few hours to hit.
@@StacheMan26 You're completely right about the drone / missile stuff. I think it is overlooked how a carrier would certainly not have fighters with biological humans, but might instead plausibly have multipurpose drones. However, I think you're wrong about most things needing guidance. Maybe in a slightly lower tech universe without rapid fire relativistic particle cannons, clouds of rail-accelerated slugs can be employed. With enough volume of fire and good enough predictive algorithms it would be basically impossible to not hit with some slugs. In fact I think they would be more suseful offensively than missiles as they can be shot at higher speeds.
@@StacheMan26 That's actually the entire concept of my strikers. They're effectively kinetic missiles but with a machine gun turret mounted on their side, which is meant to protect them from interception and also have more chances at shooting out enemy weakpoints before impact, I like to describe them as missiles with aimable shrapnel for that purpose.
To be fair, battlecarriers (ie carriers with guns meant to engage the enemy after launching their aircraft) were developed in the Interwar years as navies were figuring out the carrier concept. It's also worth mentioning that none of these ideas persisted and were generally converted to full carriers if they were ever laid down.
I like how carriers can be used in Stellaris. They make it possible to have your most valuable ships further away from the fight, and strike craft can ignore shields. They also provide more targets for the enemies and are rebuilt during battle, so they provide some nice protection. However, putting hangars on your ships means you have less guns on them, and the kinds of guns you could have instead of hangars can be much more powerful... But also less accurate against smaller ships, and with a shorter range than strike craft.
Gundam doesn't just use 'runways', they almost always have catapults (like on ocean-going carriers) to impart initial momentum to the MS without expending propellant. That's those things the MS stands on that sort of clamp onto the feet at the beginning of most launch sequences. It's actually a pretty neat bit of world-building, you really only see the "runway" type launches on Earth-based faction ships, whereas space-based factions tend to have a less "gravitationally-oriented" approach, of either just dumping them out of a bay or launching them on some magnetized rails, again to impart initial momentum and conserve propellant. There's even some scenes when Zeon soldiers are on a Federation ship and they find it funny that the Federation makes their MS stand on the "ground", which plays into the whole theme of 'perspective' that runs through the whole franchise.
Actually that's not the only advantage: Drone systems do not require the supplies a human pilot would. There's several ways of utilising drone technology: Telepresence (I.E. remote control) and autonomous, but the problem with the fomer is that jamming and signal strength can play a role..
@douglasdarling7606 That only true for modern humans. Genetic modifications and cyber implants might limit the use of drones to several roles like recon,missile defense, loyal wingman
@@douglasdarling7606 Exactly. It's indisputable that drones will outcast a human being that is present in a ship side cockpit. But that's the issue with attempting to craft compelling stakes for a sci-fi space battle. It's equally indisputable that a bunch of unmanned drones slugging it out is no where near as emotionally investing as when there are living people inside those vessels.... So the question comes down to this, which would you rather have? A realistic setting or an emotionally compelling setting?... Perhaps a middle ground can be reached with genetically/physically enhanced pilots, but then again that will make producing those pilots much more expensive. Lol
A couple points of order here: RE: Naval carriers vs Sci-Fi Carrier/Battleships -- There is a VAST discrepancy in size that you did not take in to account much less use cases. Star Wars carrier/BS are 1/5km long and the Galactica is almost 1km. And this does not include height/decks. The largest US carrier is about 333m long (or a minimum 1/3rd as long) and only 76m tall including mast (about the same size difference to length). Add in use-cases where a naval carrier travels with a HUGE support fleet (that is also armed unlike BSG), your comparison stumbles. RE: Cylon Basestars -- They address this in universe that Basestars are NOT battleships. They carry an impressive missile loadout, but rely on fighters and support vessels for primary attack and defense.
I've had the discussion about combat carriers a few times, and my take on it is that once you start getting into the (frankly somewhat ludicrous) scale of Star Wars ships, the hangar facilities start to take up such a small relative part of the total volume of the ship that it doesn't really make sense to _not_ include a complement of fighter craft. Particularly in the case of something like the Imperial class, it gives the vessel a lot more utility without significantly reducing its combat potential. I'd argue that, at least in the case of the large ships of the original trilogy, the fighter complements are in many ways more analogous to the sea planes carried by some WW2 battleships rather than carrier air groups. The relative volume taken up by hangar facilities and fighter launch equipment on an ISD probably isn't greater than that of e.g. the Yamato (and since Star Wars fighters can stop on a dime, recovering them is more akin to hoisting a seaplane on board than a carrier landing). On a side note, I think the LAC carriers from Honorverse deserve a mention. They primarily serve as a platform for moving small, non-hyperspace-capable combat vessels into battle, and then hang back with their escorts out of range of enemy weapons.
One thing to mention is that in space, all large ships need to have a carrier capacity, even if it's just a couple shuttles like the Enterprise, as secondary craft are extremely important. The term "carrier" doesn't exactly mean what it does in today's naval world either. Sci-fi carriers are more like a combination of troop transport ships (like where Marines stay on MEUs), aircraft carriers (but with spacecraft), and cargo/military cargo ships. Carriers irl carry aircraft. Carriers in sci-fi carry multiple combat elements: 1) a ground force of vehicles, infantry, artillery, etc 2) air/space vehicles like fighters, bombers, GSA, drop ships, escape pods, etc 3) The enitre LCE like food, water, ammo, power, fuel, medical personnel & equipment, etc. They bring the whole fight to the planet, whereas you'd probably use 2 or 3 ships to do the same on earth irl (ground combat + air combat + logistics). This also allows fleets to send in one ship and escort it with various types of gunship (battleships, destroyers, corvettes, frigates, etc) rather than send a massive fleet of aircraft (or spacecraft) carriers, troop transport ships, logistical supply ships, and a couple fighting ships for protection. Sometimes you just don't have the manpower to send that many, so ships either go with no escort or don't go at all. Having a carrier means you have 1 asset to protect per fleet.
With larger factions, standarization and maintenance/repair are a factor, too. Much easier to keep your fleet in the field if you only have a few types of ships that need to be worked on.
I love the constant nods at the Cylon Toasters... And my favorite example of a space-based carrier using standard flight deck design is the multi-deck carriers from Space Battleship Yamato.
There is some precedent for battleship-carrier hybrids IRL, but only in the early age of carriers. HMS Furious was built as a battlecruiser, but had her forward guns removed and replaced with a flight deck (no change to the bridge position which of course caused problems until they changed it). The Lexington class carriers had 8 8-inch guns around their bridge right up until the start of WW2. They both did this because no one quite knew what to do with aircraft carriers starting out, and thought they might need to be able to defend themselves from surface combatants. Which of course never happened, but I would've loved to see a German or Japanese ship try to get in close with one of them thinking they were defenseless and getting a surprise of their lives.
@@HeIsAnAliYou're right, I can't believe I keep forgetting about USS White Plains. This is the second time that's happened. Granted, that 5"/38 is a pop gun compared to the 8" guns the Lexingtons had, but it was still a ballsy move to do a surface action with your one real cannon.
@@LlortnerofThat is true. But even moreso with spaceships, mass is an important factor. How many ships and how many missiles could be put onboard instead of big "surface action" guns?
@@wrenchinator9715 I didn't exclude missiles. And any action is going to be surface action. Though missiles aren't necessarily going to be more effective per mass.
The space carriers in Macross, especially seen in Macross Frontier do a lot of things well. The Fighter Carriers are pretty dedicatedly carriers, and only have Point Defense weapons beyond their fighter compliment. They also have 4 accelerator flight decks they use to propel fighters in the direction of combat to let them save their fuel for maneuvering, but can just release them from the bay via the elevators. Recovery is done by either fighter matching speed and being recovered by claw, or rapid/emergency recovery on the deck
I think that depends on what class you’re talking about, because the Uraga-class looks pretty conventional (aside from the lower launch deck being an extension of the hangar deck)…
Almost sounds like he is talking about the Guantanamo class AKA the Advanced ARMD class. Macross is notorious for various types of carrier designs all the way up to it's Macross class ships. I even think the Northampton class frigate can carry a small compliment of Variable fighters.
@@Wolfman053a Yea, Uraga being closely to conventional because it purpose is to work both in space and in atmosphere, even using as a seafaring vessel. Guantanamo class is like a space station, can still work in atmosphere but the retrieval of VF is pretty damn hard for them then
Favourite: The Quasar fire. If you actually flew it with the sense that "up means nothing" you can nose-down at the enemy, both shielding the launch bays with your top side (which you then put shields and armor on) as well as minimizing the cross-section the enemy can hit. Its not used this way, but it could be close to a sensible design, which is simple and can be mass-produced + does not require fancy flying from the fighter craft.
The battle carrier was also discussed in the late 1940s. Around the Development of the Montana Class Battleships that were to be the larger sisters to the Iowa. The notion was to remove the rear Mark 7 guns and give her an angled deck. However this would also extend her length considerably as they would have to add structures to accommodate a small flight wing. The plan was overall scrapped, allowing the Montana Class to remain the same and obtaining approval for production while the concept was placed on the drawing board. In the end the war ended so both the Montana class and experimental battle carrier never came to be. So for sci-fi to embrace the battle carrier concept is born out of what-if scenarios.
The battlecarrier concept is getting more and more relevant as the nature of warfare changes. We had THOUSANDS of ships in U.S. fleets during WWII but no missiles to speak of, so defending carriers with other ships in a "defense in depth" strategy was a practical counter to fighters and other ships. These days we are fielding a handful of ships in carrier task groups and modern combat theory favors standoff weapons like missiles and fighters instead of big ship-killing guns. Hell we don't even have more than a couple of short-range anti-missile or anti-fighter weapons on each ship! It's all about electronic countermeasures and missiles/fighters taking out the other guy's missiles and fighters. So with that in mind, a heavily-armored carrier with countermeasures and maybe a couple of big guns for bombardment are what you probably want. I know they use the Galactica's guns for ship-to-ship fights but they are bombardment weapons just like missiles--if those ships were moving around more then unguided munitions would be useless against anything except fixed targets. The battlecarriers also have to contend with no line-of-sight limitations as others have mentioned, but worst of all they have to survive an enemy that can literally jump in on top of them. That means anything without a good layer of armor is dead meat if something like a battleship jumps in right next to it.
in the classical naval carrier on an ocean perspective: carriers make no sense in space warfare, but as a mobile base with an ability to carry bays and crews and pilots and so on --- that makes a ton of sense.
@@everfaithful9272 sure, definitely, if fighters and other smaller craft have FTL, there's not a ton of reasoning, but if a medium to small size combat or support craft can't FTL or has massively limit fuel / oxygen / food / etc reserves, it immediately makes more sense
In a game setting, the carriers in the X series mostly make sense, with one major exception in the form of a light carrier that packs a punch like a frigate in X3: Albion Prelude. In X3, carriers make more sense as they generally have the cargo capacity to refill fighter missiles AND energy cells allowing them to jump to distant sectors and back, something few fighters can manage. In X4, carriers lost the ability to jump, and are generally very slow. It makes them much worse at rapid deployments than just sending the fighters on their own. They do have one major advantage: they can repair and resupply their fighters automatically. That makes them good, if expensive mobile home bases.
Interesting been a while since I played X3 - which carrier are you talking about? The Terran one? I always liked the carriers in X3 they (as you say) worked really well. Never tried X4 for a variety of reasons - some being that X rebirth was horrible
@RegentofSparta Oh right, Rebirth... 😅 I waited until others had given X4 a chance. I actually enjoy it a lot. I find it CPU intensive though. As for the M7 in X3, it's the Split Panther. Has good shields, carries 20-32 M3+ - M5 ships (🤯), equips 6 IBLs on the front turrets and 2 on either side, and has a weapons recharge generator only slightly worse than the Tiger. It's downsides are that it does not have main weapons (all turrets) and has about 60% laser capacitor capacity as that of the Tiger. But for a M7 at the same price as a Tiger, it's too good to pass up. So it ends up being good at almost anything a M7 can be asked to do.
With respect, the Japanese tried this tactic with their aviation battleships and cruisers such as Ise. So did the Americans with the Iowa-class. The Iowa-class aviation battleship idea went as far as having waterline models built and no further, but Ise and a cruiser with similar configuration, Tone, were actually built and used. The Japanese really went crazy trying to make things into carriers. They put planes on everything, even submarines (the Sen-Toku class of subs, I-400 through I-402. These subs later formed the basis of the later missile-carrying submarines, both conventional attack submarines with their cruise missiles and nuclear armed ICBM carriers.) Speaking of Japan, the anime Space Battleship Yamato even has a few true carriers, and of course there's Thundersub/Blue Noah, an entire anime about a space carrier that's basically a super-sized I-400-class. A VERY cool little anime, quite obscure though you can find it here on RUclips.
I think Mobile Suit Gundam has an interesting interaction with vulnerability of launch bays. Since energy shielding isn't really a thing in most Gundam settings, exposed launch bays have sometimes been depicted as vulnerabilities precisely because Mobile Suits are also tanks, so they can fly INSIDE THE HANGARS, and then a mobile suit is inside your carrier doing whatever the heck it wants.
Since you mentioned Legend of the galactic heroes, it,s worth noting to say that in this universe almost every battleship carries at least a squadron of fighters to especially last resort engagements (since the chaotic battlefield with that much things make difficult for not friendly fire), and the dedicated carriers who carry hundreds of fighters are always on the rear, usually escorted by another ships
One consideration as to how useful carriers are in space warfare is how difficult it is to achieve FTL travel in the setting. Is the FTL drive and necessary power source physically small enough to fit in a fighter size vessel? Even if it could fit, is the FTL drive so expensive to make or operate that equipping the fighter craft would be prohibitive? The carrier could effectively be little more than a box with an FTL drive. Except for most militaries wanting to recover their troops and assets, the carrier could almost be considered disposable. Or partially disposable with the hanger pod being jettisoned with the fighters and the expensive FTL drive retreating from the theatre.
Starcraft's Protoss have a dedicated Carrier starship, which is entirely defenseless except for it's massive fleet of combat fighter drones it can replace rapidly over time. They work best when accompanied by other support craft like Phoenix Fighters or Void Rays.
I want to point out that the very first generation of aircraft carriers were designed with anti-ship guns. The Lexington and the Saratoga were converted from battlecruisers and had 8 inch guns. Also the late-war partial conversion of the IJN Ise and Hyuga were designed as battlecarriers with the front half remaining battleships while the rear was converted into a seaplane carrier. I should point out that the Akagi and Kaga were built with 8" guns as well, but again they were battlecruiser conversions.
I would consider the dual-purpose nature of space carriers as an off shoot of the environment. Water-based carriers generally only have 180 degrees of structure to work with, in space you have a possible 360 degrees of internal and external space for mounting bays/armaments. Especially if they are built in space docks and don't do planetary landings. And as someone pointed out, space fighters typically don't have a higher flight time than in-system maneuvering/transit. And it's likely that any space-faring species would have system defenses, thereby requiring any warship to be at least moderately efficient in self-defense.
I think it's far more likely to have something like the Arsenal Ship. A lightly armored (relatively) capital ship that just carries a ridiculous amount of missiles of all types. It would make the more sense than deploying a bunch of manned vehicles that will either be too fragile to withstand the radiation output of the ships they are sharing a battlefield with, or too cost prohibitive to be to protected enough to stay in the fight.
I think the one thing I like most is when a ship built for one task gets co-opted & refit for another. For instance, the Lucrehulk was initially just a very heavy freighter, but they found out that its cargo bays & armor could make them pretty decent armored carriers, so they were co-opted into warships.
To carry the WW2 metaphor through... battleships did have planes they could launch, but they were almost exclusively for scouting and range spotting. They first appeared at the end of WW 1 or the inter-war period. Retrieval was a tedious task of a sea landing, putting up next to the ship, and being craned aboard and prepped for another launch or folded up and stowed in a makeshift hanger on the desk. The first Aircraft Carriers developed during the end of WW 1/inter-war period from the hulls from Battleships reconfigured into carriers. Some featured multiple elevations of decks, the lower and upper for launch when space allowed, and the upper for retrieval.
Being fair to _Battlestar Galactica_ 2003, the _Galactica_ was the last surviving military vessel. Multiple ship types might have been valuable, but since everything got nuked at the beginning, it had to make due. I expect there may have been gunships at one point. The _Galactica_ looks like it's good for spreading flack against nearby fighters and missiles, but not delivering big damage to the basestars. In _Space Battleship Yamato_ they could only build one ship, so again it had to do everything. In the first episode we see a large and varied navy before the major loss at the Battle of Pluto.
My favorite carriers are in the game Children of a Dead Earth, housing disposable, remotely-controlled attack drones capable of intercepting other drones, precisely disabling warship modules, or even engaging and destroying multiple capital ships at once from extreme distances. The carriers themselves can be heavily-armed too; my own carriers typically have large amounts of missiles in addition to the drones, along with railguns, lasers, and many armor layers just in case something intercepts the carrier.
CDE drones are definitely a more realistic example of what a space fighter might be, in fact they're essentially just a missile which carries a gun and limited supply of ammo. Take the concept even further than they'd likely just be a larger type of munition, basically a large torpedo with some limited ability to protect itself, which would still carry a warhead and still be expendably light and cheap. You'd likely deploy them pre-engagement where they'd act as a screen against enemy fighters and missiles before racing off to both expend the remainder of their ammo against the enemy capital ships before finally attempting to ram them and detonate, fulfilling the torpedo half of their role. If they end up not needing to be expended then they can be returned to their mothership and resupplied.
Battlestar Galactica's hybrid carrier/battleship concept make some sense in light of the setting: with enemy ships able to jump in at any time, you can't use distance to protect a pure carrier; your ships need to have the ability to fight close-in, at least for a while.
The evolved carriers in the Honorverse books recognize that they're basically big transport ships and rarely go out without large numbers of screening warships, unless they're doing something sneaky far in the distance.
I think one of the reasons or "excuses" for carriers to also engage is combat is the nature itself of space. Logic dictates, if you have a big ship with an FTL engine to carry all your fighters, you won't waste resources on installing FTL engines to your fighters, since that's redundant and makes it so the carrier doesn't really have a reason to exist. So, in most settings, let's say star trek, you can have the USS Fat-Ass come out of warp "near" to a borg cube or wathever and drop a lot of fighters armed with their best redshirts. Probably some gunned-up version of a shuttle or something like that. If you drop too far from the cube, even at close FTL, those fighters will take minutes, maybe hours to reach the battle, the cube will have assimilated the Enterprise or whoever you're trying to save that day. If you drop close enought to "be on time", you've basically put your carrier into shooting range and best you can hope is for there to be a moon to hide behind or something, but that won't always be the case. So, either the USS Fat-Ass has some decent shields, phasers and a bunch of torpedos to pull their weight, or they're just a giant target for the Borg to play duck hunt with. And if it gets too damanged, you also have a lot of fighters without warp drives who better hope they win the fight, because they ain't getting rescued anytime soon otherwise.
Building on this, I can *maaaybe* the the point if you make up some watered-down FTL engine that maybe lets the carrier drop the ships WHILE on FTL, get the fuck out of there, and then come back once the fight ends to pick up whoever's left. That might be a realistic use of a space-carrier, but it makes for a very un-heroic sip to drop the good guys to fight and flee to safety.
I grew up watching and thinking about the exterior flight decks of Gamilon carriers in Space Battleship Yamato, and contrasting them with the launch catapult system on the Yamato/Argo, and how that ship recovers, and sometimes launches, small craft from what was the real Yamato's enclosed boat bay: those long tubes either side of the stern. I knew the second one was just cooler, as well as making more sense in space, and have always hearkened back to it. They are only open to the stern, partly following Spacedock's tactical evaluations here, and IIRC, they aren't a single cross-hull space like I believe the combination boat bay and hangar on the real Yamato class was. The Gamilon carriers of Space Battleship Yamato, in contrast, are barely thought out at all. They're generally not seen much, though, and we really don't get to learn anything about them, so it's likely that not much time or effort was spent on them, which in practical terms makes a lot of sense, especially with 1980s-era animation tech! The Alliance cruisers in Firefly ship a sizeable squadron of "gunships," light attack aerospaceplanes that also seem to be used roughly like the RHIB boats that modern navies and coast guards use as boarding craft. These gunships, which look similar to early YF-22 designs and some Gundam designs, are docked with a ventral docking clamp on the underside of the skyscraper-like cruiser, and maneuver downward and away when deployed. Similar craft are seen being used in atmosphere by law enforcement. It's unlikely, given the show's canonical politics, that these "Alliance cruisers" were built with any idea that they would see combat with comparable ships. David Weber's Honorverse re-invents carriers in the middle to late books, but I don't remember how they were used tactically. They almost exclusively carried missile corvettes instead of small, fighter/bomber type craft. I definitely think more sci-fi should make use of carriers as standoff vessels, perhaps as unreachable antagonists. Also, there's the idea that they could be needed for planetary attack, carrying dedicated aerospaceplanes instead of spacecraft-killing craft. One thing a lot of commenters are missing is, even if dedicated carriers don't need flight decks, they're still going to be boxes full of small spacecraft, lots of fuel, and lots of weapons. It takes a lot, to make a space carrier less vulnerable. In my original take on Lasers&Feelings, the Hive travel in what the Consortium call "carriers," imagine a sized-up Protoss carrier, deploying Formic swarm-ships instead of robotic drones. It's unknown to the Consortium whether or not the Hive have "queens" the way the Formics from Ender's War do. In another original concept from my youth, the entire theory of space warfare was fictionalized, and carriers were medium-size vessels, one of several highly specialized types of "cruiser" that would be used as needed.
In modern warfare, a carrier isn't as much a weapon of force as it is a weapon of intimidation - you park one off the coast of a place you want to threaten. If you want to bomb a place in an actual war, you use aircraft from a static base so you don't need to be limited by the types of planes that carriers are restricted to. Even a full load of fighters from a Ford-class CVN is only really capable of maintaining air superiority and surgical strikes, you need ground-based bombers to actually go to war effectively. The carriers keep the bombers from the ground bases from getting shot down. So taking that into account, it does make sense for a combined arms deployment ship like a Battlestar in space where you can't call on a dedicated ground base to do the actual work of destroying the enemy en masse. Battlestars are there to do the actual attacking, and their fighters are there to make sure that they can get close enough to do so without enemy fighters launching nukes at them. In many ways they are similar to the Soviet "aviation cruisers" that carried the full missile arsenal of a real cruiser along with some fighters for defense, recon and strike missions.
Fighters aren't the only type of aircraft on a carrier. The limits of an aircraft carrier is the amount of fuel and ordinance it can carry to keep up its mission. With constant resupply you can keep up a fair number of bombing runs. Granted, the same aircraft at an airfield can handle heavier loads with more fuel but a carrier can still handle the job for a short time. In either case you still need infantry to get anywhere beyond harassment. Dedicated bombers aren't as useful as they once were. Most of that is handled by multirole fighters.
@@obliviouz Moving entire starbase between systems seems extremely unfeasible. By design a starbase would either orbit a planet or be placed on a Lagrange point, in both cases having enough propulsion capability to stay in their designated place. The energy required to move the bulk significant distance would be magnitudes larger than that, at which point you'd end up with a starship anyway.
The thing with the Battlestar is that it's more battleship than carrier. That works, because one mission is prioritized over the other. But while it can hold it own alone, to go to war it needs support. The Colonial Fleet had a wide variety of ships, including dedicated carriers. Plus the battlestar concept as it is, only worked because despite including some realistic physics, it still was "naval battle in space".
Interesting thing to note about LoGH carriers is that they are always deployed in-fleet (never independently like how most other classes are used - yes, even battleships get used in the setting for picket duty), and because of the extreme engagement distances fleets fight at, carriers are more of a powerful short-range glass cannon that are used, quote, "to establish control over the local battlefield".
I'm quite fond of the Homeworld game series carriers. Very limited guns for point defense but they are multipurpose utility vessels; they carry fighters and other small craft during long range FTL jumps like "standard" space carriers but they also have onboard assembly bays to build new ships, and mineral ore processing capabilities, as well as very strong sensor packages.
The problem is that, depending on the Sci-fi franchise, large warships can appear suddenly from hyper space/warp/light speed and be within gun range of carrier vessels instantly. It's as if the Wwii battleships could move as fast as the strike aircraft launched from the carriers. So this gives some credence to the hybrid Battlestar/Star Destroyer type ships.
The existence of instantaneous FTL is also why the Galactica-style combat landings are a thing in scifi. The fighters being left behind by the carrier is a real danger when the carrier can travel much faster than the fighters.
The thing with "Battlecarrier" style ships is that they CAN make sense, yes specializing makes more sense, a separate battleship and carrier would both perform better than 2 battle carriers but the issue is that often the setting will restrict the deployment to 1 ship; you might get more every now and then but these ships are not meant to be specialized they are meant to be jack of all trades vessels that can operate alone and outside of a fleet where a specialized vessel can shine. Stargate, Battlestar Galactica (Though they were a part of fleets pre war), Star Wars (not always but often single capital ship deployments),and Kinda star trek (though they aren't a 'military' per say but ships often are alone) to name a few.
That's a nice round up of the various science fiction methods of transporting small craft. Also a nice critique on those tropes of the high cool factor launch tubes and recovery tunnels. I think you are only missing perhaps one method not often used in science fiction but is itself, a very common trope. The Mothership. One very good 'Das Boot' in space, book was 'Passage at Arms', By Glen Cook. Part of the 'Starfishers' series. 'Passage at Arms' offers up so extremely interesting space combat ideas that closely mimic submarines in space. One idea he posited however does not quite mimic real warfare. The Mothership is very akin to a aircraft carrier. A milch cow and repair and recreation station. The small craft that were carried were rather large, containing a crew of about 20 or so. Fully self contained, they dont need a mothership, however because of the size constraints, living in one for months at a time would be bad for ones wellbeing. A problem often seen in german U-boats or allied Destroyers. The mothership suckles up to a dozen of these patrol ships, dropping them off and recovering them on its long patrol. Very much like a carrier, they are never used in combat and are lightyears away doing other duties, nowhere even close to hostile areas. because of this they resemble more a framework to dock the patrol ships too. because of their size, they are docked externally. This leads to the common problem of everyone assuming a attack craft as small. And I gurantee you 100% NO attack ship will be small. this is one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out trope in science fiction combat I have ever seen.
nebulous fleet command does fighters well; taking off from individual small pods with blast doors that open akin to a docking port but wedged inside the hull and inverted
5:43 Speaking of outside storage, the Confederacy of Indipendent Systems' fighters may have the best system yet. Even better than reversing. Just attach to the hull somewhere and walk back to the designated resting points Probably taking turns in the hangar for repairs and maintenance Volture droids are fantastic
8:18 in fairness there are plenty of examples during inter war period of America, UK, Germany, Japan slapping 8 in or bigger guns onto carriers or least wanting to
In Wing Commander, many cap ships could do both fight and launch fighters. The Tiger's Claw and the especially the Concordia weren't unarmed carriers, but the Yorktown- Ranger- and Lexington- classes from the later games were definitely purpose built carriers who were useless in a fight. And even the hybrid carriers did most of their work via fighters and bombers from a huge distance away.
I was thinking about your comment regarding SF carriers being typically battle carriers whereas navies those are separate ships. The biggest reason for having separate naval ships is simply deck space - a naval carrier simply doesn't have any available deck space to mount large gun turrets or missile tubes. For space vessels this is less of an issue as the surface of the ship doesn't have to be dedicated to launch & landing areas and there's simply more surface area to mount gun turrets. However, there are two other reasons for having separate vessels. First, more specialized vessels can be smaller and therefore less massive and requiring less propulsion. OTOH A single battle carrier will require less materials and manpower than multiple vessels. Second having multiple vessels also increases flexibility (easier to add vessels if required / desired) and survivability (mission can continue even if a single vessel is lost or damaged).
Space Battleship Yamato is definitely guilty of "have your cake and eat it to". The titular ship somehow fits a very large launch bay, storage space, and maintenance room for a full combat squadron plus a few other specialized craft. All built not in a carrier, but a resurrected battleship Yamato. The franchise is by far my favourite, but that bit requires an extensive amount of handwaving.
Yeah.. I love the show but Yamato has way too many fighters aboard it and it's recovery via slow grabbing arms would take hours. Given how many times she seems to repair her damage on her own with no dry dock, I just shut my brain off.
My biggest gripe is lack of escort ships to protect these carriers/semi-carriers. They show up in Star Wars when convenient, but you should see them most of the time. Take the battle of Coruscant, where you have Venators doing broadsides, instead of where they *should* be with their hangers and long range turbolasers, far away from broadside distances, with smaller, heavily armored and heavily armed vessels providing fire at medium and close ranges. All that and lack of any real "air" defenses (or point defenses i guess) other than WW2 style flak guns that shoot lasers. Actual flak shells would be more effective, spraying shrapnel over a wide area, without air resistance you can even fire them well ahead of incoming small craft and force less optimal approaches where other guns and point defense missile batteries would shred incoming ships.
tbh rotary launching systems make the most sense since spin gravity systems will already be present most likely, like a giant spinning revolver mag full of microfighters that spins to fling them out on rails with angular momentum. Their launch can be timed precisely with the spin of the hangar to project them in a specific direction and save precious onboard reaction mass for the drones.
It should also be noted that in the Freespace games, the carriers are labeled as "Destroyers" despite never really being seen in direct combat outside of "something has gone horribly wrong".
One thing that occurred to me a while back is the extreme unlikeliness that we may never develop proper protection for star ships traveling at high velocities, from even small objects, let alone weapons fire. Which is why I figured that it could be sensible for such ship to load their munitions on to ship orbiting drones or pods to do the fighting (like something between the pods from 2001: a Space Odyssey and the Star Furies from B5). They could also be Responsible for Electronic Warfare, the thing that could truly determine how long the ship would remain intact.
It's rather telling that the best way (I found) to use carriers in Battlestar Galactica is to run a pure Berzerk Carrier fleet, which happens to be the both the fastest carrier ship AND carries the most fighters with the highest survivability. My sequence of orders after jumping in to a fight: 1) All 7 Berzerk Carriers turn 180 degrees and stack on top of eachother vertically. 2) All 7 Berzerk Carriers divert ALL power to engines, and flee the enemy. While sprinting at max speed, they wiggle side to side to confuse long range dumbfire missiles. 3) AFTER the cylons release all fighters and order them to target my carriers, I release all 14 squads of anti-fighter fighters. They guard the carriers from lucky shots from long range missiles. 4) The turn before enemy fighters get in range, all carriers abruptly stop fleeing and present their broadside weaponry. My entire fleet focus fires individual enemy fighter squadrons as they get in range. Meanwhile, my fighters focus fire enemy fighters. If my fighters get attacked or focused by the enemy, they immediately retreat to the hangers for repairs. 5) After winning the fighter battle, all Berzerk's proceed to flee at max speed. All uninjured fighters dive around the battlefield to get behind the enemy capital ships. 6) All fighters proceed to blast the rear armor of enemy capital ships, which typically don't have point defense or significant armor plating. From here on out I'm usually destroying 1 capital ship per turn. 7) Once the enemy fleet is down to only a few ships (typically slower basestars, the only capital ship fighters struggle against), the Berzerk's turn around and finally engage the enemy. All power is taken away from the engines and diverted to weapons for a range bonus. Did I mention that Berzerk's have the best range in the game? A 7 stack can sometimes kill a basestar without taking ANY return fire if the relative velocity is low enough. Most of the ships in the game are either specialists, which means they are amazing when they aren't being destroyed by fighters or missiles, or generalists, which means they can technically do anything but are too slow to choose their engagements. (I lost a LOT of battlestars before I figured out they were practically useless). The Berzerk is the only exception. It has all the tools needed to flee unwinnable fights, survive deadly but limited resources like missiles and fighters, then turn around and outrange the enemy when they pursue in a stretched out conga line. If I had to design a space carrier, it would probably be just like the Berzerk - with two important changes. Instead of broadside weapons, they'd have rear mounted weapons that would allow fighting and fleeing at the same time. Instead of just having massive aft engines, they'd also have smaller fore engines that would let them "back" up into artillery range of the enemy while reserving the option to flee at maximum speed should the enemy pursue. Open hangars are fine. If you get hit, you're probably dead anyway. At least with open hangers, your fighters can launch fast enough to handle incoming missiles/fighters/asteroids on short notice. (Note: Yes, the AI is dumb. However, my trick worked shockingly well in multiplayer - after taking into account my opponent had many times my fleet power due to the population limit of capital ships - up until I found out that there's an invisible wall that prevents long chases in multiplayer skirmish mode. In a REAL space battle, speed and mobility is king.)
@4:20 I liked the approach of Space: Above and Beyond. The fighters launched from slender bays barely as tall as the ships were, which made them hard targets to hit. The key design element was that the ships' cockpits were detachable. There were pressurized "cockpit rooms" with ~8-10 cockpits each above the launch bays that allow the pilots to get into their cockpits and get last minute assistance from various flight techs and mechanics. Once the pilots were strapped in, the crew would leave, massive pressure doors would close, the floor around each cockpit would open up, and the cockpits would be lowered down to "plug in" to the fighters. Then the "completed" ship would launch. On one hand you could argue that creates new failure points, but it also solves a lot of problems. Plus, detachable cockpits can be made of more durable materials and designed to be used as "escape pods" if the surrounding ship is damaged or destroyed. It also solved another practical problem...a TV show set with a couple of freestanding cockpits rather than full-sized ship models (or something approaching that) is a heck of a lot cheaper to build and maintain. You can even upgrade the ships later in the series and--since those are just CGI after the cockpits lower--you can just keep on using the same compact "cockpit only" set.
The big question in any sci fi setting is can “aircraft” reliably kill capital ships. If the answer is yes then a dedicated carrier makes sense as IRL the “aircraft” will form the main offensive punch of any fleet. If the answer is no or not easily then using the “battle carrier” approach makes a lot more sense. Even if they can kill capital ships maybe they’re still capable of performing missile interception or taking on smaller destroyer or torpedo boat equivalents that can carry ordinance big enough to be able to hurt the capital vessels.
David Weber's Honor Harrington series has a ship class called Carrier Light Attack Craft or CLAC which is a pure carrier with some point defense. The LAC compliment *is* it's offensive capability and relies on screens and the idea that it is not even supposed to be in the engagement envelope of active combat for protection.
What's interesting is that Weber actually somewhat avoids the idea of fighters in space given that a LAC usually masses upwards of 11,000 tons with crew complements in the double digits.
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A game you guys might like, is Spaceborne 2. Its a passion project about space age combat
I am glad you pointed out something htat has bothered me about space carriers for a while. Using them as front line ships. I always thought you'd keep the carrier away from the point of contact with any long range sniper ships and supply vessels and just let it disgorge hundreds or even thousands of fighters to do the fighting for the carrier.
Not saying you can't have a front line combat carrier but doing so reduces its fighter complement as you now have to have space and resources for heavy guns.
Carriers in Sci-Fi are more like Aviation Battleships. the the USS Nebraska and a few of the japanese ones.
I don’t really know how you would classify this or if it would even be possible. But if you haven’t already, I think you guys should try and do a video similar to this. But maybe with craft that could almost be seen like the outer space equivalent of a submarine.I don’t know if that’s even possible but you know just a dumb idea.
Here’s a few questions: (1) How realistically viable are most “super-weapons” in Sci-Fi, (2) are there any good hard sci-fi super-weapons, and (3) what Is your favorite “super weapon” (and why is it the Death Star?)
Cylon raiders used to reverse into their bays, but the eights kept complaining about the beeping
:D :D :D Made me crack up.
gonna tap dat toaster
Just imagine a thousand of them getting into a shouting match over coms as to who gets go move first
@@UltraBadass From the series the Raiders had the same intelligence as birds of prey, so really you're dealing with massive-scale falconry.
burn
"How do Cylon Raiders return to their Toast Racks?"
Viper Pilot: "They don't."
Raiders are piloted by robots, so they don't have to worry about g-forces. They can zoom in do a flip and park it. They're computers, so calculating the landing solution isn't a problem. I'm sure there's a repair bay that the ships get auto-piloted to for repairs once the cylons have exited.
@@MrAkaacerI think it was meant to be a boast: _They don't...because we shot them down._
@@MrAkaacer Cylon raiders are robot organic hybrids. They've got some squishy bits
@@MrAkaacer considering Cylons can just be downloaded into a new body, they don't even need to return. And as we see with Scar, an immortal enemy fighter pilot is dangerous, even if you shoot it down.
@@MrAkaacer Robots? Pretty sure those ships were like half-organic... like animals basicly with intestines, Starbuck stole one and flew it if i remember...
i literally jusst started rewatching battlestar galactica... blood & chrome was good.. now to season1, already hate the pilot... baltar and that actor who cant keep her clothes on... pff... ruined it imho... if this nonsense wouldnt be there, the series would have been way way better...
The question of practically of carriers in space combat.... well look at naval carriesrs... Nimitz class... what arsenal it has and can carry over 100 F18's...
pretty insane specs actually... not a easy task to bring down those carriers, and US has like i think 11 of them? China has only 1 or 2.. :D
tho China generally has now larger naval fleet than america, a lot of destroyers and their destroyer F5 is like cruiser size, 350~ of those... no wonder US wants to focus on China, rather of thinking of supporting EU in ukraine war....
The Starcarrier series of books by Ian Douglas bring up early-on a rather great point about magnetic-acceleration launch tubes. Once the flight wing is away, there's nothing stopping the carrier from just loading a giant car-sized slug into the tubes and turning them into perfectly functional giant coil guns. Just as long as you have the capability of (literally) amping up the power output.
That makes sense but to me it would be more practical to launch a torpedo equivalent.
I should ask him about those. Really brilliant idea.
A mass-driver is a mass-driver, I suppose. Might be a bit finicky to aim though.
@@CaptainBlueTech Not necessarily in space. Depends on the scale and faculties of the ship. On Earth there are two main things that limit our ability to deliver destructive energy to a target.
1) Propulsion. With the exception of the wildly expensive and cumbersome US Navy Rail Gun which isn't actually used except for research, we use chemical propellents which transform stored chemical energy into kinetic energy in a projectile. Bullets, missiles, cruise missiles, ICBMs, all of them. The amount of energy that can be transferred to the projectile is limited by the rate at which the chemical reaction of the propellent happens to release its energy. Rockets and missiles are less restricted by this because they burn their propellant as they travel to the target, but, for the same reason, it takes a long time to burn that propellant and that may be time you don't have (I'll explain that later), and the more energy you try to add with more fuel, the more mass it must accelerate and therefore the slower the acceleration.
2) Our atmosphere limits the amount of energy we can efficiently deliver to a target as kinetic energy in the form of a solid projectile due to drag. We get around this by using chemical explosives and incendiaries because they store large amounts of chemical energy to be released into the target on or shortly after impact. The torpedo is the perfect example because they deliver essentially no kinetic energy to the target. They can't. The drag from being immersed in water is way too high. Real ones used in water don't hit at all typically, they blow up underneath using magnetic detonators. All the destructive energy is from the explosives. The transfer of energy from the torpedo to the target is not that efficient necessarily, but it's better than in air because water is incompressible and fairly dense. The advantage of being in the water is that it's easy to load torpedoes with very large amounts of explosives due to buoyancy, so it's still effectively delivers a lot of destructive energy to the target and it does so under the waterline, so damage causes flooding.
Space, meanwhile, is a vacuum so no drag and it has no horizon or major gravity well to limit its line of sight and weapon range either. Projectiles will travel in straight lines without slowing down forever essentially, unless they hit something. This brings us back to the US Navy Rail Gun. It is big and expensive, but spaceships are even bigger and more expensive so that is less of a concern. The advantage is that a rail gun can dump as much energy into a projectile as it has electrical energy available. Electric currents turn the coils into powerful electromagnets that fling the projectiles with an extraordinary amount of force, meaning acceleration and top speed are essentially uncapped. You could potentially fire projectiles at significant fractions of the speed of light. The type of ammunition is also really simple. It just needs to be magnetic and fit within the coils. You could shoot big or small projectiles no problem and the ammo will never misfire or explode on the ship because it contains no chemical energy in the form of propellent or explosives. Fictional large space warships also typically contain some form of serious electrical energy production like nuclear reactors. A ship could run the reactor for day, filling every battery and capacitor on the ship full energy, and then release it at the speed of light into a projectile that will hit its target with all that kinetic energy focused at the point of impact. The time-to-target would be much shorter than that of a missile and it'd cause deep penetrations rather than surface explosions (particularly dangerous because the most dangerous thing in space is being exposed to space itself as water boils right out of your 70% water body when you depressurize, causing you and ALL your cells to explode). Your ship could be getting ripped to shreds before you get your missiles out of their tubes and a suit perforation from solid or molten spalling could mean your end at any moment, if the shockwave from the iron ball bearing coming through the wall with enough energy to melt titanium to like butter alone doesn't kill you.
The only caveat might be a nuclear missile. Yes it has all the issues of missiles, but boy does it deliver a lot of energy.
@@AsheramK I most definitely agree with you, in regards to the problem with aiming. I can think of some good uses for it, still. Depending on where they're located. Planetary bombardment is the first thing that comes into my mind.
If they're side mounted, facing outward, it would be exactly like cannons were placed, in the old naval ships. When the Broadside Technique was the most common form of warfare.
Taking it just a step or two further, if you were launching pods capable of releasing multiple projectiles after launch, they could make for a fantastic "Grapeshot" launcher for use against incoming missiles. Or against enemy fighters, for that matter.
I suppose that if you wanted to turn the power WAY down, you could also use them to eject a minefield, or debris field into the path of a pursuing vessel.
I think the hybrid carrier-combat vessels make sense in most settings where they are present. A real world dedicated naval carrier can be operated without fear of a battleship jumping, warping or dropping out of hyperspace right next to it without any warning.
In an universe where FTL requires no gates or other fixed locations, every capital vessel is at risk of direct combat with another capital vessel. That means every sensible capital vessel should have decent protection and if you are going to make it protected, you might as well arm it to fend for itself against smaller threats so you don't need to dedicate escort ships (which the FTL renders less important in screening role) or half of your fighters and bombers (since just fighters isn't enough when bombers aren't the only thing that can realistically jump you) to protect the carrier.
In real life naval carriers, the whole top surface and lengths of the ship needs to be dedicated for that role. In most sci-fi settings, carrying and operating fighters/bombers only requires a relatively compact and enclosed space on the vessel. That being said, even real life non-carrier combat ships often had or have catapult launched spotting aircraft or helicopters respectively, which similarly only require relatively little space but offer a lot of flexibility.
Fighters make no sense in an environment with no horizon to obstruct line of sight. Nothing beats covering the space vehicle in missile tubes and CIWSs. Besides maneuvering being pointless with infinite line of sight and no cover, you don't even need to change attitude much, just let the missiles do it themselves, plus overlapping fields of fire. Bombers are especially useless and specialized bombers, rather than multirole fighters that can deliver bombs, are becoming obsolete even today.
The only story I know of that has logical explanations for carriers and bombers is George Lucas' Star Wars saga (Episodes 1-VI).
@@everfaithful9272There is a potential use, depending on ranges and weapon types. You could use fighters as a sort of remote point defense system, intercepting incoming anti-ship missiles before they build up so much speed that interception becomes effectively impossible. The other use, off the top of my head, would be to create an additional attack vector for the enemy to worry about, which depending on whether or not ships are armored could dramatically complicate an otherwise simple ship-to-ship engagement. A Star Destroyer-style ship, for example, has excellent line-of-sight armor thickness against attacks from the front and sides, but would have significant difficulty dealing with fire from above or below.
Right On. Also Carriers on Earth only have to worry about up, down & horizontal attacks ...Space Carriers have to deal with possible 360 Degrees attack.
Even Earth Carriers have to carry some amount of CIWS & Mid-Range Defence Systems. Space Carrier needs CIWS to deal with Fighter, Fighter Bombers, a Mid-Range Defence against Mid-Size/Mid-Distance Enemy Ships ...Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers and against heavy hitter stand off beasts like Battleships & Dreadnoughts.
Whether dedicated carriers are desirable or not actually depends more on the role of the craft that you are intending on deploying from the capital ships.
In a sci-fi setting, embarked craft would range from snub fighters to small transports (cods); patrol craft, like a pt boat, could operate independently for long enough that they're not really embarked as attached.
Some roles:
Fighter/interceptor
Bomber/attack
Electronic warfare
Early warning (active scout)
Supply
Search/rescue
Reconisence
While point defence should be effective, engaging enemy attack craft before they can reach your fleet us prefered, which requires interceptors.
Interceptors would also be better suited to engaging pt boats.
Warfare evolves, a piece of equipment or tactic is developed to take advantage of a weakness; a defense is developed; something else is developed; and so on.
While microjumps may be possible to close range, it may leave the attacker open to counter attack; it is so dependent on the setting, there is no one-size-fits-all, it needs to be evaluated by the rules of the setting, and by the thoughts of the culture deploying the fleet.
I could easily see a culture that views lauched craft as a form of cavalry, even employing cavalry formation tactics; even if they're ineffective.
@@robertpopa2628 I can see his point though. If rather than a single ship, you jump a small squadron to shooting range, it's no longer a suicide mission but an assault.
Lest we forget, the Wing Commander game series was literally about pilots on a space carrier. The franchise was very much inspired by WW2 in space, so the carriers (Tiger's Claw, Victory, Lexington, etc.) were vulnerable to capital ship and fighter/bomber attacks, later entries were also through-deck carriers to boot. :)
Came in here to say the TCS Concordia from Wing Commander. Loved these games as a kid. I probably have hundreds of hours of flight sortie time and who knows how many dead Kilrathi were left in my wake.
@@my00t8 She went before her time.
THANK YOU! Someone else thinking the same thing.
They do have a Wing Commander scene at 2:20. It's from Super Wing Commander though.
@@jgummert58 yeah I noticed the SWC claw. :)
Honestly space Carriers make more sense as mobile patrol craft bases. They’re big and slow and not meant to actually fight anyone, but they are really useful for setting up quick garrisons or anti-piracy operations
Even just long haul cargo or as a staging point for things like setting up new infrastructure.
More sensible to use a destroyer tender in that situation. A mothership where destroyer and frigates dock against for service or transport.
I think Generation Tech has mentioned the Venators being good for that a lot, especially in regards to the ISD's not doing that nearly as well.
Yep more a mobile space station than an actual carrier.
HMS Hermes was employed on anti-pirate operations in the 20's and 30's in the SE Asia area
In BSG we don't see a dedicated Carrier or other ships is because they were all destroyed. A Battle Star was supposed to be part of a battle group like our Aircraft Carriers
In the BSG Deadlock games (which I think are cannon) they have a dedicated carrier called the Atlas class.
@@LostSanityAgain and I both love and hate that ship. Shockingly tough but insanely slow compared to most others. Which wouldn’t be that big a deal except that for some reason, despite being a dedicated carrier, it has fewer aircraft slots than some battlestars, making it not feel as much like a carrier as it should be. If a frigate can have its own fighter squadron, a dedicated carrier should exceed most others’ fighter complements, and yet in-game this isn’t the case.
I would recommend checking out Deadlock. It's a pretty fun game. It actually has a cool concept of having a lot of Colonial ships that lead up to the Battlestar and give sort of a reason why it was better to have a Battlestar, as the older Colonial carriers didn't really carry effective firepower to take down a Basestar.
@@John-fk2ky I think the reason why they did it (besides balancing) was that the Atlas was a really old ship design, like Colonial Imperial design. It was (at least speculated by some), to be replaced by the Artemis Battlestar, since it was just simply better. I really wish they offered modding support for Deadlock as it would have allowed modders to come up with such cool ideas for the game.
@@cmedtheuniverseofcmed8775 I would if it wasn't for the fact that it's turn-based and 2D (movement, that is).
I think part of the reason for the carrier/battleship trope (besides simplicity) is that a) space carriers don't have to make themselves as cripplingly weak in gun battles as real ones, since runways don't work the same way and b) space fighters and bombers are not usually depicted as having vastly longer ranges than gunnery. The entire point of the WWII carrier is that the planes can attack things hundreds of miles further away than guns can, so carriers can be extremely weak at short range but capable of extremely long-distance attacks. Space fighters, on the other hand, are rarely shown deploying far from their base on their own. This might be because of the nature of the extreme environment (large ships can hold much more life support and walking-around room) but also because with hyperdrives and big engines, large spacecraft are often depicted as being faster over long distances than fighters.
If the fighters cannot go very far from the base, relatively speaking, it makes sense for the carriers to be more prepared for close-range battle.
But if that's the case, what's the point of the fighters?
Might as well seal up those holes in your big ship's hull and give it more or bigger guns. Or both.
@@nigeldepledge3790 There are non-combat roles that aircraft serve in modern navies, like reconnaissance, patrols, and of course, shuttling people to and from the ship. In a spaceship, all of these are even more valuable - especially since many large ships in scifi simply can't land at all, or at least won't have a good time if they do.
So a large capital ship would need at least one hangar bay for shuttles, which is how the original Imperial Star Destroyer was mostly seen using its belly hangar and how Star Trek ship almost exclusively use theirs.
Using fighters in a battle can have some specific strengths depending on the setting. In Star Wars, fighters are capable of things like "snubbing" by strafing enemy capital ships at close range with missiles, moving too fast for defensive guns. In Battlestar Galactica they serve primarily as a defense screen, but examples like the Stealth Viper and the Raptor with missile pods being able to strike vulnerable targets away from the battlestar.
Basically, depending on the setting, fighters have varying levels of utility in and outside of combat, which justifies having them in most scifi settings. The specifics of the setting's space combat determines how valuable they are and if the tradeoff is worthwhile. In a setting where point-defense lasers are very strong against small craft, you'd probably want to have only a small number of multi-role ships like BSG's Raptors and Trek's shuttles which can serve non-combat roles as well as occasionally do heavy combat, while in Star Wars where point-defense is mostly big cannons you can have a dedicated carrier which swarms the enemy, especially with Droid fighters.
@@nigeldepledge3790depends on the setting. Usually a fighter is more space efficient than a bigger ship when it comes to attack capability, since there's no long term life support or hyperdrive involved. Further if the setting has powerful anti-cap ship weapons or shields, fighters can avoid or bypass those. If heat dissipation is an issue, a large number of fighters will be able to radiate more heat than a single big ship, so they will be able to manage much higher firepower.
Specialized anti-fighter weapons won't be good Vs heavily armoured or shielded capital ships too, and anti capital ship weapons can't track fighters, so if you have both, you would be able to exploit any such weaknesses the enemy might have.
@@nigeldepledge3790 simply put fighters can engage smaller crafter more efficiently i.e trying to hit that shuttle so you can disable and then capture it with the main weaponry and even the secondary weaponry may be overkill. Where a fighter with it's smaller weapons may be just right. This is of course before you factor in you can use the carrier as a mobile base for planet side operations as well. I.E you won't be taking the carrier into atmo but you can probably send it's fighters into atmo.
If I may put up another example is that it allows you to slim down fighters even more. The Star Wars TIE fighter lacks any hyperdrive capability and, instead of onboard life support, it relies on a pilot suit and onboard oxygen tanks. This makes them _very_ cheap to produce and to use in numbers.
Of course, this means that they're solely used around carriers and stations that can support them.
I think the Gamillon Carriers in Space Battleship Yamato 2199 are a good example of semi-well thought out sci-fi carriers. Carriers in the show in general are shown to be able to launch fighters nearly instantaneously in a vacuum because, well, there's no gravity, but they retain the catapults for atmospheric launches (such as the Battle of the Rainbow Cluster)
In the live-action movie they did a great atmospheric fighter drop on Iscandar, where they warped the Yamato in, launched the fighters (in free-fall, to avoid the point defenses that would have locked onto their engines), and then immediately warped the Yamato out to draw the Gamillon's attention elsewhere.
@@olencone4005 Isn't that just the Adama maneuver?
@@InLoveWithCities It's similar. It's not a new idea to be sure -- I've seen it in several anime over the years long before anyone considered using it in live-action, and they even used something similar in a TNG episode (with phasers instead of fighters). But it sure does look good when the Yamato does it! ^_^
I think the Yamato and other EFCF Andromeda and Dreadnaught-class ships (especially the Hyuga) are better than the Gamillas Gaiperon-class Multideck Astro Carrier because the former are hybrid warships that can defend themselves as well as engage in battle, where the latter have almost nothing but defensive armament.
About halfway through the series, the Honorverse novels introduce the CLAC - Carrier, Light Attack Craft. LACs aren't typical space fighters but rather small warships that save volume and mass by not mounting an FTL drive. CLACs carry them into the target system where they deploy, coordinate and maintain their LAC wings well away from the main combatants (at least until FTL-guided MDMs become the standard, after which "well away" ceases to exist).
Not totally. IIRC around that point CLACs started to duck back into Hyper and either maintain a stable position in Hyperspace since it was impossible to attack through the Alpha Wall, or a predetermined point well outside the System in question and wait for a messenger (usually a destroyer) to come back and tell them it was safe to return.
And lest we forget, each ship in the Honorverse usually has shuttles to ferry Marines or provide CAS, or any other of a number of roles we usually forget about.
They're also meant to operate as part of the fleet - so their LAC wings in a number of later books are more used for fleet missile defense to increase the engagement envelope against inbound missiles than for offensive punch.
I was going to come here to mention the Honorverse CLACs.
Adding some additional context - in the Honorverse LACs are very much not "fighters" in the way we think of the term today. These are craft in the 10-20k ton range with around a dozen crew. For context, modern navy cruisers and destroyers are in the 10k ton range. The CLACs are 6+ million tons, compared to a modern super carrier at around 100k tons. These are MASSIVE ships.
People should think of LACs like WW1/2 era torpedo boats designed to swarm capital ships. As mentioned, they also can be used defensively as anti-missile pickets for the fleet.
"Carrier has arrived."
My favorite is Starcraft's Protoss Carriers. They're JUST flying mobile factories for interceptor drones without any weapons of their own, but they still feel epic in presence. Automatic fire from enemy forces will end up locking onto the interceptors instead of the carriers, and even manual targeting can end up accidentally locking onto the drones instead of the intended target underneath.
One argument that can be made for a lot of sci-fi carriers doubling as battleships could be that a lot of these settings also tend to have some sort of FTL movement. In real life, carriers are usually protected by the distance they can keep from the actual battle, acting like the mobile airstrips that they are. In a lot of sci-fi settings, that doesn't work as well when enemy forces can just triangulate where fighters are coming from and then speed over to a carrier's location, so it could make more sense to just park the carrier on the front lines with heavy weaponry and shielding rather than leaving it relatively undefended at a back line.
Even I feel like Automatic-Replenishing Drone Ships are cheating.
Probably why they are the backbone of any good space based navy!
Why have a ship, when you can have a whole factory!
Star Wars has a healthy number of essentially pure carriers, too, but they don't get the same attention that the combination craft like Star Destroyers do.
There is a point to be made for the "combinations are bad" argument, too. An ImpStar Deuce is a mile stem to stern and only carries a fighter complement on par with a WW2 era carrier; 72 TIEs of various types. Proportionately speaking that's much closer to the space a cruiser would dedicate to helicopter or seaplane functionality than a carrier's "this is my one job" flight deck and hangar. Likewise the complement, usually 4 squads of superiority fighters/interceptors, 1 squad of bombers/strike craft, and 1 squad of recon craft/auxiliaries, is more what you'd see on an old escort carrier than a fleet carrier, which should have a lot more strike craft on board. The Star Destroyer isn't trying to be a battleship AND a carrier, it's a battleship that carries its own escorts in a tiny portion of her volume.
"Here comes the Gantrithor!"
@@Ryvaken basically an aviation battleship
In the full lore-canon size, Protoss carriers have point defense weapons and an orbital bombardment laser, but in the game units, neither are particularly balanced or terribly useful with how the unit as a game piece is designed.
Another thing a LOT of sci-fi settings do is _try to make humans useful_ . If point defense are all manned by humans, then human-manned fighters can be effective. If they're all controlled by AI or droids or what-have-you, then you'll need several more humans in fighters, or AI-controlled fighters, or just AI-controlled missiles and ECM/ECCM to avoid the point defense. And if point defense is strong enough, eventually the only actually effective weapons will be stealth or immense long range KKV penetrators, or extremely high power laser bursts, because anything slower will just be dodged or intercepted.
In my setting, I have carriers that drop atmospheric fighters from orbit.
Like a mix of ODST and Top Gun.
How do they get back into orbit to get back on the ship?
@@thelonelyrogue3727, That’s the neat part, they don’t. Kamikaze in space!
If you had tractor beams in the setting they might be able to do it or maybe the ships themselves are capable of getting out of orbit but need a carrier to go FTL.
@@thelonelyrogue3727The carrier can get as low as the upper atmosphere, the kind of altitude where real planes like the Blackbird fly.
But, if the planet is lost, or their carrier destroyed, the pilots may be on their own.
I remember a scifi show back in the 90s that had atmospheric fighters like that. They would drop from carriers in orbit and as they entered into the atmosphere they would unfold into fighters already moving at hypersonic speeds.
I’ve always like the idea of assault ships which bring in troops and atmospheric fighters like what the marines use with the US navy
Carriers are as practical as the setting makes them.
Something is only as effective as the writers make them
@@commanderwookiecopc806 generally speaking.
In Stars Without Number (a TTRPG), ships need a special drive (called a spike drive) to go into what's basically hyperspace, to travel to other star systems. This drive costs more money than a regular system drive (to fly around a system with), and takes up more of the ship's available energy and mass, limiting other ship fittings. By equipping a carrier with a spike drive, the ships it carries no longer need to be outfitted with a spike drive.
TL;DR - in a setting where you need a special drive to travel interstellar distances, carriers could just have that drive, alleviating the need of having such a drive for the ships it carries.
@@Novenae_CCG Kinda the same think in Battletech. You have Jumpships and they are like 95% Jump Drive, but they can be made to attach other ships to them and jump with those ships. They have a Warship version with what is known as a Compact Drive, which takes up about 48% of the ship' mass. And attached ships are limited to 100,000 tons in mass each. But not in number that can theoretically be jumped with. IIRC the Star Lord is the largest Jumpship and can jump with 9 50,000 ton or less ships attached. But the big boy is the Potemptkin Class Troop cruiser built as a warship that can jump with 25 50,000 ton or less ships attached. Any ship above 50,000 tons up to 100,000 tons takes two attachment points.
I like Honor Harringtons LAC's instead of "fighters." They're tiny corvettes basically. More like torpedo boats. Great stuff when they surprise the enemy with their battlecruiser being converted to LAC carriers.
I think ALL ships would have small hangars. Something you didnt mention is that almost all modern naval ships have some limited carrying capacity for helicopters, as well as carry small outboard craft and inflatables. Such requirements would be similarly fulfilled by a shuttle bay, for landing on planets, shuttling crew (way way way safer and smarter than docking two massive warships), transfering supplies, assisting in docking maneuvers, performing maintenance, and serving as an emergency life boat. There is almost no concievable way for a warship of any considerable size to operate without at least one of these, unless the warship never ever operates outside of the reach of friendly carriers. Even for dedicated escort vessels, such dependence is rare.
One advantage to carrying fighters, drones, or other support craft on external mounts is it allows a ship to carry support craft without spending much or any internal volume on it. This is particularly useful in settings that have FTL that only works on large craft or fuel constraints on small ships, even modest sized capital ships could carry something like a fighter wing or picket ship. The result could be similar to how modern destroyers like the Arleigh Burke-class have a pad and small hanger for two helicopters.
In settings like Traveller where FTL drives are expensive and take up huge fractions of a ships mass and volume this can be taken to the extreme, with squadrons of large combat ships lacking FTL drives (Traveller calls them Riders, and in that setting they are much cheaper and more capable than FTL equipped ships of the same tonnage) towed to the combat zone by dedicated transport ships.
Sword of the Stars 2 used Riders, also - and even called them that.
As long as your setting doesn't involve ships trying to engage in high-G burn maneuvers. In such cases, anything that isn't very thoroughly bolted down is going to get ripped off the ship. Of course, this is also true of ships inside, but at least those could be secured in a fully enclosed bracing structure, rather than having to somehow be strongly bound to the side of the ship.
@@ZlothZlothChad SotS player! Was wondering if this gem of a game will be mentioned.
And I agree, I like how the game handles carriers. The strikecraft/battleriders are attached on the hull of the ships. I still remember the Morrigi (Space Crows) being so focus on strikecraft that even their tanker/supply/colony ships has the ability to carry them.
@@Jesse_359I suspect the idea is to jump in and almost immediately deploy the docked craft, both letting them get on with their business and freeing up precious thrust/weight margins for the carrier to nope the hell out of weapons range so the other craft have a ride home.
@@griffinfaulkner3514 Yes. I'd have to assume that any carrier designed to carry craft externally will have to be spinning them off almost immediately as it enters the battlespace. If it is a battle-carrier, this essentially means those craft are entirely on their own until the fight is over - there's no realistic way for them to return to their ship while it remains engaged in combat.
If it's a dedicated carrier they could return, though servicing a craft attached to your exterior hull seems likely to be a much more time consuming process than one that returns to some kind of enclosed bay. The 'external' mount carrier is probably essentially restricted to a single battle sortie in most circumstances, which might not be feasible. In WW2 carriers would launch many separate sorties, with wings returning to land, refuel, re-arm, or even returning to swap loadouts in order to engage different potential targets in the battlespace.
One interesting thing in some settings is carriers for ships larger than fighters. If an FTL drive is so big and heavy that a ship built without one can be more effective in combat, or is rare and expensive, or requires the navigator to take a bunch of weird space drugs and turn into a caterpillar, then it makes sense to have even large ships rely on carriers to cross interstellar distances.
For example: Tarka Hunter carriers in Sword of the Stars, CLACs in the Honorverse, Guild heighliners in Dune.
there are also great examples of ship carriers being the main infrastructure for warfleets in the excellent book series Expedition force.
here the carriers main duty is to transport heavy battleships, battlecruisers and other combat specialised ships closer to the engagement as they have massively better jump drives and also allows for maintainance on some of the carriers. Essentially they are what train transportation was for WW2 tanks, but in this case, instead of having a bunch of tanks on the traincars, they have a bunch of heavely armored and armed battleboats.
With No FTL it is Cheaper and the Space can be used better in Main Worlds you would have Defence Fleets only for the System to Come Out that would increase the Power much more than Ships with FTL.
These are all great examples. The UNSC infinity also does this to lend escort vessels its advanced FTL drive, even if the ship is guilty of many many issues.
This actually has a real-world comparison in the earliest carrier craft - Torpedo Boat Carriers. Which may actually be a better comparison than aircraft carriers anyway, since all Voidcraft from fighters to battleships travel in the same medium (space); unlike blue water navies which have to draw practical distinctions between craft that travel through the air vs those that traverse the waves (and again vs submarines under the water).
@@carthienesdevilsadvocatenr2806 great point!
Homeworld has some really cool examples of sci fi carriers done right. Both the Mothership (effectively a massive carrier and fabricator) and actual carriers are not intended for actual combat whatsoever, they are intended as..well, carriers. They're for having a staging point for strikecraft to repair and resupply, and rarely are ever in direct combat.
The sequel did give the battleships a hanger for strike craft but if I remember right they were pretty limited in capacity and I got the feeling they were there more to support the fighters launched from other vessels by providing an additional place to repair and rearm that was closer to the battle (or just being able to get more serviced at once). Or that it housed a fighter contingent that was just meant as more point defence in case enemy bombers got close enough to be a threat.
I remember playing Homeword Multiplayer and mastering loading fighters and corvetts on Support Frigates for a tactical jump. Even the Resource Controller had docking slots for up to 6 fighters and a resource collector.
@@procrastinatinggamer That, and the ability to carry fighters through hyperspace jumps. Being able to bring fighter cover with you when jumping into close-range fights was pretty handy.
@@procrastinatinggamer And I feel like the setting really supports this and makes it realistic. Fighters and corvettes that don't have hyperdrive always felt awkward to use in HW1 unless you were prepared to risk your carries for close support. Launch bays also allow rapid deployment of the fighter screen after a jump.
That still runs into the main problem of "carriers" though: fighters in space are absolutely useless and a waste of resources.
I love the carriers from Homeworld, they are design to produce/replace ships ranging from fighters to Frigates.
Love Homeworld’s approach to ship design. The Mothership being a colony ship and a mobile factory and refinery made to adapt to any situation the expedition may run into during its journey. Then it found itself as the center of the strongest military resistance against the Taiidan empire.
Love how in one part of the journey they set a hyperspace trap for Captain Ellison’s destroyer only to pull out the entirety of the Exile fleet.
The mothership in Homeworld’s ship designs also reflect that they have common design language among chassis so you could see that fighters, corvettes, frigates and capital ships are from the same line but adapted to their roles. It also makes it easier at a distance for the player to identify ship types. Unfortunately HW3’s ships aren’t quite as distinctive. Battleships in that game with NLIPS on makes a battleship look like a stretched frigate
@@uss_04 Just imagine the Taiidan commander's reaction. "Oh, Grav wells have captured the Rebels and... why are there so many hyperspace signatures... and why is one the size of the Flagship...?" Proceeds to then be taken prisoner by the way too insane Salvage Corps of the Kushan Navy
@@Drave_Jr. Proceeds to not survive questioning.
The Lucrehulk from Star Wars continues to be the best do-it-all platform I have ever seen in Sci-Fi.
To be fair (and speaking of WW2), "battleship-carriers" did exist: the Ise-class battleships (IJN Ise and IJN Hyuga) were retrofitted with a flight deck with 22 airplanes on board, while still packing 14 inch guns.
there was also the two US Aircraft carriers USS Lexington (CV-2) and USS Saratoga (CV-3) which carried 8x 8inch guns because when they were built (the 1920s) the Navy thought the vessels might need them for self-defense.
And it was horrible at either role.
@@caelestigladii True, but space makes the calculus different. They sucked because they didnt have the surface area to do either job properly, in space the carrier part of the role is INSIDE the ship, so you might as well put the guns on the unused exterior surfaces.
@@joewelch4933 While I agree, the spacecraft would have to be significantly larger than current carriers.
Because guns actually don't take only the exterior part of the ship. Unless it's an energy weapon, of course. You'd also need a citadel somewhere in the ship.
One of the big disadvantages of hybrid carriers is the fact that enemy gun fire will likely damage the flight deck, making it impossible for returning fighters to land after a battle.
This might be less of an issue in space though; since the fighters would just need to match speed and dock slowly.
From what I remember, and it was a long time ago, I got the impression that (at least in the show) the Galactica in the original show was more of an armored carrier than a battlestar. The guns it had were mostly used for point defense against enemy fighters and the fighters were the heavy damage dealers.
More the fact that apart from two episodes, the second of the admiral cain/Pegasus double episode and the very last episode where they take on a single bay star then you never see galactica vs other ships, is galactica and vipers defending against Ceylon fighter swarms.
As such not practical to get the heavy firepower out.
Even in the reboot then mainly the flak battery and rare that saw the main battery out and use.
The original Galactica was also a ragtag fleet of civilians and military that escaped the cylon destruction. They were forced to use carrier/command ships as battleships due to circumstances.
No, they had missiles and had weapons to take out other carriers.
The original series, Battlestar Galactica, has the answer right in the title. The Galactica was a Battlestar, a battle starship, not an armoured carrier.
@@MrGrumblier exactly. The handful of fighters it carried were support craft. The ship itself tried to stay out of combat because of the fact that it was acting as a lifeboat. The fighters were used as scouts and to take out enemies before they could get close enough to do damage to the ship.
Props to Space: Above and Beyond for not only giving us a carrier that is just a carrier, but putting it in a battlegroup escort. That didn't come into play much in the only season of the show, and it was a little hamfisted with our one cast of highly skilled fighter pilots being reduced to every grunt job in the military so they could recreate that one iconic scenario from WWII, but this was a detail they did well. And they got that right in 1995.
Protected launch systems - Check
Recovery that is not via a landing strip - Check
Separated maintenance and launch facilities - Check
Heavy emphasis on point defense, not offense - Check
All craft have attitude thrusters at key wide areas - Check
Ships are portrayed in more than 2D space - Check
Space A&B was and is one of the best depictions of a proper space carrier. Love that series, have the DVDs of it (and before then, bootleg VHS)
That "our one cast of highly skilled fighter pilots being reduced to every grunt job in the military" was what broke my willing suspension of disbelief for the series.
In the Expeditionary Force series of books, a star carrier is basically a space truck. Used to transport all manner of other vessels including battleships, etc. In order to reduce wear and tear on components and means every ship doesn't need a long-range ftl jump drive ability
The Protoss Carrier in Starcraft is the best example of a future carrier. Shield protected launch bays. Robotic fighter interceptors that could be manufactured and repaired internally. No armament on the main ship aside from orbital bombardment weapons that weren’t used in the game.
That is honestly the stupidest part of the Protoss Carrier that it doesn't have short range point defense armaments.
@@anvos658 They did delete that terran wrecker ship in that one cutscene with that planet killing beam, I think they just didn't want to ever have to balance around a carrier that can also do that.
7:30 In defense of Stargate: Both the Wraith and the Goa'uld focus on "motherships" designed for planetary assaults. Their fighters are designed to attack ground targets without advanced weapons. Fights against an equal enemy are a secondary concern.
That is true it fighter where used more for attack other fighters or planet assault. But outside of tauri vessels we do see ships vulnerable to fighters
One thing I feel is important to note is that even if your battleship or cruiser or whatever DOESN'T carry fighters, you may still want to have a hanger anyway. This lets it carry things like shuttles, utility craft, or small scouts. See Star Trek's shuttlecraft for example.
This is useful not only for the fact you can't exactly tie down a small boat to the deck of a spaceship like you can a real-life battleship or cruiser for use in things like personal transfers, moving small amounts of supply or mail, or any number of other useful duties a small boat could be used for (beyond that of a lifeboat).
But it also plays into the WWII inspirations of many Sci-Fi settings. Battleships and cruisers nearly universally carried a floatplane or 5 for things ranging from recognizance to spotting fall of shot, to search and rescue, and even anti-submarine warfare. These were by no means fighters, and could generally only carry light strike munitions for the aforementioned anti-submarine duties, but they were invaluable. The US even experimented with putting some on a destroyer!
Even in the modern day helicopter facilities are common on many warships for the utility they provide in a way quite similar to how such things work in sci-fi. Shuttling supplies and personnel, performing search-and-rescue, and anti-submarine warfare duties. And even if a ship may not carry any of its own, it may have a clear spot on the rear deck where one could land to drop things off, or if it lost its mothership the helicopter's crew can safely disembark onto another ship.
In a Sci-fi thing I partake in, the battleship I designed for it features a small hangar tucked away near the stern, protected by a sliding armored door that required the rearmost dorsal turret to traverse so that its barrels weren't blocking the way for craft to enter and exit. It is suited for only utility craft and shuttles, but on one occasion it was used to land fighters whose carrier was destroyed, since unlike with an ocean-going navy, you can't exactly ditch alongside in space. The empty fighters were then shoved back into space to make room for the next set of pilots to land, with the last set being carried back to base and taken off there.
On the topic of armed carriers though, that isn't entirely unwarranted. Vessels like the United States's Lexington Class were originally armed with fairly chonky guns for a carrier without sacrificing their ability to conduct carrier operations. What is notable, is that, even though they were heavily armed for a carrier, the key term is "for a carrier". They were armed like a heavy cruiser, more than capable of fending off stray destroyers or light cruisers that managed to catch them, but no match for anything approaching their weight class. (And this design was done back when airplanes were slow, light, and short-ranged, with the heavy guns later replaced for heavy-AA dual-purpose guns). So slapping a heavy gun or two on your sci-fi carrier to give it some basic close-range firepower is reasonable, but there is a reason the only "battle carriers" ever built were done so by the Japanese out of desperation and a lack of time for full-conversions.
Mobile Suit Gundam is once again is on my main favorites with this, using the Universal Century as an example, during the One Year War you had in the Federation's case separation between Carriers, Battleships and Cruisers but with the introduction of Mobile Suits into warfare you start to notice less dedicated battleships and cruisers and more carriers with battleship grade weaponry, by Unicorn era you have alot of dedicated warships that would have a MS Hangar and a MS Catapult System like the Clop-Class, Nahel Argama, Ra Cailum, Musaka, Rewloola, etc. Lastly when talking about the dual sided runways Unicorn also had the double-sided MS Catapults with the Nahel Argama or the General Revil.
Victory also had a couple of pure carriers as well as some that took advantage of the whole "no up in space" with three hangars in different orientations. Of, and the Ptolemios from Gundam 00 is another pure carrier as is the Feeden from Gundam X.
@matteste wish I could watch Victory, it's the only UC Series I have yet to watch
@@Robocopnik Even if said series _was_ GSD?
First comment I've seen so far mention Gundam.
Oh yes. The Federation's stubborness in having big-gun battleships bites them in the proverbial rear-end until Operation Stardust, and some pragmatic people got put in charge of the navy.
The Pegasus class was also the Federation's first experimental carrier ship. The rest of them during the one year war appear to be repurposed carho haulers.
Hybrid carrier/battleships do make since in certain settings, such as situations where the ships have to operate without little to no support on or behind combat lines. Several sci-fi series that feature hybrid carriers usually end up taking place at some point where the ship has to fight in a situation where there is no support and they have to bring every weapon available to the fight. Also all modern day carriers are still equipped with defensive weapons and a space carrier would require at least some weapons to deal with a potential enemy ambush that can often be found in sci-fi settings that have them.
Consider Russian carriers. Not only do the carry aircraft but anti ship missiles. Japanese destroyer carriers have vls tubes
I want to throw a shoutout to a certain GSV in Iain M Banks' Excession with what has to be my favourite sci-fi carrier scene of all time
with regards to carriers getting caught up in ship-to-ship engagements, I can see some circumstances under which this might happen in SF- particularly in settings where warships can drop out of hyperspace (or equivalent) at close range to a carrier, particularly if the carrier is parked in orbit or otherwise constrained from manoeuvring
Carriers in atmosphere: Reasonably good and effective
Carriers in space: Depends on the setting.
My opinion: Missiles ans point defense guns
It also depends on WHAT they're carrying. I've seen a couple settings where the carriers are the only means of FTL so they're carrying......destroyers, cruisers, battleships, etc
That's actually one of the things that I do in my stories as well, such as atmospheric assault carriers that deploy planetary fighter craft. Space, on the other hand, is more problematic.
That makes me think of The infinity of the u n s c
@@TheAchilles26Destroyer's cruisers corvette makes sense battleships are kind too big for a reasonable carrier
@@borttorbbq2556 that really depends on your setting and the method of FTL. Space is MASSIVE and you can build some really massive things in it if they're never supposed to get closer to a planet than high orbit.
At least with the "rotating the ship to launch the fighters out of sight" made sense in the Thrawn books where the move originated from, not the bastardization we see Ahsoka come up with. It isn't meant to be a surprise attack, it's using the ship's heavy armor to screen the fighters as they launch in a vulnerable condition when in close combat scenarios instead of launching at a distance ideally. It was to provide a safe zone for the fighters to quickly launch, form up and head out to fight rather than being exposed to incoming enemy fire instantly
Thank you! They even explained it in Heir to the Empire.
That is also wrong. Thrawn used the unstructured attack pattern of the Marg Sabl maneuver to crash the Elomin task force's commander's excessively structured thinking. He could not handle the messed up attack profile, so the task force's coordination broke up into pieces. Elomins calculate excessively so with nothing to calculate, the commander became a mess. It had nothing to do with "screen the fighters" but everything to do with causing unstructured chaos.
Irl carriers have escorts typically so they can specialize, but space scifi typically has each ship able to defend itself to a degree because they might be sent alone
It’s actually because if space warfare is anything like modern naval warfare, it’s going to be done at distances beyond visual range. There will be dozens if not, possibly even hundreds of miles between each ship, so if one manages to slip undetected, every shift needs to have capacity to defend itself somewhat.
One thing I think is definitely worth discussing is: where does the line between 'fighter' and 'ship' lie? Does the GP03 Dendrobium (Gundam 0083) count as a fighter? It certainly behaves like a monstrously oversized fighter the size of smaller battleships. I propose that the dividing line would be 'is routine maintenance performed internally or externally?' to answer a decent amount, and it would vary highly depending on the weapons of choice.
After that's decided, we need to figure out if reactor output is a major factor for weapons and similar. In Glynn Stewart's Castle Federation series, the weapons vastly out perform armor, and the shields and energy weapons interact at range resulting in one or two hits being more than enough to mission kill a full sized ship, however fighter weapons and ship weapons are two totally different beasts with ship weapons having significantly better effective range. The fighters serve a number of purposes, both long range attack systems, missile screening, sensor sweeps and such, but the raw reactor output of the big ships means that the ship still counts as a significant chunk of firepower.
I don't think I can understate how much I enjoy the way Stewart comes up with variations on FTL/weapon systems that create interesting interactions that govern which combat doctrine works best.
I agree with this segment. It's all about the drama and the utilization of tropes. The fighter personalizes the story. Capital ship carriers is all about the magnitude of the risk. Also, when a fighter meets its end, it goes "pop" in the vastness of space. When a capital ship carrier goes down, that goes KA-BOOM!
I have to say, i love the Chimera from Eve online. The original i mean. Forget about how well carriers work in eve today and what the Chimera looks now, what i love about the chimera is its lore which says it was based upon the Kairiola, which was a water freighter converted into a fighter carrier during the orbital bombardment of Caldari Prime in the first Gallente-Caldari war. The Kairiol was the flag ship of Admiral Yakia Tovil-Toba who decided to take every ship he commanded and jumped to Gallente prime forcing the Gallente to recall vessels from the orbital bombardment to protect their homeworld. Eventually only the Kairiola remained and in a final sacrifice, was flown into Gallente prime. The attack allowed millions more Caldari to flee Caldari prime and because of his sacrifice Yakia Tovil-Toba is the first name every Caldari child learns.
And out of all four extant carrier hulls, the Chimaera has the best protected hangar bay, even though that means nothing in-game, especially since it’s the least used.
Sci-fi carriers usually have the dual-purpose gunship/carrier theme, because seriously... it's sci-fi and FTL drives are a thing. A well-prepared enemy can and WILL use that tactically to surprise your carriers at point-blank range. Case in point, Star Wars Legends version of Thrawn, used HIS OWN Interdictors tactically to force incoming reinforcements to drop out of hyperspace in the perfect locations to prevent hostile Rebels from escaping. He would LITERALLY drop his Star Destroyers, Lancer Frigates and other craft directly in your face, at the same moment that you are busy laughing thinking you successfully escaped and now you're caught with enemies effectively 5 feet in front of you and 20 feet behind you. Any carrier that isn't capable of direct gunnery and armored to withstand same is now a dead carrier, because you thought you could keep away from the fight.
This is also a semi-frequent thing of the Battlestar Galactica series, both original and remake; the Battlestars would send off their Raptors and Vipers for a long-range strike, and then SUDDENLY Cylons have shown up and they're forced into a gunfight because they can't immediately flee. While the Battlestars are calculating coordinates and spooling up their drive... they still gotta fight. And if you go full-hog carriers, with little to no armor and no direct fire capabilities, you're highly vulnerable to being destroyed.
Same things with the Stargate BC-304's, they had many similar conditions where they were forced to fight with no way to escape immediately. The only reason they could survive is because they were gunship/carrier hybrids, they had the firepower and shields/armor to survive, but also fighters for a force multiplier. And the Goa'uld pyramid ships were the same, heavily armored and gunned, while the fighters are force multipliers.
I can't think of many sci-fi's where a carrier can truly afford to be built like modern sea-going carriers, and focus 100% on being a fighter/bomber launchpad and effectively being a glass cannon with little to no armor/shields, and nearly non-existent main battery.
In the defense of the Marg Sabl maneuver, it was originally introduced as just a way to get fighters out safely while engaged in combat. Thrawn only used it as a winning move once where it fit a specific psychological blind spot of the enemy commander - he never implied that it was anything more than that.
I think a major difference between conventional seafaring warships and their space counterparts is that there is more or a need to have some form of hanger or significant docking system for all larger ships. Not all space-oriented sci-fi has access to things like teleporters for troop transport, and the need for support craft often means that battleships often require significantly more utility than a naval fleet. Unlike naval vessels, which can use their decks as loading zones for all manner of equipment, space ships are often resupplying in space, and need to have a safe way of exchanging fuel, ammo, and personnel in large quantities that a docking hatch will not normally be sufficient for, almost necessitating at least one hanger to begin with. In a lot of cases, space battleships are required to be more flexible because they aren't always going to be run as part of a carrier group. I think a lot of the reason you see the hybrid-style ships is due to needing more flexibility than a traditional navy.
As SFIA always says: "There's no such thing as an unarmed spaceship." You might just find that "Be all, do all" battleships ARE the way of military spacecraft, with giant space-station/ships capable of firing lasers at distances of multiple astronomical units, and small fighter drones being nothing more than peacekeeping enforcement officers over smaller distances in between spacecraft.
Also, it would be a bit foolish to have carriers with absolutely NO defensive weapons for emergency situations
Speaking of legend of the Galactic Heroes, carriers are there because most of their energy shields only covers the ship on the front so the fighters are meant to bypass that by attacking from other vectors like from the side.
Carriers in Scifi might have some difficulty in some settings though. If your Scifi settings have most navy fighting at extreme BVR range, carrier might have a hard time fitting in since it would take ages for the carrier based craft to reach enemy (unless they have their own FTL).
If a SciFi setting has 'extreme range combat' (not BVR because visual range in space is... quite significant), then you probably either don't have carriers or the strikecraft a carrier launches are meant to be more 'mobile sensor and point defence emplacements' which allow your combat ships to better target their weapons and more easily defend against an enemy focusing fire because the strikecraft can relocate to 'concentrate' point defence fire on the ships that are focused on.
With the exception of course coming when strikecraft are able to use a form of 'tactical' FTL which 'full size' warships can't for whatever reason. If the warships can use tactical FTL, then it's unlikely extreme range combat will be how things are fought and instead it would either be the slugging match or a bunch of 'pounce and dodge' where one side tries to 'pounce' on a target and take it out with an alpha strike so it can't fire back whilst the target attempts to 'dodge' out of the way and use it's own alpha strike to take out the Pouncer. The latter usually coming from settings where offensive capabilities greatly outweight defensive ones (at least when talking about ship durability under fire).
If you're doing extreme range, trading fire at multiple light seconds or more, the transit time of ordnance and/or strikecraft doesn't really matter. Everything that isn't an at or near lightspeed directed energy weapon, which have their own issues, is going to need guidance and a good reserve of delta V to have anything approaching a reasonable chance to hit. Which also means that the only difference between a fighter carrier and a missile carrier is what makes up the majority of its current loadout, assuming there's even a distinction drawn between fighter and missile.
The only difference between a missile with submunitions and attack drone with guns is the latter's expectation of recovery, but if the drone can't swing back around to its carrier to be rearmed in a tactically useful interval of time then any provisions for recovery are wasted. A one way drone can be smaller, cheaper, and packed into your carriers in greater numbers, at which point its basically just a missile with a fancier warhead.
Thank you guys for the idea, I have a very hard time figuring out how to fit a carrier into my settings. My settings are that both sides would trade missiles and railgun at very extreme range so far that it took few hours to hit.
@@StacheMan26 You're completely right about the drone / missile stuff. I think it is overlooked how a carrier would certainly not have fighters with biological humans, but might instead plausibly have multipurpose drones. However, I think you're wrong about most things needing guidance. Maybe in a slightly lower tech universe without rapid fire relativistic particle cannons, clouds of rail-accelerated slugs can be employed. With enough volume of fire and good enough predictive algorithms it would be basically impossible to not hit with some slugs. In fact I think they would be more suseful offensively than missiles as they can be shot at higher speeds.
@@StacheMan26
That's actually the entire concept of my strikers.
They're effectively kinetic missiles but with a machine gun turret mounted on their side, which is meant to protect them from interception and also have more chances at shooting out enemy weakpoints before impact, I like to describe them as missiles with aimable shrapnel for that purpose.
To be fair, battlecarriers (ie carriers with guns meant to engage the enemy after launching their aircraft) were developed in the Interwar years as navies were figuring out the carrier concept.
It's also worth mentioning that none of these ideas persisted and were generally converted to full carriers if they were ever laid down.
I like how carriers can be used in Stellaris. They make it possible to have your most valuable ships further away from the fight, and strike craft can ignore shields.
They also provide more targets for the enemies and are rebuilt during battle, so they provide some nice protection.
However, putting hangars on your ships means you have less guns on them, and the kinds of guns you could have instead of hangars can be much more powerful... But also less accurate against smaller ships, and with a shorter range than strike craft.
Gundam doesn't just use 'runways', they almost always have catapults (like on ocean-going carriers) to impart initial momentum to the MS without expending propellant. That's those things the MS stands on that sort of clamp onto the feet at the beginning of most launch sequences. It's actually a pretty neat bit of world-building, you really only see the "runway" type launches on Earth-based faction ships, whereas space-based factions tend to have a less "gravitationally-oriented" approach, of either just dumping them out of a bay or launching them on some magnetized rails, again to impart initial momentum and conserve propellant. There's even some scenes when Zeon soldiers are on a Federation ship and they find it funny that the Federation makes their MS stand on the "ground", which plays into the whole theme of 'perspective' that runs through the whole franchise.
Edit: YoU WiLl NeVeR kNoW wHaT thE oRigInaL QueStIoN WaS!
Was coming here to say much the same human reflexes just will not be sufficient for energy weapon combat in a micro gravity environment
Actually that's not the only advantage: Drone systems do not require the supplies a human pilot would. There's several ways of utilising drone technology: Telepresence (I.E. remote control) and autonomous, but the problem with the fomer is that jamming and signal strength can play a role..
@@Omnomface A mix perhaps? Limited AI kicks in upon signal loss.
@douglasdarling7606 That only true for modern humans. Genetic modifications and cyber implants might limit the use of drones to several roles like recon,missile defense, loyal wingman
@@douglasdarling7606 Exactly. It's indisputable that drones will outcast a human being that is present in a ship side cockpit. But that's the issue with attempting to craft compelling stakes for a sci-fi space battle. It's equally indisputable that a bunch of unmanned drones slugging it out is no where near as emotionally investing as when there are living people inside those vessels....
So the question comes down to this, which would you rather have? A realistic setting or an emotionally compelling setting?... Perhaps a middle ground can be reached with genetically/physically enhanced pilots, but then again that will make producing those pilots much more expensive. Lol
A couple points of order here:
RE: Naval carriers vs Sci-Fi Carrier/Battleships -- There is a VAST discrepancy in size that you did not take in to account much less use cases. Star Wars carrier/BS are 1/5km long and the Galactica is almost 1km. And this does not include height/decks. The largest US carrier is about 333m long (or a minimum 1/3rd as long) and only 76m tall including mast (about the same size difference to length). Add in use-cases where a naval carrier travels with a HUGE support fleet (that is also armed unlike BSG), your comparison stumbles.
RE: Cylon Basestars -- They address this in universe that Basestars are NOT battleships. They carry an impressive missile loadout, but rely on fighters and support vessels for primary attack and defense.
I've had the discussion about combat carriers a few times, and my take on it is that once you start getting into the (frankly somewhat ludicrous) scale of Star Wars ships, the hangar facilities start to take up such a small relative part of the total volume of the ship that it doesn't really make sense to _not_ include a complement of fighter craft. Particularly in the case of something like the Imperial class, it gives the vessel a lot more utility without significantly reducing its combat potential.
I'd argue that, at least in the case of the large ships of the original trilogy, the fighter complements are in many ways more analogous to the sea planes carried by some WW2 battleships rather than carrier air groups. The relative volume taken up by hangar facilities and fighter launch equipment on an ISD probably isn't greater than that of e.g. the Yamato (and since Star Wars fighters can stop on a dime, recovering them is more akin to hoisting a seaplane on board than a carrier landing).
On a side note, I think the LAC carriers from Honorverse deserve a mention. They primarily serve as a platform for moving small, non-hyperspace-capable combat vessels into battle, and then hang back with their escorts out of range of enemy weapons.
One thing to mention is that in space, all large ships need to have a carrier capacity, even if it's just a couple shuttles like the Enterprise, as secondary craft are extremely important.
The term "carrier" doesn't exactly mean what it does in today's naval world either. Sci-fi carriers are more like a combination of troop transport ships (like where Marines stay on MEUs), aircraft carriers (but with spacecraft), and cargo/military cargo ships. Carriers irl carry aircraft. Carriers in sci-fi carry multiple combat elements: 1) a ground force of vehicles, infantry, artillery, etc 2) air/space vehicles like fighters, bombers, GSA, drop ships, escape pods, etc 3) The enitre LCE like food, water, ammo, power, fuel, medical personnel & equipment, etc.
They bring the whole fight to the planet, whereas you'd probably use 2 or 3 ships to do the same on earth irl (ground combat + air combat + logistics). This also allows fleets to send in one ship and escort it with various types of gunship (battleships, destroyers, corvettes, frigates, etc) rather than send a massive fleet of aircraft (or spacecraft) carriers, troop transport ships, logistical supply ships, and a couple fighting ships for protection. Sometimes you just don't have the manpower to send that many, so ships either go with no escort or don't go at all. Having a carrier means you have 1 asset to protect per fleet.
With larger factions, standarization and maintenance/repair are a factor, too. Much easier to keep your fleet in the field if you only have a few types of ships that need to be worked on.
I love the constant nods at the Cylon Toasters...
And my favorite example of a space-based carrier using standard flight deck design is the multi-deck carriers from Space Battleship Yamato.
There is some precedent for battleship-carrier hybrids IRL, but only in the early age of carriers. HMS Furious was built as a battlecruiser, but had her forward guns removed and replaced with a flight deck (no change to the bridge position which of course caused problems until they changed it). The Lexington class carriers had 8 8-inch guns around their bridge right up until the start of WW2. They both did this because no one quite knew what to do with aircraft carriers starting out, and thought they might need to be able to defend themselves from surface combatants. Which of course never happened, but I would've loved to see a German or Japanese ship try to get in close with one of them thinking they were defenseless and getting a surprise of their lives.
USS _White Plains_ giving HIJMS _Choukai_ a *_FUN & ENGAGING_* time with her sole 5" gun straight at the Oxygen Torpedos. _You're welcome._
On the other hand, a space based carrier might very well have to do that due to the much larger engagement range of space based weapons.
@@HeIsAnAliYou're right, I can't believe I keep forgetting about USS White Plains. This is the second time that's happened. Granted, that 5"/38 is a pop gun compared to the 8" guns the Lexingtons had, but it was still a ballsy move to do a surface action with your one real cannon.
@@LlortnerofThat is true. But even moreso with spaceships, mass is an important factor. How many ships and how many missiles could be put onboard instead of big "surface action" guns?
@@wrenchinator9715 I didn't exclude missiles. And any action is going to be surface action. Though missiles aren't necessarily going to be more effective per mass.
The space carriers in Macross, especially seen in Macross Frontier do a lot of things well. The Fighter Carriers are pretty dedicatedly carriers, and only have Point Defense weapons beyond their fighter compliment. They also have 4 accelerator flight decks they use to propel fighters in the direction of combat to let them save their fuel for maneuvering, but can just release them from the bay via the elevators. Recovery is done by either fighter matching speed and being recovered by claw, or rapid/emergency recovery on the deck
I think that depends on what class you’re talking about, because the Uraga-class looks pretty conventional (aside from the lower launch deck being an extension of the hangar deck)…
Almost sounds like he is talking about the Guantanamo class AKA the Advanced ARMD class. Macross is notorious for various types of carrier designs all the way up to it's Macross class ships. I even think the Northampton class frigate can carry a small compliment of Variable fighters.
@@Wolfman053a Yea, Uraga being closely to conventional because it purpose is to work both in space and in atmosphere, even using as a seafaring vessel. Guantanamo class is like a space station, can still work in atmosphere but the retrieval of VF is pretty damn hard for them then
Favourite: The Quasar fire.
If you actually flew it with the sense that "up means nothing" you can nose-down at the enemy, both shielding the launch bays with your top side (which you then put shields and armor on) as well as minimizing the cross-section the enemy can hit.
Its not used this way, but it could be close to a sensible design, which is simple and can be mass-produced + does not require fancy flying from the fighter craft.
I prefer the ton falk
The battle carrier was also discussed in the late 1940s. Around the Development of the Montana Class Battleships that were to be the larger sisters to the Iowa.
The notion was to remove the rear Mark 7 guns and give her an angled deck. However this would also extend her length considerably as they would have to add structures to accommodate a small flight wing.
The plan was overall scrapped, allowing the Montana Class to remain the same and obtaining approval for production while the concept was placed on the drawing board. In the end the war ended so both the Montana class and experimental battle carrier never came to be.
So for sci-fi to embrace the battle carrier concept is born out of what-if scenarios.
The battlecarrier concept is getting more and more relevant as the nature of warfare changes. We had THOUSANDS of ships in U.S. fleets during WWII but no missiles to speak of, so defending carriers with other ships in a "defense in depth" strategy was a practical counter to fighters and other ships. These days we are fielding a handful of ships in carrier task groups and modern combat theory favors standoff weapons like missiles and fighters instead of big ship-killing guns. Hell we don't even have more than a couple of short-range anti-missile or anti-fighter weapons on each ship! It's all about electronic countermeasures and missiles/fighters taking out the other guy's missiles and fighters.
So with that in mind, a heavily-armored carrier with countermeasures and maybe a couple of big guns for bombardment are what you probably want. I know they use the Galactica's guns for ship-to-ship fights but they are bombardment weapons just like missiles--if those ships were moving around more then unguided munitions would be useless against anything except fixed targets. The battlecarriers also have to contend with no line-of-sight limitations as others have mentioned, but worst of all they have to survive an enemy that can literally jump in on top of them. That means anything without a good layer of armor is dead meat if something like a battleship jumps in right next to it.
in the classical naval carrier on an ocean perspective: carriers make no sense in space warfare, but as a mobile base with an ability to carry bays and crews and pilots and so on --- that makes a ton of sense.
@@everfaithful9272 sure, definitely, if fighters and other smaller craft have FTL, there's not a ton of reasoning, but if a medium to small size combat or support craft can't FTL or has massively limit fuel / oxygen / food / etc reserves, it immediately makes more sense
In a game setting, the carriers in the X series mostly make sense, with one major exception in the form of a light carrier that packs a punch like a frigate in X3: Albion Prelude. In X3, carriers make more sense as they generally have the cargo capacity to refill fighter missiles AND energy cells allowing them to jump to distant sectors and back, something few fighters can manage.
In X4, carriers lost the ability to jump, and are generally very slow. It makes them much worse at rapid deployments than just sending the fighters on their own. They do have one major advantage: they can repair and resupply their fighters automatically. That makes them good, if expensive mobile home bases.
Interesting been a while since I played X3 - which carrier are you talking about? The Terran one?
I always liked the carriers in X3 they (as you say) worked really well.
Never tried X4 for a variety of reasons - some being that X rebirth was horrible
@RegentofSparta Oh right, Rebirth... 😅
I waited until others had given X4 a chance. I actually enjoy it a lot. I find it CPU intensive though.
As for the M7 in X3, it's the Split Panther. Has good shields, carries 20-32 M3+ - M5 ships (🤯), equips 6 IBLs on the front turrets and 2 on either side, and has a weapons recharge generator only slightly worse than the Tiger.
It's downsides are that it does not have main weapons (all turrets) and has about 60% laser capacitor capacity as that of the Tiger. But for a M7 at the same price as a Tiger, it's too good to pass up. So it ends up being good at almost anything a M7 can be asked to do.
With respect, the Japanese tried this tactic with their aviation battleships and cruisers such as Ise. So did the Americans with the Iowa-class. The Iowa-class aviation battleship idea went as far as having waterline models built and no further, but Ise and a cruiser with similar configuration, Tone, were actually built and used.
The Japanese really went crazy trying to make things into carriers. They put planes on everything, even submarines (the Sen-Toku class of subs, I-400 through I-402. These subs later formed the basis of the later missile-carrying submarines, both conventional attack submarines with their cruise missiles and nuclear armed ICBM carriers.)
Speaking of Japan, the anime Space Battleship Yamato even has a few true carriers, and of course there's Thundersub/Blue Noah, an entire anime about a space carrier that's basically a super-sized I-400-class. A VERY cool little anime, quite obscure though you can find it here on RUclips.
I think Mobile Suit Gundam has an interesting interaction with vulnerability of launch bays. Since energy shielding isn't really a thing in most Gundam settings, exposed launch bays have sometimes been depicted as vulnerabilities precisely because Mobile Suits are also tanks, so they can fly INSIDE THE HANGARS, and then a mobile suit is inside your carrier doing whatever the heck it wants.
Since you mentioned Legend of the galactic heroes, it,s worth noting to say that in this universe almost every battleship carries at least a squadron of fighters to especially last resort engagements (since the chaotic battlefield with that much things make difficult for not friendly fire), and the dedicated carriers who carry hundreds of fighters are always on the rear, usually
escorted by another ships
One consideration as to how useful carriers are in space warfare is how difficult it is to achieve FTL travel in the setting. Is the FTL drive and necessary power source physically small enough to fit in a fighter size vessel? Even if it could fit, is the FTL drive so expensive to make or operate that equipping the fighter craft would be prohibitive? The carrier could effectively be little more than a box with an FTL drive. Except for most militaries wanting to recover their troops and assets, the carrier could almost be considered disposable. Or partially disposable with the hanger pod being jettisoned with the fighters and the expensive FTL drive retreating from the theatre.
Starcraft's Protoss have a dedicated Carrier starship, which is entirely defenseless except for it's massive fleet of combat fighter drones it can replace rapidly over time. They work best when accompanied by other support craft like Phoenix Fighters or Void Rays.
Also an example of Gameplay/Story Segregation, as lorewise Carriers could glass planetary surfaces with prow-mounted energy weapons.
I want to point out that the very first generation of aircraft carriers were designed with anti-ship guns. The Lexington and the Saratoga were converted from battlecruisers and had 8 inch guns. Also the late-war partial conversion of the IJN Ise and Hyuga were designed as battlecarriers with the front half remaining battleships while the rear was converted into a seaplane carrier. I should point out that the Akagi and Kaga were built with 8" guns as well, but again they were battlecruiser conversions.
The Sojourn is the best space opera I've heard in my life. Thank you. Waiting anxiously for the Season 2.
I would consider the dual-purpose nature of space carriers as an off shoot of the environment. Water-based carriers generally only have 180 degrees of structure to work with, in space you have a possible 360 degrees of internal and external space for mounting bays/armaments. Especially if they are built in space docks and don't do planetary landings. And as someone pointed out, space fighters typically don't have a higher flight time than in-system maneuvering/transit. And it's likely that any space-faring species would have system defenses, thereby requiring any warship to be at least moderately efficient in self-defense.
The series by David Weber, honorverse series: Honor Harrington, has the some of the best Sci-fi naval tactics.
I always scrub through the comments to find a fellow Honorverse fan! But to your point, it really does.
@@JamilLynchDammit! Now I'm going to have to read the series again 😂
@@PeterLGଈ Worse ways to kill time! 😆
video starts at 1:14
I think it's far more likely to have something like the Arsenal Ship. A lightly armored (relatively) capital ship that just carries a ridiculous amount of missiles of all types. It would make the more sense than deploying a bunch of manned vehicles that will either be too fragile to withstand the radiation output of the ships they are sharing a battlefield with, or too cost prohibitive to be to protected enough to stay in the fight.
I think the one thing I like most is when a ship built for one task gets co-opted & refit for another. For instance, the Lucrehulk was initially just a very heavy freighter, but they found out that its cargo bays & armor could make them pretty decent armored carriers, so they were co-opted into warships.
To carry the WW2 metaphor through... battleships did have planes they could launch, but they were almost exclusively for scouting and range spotting. They first appeared at the end of WW 1 or the inter-war period. Retrieval was a tedious task of a sea landing, putting up next to the ship, and being craned aboard and prepped for another launch or folded up and stowed in a makeshift hanger on the desk. The first Aircraft Carriers developed during the end of WW 1/inter-war period from the hulls from Battleships reconfigured into carriers. Some featured multiple elevations of decks, the lower and upper for launch when space allowed, and the upper for retrieval.
They were also used for anti-submarine warfare.
To answer the original question in the title - yes they are extremely practical.
why would you ever have a launching bay in Sci-fi? just teleport ships outside and build a super good hall.
Being fair to _Battlestar Galactica_ 2003, the _Galactica_ was the last surviving military vessel. Multiple ship types might have been valuable, but since everything got nuked at the beginning, it had to make due. I expect there may have been gunships at one point. The _Galactica_ looks like it's good for spreading flack against nearby fighters and missiles, but not delivering big damage to the basestars.
In _Space Battleship Yamato_ they could only build one ship, so again it had to do everything. In the first episode we see a large and varied navy before the major loss at the Battle of Pluto.
My favorite carriers are in the game Children of a Dead Earth, housing disposable, remotely-controlled attack drones capable of intercepting other drones, precisely disabling warship modules, or even engaging and destroying multiple capital ships at once from extreme distances. The carriers themselves can be heavily-armed too; my own carriers typically have large amounts of missiles in addition to the drones, along with railguns, lasers, and many armor layers just in case something intercepts the carrier.
CDE drones are definitely a more realistic example of what a space fighter might be, in fact they're essentially just a missile which carries a gun and limited supply of ammo. Take the concept even further than they'd likely just be a larger type of munition, basically a large torpedo with some limited ability to protect itself, which would still carry a warhead and still be expendably light and cheap.
You'd likely deploy them pre-engagement where they'd act as a screen against enemy fighters and missiles before racing off to both expend the remainder of their ammo against the enemy capital ships before finally attempting to ram them and detonate, fulfilling the torpedo half of their role.
If they end up not needing to be expended then they can be returned to their mothership and resupplied.
Battlestar Galactica's hybrid carrier/battleship concept make some sense in light of the setting: with enemy ships able to jump in at any time, you can't use distance to protect a pure carrier; your ships need to have the ability to fight close-in, at least for a while.
The evolved carriers in the Honorverse books recognize that they're basically big transport ships and rarely go out without large numbers of screening warships, unless they're doing something sneaky far in the distance.
I think one of the reasons or "excuses" for carriers to also engage is combat is the nature itself of space. Logic dictates, if you have a big ship with an FTL engine to carry all your fighters, you won't waste resources on installing FTL engines to your fighters, since that's redundant and makes it so the carrier doesn't really have a reason to exist.
So, in most settings, let's say star trek, you can have the USS Fat-Ass come out of warp "near" to a borg cube or wathever and drop a lot of fighters armed with their best redshirts. Probably some gunned-up version of a shuttle or something like that. If you drop too far from the cube, even at close FTL, those fighters will take minutes, maybe hours to reach the battle, the cube will have assimilated the Enterprise or whoever you're trying to save that day.
If you drop close enought to "be on time", you've basically put your carrier into shooting range and best you can hope is for there to be a moon to hide behind or something, but that won't always be the case. So, either the USS Fat-Ass has some decent shields, phasers and a bunch of torpedos to pull their weight, or they're just a giant target for the Borg to play duck hunt with. And if it gets too damanged, you also have a lot of fighters without warp drives who better hope they win the fight, because they ain't getting rescued anytime soon otherwise.
Building on this, I can *maaaybe* the the point if you make up some watered-down FTL engine that maybe lets the carrier drop the ships WHILE on FTL, get the fuck out of there, and then come back once the fight ends to pick up whoever's left. That might be a realistic use of a space-carrier, but it makes for a very un-heroic sip to drop the good guys to fight and flee to safety.
I grew up watching and thinking about the exterior flight decks of Gamilon carriers in Space Battleship Yamato, and contrasting them with the launch catapult system on the Yamato/Argo, and how that ship recovers, and sometimes launches, small craft from what was the real Yamato's enclosed boat bay: those long tubes either side of the stern. I knew the second one was just cooler, as well as making more sense in space, and have always hearkened back to it. They are only open to the stern, partly following Spacedock's tactical evaluations here, and IIRC, they aren't a single cross-hull space like I believe the combination boat bay and hangar on the real Yamato class was.
The Gamilon carriers of Space Battleship Yamato, in contrast, are barely thought out at all. They're generally not seen much, though, and we really don't get to learn anything about them, so it's likely that not much time or effort was spent on them, which in practical terms makes a lot of sense, especially with 1980s-era animation tech!
The Alliance cruisers in Firefly ship a sizeable squadron of "gunships," light attack aerospaceplanes that also seem to be used roughly like the RHIB boats that modern navies and coast guards use as boarding craft. These gunships, which look similar to early YF-22 designs and some Gundam designs, are docked with a ventral docking clamp on the underside of the skyscraper-like cruiser, and maneuver downward and away when deployed. Similar craft are seen being used in atmosphere by law enforcement. It's unlikely, given the show's canonical politics, that these "Alliance cruisers" were built with any idea that they would see combat with comparable ships.
David Weber's Honorverse re-invents carriers in the middle to late books, but I don't remember how they were used tactically. They almost exclusively carried missile corvettes instead of small, fighter/bomber type craft.
I definitely think more sci-fi should make use of carriers as standoff vessels, perhaps as unreachable antagonists. Also, there's the idea that they could be needed for planetary attack, carrying dedicated aerospaceplanes instead of spacecraft-killing craft. One thing a lot of commenters are missing is, even if dedicated carriers don't need flight decks, they're still going to be boxes full of small spacecraft, lots of fuel, and lots of weapons. It takes a lot, to make a space carrier less vulnerable.
In my original take on Lasers&Feelings, the Hive travel in what the Consortium call "carriers," imagine a sized-up Protoss carrier, deploying Formic swarm-ships instead of robotic drones. It's unknown to the Consortium whether or not the Hive have "queens" the way the Formics from Ender's War do. In another original concept from my youth, the entire theory of space warfare was fictionalized, and carriers were medium-size vessels, one of several highly specialized types of "cruiser" that would be used as needed.
In modern warfare, a carrier isn't as much a weapon of force as it is a weapon of intimidation - you park one off the coast of a place you want to threaten. If you want to bomb a place in an actual war, you use aircraft from a static base so you don't need to be limited by the types of planes that carriers are restricted to. Even a full load of fighters from a Ford-class CVN is only really capable of maintaining air superiority and surgical strikes, you need ground-based bombers to actually go to war effectively. The carriers keep the bombers from the ground bases from getting shot down.
So taking that into account, it does make sense for a combined arms deployment ship like a Battlestar in space where you can't call on a dedicated ground base to do the actual work of destroying the enemy en masse. Battlestars are there to do the actual attacking, and their fighters are there to make sure that they can get close enough to do so without enemy fighters launching nukes at them. In many ways they are similar to the Soviet "aviation cruisers" that carried the full missile arsenal of a real cruiser along with some fighters for defense, recon and strike missions.
Fighters aren't the only type of aircraft on a carrier. The limits of an aircraft carrier is the amount of fuel and ordinance it can carry to keep up its mission. With constant resupply you can keep up a fair number of bombing runs. Granted, the same aircraft at an airfield can handle heavier loads with more fuel but a carrier can still handle the job for a short time. In either case you still need infantry to get anywhere beyond harassment.
Dedicated bombers aren't as useful as they once were. Most of that is handled by multirole fighters.
Carriers are just mobile bases: VERY good at force projection, but in space where you can float actual bases, they'd make no sense.
@@obliviouz The difference between a starship and a starbase is how well it moves under its own power.
@@obliviouz Moving entire starbase between systems seems extremely unfeasible.
By design a starbase would either orbit a planet or be placed on a Lagrange point, in both cases having enough propulsion capability to stay in their designated place. The energy required to move the bulk significant distance would be magnitudes larger than that, at which point you'd end up with a starship anyway.
The thing with the Battlestar is that it's more battleship than carrier. That works, because one mission is prioritized over the other. But while it can hold it own alone, to go to war it needs support. The Colonial Fleet had a wide variety of ships, including dedicated carriers. Plus the battlestar concept as it is, only worked because despite including some realistic physics, it still was "naval battle in space".
Interesting thing to note about LoGH carriers is that they are always deployed in-fleet (never independently like how most other classes are used - yes, even battleships get used in the setting for picket duty), and because of the extreme engagement distances fleets fight at, carriers are more of a powerful short-range glass cannon that are used, quote, "to establish control over the local battlefield".
I'm quite fond of the Homeworld game series carriers. Very limited guns for point defense but they are multipurpose utility vessels; they carry fighters and other small craft during long range FTL jumps like "standard" space carriers but they also have onboard assembly bays to build new ships, and mineral ore processing capabilities, as well as very strong sensor packages.
The problem is that, depending on the Sci-fi franchise, large warships can appear suddenly from hyper space/warp/light speed and be within gun range of carrier vessels instantly. It's as if the Wwii battleships could move as fast as the strike aircraft launched from the carriers. So this gives some credence to the hybrid Battlestar/Star Destroyer type ships.
The existence of instantaneous FTL is also why the Galactica-style combat landings are a thing in scifi. The fighters being left behind by the carrier is a real danger when the carrier can travel much faster than the fighters.
The thing with "Battlecarrier" style ships is that they CAN make sense, yes specializing makes more sense, a separate battleship and carrier would both perform better than 2 battle carriers but the issue is that often the setting will restrict the deployment to 1 ship; you might get more every now and then but these ships are not meant to be specialized they are meant to be jack of all trades vessels that can operate alone and outside of a fleet where a specialized vessel can shine.
Stargate, Battlestar Galactica (Though they were a part of fleets pre war), Star Wars (not always but often single capital ship deployments),and Kinda star trek (though they aren't a 'military' per say but ships often are alone) to name a few.
That's a nice round up of the various science fiction methods of transporting small craft. Also a nice critique on those tropes of the high cool factor launch tubes and recovery tunnels. I think you are only missing perhaps one method not often used in science fiction but is itself, a very common trope. The Mothership.
One very good 'Das Boot' in space, book was 'Passage at Arms', By Glen Cook. Part of the 'Starfishers' series. 'Passage at Arms' offers up so extremely interesting space combat ideas that closely mimic submarines in space. One idea he posited however does not quite mimic real warfare. The Mothership is very akin to a aircraft carrier. A milch cow and repair and recreation station. The small craft that were carried were rather large, containing a crew of about 20 or so. Fully self contained, they dont need a mothership, however because of the size constraints, living in one for months at a time would be bad for ones wellbeing. A problem often seen in german U-boats or allied Destroyers.
The mothership suckles up to a dozen of these patrol ships, dropping them off and recovering them on its long patrol. Very much like a carrier, they are never used in combat and are lightyears away doing other duties, nowhere even close to hostile areas. because of this they resemble more a framework to dock the patrol ships too. because of their size, they are docked externally.
This leads to the common problem of everyone assuming a attack craft as small. And I gurantee you 100% NO attack ship will be small. this is one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out trope in science fiction combat I have ever seen.
nebulous fleet command does fighters well; taking off from individual small pods with blast doors that open akin to a docking port but wedged inside the hull and inverted
5:43
Speaking of outside storage, the Confederacy of Indipendent Systems' fighters may have the best system yet. Even better than reversing. Just attach to the hull somewhere and walk back to the designated resting points
Probably taking turns in the hangar for repairs and maintenance
Volture droids are fantastic
8:18 in fairness there are plenty of examples during inter war period of America, UK, Germany, Japan slapping 8 in or bigger guns onto carriers or least wanting to
Carriers for drones make sense. Worker drones to build or clean up scraps. Perhaps military ones to.
In Wing Commander, many cap ships could do both fight and launch fighters. The Tiger's Claw and the especially the Concordia weren't unarmed carriers, but the Yorktown- Ranger- and Lexington- classes from the later games were definitely purpose built carriers who were useless in a fight. And even the hybrid carriers did most of their work via fighters and bombers from a huge distance away.
I was thinking about your comment regarding SF carriers being typically battle carriers whereas navies those are separate ships. The biggest reason for having separate naval ships is simply deck space - a naval carrier simply doesn't have any available deck space to mount large gun turrets or missile tubes. For space vessels this is less of an issue as the surface of the ship doesn't have to be dedicated to launch & landing areas and there's simply more surface area to mount gun turrets.
However, there are two other reasons for having separate vessels. First, more specialized vessels can be smaller and therefore less massive and requiring less propulsion. OTOH A single battle carrier will require less materials and manpower than multiple vessels. Second having multiple vessels also increases flexibility (easier to add vessels if required / desired) and survivability (mission can continue even if a single vessel is lost or damaged).
The Wing Commander series, anyone?
No one remembers all we put poor Blair through.
Space Battleship Yamato is definitely guilty of "have your cake and eat it to". The titular ship somehow fits a very large launch bay, storage space, and maintenance room for a full combat squadron plus a few other specialized craft. All built not in a carrier, but a resurrected battleship Yamato. The franchise is by far my favourite, but that bit requires an extensive amount of handwaving.
Yeah.. I love the show but Yamato has way too many fighters aboard it and it's recovery via slow grabbing arms would take hours. Given how many times she seems to repair her damage on her own with no dry dock, I just shut my brain off.
My biggest gripe is lack of escort ships to protect these carriers/semi-carriers. They show up in Star Wars when convenient, but you should see them most of the time. Take the battle of Coruscant, where you have Venators doing broadsides, instead of where they *should* be with their hangers and long range turbolasers, far away from broadside distances, with smaller, heavily armored and heavily armed vessels providing fire at medium and close ranges. All that and lack of any real "air" defenses (or point defenses i guess) other than WW2 style flak guns that shoot lasers. Actual flak shells would be more effective, spraying shrapnel over a wide area, without air resistance you can even fire them well ahead of incoming small craft and force less optimal approaches where other guns and point defense missile batteries would shred incoming ships.
tbh rotary launching systems make the most sense since spin gravity systems will already be present most likely, like a giant spinning revolver mag full of microfighters that spins to fling them out on rails with angular momentum. Their launch can be timed precisely with the spin of the hangar to project them in a specific direction and save precious onboard reaction mass for the drones.
You leave my little catcher drone alone!! He's only trying to give me a hug.
It should also be noted that in the Freespace games, the carriers are labeled as "Destroyers" despite never really being seen in direct combat outside of "something has gone horribly wrong".
One thing that occurred to me a while back is the extreme unlikeliness that we may never develop proper protection for star ships traveling at high velocities, from even small objects, let alone weapons fire. Which is why I figured that it could be sensible for such ship to load their munitions on to ship orbiting drones or pods to do the fighting (like something between the pods from 2001: a Space Odyssey and the Star Furies from B5). They could also be Responsible for Electronic Warfare, the thing that could truly determine how long the ship would remain intact.
It's rather telling that the best way (I found) to use carriers in Battlestar Galactica is to run a pure Berzerk Carrier fleet, which happens to be the both the fastest carrier ship AND carries the most fighters with the highest survivability. My sequence of orders after jumping in to a fight:
1) All 7 Berzerk Carriers turn 180 degrees and stack on top of eachother vertically.
2) All 7 Berzerk Carriers divert ALL power to engines, and flee the enemy. While sprinting at max speed, they wiggle side to side to confuse long range dumbfire missiles.
3) AFTER the cylons release all fighters and order them to target my carriers, I release all 14 squads of anti-fighter fighters. They guard the carriers from lucky shots from long range missiles.
4) The turn before enemy fighters get in range, all carriers abruptly stop fleeing and present their broadside weaponry. My entire fleet focus fires individual enemy fighter squadrons as they get in range. Meanwhile, my fighters focus fire enemy fighters. If my fighters get attacked or focused by the enemy, they immediately retreat to the hangers for repairs.
5) After winning the fighter battle, all Berzerk's proceed to flee at max speed. All uninjured fighters dive around the battlefield to get behind the enemy capital ships.
6) All fighters proceed to blast the rear armor of enemy capital ships, which typically don't have point defense or significant armor plating. From here on out I'm usually destroying 1 capital ship per turn.
7) Once the enemy fleet is down to only a few ships (typically slower basestars, the only capital ship fighters struggle against), the Berzerk's turn around and finally engage the enemy. All power is taken away from the engines and diverted to weapons for a range bonus. Did I mention that Berzerk's have the best range in the game? A 7 stack can sometimes kill a basestar without taking ANY return fire if the relative velocity is low enough.
Most of the ships in the game are either specialists, which means they are amazing when they aren't being destroyed by fighters or missiles, or generalists, which means they can technically do anything but are too slow to choose their engagements. (I lost a LOT of battlestars before I figured out they were practically useless). The Berzerk is the only exception. It has all the tools needed to flee unwinnable fights, survive deadly but limited resources like missiles and fighters, then turn around and outrange the enemy when they pursue in a stretched out conga line.
If I had to design a space carrier, it would probably be just like the Berzerk - with two important changes. Instead of broadside weapons, they'd have rear mounted weapons that would allow fighting and fleeing at the same time. Instead of just having massive aft engines, they'd also have smaller fore engines that would let them "back" up into artillery range of the enemy while reserving the option to flee at maximum speed should the enemy pursue.
Open hangars are fine. If you get hit, you're probably dead anyway. At least with open hangers, your fighters can launch fast enough to handle incoming missiles/fighters/asteroids on short notice.
(Note: Yes, the AI is dumb. However, my trick worked shockingly well in multiplayer - after taking into account my opponent had many times my fleet power due to the population limit of capital ships - up until I found out that there's an invisible wall that prevents long chases in multiplayer skirmish mode. In a REAL space battle, speed and mobility is king.)
@4:20
I liked the approach of Space: Above and Beyond. The fighters launched from slender bays barely as tall as the ships were, which made them hard targets to hit. The key design element was that the ships' cockpits were detachable.
There were pressurized "cockpit rooms" with ~8-10 cockpits each above the launch bays that allow the pilots to get into their cockpits and get last minute assistance from various flight techs and mechanics. Once the pilots were strapped in, the crew would leave, massive pressure doors would close, the floor around each cockpit would open up, and the cockpits would be lowered down to "plug in" to the fighters. Then the "completed" ship would launch.
On one hand you could argue that creates new failure points, but it also solves a lot of problems. Plus, detachable cockpits can be made of more durable materials and designed to be used as "escape pods" if the surrounding ship is damaged or destroyed.
It also solved another practical problem...a TV show set with a couple of freestanding cockpits rather than full-sized ship models (or something approaching that) is a heck of a lot cheaper to build and maintain. You can even upgrade the ships later in the series and--since those are just CGI after the cockpits lower--you can just keep on using the same compact "cockpit only" set.
The big question in any sci fi setting is can “aircraft” reliably kill capital ships. If the answer is yes then a dedicated carrier makes sense as IRL the “aircraft” will form the main offensive punch of any fleet.
If the answer is no or not easily then using the “battle carrier” approach makes a lot more sense.
Even if they can kill capital ships maybe they’re still capable of performing missile interception or taking on smaller destroyer or torpedo boat equivalents that can carry ordinance big enough to be able to hurt the capital vessels.
David Weber's Honor Harrington series has a ship class called Carrier Light Attack Craft or CLAC which is a pure carrier with some point defense. The LAC compliment *is* it's offensive capability and relies on screens and the idea that it is not even supposed to be in the engagement envelope of active combat for protection.
What's interesting is that Weber actually somewhat avoids the idea of fighters in space given that a LAC usually masses upwards of 11,000 tons with crew complements in the double digits.