| abstract
| - Interesting military trivia: the aircraft carrier has supplanted the battleship in terms of usefulness and importance. The carrier's ability to project force thousands of kilometers away made most WWII aerial/naval battles in the Pacific happen completely out of sight for the carrier's crew. Missile technology itself and remote piloting may do this to the carrier as well, with designs for "missile ships" in the works. In space, however, the standard top-of-the-line ship is a hybrid carrier/battleship. It has the heavy armor and big guns of a battleship, along with the fighters and point defense weapons of a carrier. This makes perfect sense, assuming carrying fighters in space makes sense, because:
* A) It's awesome.
* B) The extremely thin atmosphere and the huge amount of free space means that the range of weapons are enormous. (or it should, anyway).
* C) Lack of gravity means you don't have to waste the entire top on runways and the entire bottom on being underwater. The one, tiny, insignificant flaw in the sheer awesome that is the Battlestar that could never be exploited is it usually has such a large size and mass that it's significantly slower and less maneuverable than slimmer ships, and may present a larger target while being unable to move fixed guns quickly enough to track fast targets. Of course, these may be a non-issue if their propulsion/maneuvering system is so powerful mass doesn't slow them down, their guns have full coverage of all angles, the Battlestar has escort craft to protect it, or they have good point defenses. When these aren't the case, expect the heroes or villain to engage in strafing against the Battlestar. A type of Military Mashup Machine. Compare the Battlestar's "little brother", the Airborne Aircraft Carrier. This trope is named for the Battlestar class of warships from Battlestar Galactica, one of the first such depictions to reach widespread audiences. Has nothing to do with the elite Autobot fighters from Transformers Return of Convoy. Often part of a Standard Sci-Fi Fleet. Naturally comes hand-in-hand with the Space Fighter. This model is less silly than it might appear. A couple of points: First, given how planets move through space and the need for at least rudimentary slingshot orbits, trajectories are actually fairly predictable in time and space, therefore, combat is likely to be very short range, though you could send a bunch of missiles hurtling down this space "lane". Although fightercraft are less useful in a traditional role, they can bring weapons (e.g. missiles) closer, in under the target's point-defense range, and at this point in time we can't conceive of a spacecraft that could take a missile and keep fighting, but if we could take the missile out early, the most it could do could be irradiate the ship, and you can armor against that. You can actually make an argument for almost any weapon in space, though for kinetics you'd need a propellant that doesn't need outside air, and be willing to live with the fact that you're putting hyper-lethal debris somewhere, especially immediate if you're fighting in near-orbit. Examples of The Battlestar include:
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)