FWS Topics: Hard Science Space Fighters

Damn you George Lucas! You filled my childhood with space dogfights between odd-looking TIE fighters and sexy X-Wings. Filling an entire generation with the desire to be a Jedi Starfighter pilot. Damn you for creating the wildfire over space fighters that swept over science fiction causing nearly every sci-fi show I watched be colored by space fighters and their cool pilots, everything from ROBOTECH to Buck Rogers. And double damn you over making me pay for your plastic creations of said space fighters, and invest hours of my life playing X-Wing and Wing Commander. But nothing hurt has much as the day I read that in the real-world, space fighter will not exist on the Atomic Rockets website. So, damn you, Mr. Lucas for breaking my heart. And so I write this hard science point-of-view on space fighters and all of the cold hard realities.

Sources:

Hard science blogposts can be differcult for a history major like me, and without the below sources, I could not have written this one...many thanks. 

• http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#fighters
• http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2007/08/space-fighters-not.html
• http://www.rocketpunk-observatory.com/spaceguideS-Z.htm
• http://gizmodo.com/5426453/the-physics-of-space-battles
• http://scienceblogs.com/interactions/2007/07/newtons_laws_in_science_fictio.php

The Cold Hard Realities:

No, Virginia, there is no space fighters, Mr. Lucas lied to you, and here are the reasons why an X-wing wouldn't work in outer space. Often in sci-fi, fighters are seen zipping through the bigger capitol ships, darting in and out, making the audience green. That always bothered me when I was developing rules on some custom space battle games, if capitol ships have FTL and massive engines, why would a smaller ships be faster? And that seems to be the cold hard reality of the situation, there would be no difference between the speeds of warships and space fighters. The real difference between warships and space fighters would the greater ability for space fighters to unitize Delta-V due to to their lower mass. Of course, these smaller, short range ships would have to carry into the battlefield. This means we COULD have a vehicle like a battlestar, and fielded something like fighters. But would you need to?

There is some debate among hard science sci-fi sites that future space fleets may not even need space fighters. The reality is that since energy shielding does yet not exist, and you could not wield enough armor onto a space fighter to make resist to capitol ship sized armament, it seems that if and when a gunnery computer locked into a space fighter it would be toast. And dodging is out of the question, according to the Rocketpunk manifesto blog, at Earth-to-Moon distances, about 238,855 miles, a space fighter jock would have 2.5 seconds to dodge the incoming fire. At a more realistic combat distance, say 20,000 miles, Rocketpunk Manifesto states that the pilot would have .25 of a second to dodge. That means either you the Force on your side, or your frozen corpus will be floating. If the fighters is struck with a laser, there is the possible  that the fighter could use its Delta-V to avoid the beam from settling, but if the Capitol ship filled local space with with simple kinetic AAA fire, like what the Yamato or the Pegasus did against incoming raiders or missile, an attack space fighter would be unable to avoid being hit. In space, the KEW is the preferred killer, the ability for the kinetic projectile to transfer its energy to lethal killing power is greater than DEW systems. So, small limited armored space fighter would be toast if a 60mm AAA round came slamming into it.

Even the Good Guys will use Cylons!

The space fighter pilot is, according to sci-fi, one fo the coolest job you could have, besides Orion Slave Women dealer. But would it still be cool in a hard-science space war setting? The short answer is no. If space navies did field manned space fighters, their lives would be short, one good clean shot by a AAA round and they are gone, and if the carrier is destroyed, than the entire air wing would die slow deaths, and if they are fast enough on the trigger, than...well, you get the point. If that is true, than why are space pilot so romanticized? Burnside's Zeroth Law of Space Combat comes into play here. The 1st Law of Space Combat in sci-fi  states: that combat is more interesting if involves human beings and not drones or Cylons. This is done more for the audience and writer, and for reality.

In practice, given the mass, power requirements, cost of training a pilots, space fleets would choice to  pilotless craft, either remotely controlled by trained pilots, like our Predator UAVs of today or A.I controlled drones (Cylons anyone?) or even A.I. controlled kinetic missiles (kinetic buses as one site calls them). With the possibility of the pilots remotely controlling the hardware, the heavy requirements for attack jet pilots could be lifted, making the field more open to historical less qualified applicants. Even hard-core younger video gamers would be a good choice for remote pilots, like in the 1992 Robin Williams film Toys.
So, it seems there will be no Roy Fokker or Starbuck, or even Derek Wildstar. Damn. However, this would make the main control ship for these remote piloted space fighters, a juicy target for the enemy, making it a popular. At least, in that aspect, George Lucas got it right with the Phantom Menace.

Space Fighter or Space Lancer?

One of the primary issues with the popular sci-fi image of space fighters is their armament. Due to the small size of the space fighter, power generation becomes an issue, even if it Cylon-piloted. Most directed energy beam weapons like Lasers, Particle, or plasma would require too large of a power generation system to be feasible on a space fighter, and at low-output, the DEW system would be of little use to harming a capitol ship. This power issue would also plague KEW systems, like Gauss or Rail, needed for true anti-capitol ship work. So, what does that leave us? According to Rocketpunk Manifesto, space fighter would unitize rocket-propelled kinetic impactor slugs, thus eliminating the need for large power plants. This weapon system would speak to the realistic role of space fighters and the need for a name change. These hard science remotely piloted space fighters would more akin to the World War II torpedo bomber aircraft of the Pacific theatre, than Veritech pilots. Having space fighters be the errand boys of the warships, delivering anti-ship kinetic slugs would make some sense, especially if you watch the episode of Star Gate Atlantis, where the Terran warship Daedalus could not punch through the defensive screen of the Wraith warships, and they used teleporter to beam the nuclear warheads inside the ships. Hard Science fighters could do the same, space fighters could be the way to avoid defensive fire screens, using their Delta-V and size to get through the ship's defenses, and crack the enemy warship with some kinetic love.

But are they still fighters then?

Within the Rocketpunk Manifesto blogpost about the dim reality of space fighters, the author mentions that there was another term that could replace the word space fighter: the space lancer. It seems that the term space lancer originated with Henry Cobb over at the hard science Yahoo! group, SFConsim-1. He came up with this new term because of the mission that a hard science space fighter would perform over the classic sci-fi imagine. These space lancers would be like jousters of old, rushing at the target ship or base at maximum burn, like a Knight at a jousting field, then releasing the kinetic impactor missile directly into the path of the enemy ship or base, then using their Delta-V to prevent collision.

 Realistic Designs

If the traditional science fiction view of space fighters is wrong, dead wrong, than what would a hard science space fighter or space lancer look like?

The only close to realistic design seen in popular sci-fi was the SA-23E Mitchell-Hyundyne Starfury of  Babylon 5.

The entry for the original B5 Starfury on the Babylon 5 wiki states that Ron Thornton and Steve Burg based the Starfury on real space physics and a homage to the Gunstar from The Last Starfighter. Speaking of that classic 1984 film, the design of the Gunstar is not complete soft sci-fi, the gunner pod, being a 360 degree able targeting system is dead on. This could be also said of the Star Wars B-Wing cockpit being about to rotate. Another space fighter of note was the UNSC YSS-1000 Sabre,  not for the overall design, but of its realistic portray of how a space fighter would be launch from the surface up to space with a chemical rocket booster system.

Space Fighters of the Real World

To date, no nation has deployed a true space fighter that us fans of science fiction would equity to the X-Wing or the Viper, but there has been several attempts at space planes, with several successful models: the US Space Shuttle and the USSR Buran Shuttle, the USAF X-15, X-37, and the civilian SpaceShip One. However, during the Cold War, there were attempts by both sides to field a space fighter-like craft.

USAF/NASA X-15 (1959-1970)

At the beginning of American manned space flight, there was already attempts to develop a reusable space plane, and the X-15 rocket plane was a portion of that research that led to the Space Shuttle. The X-15 was a more direct testbed for the SR-71, but also was good template for a dual-atmospheric space fighter, given that the X-15 had systems for atmospheric flight with wings and space flight with an RCS system. There are rumors, the Fox Mulder kind, that the X-15 legacy extends to the Aurora and the Blackstar projects.

Soviet Union  Uragan/BOR-4/MiG-105 Space Plane (1969-1988?)

There are many rumors swirling around this odd-looking Soviet-era space plane, and I can remember this very image in an issue of National Geographic. It seems that the Soviets were attempting to field an small reusable space plane since the late 1960's, but it reached fever pitch during the 1980's, when the US Space Shuttle was flying military missions and Reagan was talking about Star Wars.
There are sources that claim the USSR was looking at the Uragan program to develop manned space planes that could delivery space-to-space missiles, countering the US SDI program. According to these reports, six Red Air Force pilots were selected for test flights beginning in the mid-1980's.
Some sources claim that the BOR-4/Uragan was a test-mule for the larger Buran Space Shuttle program, that used these pilotless craft to test systems like the heat shield, and there was never an secret Soviet military space plane program.

DARPA/NASA/Boeing X-37/X-40 Space Plane testers (1999-2011)

In 1998, the USAF began testing a testbed craft, known as the X-40 for space plane that could replace the aging shuttle. By 1999, the USAF began testing the X-37, the full prototype of  a robotic reusable space plane that could field military satellites, repair damaged ones via robotic arms, and other missions to further the goals of US Space Command. In 2010, the first two X-37's were launched from a Atlas V rocket and successfully landed. It is unknown if the X-37 will mount any offensive weaponry, but it does possess the needed Delta-V to change orbits. The secret program was spotted by amateur skywatchers and the USAF later came clean about the X-37 program...causing China to warn of the "militarization of space."

DARPA/US Navy "American manned combat spacecraft" (1973)

In the 1970's, the US Navy and DARPA explored the possibility of fielding a manned space cruiser for a pre-SDI orbital defense system. Its mission would have been to intercept incoming Soviet ICBMs with its own space-to-space missiles or some sort of KEW system. This manned combat space craft would have been launched by a submarine via a Poseidon missile making the maximum ability for this craft to be launched covertly. In the advent of an national emergency where Soviet nuclear launch or full mobilization was looming . This craft would be launched to either intercept ICBMs or knock out Soviet satellites that could track US Navy movements. In a interesting turn of technology, the role of this military space vehicle was replaced by the anti-satellite ASM-135 ASATmissile launched from F-15 fighter.