Fighter Effectiveness

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AnonymousRedShirtEnsign
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Fighter Effectiveness

Post by AnonymousRedShirtEnsign » Mon Sep 04, 2006 10:46 am

In many fanfic crossover stories the Empire uses TIE fighters and bombers to great effect against the Federation. After re-watching the films I was unimpressed by the fighters in Star Wars in every regard with the exception of maneuverability. I was wondering why in space warfare would a bunch of lightly armed fighters be a threat to a capitol ship capable of targeting them and destroying them. The reason why fighters are effective in contemporary warfare is that they add another dimension to the battlefield. They are also capable of traveling more than ten times as fast as our land or sea based units.

So I suppose my question is how effective would fighters be in the VS conflict?

By the way, no EU, just films and shows.

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Post by Enterprise E » Mon Sep 04, 2006 5:03 pm

EU included, or not, I don't think that starfighters would be very effective against Federation starships at all. In the EU, the fighters often used torpedoes to weaken the shields, and strike again while they were stressed, adding even more stress to them so that shields would collapse in a certain section of the ship. Also, there were exposed shield generators, at least on Imperial Star Destroyers that were vulnerable to starfighter attack. Also, none of the main Imperial ships had any weapons that were effective against starfighters. Only the Lancer Frigate, and maybe some Nebulon B Frigates had lasers that could be of use against starfighters (the part about the Nebulon frigates comes from the Essential Guides). All other ships had no real anti-starfighter weapons and it was merely a lucky shot that would down a starfighter.

The Federation does not have this problem. Starfleet vessels have extremely accurate targeting systems, and use beam weapons. The Enterprise D has been shown to be devastatingly effective against starfighters in an episode of Star Trek TNG, I forget the episode's name. Not only that, but the Federation does not have exposed shield generators, as far as I know, and it takes a lot of firepower to cause any appreciable harm to Federation shields. And SW starfighters simply lack the firepower to be able to harm Federation shields. And even if that were not the case, SW fighters' missile weapons travel slowly by Star Trek standards. This is shown on screen. They'd have to get within point blank range to be able to have a chance of hitting the Federation's ships without their missiles being destroyed, and quite frankly, they won't survive long enough to get within point blank range. A single burst of wide-beam phaser fire, something that is possible with any ship that has phaser strips, will be able to take out a squadron of Imperial starfighters in short order. This is probably the reason why Star Trek powers didn't use fighters for such a long time. Don't forget that the only weapons the Federation fighters used against the Cardassians in the Dominion War were torpedoes, and I have a feeling that even if they were simply micro-torpedoes, that they were designed to take on capital ships, since that's who we see them battling in the war. And to me, the Attack Fighters seemed to be a stop gap measure. Yes, they proved themselves to be effective, which is why they continued to be used, but they still had a high attrition rate. In their assaults on Cardassian ships, they usually lost at least one fighter on each attack run on the ship, with a squadron usually consisting of four or five fighters. And don't forget that Cardassian targeting sensors seem to be inferior to Federation targeting sensors.
Last edited by Enterprise E on Wed Sep 06, 2006 7:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Nonamer » Mon Sep 04, 2006 7:00 pm

Fighters in SW were obviously based on WWII air combat, with a much greater emphasis on dogfights and much less on missiles. The only particularly impressive thing are the manueverability of the missiles which are intelligent and actively chase their target, albeit very slowly. They're also not very tough. In ROTS, we see fighters taken out with a minimum of firepower and the pilot's body survives intact afterwards.

Against ST, they shouldn't last more than a few seconds against a precision phaser given the accuracy of phasers from what we see in ST:VOY. They only way they can be effective is if they shoot hundreds of torpedoes against ST ships in the holds that some hit. It's unclear how a ST ship will deal with the slow moving torpedoes, but it's likely they can be shot out given their slow movement.

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Post by AnonymousRedShirtEnsign » Mon Sep 04, 2006 9:43 pm

Do TIE fighters and interceptors even have proton torpedos? The only evidence to support that they do comes from the fact that they are a threat to the medical frigate in RotJ. Their firepower and defenses are pathetic. The only federation craft they are suited to fight are lifepods. TIE bombers are just as poorly executed a concept as TIE fighters.
The bombs dropped from the TIEs were much bigger and weaker than a photon grenade.

It's sort of funny how modern fighter tech and combat is much more advanced than its SW counterpart.

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Post by Enterprise E » Mon Sep 04, 2006 10:33 pm

As far as I know, TIE Fighters and Interceptors don't have either shields, or torpedoes in either the EU or in the movie universes. They only have such weapons in the game TIE Fighter, as far as I know. And when they do have missiles, they only have Concussion Missiles, which aren't really all that effective against capital ships in the games, which are the only known instance of TIE Fighters and Interceptors having missile weapons, and they weren't standard loadouts for either ship. The missiles are mainly used against starfighters. Either the medical frigate had severely weakened defenses, or its shields may have been taken down. While there were no TIE Bombers in the movie, the EU (mainly the Rogue Squadron games) does show TIE Bombers attacking the medical frigate.
Last edited by Enterprise E on Wed Sep 06, 2006 7:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Sep 05, 2006 10:01 pm

Enterprise E, the episode you are thinking of is TNG's "Conundrum" (season 5) where the Enterprise-D rapidly takes out half a dozen or so fast-moving, 29 meter long Lysian drone craft with it's phasers:

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 13&pos=286

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 13&pos=287

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 13&pos=288

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 13&pos=289

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 13&pos=289

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Post by Enterprise E » Wed Sep 06, 2006 12:10 am

Yeah, thanks Mike. Anyway, I doubt that any SW fighters would last longer than those Lysian drone fighters in a battle against a Federation starship. They would at best be distractions and/or phaser soaks so that the big Imperial ships can maybe get off a few more shots.

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Post by AnonymousRedShirtEnsign » Wed Sep 06, 2006 5:18 am

They would only work as a distraction as long as Starfleet considers them a threat, which would be for about 30 seconds in the first battle. After that the federation probably wouldn't even bother shooting them until they had defeated the Imperial capitol ships. It's not like they can retreat with the rest of the fleet unless they dock.

On top of the rapid fire and multi-beam from the same array features, culminating phaser arrays can fire wide beam. This would be extremely effective against TIE formations.

TIE fighters would be canon fodder against not only Trek capitol ships, but Trek fighters as well. In fact the only two good things I can say about TIEs are that they are cheap and have efficient engines, by Wars standards.

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Post by Mike DiCenso » Wed Sep 06, 2006 8:20 pm

Here's the DITL article on the "Dragon's Teeth" VOY episode with Voyager taking on over a dozen of the Vaadaur heavy fighters

http://www.ditl.org/hedbattle.php?19

If you click on the "images" button, you can see where Voyager is able to hit up to three of the fighters, even though at that point the ship's phasers had to be manually targeted. So this confirms the ability of other ST ships to combat fighters, even under difficult circumstances.

Again to make the point, there is the E-E doing rapid fire phaser shots in an attempt to locate the cloaked Reman warbird Scimitar (click on images button again):

http://www.ditl.org/hedbattle.php?20

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Post by AnonymousRedShirtEnsign » Thu Sep 07, 2006 5:56 am

Galaxy class ships can also fire weapons rapidly, as per the episode warsies cling to for Trek shield limits (the 40 GW one with the semi-omnipotent being that killed off the whole species for killing his human wife). The E-D also experiences slow firing rates too, my guess would be where power is diverted has a major impact.

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Post by Mike DiCenso » Fri Sep 08, 2006 8:47 pm

AnonymousRedShirtEnsign, the ability of a GCS to do rapid-fire phaser blasts was already mentioned. See my posting that links to the Trekcore images of the E-D vaping a half-dozen Lysian drone craft in a matter of seconds. "The Survivors", the episode you mentioned, is more an example of the E-D firing multiple phasers and a rapid spread of photon torpedoes all simultaneously.
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Post by Jedi Master Spock » Sun Sep 10, 2006 2:32 am

To me, this is not a question of absolute effectiveness, but one of relative effectiveness.

Compared to other Star Wars ships, fighters are small maneuverable targets, able to evade at least long-range fire. They frequently rely on missiles, which are the easiest weapons to upgrade the power of.

Short range TIEs are not necessarily very good, not having independent FTL capabilities, but the heavier fighters make very flexible scouts. I would say that fighters will probably remain a very valuable part of any Star Wars military force in almost any scenario that doesn't involve completely uprooting Star Wars military technology.

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