#ENDLESS SKY SHIPS WITH FIGHTER BAYS UPDATE#

TL:DR With an incredibly ridiculously precise laser gun, firing at the easiest moving target imaginable without account for other issues, like ship vibrations, thermal expansion of the the weapon, the presence of a gravity well, and no third dimension you'd only have an effective range of ~5,000 miles. You're right about there at 2 ten-thousandths of a degree. You need to adjust by 2 hundred-thousandth of a degree.ĥ00 miles. At 20,000 miles which Future War Stories cited as a realistic engagement range for fighters, the gun needs to adjust by 5 millionths of one degree. So let's assume it's 10 meters long, and can adjust by as little as 1/10,000 of a degree/second. So then we have to ask, at what ranges could a large laser be expected to hit a target reliably.

It doesn't matter how precise the targeting computer is at calculating since the gun will be limited by physics. Even if it can adjust it's aim to ten thousandths of a degree couldn't be expected to hit a target at those ranges, even if the target was standing still relative to the gun. At a certain point you can't make the weapon anymore precise. At those ranges, the projectile isn't the limiting factor, it's the weapon firing it. And that's only for adjust aim up/down.Īnd that's the main problem. If the laser were 10 meters long, it would have to raise it's barrel by 4.5 x 10^-11 or 4.5 hundred trillionths of a mile, which I'm not going to covert, but it's smaller than a picometer adjustment.

The laser is In order for that laser to hit the target, it needs to adjust the firing mechanism on it's laser by 4X10^-7 degrees or 4 ten millionths of one degree. The fighter is also moving really slow, only 1.2m/s relative to the laser. Let's make it easy and say the fighter is traveling upwards at 90 degrees to the laser so the computer can use really simple trig. So a laser fires at a fighter 3 yards tall 239,000mi away. Secondly, even if the fighter were traveling is a predictable straight line, would the computer be able to hit it anyways? That might seem like a simple yes, but it really isn't once you consider how far away such a small target actually is.

#ENDLESS SKY SHIPS WITH FIGHTER BAYS UPDATE#

If the fighter is always altering it's course this estimate will always be wrong and it will take 5 seconds for the firing computer to even confirm whether or not it made a hit to update it's firing solutions and try again. Firstly, the laser that's firing can only determine a shot based on trajectories that are 2.5 seconds old. I think there's two problems with this suggestion. As such it wouldn't have enough time to evade enough shots to make it closer to a target. In Future War Stories, the author cites that a fighter craft at a range of ~239,000mi would have about 2.5 seconds to dodge an incoming laser.

I'd even go so far as to say that fighters/drones might actually be vital in scifi settings that are trying to accurately portray space warfare. But is that all there is to it? I'd take the unpopular opinion that the picture of warfare for a fighter/drone wouldn't be as bleak and clear cut as the raw science makes it seem once you start considering the realities of how those kinds of weapons might perform in real world conditions. Lasers travel at light speed and would only have to point at the target and at shorter distances rail projectiles move fast enough that dodging becomes impossible. At a glance this would seem like a reasonable assumption. In general they are regarded as being easy targets that, at interstellar ranges would be unable to survive in a battlefield that employs current plausible scifi weaponry such as laser and railguns. It's a somewhat accepted convention that in realistic scifi space fighters should be impossible to use effectively.

Endless sky ships with fighter bays