What About Starfighters?

Starfighters do exist, but they are exceedingly uncommon. While it is possible to build small and agile fighters, they have some significant drawbacks that have limited their usefulness.

What Is A Starfighter?

In air combat, a fighter is a fast and agile plane capable of securing air superiority. These planes were light and carried weapons specialized at downing other planes. It was logistically reasonable. A small jet with a machine gun could take out a far bigger jet. A squadron of fighters could take out a squadron of bombers and other support craft with little difficulty.

A star fighter follows on the same idea: a small, light, and agile space craft that can deal damage against bigger adversaries and other fighters. It secures a region of space for the rest of its forces. They’re fast to accelerate, manueverable, can dodge incoming fire, outmanever their adversaries, and deal significant damage.

The designs fielded so far however, are a bit bigger than old fighter planes. A good starfighter is almost as big as a gunship. They carry similar armaments, but don’t have the capacity to transport marines or conduct boarding exercises. They’re built just to do one thing: search and destroy other ships.

Starfighter Interiors

A typical starfighter has a two-man crew, some go as far as four, but they’re more rare. A few have just one-man crews. Below the flight deck there is a basic bunkhouse and a simple kitchen that reheats prepared foods. There is a small multi-function gym unit and a VR connection to help handle the claustrophobic spaces. All told there is less space in a starfighter than a even a cramped Brooklyn apartment.

A basic medsystem is included, but it’s basically limited to giving drugs and directions. Significant injuries are treated with heavy bandaging and staples until proper medical treatment can be obtained. Realistically speaking, most things that would hurt the pilot have already killed the ship.

The living section of the ship can be jetisoned as an escape pod with a compact drive for basic short-range manuevering.

At most the onboard supplies can sustain 1 month of survival.

Starfighter Armaments

A typical load out on a starfighter includes compact PDCs, one keel mounted rail gun, and some torpedoes. Due to their small size, typical torpedo loadouts are very minimal. Their use in combat is also atypical. Where a capital ship can afford to unleash dozens of torpedoes to overwhelm an enemy’s defenses, a starfighter will manually fly through those defenses and drop the torpedoes at close-range. Some ships even carry the ever-rare “Leech-Style” torpedo. These are bombed onto a target hull where they grapple against the ship and detonate after. They’re only useful against larger ships.

The most effective component of the system is the rail gun, which can put holes in far larger ships, but only at close range. This is another area the fighter’s small size benefits it. It’s able to get in close and do damage where a larger adversary cannot dodge or intercept the round.

Downfall Of The Starfighter

Taken all at once, the logistics of starfighters don’t pan out. Each ship is roughly 1/2 to 3/4ths the size of a gunship, but they can only fulfill one or two missions: recon and destruction. In combat, their best strategy is a nearly suicidal run on the enemy ship and hope to take them down without being taken out. Their light weight enables greater speed, but they have less armor and the intense g-forces and limits on the human body have limited these fighters to about the same level of engagement as a gunship.

In most navies, gunships are chosen over the starfighters for their greater practicality - but there are always exceptions.

Pirate Fighters

Racers have made excellent starfighters. Pirates frequently obtain old racing ships and retrofit them to be excellent starfighters. There have been a few shipyards exploring the possibilities of new starfighter lines. These are of course, absolutely only intended for legitimate sales and will never be sold to a pirate.

Advances In Fighter Tech

The bleeding-edge of starfighter technology is the full-immersion cockpit. In a standard-atmosphere cockpit, the pilots use a crash couch to survive the heavy g-forces, along with a cocktail of drugs to prevent stroking out. Experimentallly, crash couches have been built that encapsulate the pilot in a breathable liquid. By filling the lung cavity with liquid, the pilot can survive FAR higher g-forces than would otherwise be possible. It is not a pleaseant experience, but it can be done. The risk of a stroke still persists, but for a short engagement the standard drug cocktail will still provide a reasonable layer of protection.