They don't have the advantage of continuing to work on a target after arrival, or an ability to do much of anything but destroy, so you start getting creative, and put a Von Neumann machine as a warhead. They have the same problems as the smaller ships, but are more expendable. If an enemy has enough time to find them all and attack them, they're just a waste. Which may simply be shot to pieces anyway on a long trip. Something akin to a wet navy's destroyers. So you make a bunch of ships that are relatively self supporting, yet can also dish out a lot of damage. And you don't want those targets relying on a carrier supply ship that might be destroyed en route, leaving them stranded. Something that big would take a lot of work to move however, so you scale down and spread out to make for more and more difficult targets. Splitting things into multiple smaller ships makes less sense than say, a battleship with a mile of asteroidal rock for a nose cone/ablative armour and camouflage for the approach. In reality with known physics, I think you'd be pretty hard pressed about it, and more inclined to have a ship with the purpose of getting from A to B intact and killing whatever's at B, then probably dismantling itself to start a colony or invade. That said, how are you going to get this giant ship over to a target without being shot to pieces in the process? In scifi it works if you've got some form of FTL at work. Base ship might be a better term, as it conceptually allows for much larger or varied purpose craft to dock with it.Īdditionally, with a base ship like this, you could bring it into cover from enemies hide behind a planet or star from an attacker. I think carrier is probably a bit of a misnomer however, as it implies small fighters. So you leave that at your forward operating base and send the combat ships into battle. You're also not really wanting to add more mass to combat ships that may take damage or be destroyed, in the form of rearms, spare parts, etc. You're wanting to resupply/rearm/repair/etc combat ships, but you're not wanting a fixed location that can have rocks dropped on it. You have to base your forces somewhere and putting them down the gravity well in atmosphere is stupidĪdding engines to that base would be a good ideaįloating in a definite orbit makes you very easy target to get hit with just rocksĪt first glance, I think you've just provided a sound rationale for carrier-like ships in space, without any need for science fiction reasons. If you consider what they call carriers as forward bases, If I can speak completely out of my ass it should also be pretty straightforward to detect the gravitational pull of a large enough ship if it's nearby, supposing that you are far enough from any stars and planets. I guess it comes down to how much heat your ship have to generate - if the area needed to emit heat is small enough that you can shield one side of the ship from radar and infrared light you would pretty much be able to be invisible to an enemy using technology available today, if you know where that enemy is. Also radar, though that would have double the delay of infrared vision as the light would have to travel both to the enemy ship and back before you know where they are. As space is pretty much empty one would guess nuclear weaponry would be the standard since there will be no one to get caught in the crossfire or suffer from any radioactive fallout.Īs for detecting ships, it should be fairly easy to detect a ship from its heat emission, unless you can radiate all excess heat in a specific direction and put that side of the ship away from your enemies. Know any others? Message #scifi and let your friendly mods know!Ī nuke is always a nuke, and wouldn't require a large craft to deploy. Imaginary Mindscapes - The Art of Imagination.The Orville (Star Trek Comparisons NOT allowed).The Orville (Star Trek Comparisons allowed).Ghost in the Shell and Ghost_in_the_Shell.Previously interviewed authors in the Ask an SF Author series: To write spoilers in comments, use the following method: (/s "Darth Vader is Yoda's father")Īward Winning SF author Nancy Kress answers questions from the Reddit Scifi Community If you see a title with a spoiler in it, downvote it as hard as you can and then message the moderators. PLEASE DO NOT POST SPOILERS IN YOUR SUBMISSION TITLE. New Rule: This rule was stupid and it's gone.Science Fiction, or Speculative Fiction if you prefer.
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