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tww1fa's post concerning fighter technology in science fiction, which I couldn't post inline because it's almost 3K over the 4000-character comment limit.
Modern fighters already have the capability to engage radar targets with missiles in, if not every direction, then certainly a very wide arc and altitude range. In practical terms, if it's in the forward 180° hemisphere, you can engage it with a radar-guided missile. Infra-red homing missiles are a little more problematic, as the target has to be within the field of view of the missile's seeker (which may be as narrow as 45°) for the missile to get a lock on it.
Guns present a more difficult problem, because they're generally fixed in the airframe. The gun has to be pointed fairly precisely at the spot where the target's going to be by the time the projectile gets there. Radar assistance can be used here; the Eurofighter Typhoon has a single 27mm Mauser revolver gun with a radar gunsight that can be set in automatic-fire mode. In this mode, all the pilot needs to is maneuver to bring his sights to bear on the target, and the gun will automatically fire whenever the sight calculates that the position and movement of the aircraft and the target are such that a burst fired at that instant will hit the target. Naturally, the sight's reflexes are much faster than a human pilot's, and it can react to briefer and more sudden firing solutions.
Turret-mounting guns on fighters actually isn't a new idea. Britain tried it in World War 2 (a bit after your time, I know [grin]) with the Boulton-Paul Defiant, a fighter built on the basis of precisely this idea. Airborne radar was in its infancy then, of course, and was not accurate enough for targeting, so the Defiant had a two-man crew, a pilot and a gunner, much like many modern strike aircraft. The gunner had a power-operated turret housing four Browning .30-caliber machineguns. The idea was that the pilot could concentrate upon flying the aircraft, while the gunner could concentrate on shooting down enemy aircraft.
In practice, it didn't work that well. The Defiant was utterly useless as a day fighter; compared to the single-place fighters it was competing with, it was slow, heavy, unmaneuvrable and under-armed. In addition to that, it had to cope with the fact that the pilot and gunner were two separate people who, by some odd chance, didn't share a single brain; consequently the gunner never knew if the pilot was about to bank hard to evade incoming fire from one direction as the gunner was about to fire in another. The harsh truth was, in a dogfight, the Defiant was just as much dead meat as the German Me110 that was supposed to sweep the sky clean of RAF fighters (and ended up having to be escorted by Me109s). It was rapidly relegated to duty as a nightfighter, and wasn't even much damned good at that due to its weak armament (compared to, say, De Haviland Mosquitos or Bristol Beaufighters, both of which packed four 20mm cannon, and had the capacity -- unlike the Defiant -- to carry the early radars of the day).
The truth is, it would work even worse now. A modern jet fighter isn't equipped with .30-caliber or .50-caliber machineguns; it's equipped with one or more cannon in the 20mm to 30mm range. Frequently, they are rotating multi-barrel cannon such as the US General Electric M20E1 Vulcan gun. They are big, heavy guns, eight feet long or more, with a big, heavy, bulky ammunition feed mechanism. All of that has to go into a turret, which makes for a pretty big, heavy turret. This turret, unless absurdly huge, is going to have four to five feet of perhaps multiple gun barrels protruding, and it's going to have to be strong enough and rigid enough to resist aerodynamic forces on those barrels, and possibly the torque reaction resulting from spinning a 200lb barrel/breech cluster up to 6000rpm in a single second, and slew fast enough to hold the gun on a precisely calculated radar bearing to track a target, all while the fighter it's mounted on is maneuvering and pulling as much as 9G. And the fighter's airframe is going to have to be made stronger (and therefore heavier) to take all those loads.
To cut a long story short, it's not gonna work. Sure, you can mount a Phalanx system on a warship and it'll never even notice the weight, but on a fighter, the necessary enlargement and strengthening of the airframe to support the turret will probably, when all is said and done, double the overall weight of the airframe, with corresponding effects on the aircraft's performance and maneuverability. All this for a gun that's only a backup weapon on a modern fighter anyway?
Extending this to a Star Wars type environment, there's a few things you gain. Aerodynamic drag ceases to be too much of a problem, and probably so does ammunition feed when you're talking about laser cannon. You also don't have to be pointing the same direction you're flying (something already observed in Babylon 5, for one instance), and if you have an effective directed-energy weapon, it's probably going to be your principal weapon; a missile may be little faster than your fighter and may take minutes to reach its target, but you can't outrun light. Indeed, there are examples in SF of fighters with turrets (Space: Above and Beyond springs immediately to mind), but in most cases the turret-mounted weapons were small. The larger a ship is, the easier it is to give it effective turret-mounted weapons with wide fields of fire. At the same time, though, the larger a ship is, the heavier and less maneuverable it is.
The smallest, lightest, most maneuverable fighters are always going to be those that have their armament rigidly mounted in the airframe, and don't give up the weight/bulk penalties imposed by a turret. If you can afford to add weight to your fighter, it's more effective to spend that weight making the fixed armament more powerful -- possibly several times more powerful -- than by putting the existing armament in a turret. And this, I think, is never going to change as long as there is a tactical need for fast, highly maneuverable single-place fighters, and their primary armament is of non-negligible size compared to the fighter airframe. Sure, larger gunships are going to have turrets, probably multiple turrets (like Homeworld's multi-gun corvette, for example, with its six fast-tracking turrets); but not the majority of single-place fighters.
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An interesting idea might be to use a particle beam weapon where the beam is "bent" magnetically or electrostatically in the same way as the electron beam in a CRT is bent...
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This is technically true, but there's other things to consider. As I pointed out, putting your weapons into a turret adds a lot of bulk, weight and mechanical complexity, as well as limiting the size of the weapon system. For example, if you tried to build an A-10 that carried its GAU-8A in a turret, the final airplane would be the size of a Boeing 757. Sure, it's quicker to slew a turret than the whole aircraft, if the turret is small and light. But if the cost of having turret-mounted weapons is to have less firepower in a much bigger, heavier, slower, more vulnerable craft, it's too high a price to pay.
Think of it this way -- WW2 bombers had multiple turreted heavy machineguns. A B17 carried as many as 11 .50-caliber machineguns with complete spherical coverage, and several RAF bombers (Lancasters and Stirlings, for example) had ten or more .30-caliber turreted guns woth coverage in every direction except below. Yet even so, and even with the USAAF flying B17s in box formations where every bomber was covered by as many as a dozen others, Luftwaffe fighters shot down a lot more Allied bombers than Allied bombers shot down Luftwaffe fighters. Even the B17s, even in the box, couldn't strike targets deep inside Germany until the P47 and P51 arrived -- single-place fighters with forward-fixed armament, with the range to escort the bombers all the way to their targets and back, and the speed and maneuverability to engage the Luftwaffe along the way.
Remember the lesson of the Defiant -- on paper, it was going to make the fixed-gun fighter obsolete. In the air, it was a dead duck the first time it got into a dogfight.
An interesting idea might be to use a particle beam weapon where the beam is "bent" magnetically or electrostatically in the same way as the electron beam in a CRT is bent...
Absolutely, if your weapon technology was such that it was amenable to that. The Airborne Laser Laboratory uses six chemical lasers collimated and fed into a director turret. I figure it's entirely feasible that a future fighter (airborne or space) could have one or more energy weapons of some type built along the length of the fighter and equipped with steerable emitters of one kind or another, to give a very wide field of fire, though they would almost certainly be arranged so as to have maximum firepower available straight ahead. This doesn't mean that it would be available only straight ahead, just that in any fighter-class craft you would want to be certain that all of your primary armament could bear into at minimum about, say, a 40° cone forward of the nose.
Suppose we hypothesize, say, a fighter something around the general shape of an F16 or F18, with two beam weapons outboard of the engine(s) firing through emitters on either side of the nose forward of the leading-edge strakes. In principle, this would allow both weapons to fire into a U-shaped band varying from about 40° to 60° wide above, forward and below the fighter, with almost the rest of the entire sphere capable of being covered by one emitter. Only the areas occluded from the emitters by the wings, tail and aft fuselage would not be covered at all.
(The exact areas of coverage, of course, would depend on placement of the emitters, and would probably vary depending on the role your fighter was designed to perform.)
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There's another side to this coin, though. I suspect experience would show that in practice, fighter-class craft would be extremely vulnerable to hypervelocity missiles launched from long range, possibly with multiple passive-homing kinetic-kill darts that fly "dead" until almost at the target before lighting off extremely high-G terminal-boost motors at point-blank range for the final kill. Such a weapon would be virtually impossible for a fighter-class ship to defend against. Not to mention that capital ships would probably mount heavy energy weapons capable of blowing incoming strike craft out of space long before they got within effective range of their own weapons, or really big anti-fighter missiles with bomb-pumped X-ray laser warheads.
My guess is that unless you envision some way a fighter can have firepower out of all proportion to its size, but which is denied to capital ships, fighters really aren't going to be a factor in space combat. Atmospheric fighters for planetary campaigns, sure. But not in space. One of the things that struck me about Star Wars, for example, was how undergunned the big starships were -- none of them seemed to have anywhere near the firepower that one would expect ships that big and powerful to have. But it probably had to be set up that way for the fighters to have any chance at all.
It's interesting in this context to look at ship-to-ship combat dynamics in Homeworld. Large capital ships -- destroyers and heavy cruisers -- can be murder on strike craft; the only reason strike craft have any chance against them at all is because the game limits the range of the capital ships' heavy ion beams to about 8000 meters, barely beyond the range of the fighters' own guns. In space, 8km maximum range for heavy energy weapons is absurd; the cruisers ought to be able to open ion beam fire on incoming strike craft several hundred kilometers out. Missile destroyers make another good example -- get even a small formation of missile destroyers together in Homeworld, and no strike craft formation stands a chance. Missile destroyers slaughter strike craft.
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Funny you should say that.
Re: Funny you should say that.
Never underestimate the power of a "snub" fighter. *EG*
Re: Funny you should say that.
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Unless you have ~120 plasma bombers. Then it goes pretty quick. :-D
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I dislike Homeworld 2 though; but that's a separate discussion.