Vector movement

Vulnerable? Nah, sitting strapped atop a fusion rocket with only three centimeters of glassteel for canopy, taking on huge warships at fist-fighting range, no, that does not make me feel vulnerable, why? I just trim my moustache, whistle a few bars of the Imperial march and tell my buddies to ‘smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast’.

So, young lovely, what are you doing after this dreadful yawn of a ball? Meet me at the Areobrake salute and I’ll buy you a drink.

Single crew fighters have been a standard troupe in Science Fiction but their usefulness have been questioned on Atomic Rocket and other hard SF sites. This article will argue for their existence from an Intercept perspective; why would one build small fighters in Intercept except for coolness and Traveller canon?

Fighters have one thing going for them; their Size. Small ships are hard to hit and tend to win the Initiative. Fighters are small enough to allow the Pilot and Ship tactician being the same person so grouping them together under the command of an ace Pilot / Tactician makes perfect sense, remember that guns of the same kind can be grouped into batteries even if they sit on different ships as long as they are all under the same commander. Capital ships can easily kill a fighter with a single shot but only if they can hit them. Grouping together lots of low powered weapons will steal precious surface area from larger weapons and the fighters will probably maneuver themselves into the cracks between firing arcs or even the blind aft centerline were they can attack with impunity. Large fighter groups can also work as a mobile anti missile system defending their motherships.

What then can the capital ship do in defense? They can build really thick hulls and rely on internal sensors alone (neutrino and mass) but a more viable solution is to have their own fighters engaging the enemy and protecting their aft centerline.

So, we have dashing and brave squadron leaders with excellent pilot and ship tactics skills dogfighting around the capital ships and that one, ex farm boy, young pilot can happen to score a cascading damage hit through the radiators of that huge, space station like, enemy ship, a hit that might eventually, through cascading damage, blow up the entire ship, with huge amounts of sheer luck (or is it Luke?). You can download an example fighter design (among other ships) at the downloads page.

Yes, the single-seater fighter ship is very much alive and well in Intercept!

This entry was posted on November 23, 2013 at 15:48 and is filed under Intercept, Rules, Science fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.