Re: Fighters and Hangers

Ryan wrote:

> HUH? No they don't. They all run on JP4/JP8. MoGas and Diesel is 
> becoming a thing of the past.

I was thinking commercial vehicles. My mistake for assuming that it was
the same on the military side. I know that civilian aviation fuel is
quite a bit different from gasoline. *S*

> Corvette sized craft are getting beyond the size we're talking about 
> here. I'm speaking of small craft 1-4 mass that don't have normal 
> drives (not that we don't have any real system for these). Craft, not 
> ships.

A fighter is quite a bit smaller than mass 1 to 4, but you may have a
point with the refueling.
 
> Stowage and design considerations is what this sounds like. They 
> aren't exclusive items.

Okay, here I still completely disagree with you and I agree with Roger,
that fighters take up a greater percentage of their bay

> But its a question of small multiple bays or One big bay with 
> multiple types of craft. With a larger bay you do gain some economy 
> of scale.

Small bays gain economies based on specialization. Suppose you needed
three different sized "cradles", one for fighters, one for mass 1 to 2
craft, and one for mass 3+ craft. Each of those takes up space. Each of
those items is totally useless (worse than useless, as they cost money
to build and mass to move about the universe) if that type of ship is
never used in that bay. What you gain from a large bay isn't an economy
of scale. What you gain is flexibility. What you lose is unnecessary
equipment and wasted space.

Now you could argue that a big cradle is going to work for a fighter as
well as anything smaller. Okay, but then you have a problem of
maneuvering around a big cradle when you have 6 small fighters to pick
up. It would take you 6 times as long as having 6 small cradles. This is
all assuming some sort of cradle was needed and that fighters and larger
ships didn't just stop dead when they hit a tractor beam, or something
like that. It's all PSB, as it's all highly hypothetical.

I can see your point. Modern day carriers are essentially big hangars
with a long roof to land on. Fighters need space for refueling and
rearming. They have to be capable of landing on the deck. Bigger
aircraft have the same issue. It must be capable of landing on the deck
in order to operate on an aircraft carrier, and then it needs some empty
space for refueling and rearming. All sizes of aircraft that can land on
a carrier use essentially the same equipment, with little waste. Why
can't spacecraft be the same way? I can see that. 

My point is that Jon doesn't seem to want that option, and has fighter
bays separate from hangars. For whatever reason, Jon's universe has a
need for keeping them as separate systems. What I was listing was my PSB
for Jon's rules.

But this argument is really kind of silly as we're arguing conflicting
PSB, heavy on the "B". It's questionable whether starship fighters are
"realistic" in the first place. This is starting to get into the realm
of "the Enterprise could beat up the Death Star any day of the week,
Dude". I will agree that I see your point, and that if you want generic
bays in your own universe for your own ship designs I can certainly
agree with that.

--
Allan Goodall		   agoodall@att.net
http://www.hyperbear.com   agoodall@hyperbear.com