Product Placement
The larger battleships instead seem to focus on massive guns, that can target other battleships, with manual aiming. Then we have the small fighters that are equipped with nuclear warhead equivalent torpedoes to drop on said battleships. When your big guns can't target the small fighters, it makes a whole lot of sense to have fighters guarding your ass.
Since losing a battleship means losing billions of dollars and hundreds/thousands of crewmen vs losing millions of dollars worth of investment and a handful of people when sending a fighter squadron on a suicide mission, it kinda makes sense why they would make fighters.
It's a valiant but vain attempt, much like most kamikaze missions ironically :)
You're still using WW2 tactics as an analogy unfortunately. But that situation
only existed due to factors specific to that time and that time
only:
By WW2 battleships were outdated; being designed to sink other heavily armoured battleships and defend against them. They couldn't defend against fighters because their armour was in the wrong places and AA gun technology was in its infancy.
Fighters could project greater force longer distances from their mother-ships -that would stay safely out of range beyond the horizon. They could carry larger weapon payloads than the battleships had any defence against (in the form of torpedoes and gravity assisted bombs) and deliver them with greater accuracy than any long range gun. They could travel faster and further than ships because they flew through the air while ships were limited to the surface of the ocean...
...but building carrier craft is just as expensive...
Those historical factors don't apply to space, there's virtually nowhere for their mother-ships to hide. Even in solar systems the distances are way too vast to make such craft practical, it's doubtful fighters would even have enough on board fuel to get close enough to use their tiny weapons before they were destroyed by a large particle beam or some such... Hunting inside asteroid fields would be about their limit. Defence and attack capabilities of large ships would be fully spherical in range since space has no "up" or "down", they wouldn't
have the traditional vulnerabilities of their historical counterparts; they're not limited to "the surface of an ocean".
Even the targeting idea doesn't really work, - with size comes superior resources, the power to burn through all countermeasures, the ability to pour out vast curtains to fire... with weapons such as lasers, particle beams that travel at the speed of light and accelerated projectiles that travel at a good portion of the speed of light, there's no way to dodge that. Missiles would be far too slow in this context, and things like gravity assisted bombs and torpedoes are totally irrelevant. - there are no weapons that a fighter could carry that couldn't be carried and employed more effectively on a larger ship.
Even if small craft
did make sense in some way, why would you bother putting humans at risk? Remote controlled or even autonomous fighters, drone craft, would be what you'd use...
Hakoshen
But, since I'm a fanboy I have to mention this: Borg cube = 3 km in diameter. Death star = 900 km in diameter. Masswise, there is no comparison. Further, combat range of star wars ships starts at 2 to 3000 km. Star trek is within 5 to 10km. The power of a star trek phaser is 3.6 giga watts. The power of a naval class laser in star wars is 300 million giga watts. And these numbers are enterprise D vs a small star destroyer, much less a single super star destroyer or death star.
And yet they primarily use their useless fighters... In that case you'd have to say Trek would win because Star Wars people are tactically blind, like Nelson winning at Trafalgar over the superior forces of the French and Spanish.
Haha, tactically, spacefighters are a nonsense, I think, so Star Trek really does have the right idea. but I still prefer the battle scenes in Star wars, they're way more fun and exciting than Star Trek could
ever be!
