How Practical are Carriers in Space Warfare?
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- čas přidán 20. 02. 2024
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Spacedock delves into the much-debated topic of sci-fi carriers.
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A game you guys might like, is Spaceborne 2. Its a passion project about space age combat
I am glad you pointed out something htat has bothered me about space carriers for a while. Using them as front line ships. I always thought you'd keep the carrier away from the point of contact with any long range sniper ships and supply vessels and just let it disgorge hundreds or even thousands of fighters to do the fighting for the carrier.
Not saying you can't have a front line combat carrier but doing so reduces its fighter complement as you now have to have space and resources for heavy guns.
Carriers in Sci-Fi are more like Aviation Battleships. the the USS Nebraska and a few of the japanese ones.
I don’t really know how you would classify this or if it would even be possible. But if you haven’t already, I think you guys should try and do a video similar to this. But maybe with craft that could almost be seen like the outer space equivalent of a submarine.I don’t know if that’s even possible but you know just a dumb idea.
Here’s a few questions: (1) How realistically viable are most “super-weapons” in Sci-Fi, (2) are there any good hard sci-fi super-weapons, and (3) what Is your favorite “super weapon” (and why is it the Death Star?)
Carriers are as practical as the setting makes them.
Something is only as effective as the writers make them
@@commanderwookiecopc806 generally speaking.
In Stars Without Number (a TTRPG), ships need a special drive (called a spike drive) to go into what's basically hyperspace, to travel to other star systems. This drive costs more money than a regular system drive (to fly around a system with), and takes up more of the ship's available energy and mass, limiting other ship fittings. By equipping a carrier with a spike drive, the ships it carries no longer need to be outfitted with a spike drive.
TL;DR - in a setting where you need a special drive to travel interstellar distances, carriers could just have that drive, alleviating the need of having such a drive for the ships it carries.
@@Novenae_CCG Kinda the same think in Battletech. You have Jumpships and they are like 95% Jump Drive, but they can be made to attach other ships to them and jump with those ships. They have a Warship version with what is known as a Compact Drive, which takes up about 48% of the ship' mass. And attached ships are limited to 100,000 tons in mass each. But not in number that can theoretically be jumped with. IIRC the Star Lord is the largest Jumpship and can jump with 9 50,000 ton or less ships attached. But the big boy is the Potemptkin Class Troop cruiser built as a warship that can jump with 25 50,000 ton or less ships attached. Any ship above 50,000 tons up to 100,000 tons takes two attachment points.
I like Honor Harringtons LAC's instead of "fighters." They're tiny corvettes basically. More like torpedo boats. Great stuff when they surprise the enemy with their battlecruiser being converted to LAC carriers.
"How do Cylon Raiders return to their Toast Racks?"
Viper Pilot: "They don't."
Raiders are piloted by robots, so they don't have to worry about g-forces. They can zoom in do a flip and park it. They're computers, so calculating the landing solution isn't a problem. I'm sure there's a repair bay that the ships get auto-piloted to for repairs once the cylons have exited.
@@MrAkaacerI think it was meant to be a boast: _They don't...because we shot them down._
@@MrAkaacer Cylon raiders are robot organic hybrids. They've got some squishy bits
@@MrAkaacer considering Cylons can just be downloaded into a new body, they don't even need to return. And as we see with Scar, an immortal enemy fighter pilot is dangerous, even if you shoot it down.
@@MrAkaacer Robots? Pretty sure those ships were like half-organic... like animals basicly with intestines, Starbuck stole one and flew it if i remember...
i literally jusst started rewatching battlestar galactica... blood & chrome was good.. now to season1, already hate the pilot... baltar and that actor who cant keep her clothes on... pff... ruined it imho... if this nonsense wouldnt be there, the series would have been way way better...
The question of practically of carriers in space combat.... well look at naval carriesrs... Nimitz class... what arsenal it has and can carry over 100 F18's...
pretty insane specs actually... not a easy task to bring down those carriers, and US has like i think 11 of them? China has only 1 or 2.. :D
tho China generally has now larger naval fleet than america, a lot of destroyers and their destroyer F5 is like cruiser size, 350~ of those... no wonder US wants to focus on China, rather of thinking of supporting EU in ukraine war....
The Starcarrier series of books by Ian Douglas bring up early-on a rather great point about magnetic-acceleration launch tubes. Once the flight wing is away, there's nothing stopping the carrier from just loading a giant car-sized slug into the tubes and turning them into perfectly functional giant coil guns. Just as long as you have the capability of (literally) amping up the power output.
That makes sense but to me it would be more practical to launch a torpedo equivalent.
I should ask him about those. Really brilliant idea.
A mass-driver is a mass-driver, I suppose. Might be a bit finicky to aim though.
@@CaptainBlueTech Not necessarily in space. Depends on the scale and faculties of the ship. On Earth there are two main things that limit our ability to deliver destructive energy to a target.
1) Propulsion. With the exception of the wildly expensive and cumbersome US Navy Rail Gun which isn't actually used except for research, we use chemical propellents which transform stored chemical energy into kinetic energy in a projectile. Bullets, missiles, cruise missiles, ICBMs, all of them. The amount of energy that can be transferred to the projectile is limited by the rate at which the chemical reaction of the propellent happens to release its energy. Rockets and missiles are less restricted by this because they burn their propellant as they travel to the target, but, for the same reason, it takes a long time to burn that propellant and that may be time you don't have (I'll explain that later), and the more energy you try to add with more fuel, the more mass it must accelerate and therefore the slower the acceleration.
2) Our atmosphere limits the amount of energy we can efficiently deliver to a target as kinetic energy in the form of a solid projectile due to drag. We get around this by using chemical explosives and incendiaries because they store large amounts of chemical energy to be released into the target on or shortly after impact. The torpedo is the perfect example because they deliver essentially no kinetic energy to the target. They can't. The drag from being immersed in water is way too high. Real ones used in water don't hit at all typically, they blow up underneath using magnetic detonators. All the destructive energy is from the explosives. The transfer of energy from the torpedo to the target is not that efficient necessarily, but it's better than in air because water is incompressible and fairly dense. The advantage of being in the water is that it's easy to load torpedoes with very large amounts of explosives due to buoyancy, so it's still effectively delivers a lot of destructive energy to the target and it does so under the waterline, so damage causes flooding.
Space, meanwhile, is a vacuum so no drag and it has no horizon or major gravity well to limit its line of sight and weapon range either. Projectiles will travel in straight lines without slowing down forever essentially, unless they hit something. This brings us back to the US Navy Rail Gun. It is big and expensive, but spaceships are even bigger and more expensive so that is less of a concern. The advantage is that a rail gun can dump as much energy into a projectile as it has electrical energy available. Electric currents turn the coils into powerful electromagnets that fling the projectiles with an extraordinary amount of force, meaning acceleration and top speed are essentially uncapped. You could potentially fire projectiles at significant fractions of the speed of light. The type of ammunition is also really simple. It just needs to be magnetic and fit within the coils. You could shoot big or small projectiles no problem and the ammo will never misfire or explode on the ship because it contains no chemical energy in the form of propellent or explosives. Fictional large space warships also typically contain some form of serious electrical energy production like nuclear reactors. A ship could run the reactor for day, filling every battery and capacitor on the ship full energy, and then release it at the speed of light into a projectile that will hit its target with all that kinetic energy focused at the point of impact. The time-to-target would be much shorter than that of a missile and it'd cause deep penetrations rather than surface explosions (particularly dangerous because the most dangerous thing in space is being exposed to space itself as water boils right out of your 70% water body when you depressurize, causing you and ALL your cells to explode). Your ship could be getting ripped to shreds before you get your missiles out of their tubes and a suit perforation from solid or molten spalling could mean your end at any moment, if the shockwave from the iron ball bearing coming through the wall with enough energy to melt titanium to like butter alone doesn't kill you.
The only caveat might be a nuclear missile. Yes it has all the issues of missiles, but boy does it deliver a lot of energy.
@@AsheramK I most definitely agree with you, in regards to the problem with aiming. I can think of some good uses for it, still. Depending on where they're located. Planetary bombardment is the first thing that comes into my mind.
If they're side mounted, facing outward, it would be exactly like cannons were placed, in the old naval ships. When the Broadside Technique was the most common form of warfare.
Taking it just a step or two further, if you were launching pods capable of releasing multiple projectiles after launch, they could make for a fantastic "Grapeshot" launcher for use against incoming missiles. Or against enemy fighters, for that matter.
I suppose that if you wanted to turn the power WAY down, you could also use them to eject a minefield, or debris field into the path of a pursuing vessel.
"Carrier has arrived."
My favorite is Starcraft's Protoss Carriers. They're JUST flying mobile factories for interceptor drones without any weapons of their own, but they still feel epic in presence. Automatic fire from enemy forces will end up locking onto the interceptors instead of the carriers, and even manual targeting can end up accidentally locking onto the drones instead of the intended target underneath.
One argument that can be made for a lot of sci-fi carriers doubling as battleships could be that a lot of these settings also tend to have some sort of FTL movement. In real life, carriers are usually protected by the distance they can keep from the actual battle, acting like the mobile airstrips that they are. In a lot of sci-fi settings, that doesn't work as well when enemy forces can just triangulate where fighters are coming from and then speed over to a carrier's location, so it could make more sense to just park the carrier on the front lines with heavy weaponry and shielding rather than leaving it relatively undefended at a back line.
Even I feel like Automatic-Replenishing Drone Ships are cheating.
Probably why they are the backbone of any good space based navy!
Why have a ship, when you can have a whole factory!
Star Wars has a healthy number of essentially pure carriers, too, but they don't get the same attention that the combination craft like Star Destroyers do.
There is a point to be made for the "combinations are bad" argument, too. An ImpStar Deuce is a mile stem to stern and only carries a fighter complement on par with a WW2 era carrier; 72 TIEs of various types. Proportionately speaking that's much closer to the space a cruiser would dedicate to helicopter or seaplane functionality than a carrier's "this is my one job" flight deck and hangar. Likewise the complement, usually 4 squads of superiority fighters/interceptors, 1 squad of bombers/strike craft, and 1 squad of recon craft/auxiliaries, is more what you'd see on an old escort carrier than a fleet carrier, which should have a lot more strike craft on board. The Star Destroyer isn't trying to be a battleship AND a carrier, it's a battleship that carries its own escorts in a tiny portion of her volume.
"Here comes the Gantrithor!"
@@Ryvaken basically an aviation battleship
In the full lore-canon size, Protoss carriers have point defense weapons and an orbital bombardment laser, but in the game units, neither are particularly balanced or terribly useful with how the unit as a game piece is designed.
Another thing a LOT of sci-fi settings do is _try to make humans useful_ . If point defense are all manned by humans, then human-manned fighters can be effective. If they're all controlled by AI or droids or what-have-you, then you'll need several more humans in fighters, or AI-controlled fighters, or just AI-controlled missiles and ECM/ECCM to avoid the point defense. And if point defense is strong enough, eventually the only actually effective weapons will be stealth or immense long range KKV penetrators, or extremely high power laser bursts, because anything slower will just be dodged or intercepted.
Honestly space Carriers make more sense as mobile patrol craft bases. They’re big and slow and not meant to actually fight anyone, but they are really useful for setting up quick garrisons or anti-piracy operations
Even just long haul cargo or as a staging point for things like setting up new infrastructure.
More sensible to use a destroyer tender in that situation. A mothership where destroyer and frigates dock against for service or transport.
I think Generation Tech has mentioned the Venators being good for that a lot, especially in regards to the ISD's not doing that nearly as well.
Yep more a mobile space station than an actual carrier.
HMS Hermes was employed on anti-pirate operations in the 20's and 30's in the SE Asia area
Genuinely, Battlestar Galactica's "let's just make giant missile tubes and shoot the strikecraft out of them" idea was brilliant.
And they came up with it *IN 1978*
There are those who are unaware of how Battlestar Galactica started. I swear, I've run into some who are convinced that it started in 2003.
@@FosterTravis1071 they're wrong lol
@cmdraftbrn yeah, but millennials and genz is convinced everything started in 2000
@@FosterTravis1071not all of us tho. Thankfully.
@@FosterTravis1071The oldest millennials were born in 1981. You're thinking of zoomers who were born around the 2000s.
Lest we forget, the Wing Commander game series was literally about pilots on a space carrier. The franchise was very much inspired by WW2 in space, so the carriers (Tiger's Claw, Victory, Lexington, etc.) were vulnerable to capital ship and fighter/bomber attacks, later entries were also through-deck carriers to boot. :)
Came in here to say the TCS Concordia from Wing Commander. Loved these games as a kid. I probably have hundreds of hours of flight sortie time and who knows how many dead Kilrathi were left in my wake.
@@my00t8 She went before her time.
THANK YOU! Someone else thinking the same thing.
They do have a Wing Commander scene at 2:20. It's from Super Wing Commander though.
@@joelgummert302 yeah I noticed the SWC claw. :)
Homeworld has some really cool examples of sci fi carriers done right. Both the Mothership (effectively a massive carrier and fabricator) and actual carriers are not intended for actual combat whatsoever, they are intended as..well, carriers. They're for having a staging point for strikecraft to repair and resupply, and rarely are ever in direct combat.
The sequel did give the battleships a hanger for strike craft but if I remember right they were pretty limited in capacity and I got the feeling they were there more to support the fighters launched from other vessels by providing an additional place to repair and rearm that was closer to the battle (or just being able to get more serviced at once). Or that it housed a fighter contingent that was just meant as more point defence in case enemy bombers got close enough to be a threat.
I remember playing Homeword Multiplayer and mastering loading fighters and corvetts on Support Frigates for a tactical jump. Even the Resource Controller had docking slots for up to 6 fighters and a resource collector.
@@procrastinatinggamer That, and the ability to carry fighters through hyperspace jumps. Being able to bring fighter cover with you when jumping into close-range fights was pretty handy.
@@procrastinatinggamer And I feel like the setting really supports this and makes it realistic. Fighters and corvettes that don't have hyperdrive always felt awkward to use in HW1 unless you were prepared to risk your carries for close support. Launch bays also allow rapid deployment of the fighter screen after a jump.
That still runs into the main problem of "carriers" though: fighters in space are absolutely useless and a waste of resources.
In BSG we don't see a dedicated Carrier or other ships is because they were all destroyed. A Battle Star was supposed to be part of a battle group like our Aircraft Carriers
In the BSG Deadlock games (which I think are cannon) they have a dedicated carrier called the Atlas class.
@@LostSanityAgain and I both love and hate that ship. Shockingly tough but insanely slow compared to most others. Which wouldn’t be that big a deal except that for some reason, despite being a dedicated carrier, it has fewer aircraft slots than some battlestars, making it not feel as much like a carrier as it should be. If a frigate can have its own fighter squadron, a dedicated carrier should exceed most others’ fighter complements, and yet in-game this isn’t the case.
I would recommend checking out Deadlock. It's a pretty fun game. It actually has a cool concept of having a lot of Colonial ships that lead up to the Battlestar and give sort of a reason why it was better to have a Battlestar, as the older Colonial carriers didn't really carry effective firepower to take down a Basestar.
@@John-fk2ky I think the reason why they did it (besides balancing) was that the Atlas was a really old ship design, like Colonial Imperial design. It was (at least speculated by some), to be replaced by the Artemis Battlestar, since it was just simply better. I really wish they offered modding support for Deadlock as it would have allowed modders to come up with such cool ideas for the game.
@@cmedtheuniverseofcmed8775 I would if it wasn't for the fact that it's turn-based and 2D (movement, that is).
I think part of the reason for the carrier/battleship trope (besides simplicity) is that a) space carriers don't have to make themselves as cripplingly weak in gun battles as real ones, since runways don't work the same way and b) space fighters and bombers are not usually depicted as having vastly longer ranges than gunnery. The entire point of the WWII carrier is that the planes can attack things hundreds of miles further away than guns can, so carriers can be extremely weak at short range but capable of extremely long-distance attacks. Space fighters, on the other hand, are rarely shown deploying far from their base on their own. This might be because of the nature of the extreme environment (large ships can hold much more life support and walking-around room) but also because with hyperdrives and big engines, large spacecraft are often depicted as being faster over long distances than fighters.
If the fighters cannot go very far from the base, relatively speaking, it makes sense for the carriers to be more prepared for close-range battle.
But if that's the case, what's the point of the fighters?
Might as well seal up those holes in your big ship's hull and give it more or bigger guns. Or both.
@@nigeldepledge3790 There are non-combat roles that aircraft serve in modern navies, like reconnaissance, patrols, and of course, shuttling people to and from the ship. In a spaceship, all of these are even more valuable - especially since many large ships in scifi simply can't land at all, or at least won't have a good time if they do.
So a large capital ship would need at least one hangar bay for shuttles, which is how the original Imperial Star Destroyer was mostly seen using its belly hangar and how Star Trek ship almost exclusively use theirs.
Using fighters in a battle can have some specific strengths depending on the setting. In Star Wars, fighters are capable of things like "snubbing" by strafing enemy capital ships at close range with missiles, moving too fast for defensive guns. In Battlestar Galactica they serve primarily as a defense screen, but examples like the Stealth Viper and the Raptor with missile pods being able to strike vulnerable targets away from the battlestar.
Basically, depending on the setting, fighters have varying levels of utility in and outside of combat, which justifies having them in most scifi settings. The specifics of the setting's space combat determines how valuable they are and if the tradeoff is worthwhile. In a setting where point-defense lasers are very strong against small craft, you'd probably want to have only a small number of multi-role ships like BSG's Raptors and Trek's shuttles which can serve non-combat roles as well as occasionally do heavy combat, while in Star Wars where point-defense is mostly big cannons you can have a dedicated carrier which swarms the enemy, especially with Droid fighters.
@@nigeldepledge3790depends on the setting. Usually a fighter is more space efficient than a bigger ship when it comes to attack capability, since there's no long term life support or hyperdrive involved. Further if the setting has powerful anti-cap ship weapons or shields, fighters can avoid or bypass those. If heat dissipation is an issue, a large number of fighters will be able to radiate more heat than a single big ship, so they will be able to manage much higher firepower.
Specialized anti-fighter weapons won't be good Vs heavily armoured or shielded capital ships too, and anti capital ship weapons can't track fighters, so if you have both, you would be able to exploit any such weaknesses the enemy might have.
@@nigeldepledge3790 simply put fighters can engage smaller crafter more efficiently i.e trying to hit that shuttle so you can disable and then capture it with the main weaponry and even the secondary weaponry may be overkill. Where a fighter with it's smaller weapons may be just right. This is of course before you factor in you can use the carrier as a mobile base for planet side operations as well. I.E you won't be taking the carrier into atmo but you can probably send it's fighters into atmo.
If I may put up another example is that it allows you to slim down fighters even more. The Star Wars TIE fighter lacks any hyperdrive capability and, instead of onboard life support, it relies on a pilot suit and onboard oxygen tanks. This makes them _very_ cheap to produce and to use in numbers.
Of course, this means that they're solely used around carriers and stations that can support them.
I think the hybrid carrier-combat vessels make sense in most settings where they are present. A real world dedicated naval carrier can be operated without fear of a battleship jumping, warping or dropping out of hyperspace right next to it without any warning.
In an universe where FTL requires no gates or other fixed locations, every capital vessel is at risk of direct combat with another capital vessel. That means every sensible capital vessel should have decent protection and if you are going to make it protected, you might as well arm it to fend for itself against smaller threats so you don't need to dedicate escort ships (which the FTL renders less important in screening role) or half of your fighters and bombers (since just fighters isn't enough when bombers aren't the only thing that can realistically jump you) to protect the carrier.
In real life naval carriers, the whole top surface and lengths of the ship needs to be dedicated for that role. In most sci-fi settings, carrying and operating fighters/bombers only requires a relatively compact and enclosed space on the vessel. That being said, even real life non-carrier combat ships often had or have catapult launched spotting aircraft or helicopters respectively, which similarly only require relatively little space but offer a lot of flexibility.
Fighters make no sense in an environment with no horizon to obstruct line of sight. Nothing beats covering the space vehicle in missile tubes and CIWSs. Besides maneuvering being pointless with infinite line of sight and no cover, you don't even need to change attitude much, just let the missiles do it themselves, plus overlapping fields of fire. Bombers are especially useless and specialized bombers, rather than multirole fighters that can deliver bombs, are becoming obsolete even today.
The only story I know of that has logical explanations for carriers and bombers is George Lucas' Star Wars saga (Episodes 1-VI).
@@everfaithful9272There is a potential use, depending on ranges and weapon types. You could use fighters as a sort of remote point defense system, intercepting incoming anti-ship missiles before they build up so much speed that interception becomes effectively impossible. The other use, off the top of my head, would be to create an additional attack vector for the enemy to worry about, which depending on whether or not ships are armored could dramatically complicate an otherwise simple ship-to-ship engagement. A Star Destroyer-style ship, for example, has excellent line-of-sight armor thickness against attacks from the front and sides, but would have significant difficulty dealing with fire from above or below.
Right On. Also Carriers on Earth only have to worry about up, down & horizontal attacks ...Space Carriers have to deal with possible 360 Degrees attack.
Even Earth Carriers have to carry some amount of CIWS & Mid-Range Defence Systems. Space Carrier needs CIWS to deal with Fighter, Fighter Bombers, a Mid-Range Defence against Mid-Size/Mid-Distance Enemy Ships ...Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers and against heavy hitter stand off beasts like Battleships & Dreadnoughts.
Whether dedicated carriers are desirable or not actually depends more on the role of the craft that you are intending on deploying from the capital ships.
In a sci-fi setting, embarked craft would range from snub fighters to small transports (cods); patrol craft, like a pt boat, could operate independently for long enough that they're not really embarked as attached.
Some roles:
Fighter/interceptor
Bomber/attack
Electronic warfare
Early warning (active scout)
Supply
Search/rescue
Reconisence
While point defence should be effective, engaging enemy attack craft before they can reach your fleet us prefered, which requires interceptors.
Interceptors would also be better suited to engaging pt boats.
Warfare evolves, a piece of equipment or tactic is developed to take advantage of a weakness; a defense is developed; something else is developed; and so on.
While microjumps may be possible to close range, it may leave the attacker open to counter attack; it is so dependent on the setting, there is no one-size-fits-all, it needs to be evaluated by the rules of the setting, and by the thoughts of the culture deploying the fleet.
I could easily see a culture that views lauched craft as a form of cavalry, even employing cavalry formation tactics; even if they're ineffective.
@@robertpopa2628 I can see his point though. If rather than a single ship, you jump a small squadron to shooting range, it's no longer a suicide mission but an assault.
About halfway through the series, the Honorverse novels introduce the CLAC - Carrier, Light Attack Craft. LACs aren't typical space fighters but rather small warships that save volume and mass by not mounting an FTL drive. CLACs carry them into the target system where they deploy, coordinate and maintain their LAC wings well away from the main combatants (at least until FTL-guided MDMs become the standard, after which "well away" ceases to exist).
Not totally. IIRC around that point CLACs started to duck back into Hyper and either maintain a stable position in Hyperspace since it was impossible to attack through the Alpha Wall, or a predetermined point well outside the System in question and wait for a messenger (usually a destroyer) to come back and tell them it was safe to return.
One interesting thing in some settings is carriers for ships larger than fighters. If an FTL drive is so big and heavy that a ship built without one can be more effective in combat, or is rare and expensive, or requires the navigator to take a bunch of weird space drugs and turn into a caterpillar, then it makes sense to have even large ships rely on carriers to cross interstellar distances.
For example: Tarka Hunter carriers in Sword of the Stars, CLACs in the Honorverse, Guild heighliners in Dune.
there are also great examples of ship carriers being the main infrastructure for warfleets in the excellent book series Expedition force.
here the carriers main duty is to transport heavy battleships, battlecruisers and other combat specialised ships closer to the engagement as they have massively better jump drives and also allows for maintainance on some of the carriers. Essentially they are what train transportation was for WW2 tanks, but in this case, instead of having a bunch of tanks on the traincars, they have a bunch of heavely armored and armed battleboats.
With No FTL it is Cheaper and the Space can be used better in Main Worlds you would have Defence Fleets only for the System to Come Out that would increase the Power much more than Ships with FTL.
These are all great examples. The UNSC infinity also does this to lend escort vessels its advanced FTL drive, even if the ship is guilty of many many issues.
This actually has a real-world comparison in the earliest carrier craft - Torpedo Boat Carriers. Which may actually be a better comparison than aircraft carriers anyway, since all Voidcraft from fighters to battleships travel in the same medium (space); unlike blue water navies which have to draw practical distinctions between craft that travel through the air vs those that traverse the waves (and again vs submarines under the water).
@@carthienesdevilsadvocatenr2806 great point!
Props to Space: Above and Beyond for not only giving us a carrier that is just a carrier, but putting it in a battlegroup escort. That didn't come into play much in the only season of the show, and it was a little hamfisted with our one cast of highly skilled fighter pilots being reduced to every grunt job in the military so they could recreate that one iconic scenario from WWII, but this was a detail they did well. And they got that right in 1995.
Protected launch systems - Check
Recovery that is not via a landing strip - Check
Separated maintenance and launch facilities - Check
Heavy emphasis on point defense, not offense - Check
All craft have attitude thrusters at key wide areas - Check
Ships are portrayed in more than 2D space - Check
Space A&B was and is one of the best depictions of a proper space carrier. Love that series, have the DVDs of it (and before then, bootleg VHS)
I think the Gamillon Carriers in Space Battleship Yamato 2199 are a good example of semi-well thought out sci-fi carriers. Carriers in the show in general are shown to be able to launch fighters nearly instantaneously in a vacuum because, well, there's no gravity, but they retain the catapults for atmospheric launches (such as the Battle of the Rainbow Cluster)
In the live-action movie they did a great atmospheric fighter drop on Iscandar, where they warped the Yamato in, launched the fighters (in free-fall, to avoid the point defenses that would have locked onto their engines), and then immediately warped the Yamato out to draw the Gamillon's attention elsewhere.
@@olencone4005 Isn't that just the Adama maneuver?
@@lars7935 It's similar. It's not a new idea to be sure -- I've seen it in several anime over the years long before anyone considered using it in live-action, and they even used something similar in a TNG episode (with phasers instead of fighters). But it sure does look good when the Yamato does it! ^_^
I think the Yamato and other EFCF Andromeda and Dreadnaught-class ships (especially the Hyuga) are better than the Gamillas Gaiperon-class Multideck Astro Carrier because the former are hybrid warships that can defend themselves as well as engage in battle, where the latter have almost nothing but defensive armament.
From what I remember, and it was a long time ago, I got the impression that (at least in the show) the Galactica in the original show was more of an armored carrier than a battlestar. The guns it had were mostly used for point defense against enemy fighters and the fighters were the heavy damage dealers.
More the fact that apart from two episodes, the second of the admiral cain/Pegasus double episode and the very last episode where they take on a single bay star then you never see galactica vs other ships, is galactica and vipers defending against Ceylon fighter swarms.
As such not practical to get the heavy firepower out.
Even in the reboot then mainly the flak battery and rare that saw the main battery out and use.
The original Galactica was also a ragtag fleet of civilians and military that escaped the cylon destruction. They were forced to use carrier/command ships as battleships due to circumstances.
No, they had missiles and had weapons to take out other carriers.
The original series, Battlestar Galactica, has the answer right in the title. The Galactica was a Battlestar, a battle starship, not an armoured carrier.
@@MrGrumblier exactly. The handful of fighters it carried were support craft. The ship itself tried to stay out of combat because of the fact that it was acting as a lifeboat. The fighters were used as scouts and to take out enemies before they could get close enough to do damage to the ship.
I agree with this segment. It's all about the drama and the utilization of tropes. The fighter personalizes the story. Capital ship carriers is all about the magnitude of the risk. Also, when a fighter meets its end, it goes "pop" in the vastness of space. When a capital ship carrier goes down, that goes KA-BOOM!
One advantage to carrying fighters, drones, or other support craft on external mounts is it allows a ship to carry support craft without spending much or any internal volume on it. This is particularly useful in settings that have FTL that only works on large craft or fuel constraints on small ships, even modest sized capital ships could carry something like a fighter wing or picket ship. The result could be similar to how modern destroyers like the Arleigh Burke-class have a pad and small hanger for two helicopters.
In settings like Traveller where FTL drives are expensive and take up huge fractions of a ships mass and volume this can be taken to the extreme, with squadrons of large combat ships lacking FTL drives (Traveller calls them Riders, and in that setting they are much cheaper and more capable than FTL equipped ships of the same tonnage) towed to the combat zone by dedicated transport ships.
Sword of the Stars 2 used Riders, also - and even called them that.
As long as your setting doesn't involve ships trying to engage in high-G burn maneuvers. In such cases, anything that isn't very thoroughly bolted down is going to get ripped off the ship. Of course, this is also true of ships inside, but at least those could be secured in a fully enclosed bracing structure, rather than having to somehow be strongly bound to the side of the ship.
@@ZlothZlothChad SotS player! Was wondering if this gem of a game will be mentioned.
And I agree, I like how the game handles carriers. The strikecraft/battleriders are attached on the hull of the ships. I still remember the Morrigi (Space Crows) being so focus on strikecraft that even their tanker/supply/colony ships has the ability to carry them.
@@VastinI suspect the idea is to jump in and almost immediately deploy the docked craft, both letting them get on with their business and freeing up precious thrust/weight margins for the carrier to nope the hell out of weapons range so the other craft have a ride home.
@@griffinfaulkner3514 Yes. I'd have to assume that any carrier designed to carry craft externally will have to be spinning them off almost immediately as it enters the battlespace. If it is a battle-carrier, this essentially means those craft are entirely on their own until the fight is over - there's no realistic way for them to return to their ship while it remains engaged in combat.
If it's a dedicated carrier they could return, though servicing a craft attached to your exterior hull seems likely to be a much more time consuming process than one that returns to some kind of enclosed bay. The 'external' mount carrier is probably essentially restricted to a single battle sortie in most circumstances, which might not be feasible. In WW2 carriers would launch many separate sorties, with wings returning to land, refuel, re-arm, or even returning to swap loadouts in order to engage different potential targets in the battlespace.
Mobile Suit Gundam is once again is on my main favorites with this, using the Universal Century as an example, during the One Year War you had in the Federation's case separation between Carriers, Battleships and Cruisers but with the introduction of Mobile Suits into warfare you start to notice less dedicated battleships and cruisers and more carriers with battleship grade weaponry, by Unicorn era you have alot of dedicated warships that would have a MS Hangar and a MS Catapult System like the Clop-Class, Nahel Argama, Ra Cailum, Musaka, Rewloola, etc. Lastly when talking about the dual sided runways Unicorn also had the double-sided MS Catapults with the Nahel Argama or the General Revil.
Victory also had a couple of pure carriers as well as some that took advantage of the whole "no up in space" with three hangars in different orientations. Of, and the Ptolemios from Gundam 00 is another pure carrier as is the Feeden from Gundam X.
@matteste wish I could watch Victory, it's the only UC Series I have yet to watch
@@Robocopnik Even if said series _was_ GSD?
First comment I've seen so far mention Gundam.
Oh yes. The Federation's stubborness in having big-gun battleships bites them in the proverbial rear-end until Operation Stardust, and some pragmatic people got put in charge of the navy.
The Pegasus class was also the Federation's first experimental carrier ship. The rest of them during the one year war appear to be repurposed carho haulers.
A fun incident of note is HMS Formidable in the battle of Cape Matapan, she was briefly in the line of battle with Warspite, Valiant and Barham, three battleships and while she was ordered to pull back, she did open fire.
7:30 In defense of Stargate: Both the Wraith and the Goa'uld focus on "motherships" designed for planetary assaults. Their fighters are designed to attack ground targets without advanced weapons. Fights against an equal enemy are a secondary concern.
That is true it fighter where used more for attack other fighters or planet assault. But outside of tauri vessels we do see ships vulnerable to fighters
One thing I feel is important to note is that even if your battleship or cruiser or whatever DOESN'T carry fighters, you may still want to have a hanger anyway. This lets it carry things like shuttles, utility craft, or small scouts. See Star Trek's shuttlecraft for example.
This is useful not only for the fact you can't exactly tie down a small boat to the deck of a spaceship like you can a real-life battleship or cruiser for use in things like personal transfers, moving small amounts of supply or mail, or any number of other useful duties a small boat could be used for (beyond that of a lifeboat).
But it also plays into the WWII inspirations of many Sci-Fi settings. Battleships and cruisers nearly universally carried a floatplane or 5 for things ranging from recognizance to spotting fall of shot, to search and rescue, and even anti-submarine warfare. These were by no means fighters, and could generally only carry light strike munitions for the aforementioned anti-submarine duties, but they were invaluable. The US even experimented with putting some on a destroyer!
Even in the modern day helicopter facilities are common on many warships for the utility they provide in a way quite similar to how such things work in sci-fi. Shuttling supplies and personnel, performing search-and-rescue, and anti-submarine warfare duties. And even if a ship may not carry any of its own, it may have a clear spot on the rear deck where one could land to drop things off, or if it lost its mothership the helicopter's crew can safely disembark onto another ship.
In a Sci-fi thing I partake in, the battleship I designed for it features a small hangar tucked away near the stern, protected by a sliding armored door that required the rearmost dorsal turret to traverse so that its barrels weren't blocking the way for craft to enter and exit. It is suited for only utility craft and shuttles, but on one occasion it was used to land fighters whose carrier was destroyed, since unlike with an ocean-going navy, you can't exactly ditch alongside in space. The empty fighters were then shoved back into space to make room for the next set of pilots to land, with the last set being carried back to base and taken off there.
On the topic of armed carriers though, that isn't entirely unwarranted. Vessels like the United States's Lexington Class were originally armed with fairly chonky guns for a carrier without sacrificing their ability to conduct carrier operations. What is notable, is that, even though they were heavily armed for a carrier, the key term is "for a carrier". They were armed like a heavy cruiser, more than capable of fending off stray destroyers or light cruisers that managed to catch them, but no match for anything approaching their weight class. (And this design was done back when airplanes were slow, light, and short-ranged, with the heavy guns later replaced for heavy-AA dual-purpose guns). So slapping a heavy gun or two on your sci-fi carrier to give it some basic close-range firepower is reasonable, but there is a reason the only "battle carriers" ever built were done so by the Japanese out of desperation and a lack of time for full-conversions.
In the Expeditionary Force series of books, a star carrier is basically a space truck. Used to transport all manner of other vessels including battleships, etc. In order to reduce wear and tear on components and means every ship doesn't need a long-range ftl jump drive ability
The Lucrehulk from Star Wars continues to be the best do-it-all platform I have ever seen in Sci-Fi.
with regards to carriers getting caught up in ship-to-ship engagements, I can see some circumstances under which this might happen in SF- particularly in settings where warships can drop out of hyperspace (or equivalent) at close range to a carrier, particularly if the carrier is parked in orbit or otherwise constrained from manoeuvring
The series by David Weber, honorverse series: Honor Harrington, has the some of the best Sci-fi naval tactics.
I always scrub through the comments to find a fellow Honorverse fan! But to your point, it really does.
@@JamilLynchDammit! Now I'm going to have to read the series again 😂
@@AenesidemusOZ Worse ways to kill time! 😆
One interesting variant of the battle-carrier hybrid would be to make them into civilian commerce ships that can defend themselves.
During normal operations this battle-carrier could act like a mobile space station, with smaller civilian freighters, bounty hunters, etc. coming and going all the time and trading with carrier's internal markets and vast stores of resources tucked away in its huge hull. But if attacked, the ship could lock down its hangar bays (keeping the civilian ships safe) and use its weapons to effectively defend itself from the local pirates.
I haven't seen this often, and the closest I can think of are the fleet carriers in Elite: Dangerous which had huge long-range jump drives and vast internals and markets which effectively made them into mobile space stations.
But then at least having hangar bays and weapons would make sense.
The Protoss Carrier in Starcraft is the best example of a future carrier. Shield protected launch bays. Robotic fighter interceptors that could be manufactured and repaired internally. No armament on the main ship aside from orbital bombardment weapons that weren’t used in the game.
That is honestly the stupidest part of the Protoss Carrier that it doesn't have short range point defense armaments.
@@anvos658 They did delete that terran wrecker ship in that one cutscene with that planet killing beam, I think they just didn't want to ever have to balance around a carrier that can also do that.
Hybrid carrier/battleships do make since in certain settings, such as situations where the ships have to operate without little to no support on or behind combat lines. Several sci-fi series that feature hybrid carriers usually end up taking place at some point where the ship has to fight in a situation where there is no support and they have to bring every weapon available to the fight. Also all modern day carriers are still equipped with defensive weapons and a space carrier would require at least some weapons to deal with a potential enemy ambush that can often be found in sci-fi settings that have them.
As SFIA always says: "There's no such thing as an unarmed space ship." You might just find that "Be all, do all" battleships ARE the way of military spacecraft, with giant spacestation/ships capable of firing lasers at distances of mltiple astronomical units, and small fighter drones being nothing more than peackeeping enforcent officers over smaller inbetween spacecraft.
Irl carriers have escorts typically so they can specialize, but space scifi typically has each ship able to defend itself to a degree because they might be sent alone
It’s actually because if space warfare is anything like modern naval warfare, it’s going to be done at distances beyond visual range. There will be dozens if not, possibly even hundreds of miles between each ship, so if one manages to slip undetected, every shift needs to have capacity to defend itself somewhat.
At least with the "rotating the ship to launch the fighters out of sight" made sense in the Thrawn books where the move originated from, not the bastardization we see Ahsoka come up with. It isn't meant to be a surprise attack, it's using the ship's heavy armor to screen the fighters as they launch in a vulnerable condition when in close combat scenarios instead of launching at a distance ideally. It was to provide a safe zone for the fighters to quickly launch, form up and head out to fight rather than being exposed to incoming enemy fire instantly
Thank you! They even explained it in Heir to the Empire.
I have to say, i love the Chimera from Eve online. The original i mean. Forget about how well carriers work in eve today and what the Chimera looks now, what i love about the chimera is its lore which says it was based upon the Kairiola, which was a water freighter converted into a fighter carrier during the orbital bombardment of Caldari Prime in the first Gallente-Caldari war. The Kairiol was the flag ship of Admiral Yakia Tovil-Toba who decided to take every ship he commanded and jumped to Gallente prime forcing the Gallente to recall vessels from the orbital bombardment to protect their homeworld. Eventually only the Kairiola remained and in a final sacrifice, was flown into Gallente prime. The attack allowed millions more Caldari to flee Caldari prime and because of his sacrifice Yakia Tovil-Toba is the first name every Caldari child learns.
Speaking of legend of the Galactic Heroes, carriers are there because most of their energy shields only covers the ship on the front so the fighters are meant to bypass that by attacking from other vectors like from the side.
Carriers in Scifi might have some difficulty in some settings though. If your Scifi settings have most navy fighting at extreme BVR range, carrier might have a hard time fitting in since it would take ages for the carrier based craft to reach enemy (unless they have their own FTL).
If a SciFi setting has 'extreme range combat' (not BVR because visual range in space is... quite significant), then you probably either don't have carriers or the strikecraft a carrier launches are meant to be more 'mobile sensor and point defence emplacements' which allow your combat ships to better target their weapons and more easily defend against an enemy focusing fire because the strikecraft can relocate to 'concentrate' point defence fire on the ships that are focused on.
With the exception of course coming when strikecraft are able to use a form of 'tactical' FTL which 'full size' warships can't for whatever reason. If the warships can use tactical FTL, then it's unlikely extreme range combat will be how things are fought and instead it would either be the slugging match or a bunch of 'pounce and dodge' where one side tries to 'pounce' on a target and take it out with an alpha strike so it can't fire back whilst the target attempts to 'dodge' out of the way and use it's own alpha strike to take out the Pouncer. The latter usually coming from settings where offensive capabilities greatly outweight defensive ones (at least when talking about ship durability under fire).
If you're doing extreme range, trading fire at multiple light seconds or more, the transit time of ordnance and/or strikecraft doesn't really matter. Everything that isn't an at or near lightspeed directed energy weapon, which have their own issues, is going to need guidance and a good reserve of delta V to have anything approaching a reasonable chance to hit. Which also means that the only difference between a fighter carrier and a missile carrier is what makes up the majority of its current loadout, assuming there's even a distinction drawn between fighter and missile.
The only difference between a missile with submunitions and attack drone with guns is the latter's expectation of recovery, but if the drone can't swing back around to its carrier to be rearmed in a tactically useful interval of time then any provisions for recovery are wasted. A one way drone can be smaller, cheaper, and packed into your carriers in greater numbers, at which point its basically just a missile with a fancier warhead.
Thank you guys for the idea, I have a very hard time figuring out how to fit a carrier into my settings. My settings are that both sides would trade missiles and railgun at very extreme range so far that it took few hours to hit.
@@StacheMan26 You're completely right about the drone / missile stuff. I think it is overlooked how a carrier would certainly not have fighters with biological humans, but might instead plausibly have multipurpose drones. However, I think you're wrong about most things needing guidance. Maybe in a slightly lower tech universe without rapid fire relativistic particle cannons, clouds of rail-accelerated slugs can be employed. With enough volume of fire and good enough predictive algorithms it would be basically impossible to not hit with some slugs. In fact I think they would be more suseful offensively than missiles as they can be shot at higher speeds.
I think ALL ships would have small hangars. Something you didnt mention is that almost all modern naval ships have some limited carrying capacity for helicopters, as well as carry small outboard craft and inflatables. Such requirements would be similarly fulfilled by a shuttle bay, for landing on planets, shuttling crew (way way way safer and smarter than docking two massive warships), transfering supplies, assisting in docking maneuvers, performing maintenance, and serving as an emergency life boat. There is almost no concievable way for a warship of any considerable size to operate without at least one of these, unless the warship never ever operates outside of the reach of friendly carriers. Even for dedicated escort vessels, such dependence is rare.
I think the one thing I like most is when a ship built for one task gets co-opted & refit for another. For instance, the Lucrehulk was initially just a very heavy freighter, but they found out that its cargo bays & armor could make them pretty decent armored carriers, so they were co-opted into warships.
To answer the original question in the title - yes they are extremely practical.
A couple points of order here:
RE: Naval carriers vs Sci-Fi Carrier/Battleships -- There is a VAST discrepancy in size that you did not take in to account much less use cases. Star Wars carrier/BS are 1/5km long and the Galactica is almost 1km. And this does not include height/decks. The largest US carrier is about 333m long (or a minimum 1/3rd as long) and only 76m tall including mast (about the same size difference to length). Add in use-cases where a naval carrier travels with a HUGE support fleet (that is also armed unlike BSG), your comparison stumbles.
RE: Cylon Basestars -- They address this in universe that Basestars are NOT battleships. They carry an impressive missile loadout, but rely on fighters and support vessels for primary attack and defense.
Space Battleship Yamato is definitely guilty of "have your cake and eat it to". The titular ship somehow fits a very large launch bay, storage space, and maintenance room for a full combat squadron plus a few other specialized craft. All built not in a carrier, but a resurrected battleship Yamato. The franchise is by far my favourite, but that bit requires an extensive amount of handwaving.
Yeah.. I love the show but Yamato has way too many fighters aboard it and it's recovery via slow grabbing arms would take hours. Given how many times she seems to repair her damage on her own with no dry dock, I just shut my brain off.
To be fair, battlecarriers (ie carriers with guns meant to engage the enemy after launching their aircraft) were developed in the Interwar years as navies were figuring out the carrier concept.
It's also worth mentioning that none of these ideas persisted and were generally converted to full carriers if they were ever laid down.
The battlecarrier concept is getting more and more relevant as the nature of warfare changes. We had THOUSANDS of ships in U.S. fleets during WWII but no missiles to speak of, so defending carriers with other ships in a "defense in depth" strategy was a practical counter to fighters and other ships. These days we are fielding a handful of ships in carrier task groups and modern combat theory favors standoff weapons like missiles and fighters instead of big ship-killing guns. Hell we don't even have more than a couple of short-range anti-missile or anti-fighter weapons on each ship! It's all about electronic countermeasures and missiles/fighters taking out the other guy's missiles and fighters.
So with that in mind, a heavily-armored carrier with countermeasures and maybe a couple of big guns for bombardment are what you probably want. I know they use the Galactica's guns for ship-to-ship fights but they are bombardment weapons just like missiles--if those ships were moving around more then unguided munitions would be useless against anything except fixed targets. The battlecarriers also have to contend with no line-of-sight limitations as others have mentioned, but worst of all they have to survive an enemy that can literally jump in on top of them. That means anything without a good layer of armor is dead meat if something like a battleship jumps in right next to it.
The space carriers in Macross, especially seen in Macross Frontier do a lot of things well. The Fighter Carriers are pretty dedicatedly carriers, and only have Point Defense weapons beyond their fighter compliment. They also have 4 accelerator flight decks they use to propel fighters in the direction of combat to let them save their fuel for maneuvering, but can just release them from the bay via the elevators. Recovery is done by either fighter matching speed and being recovered by claw, or rapid/emergency recovery on the deck
I think that depends on what class you’re talking about, because the Uraga-class looks pretty conventional (aside from the lower launch deck being an extension of the hangar deck)…
Almost sounds like he is talking about the Guantanamo class AKA the Advanced ARMD class. Macross is notorious for various types of carrier designs all the way up to it's Macross class ships. I even think the Northampton class frigate can carry a small compliment of Variable fighters.
@@Wolfman053a Yea, Uraga being closely to conventional because it purpose is to work both in space and in atmosphere, even using as a seafaring vessel. Guantanamo class is like a space station, can still work in atmosphere but the retrieval of VF is pretty damn hard for them then
I want to throw a shoutout to a certain GSV in Iain M Banks' Excession with what has to be my favourite sci-fi carrier scene of all time
In the defense of the Marg Sabl maneuver, it was originally introduced as just a way to get fighters out safely while engaged in combat. Thrawn only used it as a winning move once where it fit a specific psychological blind spot of the enemy commander - he never implied that it was anything more than that.
Starcraft's Protoss have a dedicated Carrier starship, which is entirely defenseless except for it's massive fleet of combat fighter drones it can replace rapidly over time. They work best when accompanied by other support craft like Phoenix Fighters or Void Rays.
Also an example of Gameplay/Story Segregation, as lorewise Carriers could glass planetary surfaces with prow-mounted energy weapons.
I think it's far more likely to have something like the Arsenal Ship. A lightly armored (relatively) capital ship that just carries a ridiculous amount of missiles of all types. It would make the more sense than deploying a bunch of manned vehicles that will either be too fragile to withstand the radiation output of the ships they are sharing a battlefield with, or too cost prohibitive to be to protected enough to stay in the fight.
I think Mobile Suit Gundam has an interesting interaction with vulnerability of launch bays. Since energy shielding isn't really a thing in most Gundam settings, exposed launch bays have sometimes been depicted as vulnerabilities precisely because Mobile Suits are also tanks, so they can fly INSIDE THE HANGARS, and then a mobile suit is inside your carrier doing whatever the heck it wants.
8:20 The thing is that guns in naval warfare have a limited range due to air resistance, which is not present in space, where only the targeting systems somewhat limit the range. So trying to keep your carriers away and out of the range of gunfire doesn't work that well. Especially since the "range" (or more accurately Δv) of the fightercraft would still be limited.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes uses carriers in a more traditional manner with them staying in the back lines while letting the small craft do the damage, infact it was generally a sign things were going really bad if carriers were in range to be shot at.
I like how carriers can be used in Stellaris. They make it possible to have your most valuable ships further away from the fight, and strike craft can ignore shields.
They also provide more targets for the enemies and are rebuilt during battle, so they provide some nice protection.
However, putting hangars on your ships means you have less guns on them, and the kinds of guns you could have instead of hangars can be much more powerful... But also less accurate against smaller ships, and with a shorter range than strike craft.
8:30 you forgot the Chiyoda, a Japanese light carrier sunk by cruiser fire during the Battle off Cape Engaño. (Though to be fair, it had been damaged by air strikes earlier in the engagement, which allowed the cruisers to catch up and finish it off.)
There is some precedent for battleship-carrier hybrids IRL, but only in the early age of carriers. HMS Furious was built as a battlecruiser, but had her forward guns removed and replaced with a flight deck (no change to the bridge position which of course caused problems until they changed it). The Lexington class carriers had 8 8-inch guns around their bridge right up until the start of WW2. They both did this because no one quite knew what to do with aircraft carriers starting out, and thought they might need to be able to defend themselves from surface combatants. Which of course never happened, but I would've loved to see a German or Japanese ship try to get in close with one of them thinking they were defenseless and getting a surprise of their lives.
USS _White Plains_ giving HIJMS _Choukai_ a *_FUN & ENGAGING_* time with her sole 5" gun straight at the Oxygen Torpedos. _You're welcome._
On the other hand, a space based carrier might very well have to do that due to the much larger engagement range of space based weapons.
@@HeIsAnAliYou're right, I can't believe I keep forgetting about USS White Plains. This is the second time that's happened. Granted, that 5"/38 is a pop gun compared to the 8" guns the Lexingtons had, but it was still a ballsy move to do a surface action with your one real cannon.
@@LlortnerofThat is true. But even moreso with spaceships, mass is an important factor. How many ships and how many missiles could be put onboard instead of big "surface action" guns?
@@wrenchinator9715 I didn't exclude missiles. And any action is going to be surface action. Though missiles aren't necessarily going to be more effective per mass.
IIRC, Wing Commander carriers were rarely ever called on to provide canon fire. They had a couple converted into giant guns, but most were carriers that relied on the player's squad to do all the heavy lifting.
In a game setting, the carriers in the X series mostly make sense, with one major exception in the form of a light carrier that packs a punch like a frigate in X3: Albion Prelude. In X3, carriers make more sense as they generally have the cargo capacity to refill fighter missiles AND energy cells allowing them to jump to distant sectors and back, something few fighters can manage.
In X4, carriers lost the ability to jump, and are generally very slow. It makes them much worse at rapid deployments than just sending the fighters on their own. They do have one major advantage: they can repair and resupply their fighters automatically. That makes them good, if expensive mobile home bases.
Interesting been a while since I played X3 - which carrier are you talking about? The Terran one?
I always liked the carriers in X3 they (as you say) worked really well.
Never tried X4 for a variety of reasons - some being that X rebirth was horrible
@RegentofSparta Oh right, Rebirth... 😅
I waited until others had given X4 a chance. I actually enjoy it a lot. I find it CPU intensive though.
As for the M7 in X3, it's the Split Panther. Has good shields, carries 20-32 M3+ - M5 ships (🤯), equips 6 IBLs on the front turrets and 2 on either side, and has a weapons recharge generator only slightly worse than the Tiger.
It's downsides are that it does not have main weapons (all turrets) and has about 60% laser capacitor capacity as that of the Tiger. But for a M7 at the same price as a Tiger, it's too good to pass up. So it ends up being good at almost anything a M7 can be asked to do.
I want to point out that the very first generation of aircraft carriers were designed with anti-ship guns. The Lexington and the Saratoga were converted from battlecruisers and had 8 inch guns. Also the late-war partial conversion of the IJN Ise and Hyuga were designed as battlecarriers with the front half remaining battleships while the rear was converted into a seaplane carrier. I should point out that the Akagi and Kaga were built with 8" guns as well, but again they were battlecruiser conversions.
I think, as a rule of thumb, you would want a Space Ship to be able to launch smaller crafts.
For Writers, it allows for Crew and Character diversity, as well as allowing one to raise the stakes without having to put the entire ship in danger.
For Designers, it's akin to giving a ship an extra limb or a pair of eyes. From the biggest of battleships to the smallest of boats, the utility of being able to reach out to something without having to move the main body speaks for itself. Weather it is transporting supplies, sending ground teams, reconnaissance, and, of course, combat, there's very little reason why you shouldn't have at least A craft handy. You don't even need a proper hanger, if your ship has a big enough Cargo Doors and room to fit it, you can just shove it in there. It may not be the most ideal to store a spacecraft, but it beats having to find parking space for your giant ship when you just want a bite to eat, or to pick up a simple package. That is, IF you can find a place with big enough ports to service your ship.
Since you mentioned Legend of the galactic heroes, it,s worth noting to say that in this universe almost every battleship carries at least a squadron of fighters to especially last resort engagements (since the chaotic battlefield with that much things make difficult for not friendly fire), and the dedicated carriers who carry hundreds of fighters are always on the rear, usually
escorted by another ships
Children of a Dead Earth's carriers were very practical. The Carriers only mounted point defense weaponry and were just a delivery mechanism for semi-expendable drones. The drones would attempt to intercept and engage targets until they were destroyed or used up all their delta V (fuel). There was no need to recover the drones until after the fighting concluded (No pilots and orbit may as well be a parking lot).
I think a major difference between conventional seafaring warships and their space counterparts is that there is more or a need to have some form of hanger or significant docking system for all larger ships. Not all space-oriented sci-fi has access to things like teleporters for troop transport, and the need for support craft often means that battleships often require significantly more utility than a naval fleet. Unlike naval vessels, which can use their decks as loading zones for all manner of equipment, space ships are often resupplying in space, and need to have a safe way of exchanging fuel, ammo, and personnel in large quantities that a docking hatch will not normally be sufficient for, almost necessitating at least one hanger to begin with. In a lot of cases, space battleships are required to be more flexible because they aren't always going to be run as part of a carrier group. I think a lot of the reason you see the hybrid-style ships is due to needing more flexibility than a traditional navy.
tbh rotary launching systems make the most sense since spin gravity systems will already be present most likely, like a giant spinning revolver mag full of microfighters that spins to fling them out on rails with angular momentum. Their launch can be timed precisely with the spin of the hangar to project them in a specific direction and save precious onboard reaction mass for the drones.
My favorite carriers are in the game Children of a Dead Earth, housing disposable, remotely-controlled attack drones capable of intercepting other drones, precisely disabling warship modules, or even engaging and destroying multiple capital ships at once from extreme distances. The carriers themselves can be heavily-armed too; my own carriers typically have large amounts of missiles in addition to the drones, along with railguns, lasers, and many armor layers just in case something intercepts the carrier.
CDE drones are definitely a more realistic example of what a space fighter might be, in fact they're essentially just a missile which carries a gun and limited supply of ammo. Take the concept even further than they'd likely just be a larger type of munition, basically a large torpedo with some limited ability to protect itself, which would still carry a warhead and still be expendably light and cheap.
You'd likely deploy them pre-engagement where they'd act as a screen against enemy fighters and missiles before racing off to both expend the remainder of their ammo against the enemy capital ships before finally attempting to ram them and detonate, fulfilling the torpedo half of their role.
If they end up not needing to be expended then they can be returned to their mothership and resupplied.
Back in the late 19th century, when self-propelled torpedoes had just become a thing, it was suggested that battleships should carry squadrons of torpedo boats. These boats would be relatively cheap to build but impossible to ignore because of their ship-killing torpedoes. The fighters in Battlestar Galactica seem to be used like such torpedo boats.
Favourite: The Quasar fire.
If you actually flew it with the sense that "up means nothing" you can nose-down at the enemy, both shielding the launch bays with your top side (which you then put shields and armor on) as well as minimizing the cross-section the enemy can hit.
Its not used this way, but it could be close to a sensible design, which is simple and can be mass-produced + does not require fancy flying from the fighter craft.
I prefer the ton falk
When it comes to carriers, the Gundam franchise just seems to have a love affair with the concept. Ever since the White Base in the original series it is like every series since will have its own dedicated ship to house the main characters, a ship that ends up being almost as much a character as the rest of the cast.
And of course, it is incredible just how varied they have been over the years, the Argama, Reinforce Jr, Freeden and Ptolemaios to name but a few.
I love the constant nods at the Cylon Toasters...
And my favorite example of a space-based carrier using standard flight deck design is the multi-deck carriers from Space Battleship Yamato.
There are three questions to ask that determine the need for carrier ships in sci-fi.
1. Are there fighter ships?
2. Are the fighters piloted by people who can't breathe in space?
3. Are the fighters capable of FTL travel?
If the answers to 1 and 2 are no, then you don't need carriers.
If the answers to 1, 2, and 3 are yes, then you don't technically need carriers, but they'll still be appreciated by the pilots.
If the answers to 1 and 2 are yes but 3 is no, then you absolutely need carriers.
Like others have stated, I can't believe you didn't mention Wing Commander. It has Carriers and Light Carriers, and none of them are designed to engage in capital ship combat.
I grew up watching and thinking about the exterior flight decks of Gamilon carriers in Space Battleship Yamato, and contrasting them with the launch catapult system on the Yamato/Argo, and how that ship recovers, and sometimes launches, small craft from what was the real Yamato's enclosed boat bay: those long tubes either side of the stern. I knew the second one was just cooler, as well as making more sense in space, and have always hearkened back to it. They are only open to the stern, partly following Spacedock's tactical evaluations here, and IIRC, they aren't a single cross-hull space like I believe the combination boat bay and hangar on the real Yamato class was.
The Gamilon carriers of Space Battleship Yamato, in contrast, are barely thought out at all. They're generally not seen much, though, and we really don't get to learn anything about them, so it's likely that not much time or effort was spent on them, which in practical terms makes a lot of sense, especially with 1980s-era animation tech!
The Alliance cruisers in Firefly ship a sizeable squadron of "gunships," light attack aerospaceplanes that also seem to be used roughly like the RHIB boats that modern navies and coast guards use as boarding craft. These gunships, which look similar to early YF-22 designs and some Gundam designs, are docked with a ventral docking clamp on the underside of the skyscraper-like cruiser, and maneuver downward and away when deployed. Similar craft are seen being used in atmosphere by law enforcement. It's unlikely, given the show's canonical politics, that these "Alliance cruisers" were built with any idea that they would see combat with comparable ships.
David Weber's Honorverse re-invents carriers in the middle to late books, but I don't remember how they were used tactically. They almost exclusively carried missile corvettes instead of small, fighter/bomber type craft.
I definitely think more sci-fi should make use of carriers as standoff vessels, perhaps as unreachable antagonists. Also, there's the idea that they could be needed for planetary attack, carrying dedicated aerospaceplanes instead of spacecraft-killing craft. One thing a lot of commenters are missing is, even if dedicated carriers don't need flight decks, they're still going to be boxes full of small spacecraft, lots of fuel, and lots of weapons. It takes a lot, to make a space carrier less vulnerable.
In my original take on Lasers&Feelings, the Hive travel in what the Consortium call "carriers," imagine a sized-up Protoss carrier, deploying Formic swarm-ships instead of robotic drones. It's unknown to the Consortium whether or not the Hive have "queens" the way the Formics from Ender's War do. In another original concept from my youth, the entire theory of space warfare was fictionalized, and carriers were medium-size vessels, one of several highly specialized types of "cruiser" that would be used as needed.
The problem is that, depending on the Sci-fi franchise, large warships can appear suddenly from hyper space/warp/light speed and be within gun range of carrier vessels instantly. It's as if the Wwii battleships could move as fast as the strike aircraft launched from the carriers. So this gives some credence to the hybrid Battlestar/Star Destroyer type ships.
I'm quite fond of the Homeworld game series carriers. Very limited guns for point defense but they are multipurpose utility vessels; they carry fighters and other small craft during long range FTL jumps like "standard" space carriers but they also have onboard assembly bays to build new ships, and mineral ore processing capabilities, as well as very strong sensor packages.
5:43
Speaking of outside storage, the Confederacy of Indipendent Systems' fighters may have the best system yet. Even better than reversing. Just attach to the hull somewhere and walk back to the designated resting points
Probably taking turns in the hangar for repairs and maintenance
Volture droids are fantastic
One consideration as to how useful carriers are in space warfare is how difficult it is to achieve FTL travel in the setting. Is the FTL drive and necessary power source physically small enough to fit in a fighter size vessel? Even if it could fit, is the FTL drive so expensive to make or operate that equipping the fighter craft would be prohibitive? The carrier could effectively be little more than a box with an FTL drive. Except for most militaries wanting to recover their troops and assets, the carrier could almost be considered disposable. Or partially disposable with the hanger pod being jettisoned with the fighters and the expensive FTL drive retreating from the theatre.
I was not expecting to hear BattleZone 2: Combat Commander at the end screen... I'm glad we've got a Redux of it on Steam.
I think one of the reasons or "excuses" for carriers to also engage is combat is the nature itself of space. Logic dictates, if you have a big ship with an FTL engine to carry all your fighters, you won't waste resources on installing FTL engines to your fighters, since that's redundant and makes it so the carrier doesn't really have a reason to exist.
So, in most settings, let's say star trek, you can have the USS Fat-Ass come out of warp "near" to a borg cube or wathever and drop a lot of fighters armed with their best redshirts. Probably some gunned-up version of a shuttle or something like that. If you drop too far from the cube, even at close FTL, those fighters will take minutes, maybe hours to reach the battle, the cube will have assimilated the Enterprise or whoever you're trying to save that day.
If you drop close enought to "be on time", you've basically put your carrier into shooting range and best you can hope is for there to be a moon to hide behind or something, but that won't always be the case. So, either the USS Fat-Ass has some decent shields, phasers and a bunch of torpedos to pull their weight, or they're just a giant target for the Borg to play duck hunt with. And if it gets too damanged, you also have a lot of fighters without warp drives who better hope they win the fight, because they ain't getting rescued anytime soon otherwise.
Building on this, I can *maaaybe* the the point if you make up some watered-down FTL engine that maybe lets the carrier drop the ships WHILE on FTL, get the fuck out of there, and then come back once the fight ends to pick up whoever's left. That might be a realistic use of a space-carrier, but it makes for a very un-heroic sip to drop the good guys to fight and flee to safety.
Proposal: the space battlecarrier is just a battleship spec that finds launchable strikecraft a more effective point defence solution to turrets.
Turrets can carry much more ammo, yes, but their tracking capability is very much limited on onbowrd motors and their own fields of fire. Drones let you concentrate point defence fire in any field where you are experiencing a saturation attack, and so long as they keep the launched stuff occupied, they will have bought your battleship the time it needed to get into effective range for its ship-based weapons systems to fire.
Also depends on the carrier type.
A few SciFis use basically 20 to 100 meter size sub craft as well.
The old RPG Starfleet Battles have PF(pseudo frigates)/Gunboats and their carriers of roughly 45 meters size and up to 18 of them to attack in swarms.
Re SW carriers. There are some doctrine issues that were not brought up given the brevity of the video.
1) for Rebels, they use hyperdrive capable fighters for a reason...they do not need to expose their bases or carriers. The was because the Rebellion did not have a lot of capital ships and did not wish to risk them unnecessarily. A carrier could jump into a sector. Send off 6 squadrons of various types at different targets. Wait for them to return and then jump out again in under 24h. Y-Wings might sound bad but they hold 12 torpedoes each. Having 12 jump into near orbit, firing a total 144 torpedoes at the orbital infrastructure of a system and then jump away....
1a) Later, as the Rebels produced more dedicated warship, the fighters would still deploy before battle and then jump in with the other ships.
2) The Empire had a totally different doctrine. Ideally tie fighters would form a protective picket around the Imperial capital ships. The capital ships (be it a Star Destroy or Strike cruiser, etc) would then be the ones doing the heavy lifting.
2a) The Star Destroyer was made with this doctrine in mind as the normal load was 4x Tie squadrons, 1x Tie Interceptors and 1x Tie Bomber. More than enough to keep most fighters at bay while the SD beats the stuffing out of its target.
2b) the Rebellion tactics of relying on basically independent fighter squadrons moving and fighting on their own took the Empire off guard. Forcing them to disperse into smaller and smaller task forces to cover all the locations that could be logically hit. They eventually developed the Tie Interceptors, Lancer class frigates and the like to try counter the Rebellions tactics.
You leave my little catcher drone alone!! He's only trying to give me a hug.
I was thinking about your comment regarding SF carriers being typically battle carriers whereas navies those are separate ships. The biggest reason for having separate naval ships is simply deck space - a naval carrier simply doesn't have any available deck space to mount large gun turrets or missile tubes. For space vessels this is less of an issue as the surface of the ship doesn't have to be dedicated to launch & landing areas and there's simply more surface area to mount gun turrets.
However, there are two other reasons for having separate vessels. First, more specialized vessels can be smaller and therefore less massive and requiring less propulsion. OTOH A single battle carrier will require less materials and manpower than multiple vessels. Second having multiple vessels also increases flexibility (easier to add vessels if required / desired) and survivability (mission can continue even if a single vessel is lost or damaged).
One thing I think is definitely worth discussing is: where does the line between 'fighter' and 'ship' lie? Does the GP03 Dendrobium (Gundam 0083) count as a fighter? It certainly behaves like a monstrously oversized fighter the size of smaller battleships. I propose that the dividing line would be 'is routine maintenance performed internally or externally?' to answer a decent amount, and it would vary highly depending on the weapons of choice.
After that's decided, we need to figure out if reactor output is a major factor for weapons and similar. In Glynn Stewart's Castle Federation series, the weapons vastly out perform armor, and the shields and energy weapons interact at range resulting in one or two hits being more than enough to mission kill a full sized ship, however fighter weapons and ship weapons are two totally different beasts with ship weapons having significantly better effective range. The fighters serve a number of purposes, both long range attack systems, missile screening, sensor sweeps and such, but the raw reactor output of the big ships means that the ship still counts as a significant chunk of firepower.
I don't think I can understate how much I enjoy the way Stewart comes up with variations on FTL/weapon systems that create interesting interactions that govern which combat doctrine works best.
One thing to mention is that in space, all large ships need to have a carrier capacity, even if it's just a couple shuttles like the Enterprise, as secondary craft are extremely important.
The term "carrier" doesn't exactly mean what it does in today's naval world either. Sci-fi carriers are more like a combination of troop transport ships (like where Marines stay on MEUs), aircraft carriers (but with spacecraft), and cargo/military cargo ships. Carriers irl carry aircraft. Carriers in sci-fi carry multiple combat elements: 1) a ground force of vehicles, infantry, artillery, etc 2) air/space vehicles like fighters, bombers, GSA, drop ships, escape pods, etc 3) The enitre LCE like food, water, ammo, power, fuel, medical personnel & equipment, etc.
They bring the whole fight to the planet, whereas you'd probably use 2 or 3 ships to do the same on earth irl (ground combat + air combat + logistics). This also allows fleets to send in one ship and escort it with various types of gunship (battleships, destroyers, corvettes, frigates, etc) rather than send a massive fleet of aircraft (or spacecraft) carriers, troop transport ships, logistical supply ships, and a couple fighting ships for protection. Sometimes you just don't have the manpower to send that many, so ships either go with no escort or don't go at all. Having a carrier means you have 1 asset to protect per fleet.
With larger factions, standarization and maintenance/repair are a factor, too. Much easier to keep your fleet in the field if you only have a few types of ships that need to be worked on.
in the book series Honorverse we get to sort of watch (read) them develop the CLAC (carrier of light attack craft) which follows much of what is shown here. CLACs operate withdrawn from enemy fire and have very light offensive weapons relying on either it's light craft or other full size ships too protect it.
The evolved carriers in the Honorverse books recognize that they're basically big transport ships and rarely go out without large numbers of screening warships, unless they're doing something sneaky far in the distance.
Interesting thing to note about LoGH carriers is that they are always deployed in-fleet (never independently like how most other classes are used - yes, even battleships get used in the setting for picket duty), and because of the extreme engagement distances fleets fight at, carriers are more of a powerful short-range glass cannon that are used, quote, "to establish control over the local battlefield".
The Sojourn is the best space opera I've heard in my life. Thank you. Waiting anxiously for the Season 2.
The big question in any sci fi setting is can “aircraft” reliably kill capital ships. If the answer is yes then a dedicated carrier makes sense as IRL the “aircraft” will form the main offensive punch of any fleet.
If the answer is no or not easily then using the “battle carrier” approach makes a lot more sense.
Even if they can kill capital ships maybe they’re still capable of performing missile interception or taking on smaller destroyer or torpedo boat equivalents that can carry ordinance big enough to be able to hurt the capital vessels.
I think from the logical standopoint why carriers in the space in the end also need to prepare for actual slugfest is unlike current naval warfare, the range of BVR (Beyond Visual Range) is just massive order of magnitude bigger. To launch full fighter craft squads for a fully specialized carrier from safe distance away means that either you have to precisely/preemptively launch the craft before the engagement even happened, or that each craft have their warp drive to sped up their chase toward the battlefield (yet this will make the carrier redundant, unless the warp drive is only for a short distance only). It's the single reason why rebels fighter able to be docked up anywhere and quickly rallied, each fighter have their own warp drive and able to get into the fight under their own power hence not much need for a big target like a carrier, unlike the imperial TIE fighter which don't have their internal warp drive hence relying on the star destroyer for intersystem travel. Other part is that by making a purely specialized carrier means that they had to focus sheer amount of number to defense and shielding instead to protect their hull, while praying their internal fighter craft had enough firepower to shred the enemy assailant before their own breaks down. Considering the collosus size of ships in space fights, it's make sense that they still had ample power and space for weapon mount, while shield and defensive tech can only carry them so much without making the story stale. Imagine a supercarrier with cutting edge defensive measure that 99.99% of anything shot or thrown at it were intercepted first, with near limitless regenerating shields and a hundred meter thick armor plating that near impervious to any weapon. What's fun in the story if the ship never experience any risk of destruction in any of its fight?
Marg Sabl doesn't necessarily rely on stealth for it's fighters and bombers, but prevents them from being fired upon until they've ALL deployed, gotten into formation, and are prepared to attack from multiple angles.
A problem with the Venator is that if the doors open and fighters attempt to launch, and are hit, their debris will clog up in front of other hangers and prevent their launch. Additionally, launching from that hanger lines them up in a neat little condensed row to get shot at.
The reason the droids don't register that a carrier can, in fact, send out ships is just their own stupidity.
It should also be noted that in the Freespace games, the carriers are labeled as "Destroyers" despite never really being seen in direct combat outside of "something has gone horribly wrong".
Another example: In Mass Effect, space carriers weren't a thing until the humans turned up and became subject to treaties which limited the number of Dreadnaught capital ships they could have. As a response, they built ships whih were equally as large but, rather than having mass accelerator cannons, could just deploy a load of smaller craft from a further range to overwhelm enemy defences.
In Wing Commander, many cap ships could do both fight and launch fighters. The Tiger's Claw and the especially the Concordia weren't unarmed carriers, but the Yorktown- Ranger- and Lexington- classes from the later games were definitely purpose built carriers who were useless in a fight. And even the hybrid carriers did most of their work via fighters and bombers from a huge distance away.
A big reason for one size fits all ships is power projection combined with fleet size. With the modern navy, carriers work with battle groups and are sent to regions for power projection. The smaller escort ships provide surface protection and are spread out over large areas. The carrier can then proceed with its air operations. A carrier will never operate alone. Even in this confined setting, crew and cost come into play rather significantly. In space you have a MUCH MUCH bigger area to project power. If you required 10 ships per battle group per system, the man power would very quickly reach impossible levels to maintain. if you have a single multi-role ship you only need to send it or maybe one other to achieve most goals. On a planet with finite area, specialization makes sense. in space with its infinite area, versatility reigns supreme.
Battlestar Galactica's hybrid carrier/battleship concept make some sense in light of the setting: with enemy ships able to jump in at any time, you can't use distance to protect a pure carrier; your ships need to have the ability to fight close-in, at least for a while.
That's a nice round up of the various science fiction methods of transporting small craft. Also a nice critique on those tropes of the high cool factor launch tubes and recovery tunnels. I think you are only missing perhaps one method not often used in science fiction but is itself, a very common trope. The Mothership.
One very good 'Das Boot' in space, book was 'Passage at Arms', By Glen Cook. Part of the 'Starfishers' series. 'Passage at Arms' offers up so extremely interesting space combat ideas that closely mimic submarines in space. One idea he posited however does not quite mimic real warfare. The Mothership is very akin to a aircraft carrier. A milch cow and repair and recreation station. The small craft that were carried were rather large, containing a crew of about 20 or so. Fully self contained, they dont need a mothership, however because of the size constraints, living in one for months at a time would be bad for ones wellbeing. A problem often seen in german U-boats or allied Destroyers.
The mothership suckles up to a dozen of these patrol ships, dropping them off and recovering them on its long patrol. Very much like a carrier, they are never used in combat and are lightyears away doing other duties, nowhere even close to hostile areas. because of this they resemble more a framework to dock the patrol ships too. because of their size, they are docked externally.
This leads to the common problem of everyone assuming a attack craft as small. And I gurantee you 100% NO attack ship will be small. this is one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out trope in science fiction combat I have ever seen.
All fighters, be in space or on Earth, face the same problem: limited fuel capacity. Couple that with the truism "speed is life" in battle, you need to save as much fuel as you can to get you to the fight, do the fight and get you home. A static launch, like in Star Wars, fuel is used to get out of the ship and then up to battle speed. If it's a long range strike, you have two options: reach your transit speed and then shut down and coast (with no loss of velocity and saving fuel) or keep the engines on and build up more speed (getting there faster but burning up limited fuel reserves). It's the initial "stop to first gear" that takes the most amount of power, since you're now trying to overcome the mass inertia.
A catapult launch, like from a powered launch tube, lets the tube systems overcome the initial mass inertia and get the fighter up to speed quicker. To be effective however, the launch tubes need to be facing the target. If you get shot out the tube going the wrong way, then you have to use onboard fuel to basically stop, reorient the direction and thrust in the desired direction. If it's a melee battle, the tube gets you out faster into the action - just make sure your desired target is basically in front of your tube.
With respect, the Japanese tried this tactic with their aviation battleships and cruisers such as Ise. So did the Americans with the Iowa-class. The Iowa-class aviation battleship idea went as far as having waterline models built and no further, but Ise and a cruiser with similar configuration, Tone, were actually built and used.
The Japanese really went crazy trying to make things into carriers. They put planes on everything, even submarines (the Sen-Toku class of subs, I-400 through I-402. These subs later formed the basis of the later missile-carrying submarines, both conventional attack submarines with their cruise missiles and nuclear armed ICBM carriers.)
Speaking of Japan, the anime Space Battleship Yamato even has a few true carriers, and of course there's Thundersub/Blue Noah, an entire anime about a space carrier that's basically a super-sized I-400-class. A VERY cool little anime, quite obscure though you can find it here on CZcams.
I love the wild, anachronistic Space Is An Ocean style of BFG.
Imperial ships favour big guns, armour, and "dumb" torpedoes, with attack craft almost an afterthought - unsurprising given their late 19th century inspiration. They do however have the odd specialised carrier like the Nemesis and a few nods to WWII with escort carriers.
Meanwhile the Tau have a much more Cold War style navy where smart missiles and attack craft are the order of the day, with guns playing a secondary role.
And the Eldar, of course, launch super-advanced fighters from sailing ships 😆
Gundam doesn't just use 'runways', they almost always have catapults (like on ocean-going carriers) to impart initial momentum to the MS without expending propellant. That's those things the MS stands on that sort of clamp onto the feet at the beginning of most launch sequences. It's actually a pretty neat bit of world-building, you really only see the "runway" type launches on Earth-based faction ships, whereas space-based factions tend to have a less "gravitationally-oriented" approach, of either just dumping them out of a bay or launching them on some magnetized rails, again to impart initial momentum and conserve propellant. There's even some scenes when Zeon soldiers are on a Federation ship and they find it funny that the Federation makes their MS stand on the "ground", which plays into the whole theme of 'perspective' that runs through the whole franchise.
A major difference between planetary based sea warfare (second world war style) and space warfare is that planes are much faster than sea warships. This means that two fleets don't fight each other but stay hundreds of miles/kilometres apart, whilst their bombers plus fighter escorts attack the enemy fleet. Of course, sometimes did have fleets fighting other fleets directly (as in the Mediterranean/North Atlantic) but that is where no CV task forces involved (mainly the Pacific).
Whereas, in most depictions of space warfare ships are as fast as fighters/bombers, plus also a much bigger delineation between strategic movement and tactical movement.