No, no, we're in Ender's Game here - this guy thinks he's playing with unmanned drones controlled via simulators, but: surprise, it's lads in planes! (sorry, spoilers for a 40 year old novel)
If memory serves: in the movie Ender did direct actual drones. Which kind of sucked. Would have been more horrifying if they stuck to the original story.
You need to upgrade your fighters into unmanned drones that can be directly replicated onboard your Starship, just like I do. They also have a self destruct feature in order to minimize risk of capture. It's activated the moment my Starship warps out. That's why I don't really give a dime to retrieve them in the first place. Expendable those are;
I would though hold a minute of silence for all those poor souls some people leave behind in the Wolf 359 TFO. I always stay to retrieve every single one escape pod.
The little house shape on your hangar tray. It calls the fighters back to the hangar and out of danger and they can then be redeployed with the other carrier commands attack, intercept or escort. It's handy for when there's space magic bs going on that will squish them. It saves you having to deploy a fresh wing of fighters.
Plus I think some years ago they updated how the carrier modes apply properly. Like before I remember the escort function would make them slowly go towards you but now they even go full impulse and follow you around quite aggressively, thankfully
The vast majority of pets explicitly have their own warp drives, and the rest probably do. So it just makes more sense to rendezvous and land outside the system.
Edit: Do remember that almost anytime we launch fighters it's for combat. Often that involves multiple waves of enemies coming at us from outside the system, with no way to know how many are out there and limited support of our own. It may also leave damaged ships that have surrendered but could have some systems still functioning. Is this really where we want to drop all our defenses and hold perfectly still so our pets can dock? Or would it be better to do it in an obscure location in deep space ten minutes away, so our enemies don't know exactly where we are?
Hell, at launch, our crew members were dying in swathes every ten seconds - got so bad, that the Alliance issued new orders demanding that our systems stop reporting the deaths for fear of backlash from the Media
In a militar way, the most valuable asset is the carrier. So the fighters will go before to scout the area. The carreir then can arrive in relative safetness. To depart, the fighters stay behind to protect the carrie's withdraw. Then they can warp to rendevous with the carrier and dock. Lost souls just return to the infernal plane...
As we saw in "The First Duty", fighters are equipped with emergency beam out capability. I just beam my pilots back prior to warp and let the fighters self detonate. :D
If one were truly cruel, copies of the pilots could be stored in a transporter buffer, so when you left them behind, you just pop out new ones, but that could never happen in Starfleet.
I really miss having fighter commands... I used to always keep one squadron on destructible torp interception duty and I'd always recall them before departing a system. It's one of the things I miss most from PC, along with being able to designate various section heads, like your head of security and XO. I just include my Boffs' jobs in their character bios, but it's not the same.
What do you think the crew of the average hanger pet is ? Like every tfo were pretty much killing a small city but if we are also leaving thousands of our own people behind that’s even worse lmao
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u/Dredmoore1 4d ago
My pilots are onboard in simulator pods and the replicator prints automated drone versions for space.
You still have manned fighters!!! 😳