StarSea Chronicles – Strike Craft
In a futuristic setting, such as the Starsea Chronicles the question may be raised, why use strike craft? Arguments can be made that long-range missile strikes can fulfill many of the requirements of strike craft. Alternatively, automated drones might be used, to avoid loss of life and extend endurance. The bottom line comes down to the fact that when you have opponents throwing antimatter weapons at each other, you need the flexibility and adaptability that a living pilot provides. A living pilot allows for the strike craft to fit many different roles, and shift rapidly between them. Everything from recon, external ship inspections, intimidation, escort, missile defense, and more can be provided by strike craft, and just as importantly, a strike craft can shift in functionality as needed.
Combat Flaws and Advantages
In terms of firepower, one individual strike craft has little to boast about. Most ships, including many merchant vessels, possess enough defensive weaponry to protect themselves from one or two strike craft with a reliable chance of success. The power of strike craft, therefore, comes in numbers. Twelve strike craft each launching four missiles individually are little threat to even a small warship as long as its crew is alert. Twelve strike craft launching forty-eight missiles simultaneously is a serious threat, even to smaller capital ships.
Even before the adoption of shielding technology, the presence of military-grade structural integrity fields meant that a single strike craft would be unlikely to inflict any significant damage to a vessel, assuming it survived to get into range of its internal weaponry, even with precision strikes. This leads to another reason strike craft are best used en masse, and why it’s so important to have strike craft of your own to break up and disrupt such attacks. Even if only a few strike craft of an incoming attack are destroyed, the rest can often be thrown into confusion, or have their formation broken, greatly limiting their ability to get in that all-important concentrated attack.
Conclusion
In short, strike craft provide a number of advantages to their users, both in terms of defense, and force projection. Relatively cheap and requiring few trained crew in relation to the potential damage they can cause, they are and will continue to be a vital aspect of warfare in the Starsea Chronicles for the foreseeable future.