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  1. #46
    The Weeping Mod Sharpandpointies's Avatar
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    There are probably loads of other reasons for fighters, some general, some specific to a setting (and its tech, its peoples, etc). ^_^ I'm just firing out a couple.
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  2. #47
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    Star Trek and Star Wars had true AIs. On the original show, they had one of the Enterprise class run by an AI which went nuts (what else) and it kicked the butt of several ships until Kirk came along. I forgot what he did.

    The reason to ditch pilots is to save expenses on all the life support a space fighter would need. In our planes, one reason is that drones and missiles can take higher G forces for maneuvers than organics. But with the sci-fi anti-g, etc. I think they have acceleration beat - but it would still take up space.

    The ST ships tended towards the battleship model. Carriers and fighters came in later fighting the Dominion. Star Wars ships were hybrid carriers - part BB and part carrier. That never worked in our world. Now, the Yamato universe had hybrids (the Yamato carried fighters) but there was also carriers in some of the fleets.

    We don't see that much of dedicated anti-fighter cruisers and destroyers that are basically big arsenals of anti-fighter weaponry. In WWII, towards the end the new BBs were usually for AA work. Only one USN modern model BB duked it out with another Japanese BB. At Leyte Gulf, some WWI sunk some WWI Japanese BBs.

    Just recall the crews in most star ships never get belted up into chairs, so they get thrown around.

  3. #48
    Rumbles Limbo Champion big_adventure's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sharpandpointies View Post
    There are probably loads of other reasons for fighters, some general, some specific to a setting (and its tech, its peoples, etc). ^_^ I'm just firing out a couple.
    Nah, you basically nailed it for the "fighters versus capital ships" question in your prior post: the most expensive fighter costs a thousandth, at MOST, of the cost of the capital ship, so chucking 40 or 50 with the hope of getting a "you sank my battleship" is very worth it. Not talking ethically or morally - those things don't favor combat generally.

    Now, a flight of a hundred (or whatever) missiles costs vastly less still, so the "best" option in sea navies is to use fast and light fighters to bring weapons close to the enemy (and to do all of their other tasks, like recon and air superiority). Fighters travel at 20 or more times the speed of the capital ship, so they are good at projecting power or defending at a very extended range.

    In space fiction, it's different - large ships are, in most fiction, generally massively faster than small ships - so that model breaks down.
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  4. #49
    The Weeping Mod Sharpandpointies's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by big_adventure View Post
    Nah, you basically nailed it for the "fighters versus capital ships" question in your prior post: the most expensive fighter costs a thousandth, at MOST, of the cost of the capital ship, so chucking 40 or 50 with the hope of getting a "you sank my battleship" is very worth it. Not talking ethically or morally - those things don't favor combat generally.
    While I agree with most of this, if it were solely cost, they'd go with drones, hang the inefficiency, and just buy a gazillion more of them. The most expensive drone doesn't match the cost of a fighter due not only to the actual costing of the equipment, but also the training time of the fighter pilots.

    More on my reasoning below. But I totally agree that cost is a big part of it.

    Now, a flight of a hundred (or whatever) missiles costs vastly less still, so the "best" option in sea navies is to use fast and light fighters to bring weapons close to the enemy (and to do all of their other tasks, like recon and air superiority). Fighters travel at 20 or more times the speed of the capital ship, so they are good at projecting power or defending at a very extended range.
    Agreed.

    In space fiction, it's different - large ships are, in most fiction, generally massively faster than small ships - so that model breaks down.
    This is where I have a different experience. In the vast majority of the space combat series I've read, fighters actually have faster tactical movement than capital ships (and, in fact, in the series where the capital ships DO have ridiculous accelerations that in the lore would be better than fighter acceleration due to whatever reason, usually magical engines...there usually ARE no fighters, because 'why?' - they'd be pointless). That is to say, once fighters have entered an area where the conflict is going to happen, for the short time before they exhaust their fuel or whatever they're using, the fighters tend to be quite a bit faster than the capital ships. So they operate in much the same way - high speed assaults, bringing force to bear at specific points, etc - as they do in modern navies.

    With the same reasoning to be chosen over drones that I note in the first post on the subject - communication, flexibility, less vulnerability to ECM, etc.

    In terms of strategic movement - what Rumbles might refer to as 'travel speed', though it's not quite the same - the capital ships have it all over the fighters in most fiction. Either the fighters can't 'jump to lightspeed' and must be carried, they can't use 'warp gates' or the like because it would destroy them, they run out of fuel if they start trying to fly longer distances for travel, or whatever, the fighters seem to be dependent on carriers and support ships.

    But tactically speaking, in the stuff I've read fighters have faster 'combat speed', in that for a short time or once in the engagement zone they can outperform the big ships. In space opera series, this is usually because for whatever reason fighters can't manage FTL travel speeds. In more crunchy, hard sci-fi, it's usually because the fighters can (logically) fire up a higher acceleration than the big, super-heavy ships...until their fuel runs out, and compared to the big ships they just don't HAVE a lot of fuel (or they use fuel and the big ships use some kind of reactor).

    Edit: put more simply, fighters in the stuff I've read tend to be lousy at getting from Point A to Point B on a galactic scale...but once they get carried to where they need to be, they swarm around the big, slow ships like high-speed gnats armed with missiles. If that makes sense.

    Occasionally there are other reasons - ability to close further inside the engagement envelope than a capital ship due to inability of a fighter to be targeted by the big 'guns' on a ship, meaning the fighter can volley ship-killing missiles at a range difficult to intercept/jam/shoot down is one I've seen in a couple of places. If a larger ship were to try to get that close, it would end up becoming a beam-duel and at that point (in the series in question) it mostly came down to 'one ship gets killed, the other crippled'...unless one of the two ships were vastly more powerful than the other, at which point one would say 'yeah, no point in using fighters here, just close and destroy'.

    Edit: Admittedly, most of the time in Space Opera stuff it's because 'fighters is cool' without any real reason given (sometimes there's a thermal exhaust port that needs to be hit, I suppose).
    Last edited by Sharpandpointies; 06-27-2022 at 04:37 PM.
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  5. #50
    Rumbles Limbo Champion big_adventure's Avatar
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    I think we basically agree but are going at the point from two different directions:

    1. Drones - Modern drones are distinguished by their ability to function autonomously. They do this now. You give them directions to a combat zone and they loiter there without intervention. When you need to take them over to actually engage in shooting, then an operator does so. When they need to come back to base, they do that autonomously as well. This is massively efficient in the sense that multiple drones can be on station with few operators. And, of course, drone crashes / accidents / losses don't cost you an expensive pilot. Drones didn't exist in mass numbers before because the tech simply didn't exist to make them work like this. If they were armed RC planes using 60's tech, they'd never survive combat thanks to communications difficulties, and it would have be more expensive to have a team of ops for each one housed in a trailer somewhere.

    The reasons that they don't exist in much of fiction boil down to two things:

    A. The authors honestly couldn't imagine how this would work. Space combat in fiction resembles naval combat IRL because that's the model the authors have some frame of reference for. Authors from the 70's could imagine flying cars but couldn't have dreamed of smartphones and Google and Amazon. Star Trek had warp drive transporters but were stuck with communications devices significantly worse than a StarTAC.

    B. The pilots are characters in the story, or are at least part of the drame - take away those elements and there simply isn't a story.

    Obviously, there are advantages to having a fully intelligent and somewhat moral being behind the stick in a plane - if things go sideways, they can hopefully react in a good fashion. But like we see with self driving cars - the robots make MANY fewer mistakes then the humans do, but the mechanical mistakes are exploded out of proportion compared to the human error. I love the NYTimes and read it daily, but even they published a story the other day talking about a study that linked X number of accidents to self-driving systems. They never once even tried to compare that to the expected number of accidents among human drivers in the same situation - something that should be trivially available thanks to the statistics that MUST exist.

    2. Speed - I agree, often tactical speed is better for fighters - but again, the "need" for space fighters is often just to have the characters or the action. The big ships should have the weapons to deal with the situation from range. And if not, they should have the targeting capability and the weaponry to blast away the fighters like chaff. But authors still seem to think that space combat resembles 1940's naval engagements, with a wave of fighters descending on a tightly packed group of cap ships with basically useless flak spamming the "sky" around. Star Destroyers have hundreds of guns that damn straight should be auto-targeting by things that think a hell of a lot faster than humans (SW has droids, yo), yet a small wave of human-piloted fighters, or hell, one fighter, just flies through that with impunity to physical touching distance, basically all the time.

    Even modern naval combat doesn't work like this. No fighters are approaching a modern combat group. They are not getting within a couple of hundred km before being detected and engaged, so they are going to launch missiles in waves from well BVR against sea and air targets. But that's kind of boring to write and to read. Thus, fighters. :-)
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  6. #51
    The Weeping Mod Sharpandpointies's Avatar
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    I see your point about the drones, but it does skip the communication and distance issues. Again, human pilots on-scene, not struggling with a 1.5 second lag, are superior with regards to dealing with unexpected twists and such. Having an operator two light-seconds distant trying to take control and open fire, or adapt to changing circumstances, or even deal with shifts in incoming enemy fire against the drones, seems...sub-optimal.

    Totally agree with the cost (dollars), mentioned before.

    None of this would be to say that there isn't place for drones in space combat, but again, unless ranges are far shorter than I would expect or the drone-users have worked out FTL comm and sensors (and if they have, sure, drones are likely the way to go), I would expect a fighter presence in addition to any drones. And in this case, drones would simply be 'the guided missiles', and be completely autonomous.

    Agreed about points A and B, mind, though modern, hard-scifi writers with actual military experience or drawing on military sources seem to have a far better grasp on things with regards to A.

    I'm completely in accord with all your points when it comes to any kind of Space Opera sf. In Space Opera, space combat resembles nothing close to how it would likely look in reality. So we get fighters doing all kinds of stuff, like attacking massive base stations unsupported by any kind of fleet, and said base station having utter crap AA fire.

    I'm talking more about the hard sci-fi stuff, which are more guesstimations of what 'real' space combat would be like.

    As for blasting away fighters like chaff, it is a fairly common thing in the hard sci-fi I read that fighter losses are high against an enemy that is prepared and actually equipped to deal with them (Anti-fighter missiles, computer-guided point defense laser systems, etc). However, it's also a thing that ECM is usually far more advanced than it is now, that fighters use drones (missiles) as ECM coverage, and other such things. Included atop that is the fact that the fighters can be armed with longer-ranged missiles, and sure, that means that they do something like you point out - launching missiles from outside of the engagement envelope of the point defense to try to saturate the enemy with missiles (and yes, this is often done in the more realistic stuff I read as an option for the fighter strikes, a whole lot of writers don't go with the 'flying through the flack' most of the time, it's only in more desperate situations and at that point the fighter losses are normally horrendous). They can still arrive in a more close range than the capital ships in a shorter time, can engage and return for re-arming, attempt to wound the enemy before any larger-scale conflict starts, and if need be, try to press the assault at closer ranges once the actual battle begins by engaging at the same time as the capital ships do.

    The ranges in warfare in space combat are vastly greater than naval conflict (I know you know this, just mentioning it because it supports the point), the ranges for weaponry are completely different and very much out of proportion even than with our naval conflicts (it's not just 'all things scaled up'), so things are a little different. Same with tactics, especially when you get ECM to the point where 'stealth' systems are possible (less Space Opera 'magical cloaking' and more 'passive stuff, a non-accelerating ship, and Space Is Big™ so detecting something that's mostly cold and not flaring energy is really hard at longer ranges'), three dimensional movement rather than a limited plane of engagement, etc. Then there are technology gaps between now and the future - missiles meant to engage tiny, high-speed targets with ECM must do so at much longer ranges (versus the fighters, which are using weaponry calibrated to attack truly enormous, 'slower', massive energy-emitting targets that yes, have ECM, but still...). It is often-times not the same as our own naval engagements, though in a 'realistic' fashion due to the tech advances involved.

    And yes, again, I totally agree that there is spillover with the 'because fighters are cool and pilots have good drama'.

    My feeling on it is that depending on the technologies being presented, having fighters can also make perfect sense. I don't feel there's a blanket 'it's only because they're cool' situation - there are plenty of different possibilities in Hard Sci-fi tech that have quasi-realistically demonstrated the uses of fighters over drones or 'just capital ships'.

    Mileage, etc. Our opinions differ on that matter, and that's cool. I'm also realizing I've massively derailed the thread, so...I think I'll stop here. ^_^
    Last edited by Sharpandpointies; 06-28-2022 at 04:34 AM.
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  7. #52
    Extraordinary Member Cody's Avatar
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    So I guess fighters would realistically only be useful for planetary conflicts either in sky or atmosphere, right?
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  8. #53
    The Weeping Mod Sharpandpointies's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cody View Post
    So I guess fighters would realistically only be useful for planetary conflicts either in sky or atmosphere, right?
    Not for me. As noted I'm completely fine with them being realistically used in space warfare, technology depending. Again, there have been a lot of military, hard-scifi series that use/depend on fighters in a logical fashion based on the overall technological improvements that have been developed.
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  9. #54
    Rumbles Limbo Champion big_adventure's Avatar
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    I agree completely with Sharp about "fighters make sense, technology-dependent."

    It's just that some of what we see in the biggest franchises don't seem to leverage this or use it beyond the "it's cool" level.

    Trek and Wars are two that fall into this. Especially Star Wars, but Lucas isn't a hard sci-fi writer. He's a guy writing stories for 12 year olds. Star Destroyers and other warships have gazillions of auto-targeting guns firing shots that move significantly faster than the ships they are targeting, and they have full-on AI at their disposal. No human-directed ship should ever get through their protective fire. And then, they shouldn't really have to, because they ALSO have ion cannons that can one-shot Star Destroyers. None of it survives the smell-test in that universe.

    As Sharp says, this isn't always the case. There are universes where AIs or even computers don't exist. There are fighters that are linked directly into the nervous system of the pilot, granting superhuman reactions, combined with unimpressive weapons tech, so fighters are pretty badass. There are universes that, OTOH, everything is built into planet-wrecking weapons and fighters really don't do a hell of a lot other than harry the enemy and cause distractions. There is a lot of well-written sci-fi that uses fighters, but the universes have reasons.

    Trek has never really used massive amounts of fighters, but then, their capitol ships have lightspeed and FTL weapons that fire with incredible accuracy over massive ranges, and the big ships also have the mobility to get into place to use this and the shields to resist small stuff, so fighters are drastically less useful.

    ISTR some Trek discussion coming up 20+ years ago among some people I was talking to, and the entire Federation fleet ranged between 600 and 700 ships, spread out over a massive area, and the entire Klingon fleet was something like 1500 max, with many of those ships being much tinier.
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  10. #55
    The Weeping Mod Sharpandpointies's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by big_adventure View Post
    It's just that some of what we see in the biggest franchises don't seem to leverage this or use it beyond the "it's cool" level.
    Totally.

    Trek and Wars are two that fall into this. Especially Star Wars, but Lucas isn't a hard sci-fi writer. He's a guy writing stories for 12 year olds. Star Destroyers and other warships have gazillions of auto-targeting guns firing shots that move significantly faster than the ships they are targeting, and they have full-on AI at their disposal. No human-directed ship should ever get through their protective fire. And then, they shouldn't really have to, because they ALSO have ion cannons that can one-shot Star Destroyers. None of it survives the smell-test in that universe.
    Truth. Trek and Wars are both Space Opera, despite Trek trying to scream 'SCIENCE' at everything.

    Trek has never really used massive amounts of fighters, but then, their capitol ships have lightspeed and FTL weapons that fire with incredible accuracy over massive ranges, and the big ships also have the mobility to get into place to use this and the shields to resist small stuff, so fighters are drastically less useful.
    It's definitely one of the universes where Capital Ships are about as fast as fighters would be (though not as maneuverable, despite all of the 'inertialess' stuff), with big guns accurate enough to drive nails, and heavy shielding. There wouldn't be any point in fighters. Even Jem'Hadar 'fighters' were actual fully warp capable ships requiring no carriers, 90m long, shielded, easily as heavily armed than warships, and with a crew of almost 50. Calling them 'fighters' was rather misleading; more logically, they should have been considered to be 'corvettes' or the like.

    Buuuut...people like fighters.
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  11. #56
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    It's always a tech war in part. Didn't the Jem'Hadar corvettes have weaponry that penetrated standard ST shields? At first, WWII capital ships didn't have adequate on board AA weapons. Despite their armor, several were taken out by the one shot in the right place. The Italian battleships were sunk and or damaged by German radio controlled missiles/bombs. The Hood was sunk by one shell in the right place. Later, in the Pacific, the massive AA gun increase with proximity fuses and the CAPs from numerous carriers saved the day.

    If a fighter can get to a capital ship - passing shields, with the explosive yield of what should be their tech, would destroy most materials. Spock told Kirk that if they take a missile from a USAF jet, that nuke would be damaging or fatal. Now, the Galactica explicitly survives direct contact nuclear warheads. I don't know if ST or SW ships could. I always wonder why if the Alliance fighters could get so close to the Death Star, they didn't nuke or whatever the big ol' laser array.

    In today's world, it might be blamed on incompetence or lack of readiness or lack of enough weaponry but jets and missiles against ships were doing. The Argentinians with a small air force was given the Royal Navy fits. If their iron bombs had good fuses they would have sunk even more UK ships. A US Perry class frigate couldn't stop two Iraqi Exocets, IIRC. The Russians have had problems with the Moskava sunk. Supposedly, it wasn't even running its radar.

    As an aside, the Argentines were thinking of taking ship board torpedos and putting them on Pucara turbo prop planes and running a low level WWII attack on the Brits. The war ending before they did but it was thought it might work. The RN had crappy low level AA defensive abilities as it turned out. Their close range missiles were flops.

    Interesting discussion.

  12. #57
    The Weeping Mod Sharpandpointies's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Captain Smith View Post
    It's always a tech war in part. Didn't the Jem'Hadar corvettes have weaponry that penetrated standard ST shields? At first, WWII capital ships didn't have adequate on board AA weapons. Despite their armor, several were taken out by the one shot in the right place. The Italian battleships were sunk and or damaged by German radio controlled missiles/bombs. The Hood was sunk by one shell in the right place. Later, in the Pacific, the massive AA gun increase with proximity fuses and the CAPs from numerous carriers saved the day.
    All of the above, yes.

    If a fighter can get to a capital ship - passing shields, with the explosive yield of what should be their tech, would destroy most materials. Spock told Kirk that if they take a missile from a USAF jet, that nuke would be damaging or fatal. Now, the Galactica explicitly survives direct contact nuclear warheads. I don't know if ST or SW ships could. I always wonder why if the Alliance fighters could get so close to the Death Star, they didn't nuke or whatever the big ol' laser array.
    The Galactica can manage it because it's a big, slow-moving tank - it has no 'shields', and the design compensates with massive amounts of armor for survivability. Layer enough metal on something, and even a nuke can't easily get through (especially since a nuke in space loses a little due to lack of air). The Enterprise likely has less armor, since it has 'Deflector shields' that are of sufficient strength to basically laugh off nukes and so forth. No need for staggering amounts of armor that reduce efficiency in other ways; the deflectors are the primary defense. Probably has SOME armor in the form of some Trek-science super-metal.

    Star Wars ships don't have nukes. Explicitly. The tech DOES seem to exist in that setting, and they are occasionally pulled out when someone wants to do something horrific (like 'assassinate with nuclear bomb' or other weirdness) or to show who the bad guys are. But there are things called antimatter bombs, apparently, which would put nukes to shame. Why aren't they used? Drama. Most people seem to only have big Pew Pew guns. *shrugs* It's Space Opera/Wizards in Space.

    In other series, where ships can withstand multiple nuclear (or better) missiles and such (damaging, but not immediately fatal), it takes a similar amount of missiles from fighters to defeat them. Fighters don't carry bigger missiles than capital ship launchers, and their various non-missile weapon systems certainly aren't the equal of Capital Ship energy weapons/kinetic kill weapons/whatever.

    In today's world, it might be blamed on incompetence or lack of readiness or lack of enough weaponry but jets and missiles against ships were doing. The Argentinians with a small air force was given the Royal Navy fits. If their iron bombs had good fuses they would have sunk even more UK ships. A US Perry class frigate couldn't stop two Iraqi Exocets, IIRC. The Russians have had problems with the Moskava sunk. Supposedly, it wasn't even running its radar.

    As an aside, the Argentines were thinking of taking ship board torpedos and putting them on Pucara turbo prop planes and running a low level WWII attack on the Brits. The war ending before they did but it was thought it might work. The RN had crappy low level AA defensive abilities as it turned out. Their close range missiles were flops.

    Interesting discussion.
    It's always a tech race. One method gets a leg up on the other, then the other side figures out an effective counter, then...

    Alternately, when war isn't happening a lot, one group figures out something they feel will work great, and it fails spectacularly when put to the test in pressure situations. Or assumptions are made that don't hold up under pressure. Or...
    Last edited by Sharpandpointies; 06-28-2022 at 09:04 AM.
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  13. #58
    Friendship's Shockwave BitVyper's Avatar
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    Phasers seem to be able to fire very rapidly with extremely pinpoint accuracy and a lot of range, so I feel like that's probably why you don't see fighters as much of a thing in Star Trek. R-Type has fantastic reasoning for them, being that humanity needed to be able to field a whole ton of a very specific type of experimental weapon very very quickly(R-series fighters are also capable of ftl though). So it's just like "strap force units and wave cannons to literally anything you can put jets on because we can't build enough capital ships to keep up with the scale of this invasion"

    As a general rule, without specific justification, I don't feel like there's a lot of reason for them in something like ship-to-ship combat. I guess if they've got really good point defenses, maybe having a lot of fighters spread out could help to outmanoeuvre them? And then you'd need to have fighters to deploy defensively too. It generally feels like you could trade those fighters for more missiles though, and by the time any fighters got to engagement range, those missiles, far lighter, would have done their jobs. It's not hard to come up with reasons to have them though, and I guess that's going to be true of almost any tactical context in a given sci fi.

    Obviously it all changes in the kind of battle where you're trying to hold objectives or fighting on a planet or something, so there's at least general reasons for fighters to be in pretty much anything.

    Anyway, in regard to the thread: I think the saiyans are being overestimated a bit, to be honest. More recent stuff seems to be suggesting that even Radditz was probably somewhat above average, with Goku appearing to be pretty much the norm for a rank and file Saiyan, and he drank magic god water before he was even a third of Radditz's strength.

    Regardless, I think this still all boils down to whose FTL capabilities are better, and we just don't have any good context for the Saiyan pods.
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  14. #59
    Astonishing Member Slade1's Avatar
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    In Star Trek TNG (season 6, episode 20, The Chase), one Klingon Bird of Prey destroyed all life on a planet by destroying the atmosphere and biosphere. And again, that was just one ship.

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    God I love Rumbles so freaking much.
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