Are ground support fighters effective? Are they worth the effort?

[Jovus (OP)]

Pretty much as title. I'm just experiencing C# ground unit creation now, and reading through everything I can find and talking with people it seems the NPRs don't use fighters themselves, but it also seems like people consistently have difficulty with huge masses of enemy formations when invading large colonies.

This sounds like exactly the kind of situation tactical and strategic air supremacy is used to solve, yet I hear very little talk of people using ground support fighters. Why is that?

[nuclearslurpee]

Are ground support fighters effective? Are they worth the effort?

No.

In case this was insufficiently clear, let me illustrate the point with a GIF:


There are two principal problems with GSFs:

• They are extremely micromanagement-intensive, requiring large numbers to be effective each of which must be individually assigned to a ground support mission. Clicking and dragging hundreds of fighters is no fun.
• Anti-Air units are extremely effective against GSFs, and NPRs in particular tend to run a lot of AA units. All that micromanagement just to die horribly is more fun in space than on the ground.

The best solution is to join the lobby petitioning Steve to make ground support fighters a new Air Unit ground unit class. We have meetings irregularly in random suggestion threads regardless of the original topic. 

[Andrew]

A few other problems with ground support fighters
1)It is inredly easy to design ground support pods which are less effective than infantry weapons, which incidentally means that the pods you can fit on missile fighters are garbage so no dual role fighters
2) As you need a similar number of fighters as ground troops so hundreds of thousand tons of them, you also need carriers commercial carriers will probably do but that means you need as many of them as you would need troop transports so no savings there, Military carriers mean that you either need 2 sets of fighter one for the space war and one for the invasion or it will cost you a lot of warships. Last NPR  Invasion I had 2.5 million tons of troop transports and about 2 million tons of warships so military carriers would have been impossible

[Jovus (OP)]

The best solution is to join the lobby petitioning Steve to make ground support fighters a new Air Unit ground unit class. We have meetings irregularly in random suggestion threads regardless of the original topic. 

I would like to request the chairman call the meeting to order and proceed to the business, unfortunately not included in the prospective minutes mailed to all current members who indicated intent of attendance at the next meeting of the Society for Urgent Fighter Formation Experience Rework (SUFFER), of inducting a new member. All in favour please say aye, all opposed please stay silent as your votes don't matter.

Ahem

I would also propose that fighters should be part of a separate floating support category, tasked instead with broader mission types (CAP, CAS, strike, SEAD, etc), since unlike most ground units they can be anywhere relative to the surface within minutes. These categories would heavily weight fighter targeting pools toward different field positions of enemy units and/or units with different capabilities (e.g. SEAD would try to target enemy anti-air).

I would also also propose that individual fighters be rather heavily buffed in effectiveness, possibly even further with the addition of the idea of a dedicated fighter pod, because in terms of battlefield or even transport tonnage even air-heavy doctrines like those pursued by the US involve far less tonage and far fewer units in the air than on the ground.

[Andrew]

I suspect when you include all the support infrasturcture for an F-16 squadron you are a lot closer to the same size as a tank Brigade, a quick look at some US figures gives 14000 personel while a Brigade combat team is around 4500, I suspect though that as the figures come from different sources that manpower for the squadron includes its slice of admin and support personnel away from the squadron.  But in any case requiring a ground attack squadron to need the same tonnage as a tank Brigade does not seem unreasonable. Alternativly making its cost a lot higher and supply needs higher would also balance.
The aicraft invovled are also not going to resemble modern aircraft very much , instead they really have to be flying tanks as modern aircraft could not survive in the face of LOS light speed weapons which are capable of hitting spacecraft at very long ranges its just too easy a solution.

[Jovus (OP)]

I dunno about you, but if I ever have any ground support fighters they're going to look like gigantic sentient swans trained and bred for space war, because TN means I can do what I want in my headcanon.

[Aloriel]

I really like the idea of having aircraft that have to be carried on a starship like a tank would be. I also like the idea of construction units being used to make aircraft more efficient at their roles by building airbases and what have you.

Aircraft should also be significantly reduced in efficiency if the atmosphere is thinner or thicker than normal racial average, and utterly useless in non-atmospheric environs. There could be specialized aircraft made for light or heavy atmosphere (separate research to expand this!), but they have reduced efficiency outside their normal scope just the same.

So far as aircraft role, I'd argue that these should be customizable. You have 1.0 to apply to all the different potential mission parameters. So, for example, an air superiority fighter might be 0.8 air superiority, 0.1 CAP, 0.1 strike, and 0.0 SEAD. There could also be a stealth aircraft research that when applied multiplies the cost of the fighter by 3x (or more), and de-prioritizes that unit in targeting.