Haesslich
Spaceman
Dishwasher said:Perhaps people here should try Dan Simmons Hyperion series, he has quite interesting idears of future space combat. And i still stick to my people suck for future air and space combat, already pilots have verry big problems with keeping up with their machine in dog fights. And believe me when you have weapons like (my favorite) tachyon cannons you really want an computer to lineup and kill the target on the other end of the weapon. And about the engines up front that would be silly indeed i was just trying to ilustrate that dogfighting in space would be verry frustrating .
I've seen inertial flight models - and we don't have them in WC. The reason g-forces aren't a factor in the games is because humans have mastered gravitic technology - they can produce artificial gravity AND antigravity, which means that the problem with inertia's already taken care of. WC1's fighter blueprints and the game itself shows that there are 'acceleration compensators', which means that g-forces due to inertia area already removed or no longer a factor, at least not once a ship is out of a larger gravity field like that of a carrier or a planet. This removes one factor that make AI pilots better than human pilots; the whole 'they can survive maneuvers that would kill a person' schtick is gone.
Second: we've seen autoaim in the WC universe - it's the type of thing you see on the Bearcat and the Excalibur, and it's awful. Later fighters seem to get by without this feature, and at most we have ITTS systems. They're either horribly complex to maintain, incredibly expensive to deploy, or else humans just aim better than most AIs do. Otherwise, we'd be seeing the same auto-aiming guns on every ship in WCP and SO.
Third: one more reason to use AI in combat is to avoid human casualties on your side. However, these don't seem to be as much a factor in the Confederation where there are trillions of people... and being blunt, you need people to crew carriers even if the fighters are AI. Since the technology is either not up to the task of combat (AIs being too easily spoofed, perhaps) or else the technology is far too expensive for combat (being able to deploy a hundred fairly good human pilots is still better than deploying ten okay AI pilots), we're still stuck with people in Confederation fighters.
There's also the 'people can do things that no AI can' argument - at least when it comes to programming and figuring out solutions. Example: In the WC4 novel, Blair uses a sonic boom to try and knock out a missile battery, by disabling the crew. An AI pilot would simply have gone down and tried to kill the battery, which would have accomplished the mission but shed more blood than was necessary.